Monthly Archives: April 2017

Fusee:

• 2 :  a red signal flare used especially for protecting stalled trains and trucks [Merriam-Webster]

Seen at the Minnesota Transportation Museum in St. Paul, as depicted below:

Appropriation art:

I blame Richard Prince. If you’re not familiar with Prince, he was the first photographer whose work sold for more than a million dollars. What made that amount even more staggering is his work was also the work of commercial photographer Sam Abell. Does that sound confusing? That’s because it is.

Sam Abell photographed the famous Marlboro Man advertisements. What Richard Prince did was re-photograph some of those advertising images. He removed the text, printed them very large, then presented them as a comment on American culture.

Some folks would call that theft; Prince called it appropriation art. The idea is that by removing the image from its original context, new layers of meaning can be attached to the work. Abell’s original photograph was intended to create an association between Marlboro cigarettes and the robust life of a manly cowboy living and working in an idealized vision of the Old West. It was, in effect, a lie. A double lie, in fact. It not only associated smoking with a healthy lifestyle, it also invoked a nostalgic vision of an American West that never really existed. It was a lie used to sell cigarettes.

Richard Prince removed the Marlboro Man from that original context. In doing so, he gave the photograph a radically different interpretation and a different meaning. It became a comment on commercialism. The viewer has a different experience when looking at the re-photographed photograph — he’s no longer being sold a product, he’s being introduced to the idea of using romance as a marketing tool. Prince would argue that this, in effect, makes it a different photograph.

That concept — that simply by shifting the context of an image it can be turned into an entirely new image –fascinated me. It still does, in fact. I’m appalled that Prince made millions of dollars off Abell’s work, but I have to admit that even though the photographs of Abell and Prince are essentially the same, they DO have a different meaning — and Prince’s image is more interesting. [“the integrity of theft,” Greg Fallis, gregfallis.com]

Andrew Sullivan indulges in a therapy vent concerning President Trump:

What on earth is the point of trying to understand him when there is nothing to understand? Calling him a liar is true enough, but liars have some cognitive grip on reality, and he doesn’t. Liars remember what they have said before. His brain is a neural Etch A Sketch. He doesn’t speak, we realize; he emits random noises. He refuses to take responsibility for anything. He can accuse his predecessor and Obama’s national security adviser of crimes, and provide no evidence for either. He has no strategy beyond the next 24 hours, no guiding philosophy, no politics, no consistency at all — just whatever makes him feel good about himself this second. He therefore believes whatever bizarre nonfact he can instantly cook up in his addled head, or whatever the last person who spoke to him said. He makes Chauncey Gardiner look like Abraham Lincoln. Occam’s razor points us to the obvious: He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Which is reassuring and still terrifying all at once.

Like I said, Trump is well outside the norm. Andrew also has a whack at Clinton, which accords with my thought that the wife of Slick Willy was perhaps the least slick Presidential candidates of modern times.

The balls were good, no? But this one just made me laugh.

Kenneth Anderson on Lawfare wades into the problem of statistical comparisons:

What’s “The Bathtub Fallacy,” according to [Justin] Fox? Following a terrorist incident or government counter-measure, he says (quoting a recent Financial Times (paywalled) column by its principal political columnist, Janan Ganesh), statistics are “dug out to show that fewer Westerners perish in terror attacks than in everyday mishaps. Slipping in the bath is a tragicomic favourite. We chuckle, share the data and wait for voters and politicians to see sense.” ..
The conclusion that terrorism is different relies importantly on Fox’s characterization as a “fat-tailed distribution” of risks.  Fox cites Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (of Black Swan fame) extensive writing on this, but then moves on to an interview Fox conducted with Carnegie Mellon University professor Baruch Fischhoff in researching this column.  Who’s Baruch Fischhoff, you ask? Well, among (many) other things, Fischhoff is a “past president of the Society for Risk Analysis, past member of multiple national and international commissions on the risks of terrorism and other bad stuff, and author of lots of books with ‘risk’ in the title.”  Also, Fox adds, he was Daniel Kahneman’s former research assistant at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the early 1970s, and thus someone “present at the creation of the school of psychological research that has shown how bad we humans can be at processing probabilities.”

“People who just look at the average are doing the analysis wrong,” Fischhoff tells Fox.  Fischhoff does not think, either, that “it’s irrational to fear terrorism more than falling in the bathtub.” Why? It’s different in terms “of the uncertainty and the shape of the distribution, how well we understand it and the possibility of these large-scale events.”  Moreover, Fischhoff adds, in another deceptively simple observation, that “people tolerate risks where they see a benefit.”

Seems to me that when comparing statistics this way, the magnitude of the difference in the standard deviations of the two averages will be a measure of the incommensurability of the comparison, taken as a ratio to the average value.

That is, a big standard deviation indicates the importance of the average value as a predictive tool is very low; a small standard deviation indicates the value of the average as a predictive tool is quite high, as compared to the actual value. As a species, we do value predictability, so when the deviation is high, we need to be more concerned about the phenomenon in question.

And I’m sure all the risk analysis and statistical nerds are already chanting We knew that already. Ah, but I didn’t.

Great sense of self. I have virtually none, by the way.

The dust settles in Kansas, as Republican Ron Estes defeats Democrat James Thompson in the 4th district in the race to replace Mike Pompeo, now the CIA Director, in the US House of Representatives. It’s interesting to read the spins on this. First, President Trump via the Kansas City Star:

President Donald Trump congratulated Kansas’ newest congressman Wednesday morning, but also misstated information about the unusually close special election in the Wichita region.
“Great win in Kansas last night for Ron Estes, easily winning the Congressional race against the Dems, who spent heavily & predicted victory!” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning after Republican Ron Estes beat Democrat James Thompson by 7 percentage points in a district that Republicans won by more than 30 points in November.

Estes, the Kansas state treasurer, will replace Mike Pompeo, who gave up his seat in the 4th congressional district in January to serve as Trump’s CIA director.

Neither the state, nor national Democratic Party predicted a victory in the race at any point. However, Thompson was quoted in some outlets as saying that his campaign was winning during the final days of the campaign.

Contrary to Trump’s tweet, Democrats did not spend heavily on the race.

From the progressive wing of the Democrats is David Nir on The Daily Kos:

In an extraordinary political earthquake, Kansas Republicans held on to a dark red House seat in the Wichita area night by just a single-digit margin on Tuesday night, throwing into question whether the GOP’s majority can survive next year’s midterm elections.

Republican Ron Estes, the state treasurer, had been universally expected to easily win the special election in Kansas’ 4th District to replace Mike Pompeo, who left to become Donald Trump’s CIA director earlier this year. But instead, Estes found himself struggling in a district that Trump carried by a dominant 60-33 margin and Pompeo won by more than 30 points last year.

I suppose at this point, President Trump’s followers are just hoping we should just accept he lies about everything, but it remains unacceptable.

Therefore, I request and require President Trump retract the lies embedded in his communication congratulating Ron Estes and promise never to do that again.

So how does Republican dominance look in the 4th district? This gives me a chance to play with a charting tool:

Data Source: Ballotpedia

While a 7 percentage point loss actually sounds like a lot, compared to the tighter races we’ve seen of late for President, the chart does clearly indicate a change in the mood of K4 voters, especially over a 5 month period. Will this continue?

I think it’ll depend on three factors. The two obvious factors are President Trump and the GOP. The former has been flip-flopping on his radical positions, and of late some of his positions approach reasonableness – although I suspect this is only random chance, as one White House faction or another gets his ear – or which world leader he talks to next. He may be the least important factor in the 2018 race for Kansas 4th.

The GOP, on the other hand, have been a consistent bunch – advocates of extreme positions, users of highly dubious reasoning, and vessels of damaged ethics, if we’re to judge from the current Administration nominees’ behaviors. Attempted revocation of the ACA damaged the GOP brand, yet they have returned to talking about the same action – acting as if the electorate was four-square behind them, which is not true.

That and a number of early missteps symptomatic of a party drifting well out of the American mainstream may damage their chances in K4.

But the biggest factor may be … Estes himself. I know very little about him, so I can’t guess how he’ll perform in the House of Representatives – will be be relatively independent, thus isolating himself from the more damaging effects of the GOP behavior patterns, but also from influence? Or will he be another yes-man, and thus vulnerable if the GOP manages to misread the situation completely and disappoint the Independents who hold the key to the next election?

Thompson, the loser on Tuesday, has stated he will run again. The time to start is now – to borrow the mildly loathesome phrase from the private sector, it’s time to build your brand. More accurately, now is the time to formulate positions and show why they are preferable for K4 residents – and point out how it’s conservative ideology wrecking the formerly great State of Kansas.

[EDIT Fixed typo 10/30/2017]

Urtext:

the original text (as of a musical score)

Seen in “The Bathtub Fallacy and Risks of Terrorism,” Kenneth Anderson, Lawfare:

The urtext of ordinary accident/terrorism comparisons might be the 2009 book by political scientist John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare puzzles over the latest dump of stolen NSA cyber-tools by the Shadow Brokers group:

The real mystery here is why the Shadow Brokers released this data. Ordinarily, a hostile intelligence service wouldn’t tip their hand by showing that they had obtained this information but there are some clear strategic benefits to that kind of signalling. Releasing the vulnerabilities themselves goes a step further. It ensures not only that the NSA is unable to use the Windows 0-days against targets, but that you aren’t either. It is a matter of short time before these tools are patched, and thus unavailable to anyone. These are tremendously valuable tools to just burn that way, so it does make one wonder (and worry): what exactly is the intended payoff here?

Steve Benen on Maddowblog gets a bit het up about President Trump’s changes in position:

One of Donald Trump’s most important early flip-flops came just 11 days into his presidency. As a candidate, Trump broke with Republican Party orthodoxy and endorsed lowering prices on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s negotiating power. That, however, did not last.

On Jan. 31, after a meeting with executives and lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, Trump denounced the idea he used to support, calling it a form of “price fixing” that would hurt “smaller, younger companies.” Trump had one set of beliefs, he heard conflicting information, so he adopted a different set of beliefs. …

Now, however, Trump is adopting an entirely different set of opinions on many issues, not as part of some grand ideological rebranding, but because some folks gave him new information he found compelling. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) explained this yesterday by saying, “Some of the things that were said during the campaign, I think he now knows simply aren’t the way things ought to be.”

That’s an exceedingly polite way of saying, “Trump had no idea what he was talking about when he ran for the nation’s highest office, but a variety of people are now guiding him new directions.”

Some sympathetic figures may find all of this vaguely encouraging. Perhaps it’s a good thing, optimists will argue, that the president is acquiring new information and drawing new conclusions. It’s at least preferable to him ignoring evidence and sticking to old assumptions that never really made any sense.

All of which brings up the question of how and when someone should change a position. Generally speaking, everyone takes positions on issues that are wrong. In the science community, these are called hypotheses, used to attempt to explain some observation. Scientists then attempt to falsify, that is, disprove their hypothesis. Those hypotheses which survive numerous such challenges are accepted on a contingency basis, that basis being that it may still be disproved in the future, but for the moment we’ll go with it.

Transferring this to the non-scientific world isn’t that much of a stretch, but for one thing – we tend to attach our egos, our prestige, into our hypotheses. Scientists are not immune to this problem, although the better ones manage to disconnect it. But outside of the science community, the prestige that goes along with backing a given position on an issue is inevitable. It’s not even necessarily a bad thing. After all, if someone comes up with one good position on an issue, maybe they’ll have more. Sure, give them prestige.

But when a hypothesis fails, then what? The ego and prestige resist being wrong, of course. A prominent example is the Kansas economic disaster, brought on by Governor Brownback’s position that lower taxes will spark an economic Renaissance. He wants Trump to replicate his position on the Federal level – and then surely heaven will follow.

It’s a choice bit of madness for a former star of the GOP who is beginning to lose the support of his own party. I suspect he’ll disappear – or at least should – into the swamp once he’s a former governor. Unfortunately, like the economist he relied on, Arthur Laffer (one of the great nominative determinism examples), he’ll probably linger on and assume an air of respectability, unearned in reality, but still palpable.

But I digress.

The proper response when a position on an issue results in an unpredicted (and negative, of course) result is that the position should be changed. This is what a mature adult human should do.

But President Trump is outside of this model of human behavior. During the campaign, he didn’t hesitate to promise whatever would please his audience most, without regard to realities on the ground. Now that he’s discovering issues are far more complex than his shallow knowledge base encompassed, he changes his positions.

It sounds reasonable, but it’s not. From Steve:

The Wall Street Journal noted a similar shift this week on the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump was skeptical of Ex-Im Bank, which funds U.S. trade deals, calling it “unnecessary.” The bank has been a target of Republican criticism, which Mr. Trump seized on.

But that view changed earlier this year after he talked to Boeing Co. CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who explained to him what role the bank plays, according to people familiar with the matter.

Explaining his new position, Trump told the Wall Street Journal this week that he “was very much opposed” to the Export-Import Bank, but “it turns out [that] lots of small companies will really be helped.”

The problem is that he simply goes with his latest information. Boeing is the primary beneficiary of the Bank. Sure, they’ll present a positive case. And for all that he once opposed the Bank, now Trump wants it.

Why, yes, I do think you’re awful parents.

I put off watching Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) because I felt the title was wretched.

The title is the most wretched element of this movie. This is a taut thriller about a nightmare – your child has gone missing. Set in England, a sister and brother have just arrived from America, along with her 4 year old child, and the child is being placed in a traditional British preschool. She disappears the very first day. But why? Ran away? Kidnapped? But no money, no celebrity, just another obscure mother and daughter …

And then the twists begin, as each assumption you might make is taken out and given a fierce shake, casting different lights and shadows over the story. Bathed in the traditional ascerbic British humor, mostly delivered by the police superintendent assigned to the case, it brings freshness to dialog that might have otherwise been a traditionally dull American dialog. And along with that dialog comes quirky, fascinating characters, from the aggressively self-promoting landlord, looking for some action from the single mother, to the elderly founder of the preschool, now writing a story book based on the imaginative stories of the children she’s cared for. In her living room is a painting of her co-founder, Madge, naked.

We started this movie on impulse, starting way too late to finish it. Except we did, drawn in by the fine performances, the intriguing characters, the flood of information that led nowhere, the paucity of critical information – all the elements of a good thriller.

And then the surprise blow is struck.

The organic nature of the story makes this an excellent specimen. The characters went where they must, with no deviation to the sentiments of the audience, who are consigned to following along behind the characters as they follow their impulses, and pay for their decisions. Yes, this strikes me as film noir.

Recommended.

Suzanne Maloney on Markaz highlights some potential long range maneuvering taking place in the Iranian Presidential campaign by one of the candidates, cleric Ibrahim Raisi:

However, recent events would appear to call Rouhani’s presumptive lock on a second term into question. In this sense, Ahmadinejad is, at least for the moment, mostly a sideshow. The real competition may come from Raisi, a former prosecutor whose political fortunes have risen stratospherically over the past year, when he was named the administrator of Iran’s oldest and wealthiest religious shrine and his name began to surface as a leading contender to succeed Khamenei. Although the supreme leader’s health appears to be relatively robust, his age (77) and the January 2017 death of another scion of the revolution—former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—has brought the whispered guessing game about leadership transition out into a much more open debate.

Like Ahmadinejad, Raisi’s sudden decision to contest the presidency, Iran’s second highest slot but one that is distinctly subordinate to the supreme leader, provoked some double-takes. Iranian elections are heavily managed, but a significant element of improvisation and volatility is unavoidable. Anything less than a credible campaign and a commanding victory would undercut the effort to position him as a viable supreme leader. It’s possible Raisi’s bid for the presidency is a mere trial balloon, to boost his name recognition and test his capabilities to engage with Iranian citizens. Alternatively, a well-orchestrated election victory would benefit Raisi as a future supreme leader, by giving him the same national exposure and executive experience as Khamenei, who served as president for eight years before his own elevation.

This strategy does not seem to apply to former President Ahmadinejad, who just registered, as Ahmadinejad is an engineer and teacher, not a cleric.

The currents of politics in Iran continue to swirl deeply. Last year former President Ahmadinejad was advised by Supreme Leader Khamenei to not run for a third term as President. Now, in the wake of his former Vice President Hamid Baghaei registering to run, President Ahmadinejad has also registered – purely to boost his VP’s chances, he claims. Rohollah Faghihi has the story for AL Monitor:

On the heels of Baghaei’s announcement, various video clips were released by Baghaei, Ahmadinejad and the former president’s controversial friend and aide Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, some of whose pronouncements have been interpreted as “deviant” by some religious conservatives. In one of the clips, Baghaei tells Ahmadinejad and Mashaei that “one of us must be sacrificed.” Based on this, it seems that Ahmadinejad is planning to pressure the conservative-dominated Guardian Council, which is tasked with vetting presidential candidates, to let Baghaei run. On April 12, after registering to run, Ahmadinejad and Baghaei both held a press conference in which Ahmadinejad said that his decision had been made in support of Baghaei, “I registered merely to support Baghaei and I will act according to the [supreme] leader’s advice. … I’ll be serving Mr. Baghaei with all my power.” The former president added, “Some people say that the [supreme leader’s] advice was meant to completely forbid [me from running], but what the leader said was just advice. … I am still committed to my moral promise.”

Conservatives and many analysts have been saying in recent months that Baghaei wouldn’t get approval from the Guardian Council. Baghaei, who has crossed many of the red lines in Iranian politics, was jailed for unannounced reasons for more than 200 days and he still has cases that are being reviewed by the judiciary. Therefore, Ahmadinejad’s candidacy might have been registered just to prevent Baghaei’s disqualification. However, the former president may try to stay in the race, putting more pressure on the Guardian Council, which would probably disqualify him for defying the supreme leader; such a decision could then provoke Ahmadinejad’s vocal political base. The likelihood of such a scenario caused conservative cleric Mohammad-Taghi Rahbar to voice his concern April 12 that Ahmadinejad’s candidacy could cause chaos in the country.

At least it doesn’t if there’s a high civilization to borrow from. 38 North‘s Martyn Williams reports on North Korea’s latest apparent achievements in the realm of quantum encryption:

North Korean media hasn’t provided much coverage of the development, which indicates it could still be in the research stage.

I’ve only been able to find two reports on the system. The first was in the Tongil Sinbo on February 27, 2016, and the second was on March 24, 2017, in the Naenara online magazine.

The reports say it was developed by a team at Kim Il Sung University.

The Naenara report mentions that the North Korean system is based on BB84, which was the first quantum key distribution protocol. It was originally developed by researchers at IBM and the Université de Montreal in 1984. And it mentions the error rate of the North Korean system is 3.5 percent against what it said was an international allowable error rate of 10 percent.

That all points to a working system in the lab, but putting it into real world use is very different and more complicated.

Still, it just takes persistence to make it work, and access to advanced science journals. And you can’t lock those away, because science advances best when researchers are free to discuss the state of their fields – so I wouldn’t argue that we need to keep North Korea from gaining that scientific information. That’s a mug’s game.

The news out of North Korea just keeps becoming less and less pleasant, doesn’t it? Martyn notes that it’s unlikely that it’ll be useful from Pyongyang to the launch sites just yet – but that’s only a temporary relief. Intelligence analysts had better be thinking about what to do when it does become widespread in North Korea – and what to do about it.

Kevin Drum laments our flying ways:

So flying sucks because we, the customers, have made it clear that we don’t care. We love to gripe, but we just flatly aren’t willing to pay more for a better experience. Certain individuals (i.e., the 10 percent of the population over six feet tall) are willing to pay for legroom. Some are willing to pay more for extra baggage. Some are willing to pay more for a window seat. But most of us aren’t. If the ticket price on We Care Airlines is $10 more, we click the link for Suck It Up Airlines. We did the same thing before the web too. As usual, the fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.

Flying is the ultimate denigration of the journey as the purpose of a trip – it’s all about the destination, where the journey itself is nothing more than an inconvenience that has been bought away. We substitute a few hours of uncomfortable, loud, bad air flying for a few days of loud, uncomfortable, but possibly interesting driving, for weeks and weeks of riding a horse or even walking.

So of course most people won’t pay extra for it – get there and start vacationing.

Just part of our hurry-up, 24 hour online culture.

In the travails of the leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), wherein a judge declared the leadership structure of the CFPB unconstitutional as the director cannot be fired, the CFPB has appealed and now the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice has disowned the Obama’s argument while managing to take … both sides of the argument. Deepak Gupta and Jonathan Taylor of the Take Care blog have the uptake. First, a summary of the first opinion:

It is this “for cause” removal provision that is now under attack in the courts. In October 2016, in PHH v. CFPB (an appeal from an enforcement action against a mortgage lender), a panel of the D.C. Circuit held that the for-cause provision, coupled with the agency’s single-director leadership, violates the constitutional separation of powers. Writing for himself and one other colleague, Judge Kavanaugh reasoned that the CFPB director is insufficiently accountable to the president because he is not removable at will. Never mind that many other hugely important federal agencies are led by those also removable only for cause (the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to name five). And never mind that the Supreme Court has expressly upheld the constitutionality of those agencies.

To Judge Kavanaugh, the critical constitutional distinction is that those agencies are led by more than one person, whereas the CFPB is not. His opinion claims that this distinction is grounded in the need to safeguard liberty and in what he calls the “deep values of the Constitution.”

Deepak and Jonathan think that’s irrelevant. And now on to the fun part:

What does the Trump DOJ think about the constitutionality of these agencies? We don’t have to speculate. It filed a brief on February 27 supporting the constitutionality of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. That brief adopted the reasons given in the FHFA’s brief, filed the same day, which describes the separation-of-powers challenge (the one based on Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion in PHH) as “wholly without merit.” Here’s a taste:

It is long settled that Congress is not prohibited from creating independent agencies run by officers removable only for cause. … It is also beyond dispute that Congress may structure agencies to be headed by a single officer. Plaintiffs’ position in this case is that those two aspects are somehow mutually exclusive, i.e., that Congress is forbidden from attaching removal protection to an office unless that office will share leadership with a number of other officers also having removal protection. No authority supports that novel and illogical thesis, and it finds no purchase in the principles that animate separation-of-powers jurisprudence.

The same Justice Department lawyer (Chad Readler, the acting head of the Civil Division) signed both this brief and the PHH brief—within the space of a few weeks. Although Readler later filed an “advisory” in the FHFA case saying that DOJ “does not urge reliance” on the separations-of-powers argument it had adopted earlier, he did not disavow that argument.

The upshot is that the Trump DOJ’s brief in PHH achieves a truly remarkable trifecta: It stands opposite not only another part of the executive branch and a previous administration, but also itself.

Given this extraordinary contradiction in DOJ’s position, which reveals that even Trump’s own lawyers are alarmed at the implications of the unprecedented position they’re advancing in the CFPB litigation, what happens next?

I, too, cannot fathom why the number of officers, so long as it’s more than zero, can possibly matter in the context of the Constitution, and, for that matter, common sense.

But I think the larger picture is to ask what’s driving the DoJ to take these opposing positions. While I won’t delude myself to think that the DoJ is unitary at even the best of times, the contradictions here may be indicative of a deeper sickness in the department, where a false doctrine (from the viewpoint of the government) may have been introduced. We need to remember that Government regulates the rest of society in the interests of justice – not the interest of profits.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com served as a judge for this year’s Architizer Awards:

Kamikatz Public House
Source: Architizer Awards

When I was asked to be a juror in this year’s Architizer Awards I was honoured, but had absolutely no idea how much work it was. Over the course of a week all my non-TreeHugger time was devoted to looking at and trying to decide among hundreds of entries. It was exhausting. And when you look at the list of jurors, there are hundreds of them, and it is a really stellar list; I am squeezed between Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Lockhart Steele, who founded Curbed. Just putting all the L’s in a room would be a great party.

Green Building is not a typology, given that everybody claims that they think about sustainability these days. But there is the Plus page that looks at concepts and included an “architecture + sustainability” category. I was not a judge in this category but love this brewery, the Kamikatz Public House, in Tokushima prefecture in Japan by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP.

Some interesting designs there.

Lt. Colonel Shane Reeves of the US Army remarks on the problems of justifying the legality of the Syrian missile strike, writing in Lawfare:

As Professor Deeks highlights, the United States may eventually attempt to shroud this moral justification in legality by arguing that the missile strikes were part of a humanitarian intervention to protect the Syrian people from Assad’s chemical weapons. Under this controversial use of force theory, moral legitimacy equates to legal justification for military action. Some have made efforts, most notably the United Kingdom following the Syrian use of chemical weapons in 2013, to outline conditions that trigger the right to intervene. However, these criteria are not widely accepted and decisions to use military force for humanitarian purposes remain subjective and inherently political.

The Russian involvement in the Ukraine is illustrative of this point. In March 2014 Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula, a recognized territory of the Ukraine, and occupied the region. Then-Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers condemned the act by stating the “intervention is without legal basis—indeed it violates Russia’s commitment to protect the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of the Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, claimed the intervention, in large part, was for humanitarian purposes including to protect Russian-speaking minorities and to stop anti-Semitic violence.

While Putin’s justifications were easily dispelled, his response was that of a humanitarian interventionist. Here lies the problem with these types of moral-based use of force decisions: they are inherently subjective and, consequently, easily abused. For example, why is there an obligation to stop the use of chemical weapons in Syria but not to stop the daily atrocities committed in North Korean work camps? When does the moral responsibility that justified an intervention end? Why do certain states have a moral imperative to act while others do not? This lack of clarity empowers states to make these determinations unilaterally and results in divergent views on the appropriate use of force. Even more dangerously, this ambiguity allows a state with nationalistic goals to act with aggression under the pretext of a moral obligation.

Possession of a deadly weapon such as sarin, VX, or any others of that class, on the other hand, have the potential to inflict serious harm on United States citizens, or for that matter U.N. peacekeepers, if it were to be deployed by Syria – or by those who were to steal it from them – in any location.

I think we could justify the Syrian missile attack on the grounds that destroying this weapon – if in fact it had been specifically targeted – is a matter of collective self-defense, which is noted by Colonel Reeves as an accepted justification for just such a military action.

I think the intellectual error in this scenario is to focus on the concrete results of the activities, rather than the potential, worse-case results. Through the latter lens, it becomes clear that the North Korean activities, as self-destructive as they may be, are not in the same class as possessing one of the more foul weapons devised by mankind.

It occurred to me this morning that modern word processors still lack that one important feature:

The sound of the typewriter mechanism pulling in the paper.

Whirr! Whirr!

So in this previous post I speculated that the Syrian missile strike would improve the polls for President Trump. Turns out, not so much:

Gallup notes in another article that, compared to similar actions by other Presidents, this action has relatively little support:

Reactions to the missile strikes President Donald Trump ordered are much more positive among Republicans (82%) than among Democrats (33%) nationwide.

And Independents are at 44 / 43. So we see a lot of partisanship here, while the Independents – the king-makers, if I may indulge in a completely inappropriate analogy – so far haven’t really swung one way or another. I hope they engage in a follow up poll, since the information that has emerged on the results seems to be mostly negative – airstrip not out of action, the planes destroyed may not have been operational, and the impact on the gas is not yet clear, at least to me. And then what is Trump going to do in the long term?

Kevin Drum thinks not much:

And yet, the US government is now officially committed to regime change in Syria even though it wasn’t last week. In fairness, so was Obama. But Obama was always clear that this was merely aspirational. Trump hasn’t said one way or another, and he’s avoiding the press, which would like to hear a little more about his new foreign policy. The problem, it appears, is that Trump doesn’t know what his foreign policy is. He doesn’t know what to do about ISIS. He doesn’t know what to do about Afghanistan. He doesn’t know what to do about China. He doesn’t know what to do about Syria. He doesn’t know what to do about North Korea. He only knows how to send tweets into the atmosphere about how all these folks better watch out because there’s a new sheriff in town. But there’s nothing more. Trump has taken strategic ambiguity to whole new levels.

Personally, I guess I’m rooting for the meaningless Twitter rants to continue. It’s better than the alternative.

As most anti-Trumpers feared, he now has access to advanced weaponry and may end up drunkenly shooting it off in frustrated bouts of anger. This will be no good for anyone, enemies or allies.

Nora Ellingsen and Lisa Daniels on Lawfare fact-check President Trump’s claim that the data justify his attempts to shut down immigration from certain countries:

A new, more comprehensive dataset became available to the public. Shirin Sinnar at Stanford Law School received under a Freedom of Information Act request from 2015 the National Security Division’s list of public and unsealed international terrorism and terrorism-related convictions from September 11, 2001 to December 31, 2015. …

Here’s the bottom line:

• The data Trump cited in his speech to the Joint Session of Congress simply don’t support his claims that a “vast majority” of individuals on the list came from outside the United States—unless, that is, you include individuals who were forcibly brought to the United States in order to be prosecuted and exclude all domestic terrorism cases.
• While the data do validate the Executive Order on its statement that hundreds of convicted individuals were born overseas, it actually doesn’t support the policy the executive order embodies.
• Of the hundreds of foreign-born individuals, the vast majority were born in countries not covered by the Executive Order.
• And of the relatively small number of individuals from covered countries—which total 43—the clear majority come from only two countries (Somalia and Yemen), while a vanishingly small percentage of that come from Iran, Sudan, Libya or Syria.

They will have two more posts in this series, analyzing the data and, presumably, giving their conclusions. But at the moment, it appears that Trump was simply pandering to his supporters’ xenophobia. Also interesting? How the right wing played it. Using the results found by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and National Interest,

Fox News and Stephen Miller ran with [the Center for Immigration Studies] headline: “Study Reveals 72 Terrorists Came from Countries Covered by Trump Vetting Order,” while the Washington Post fact-checked the study. The Post noted that some of the individuals on the list had entered the United States years before they conducted any crime and many of those individuals were not bomb makers, they engaged in more innocuous activities such as transferring money.

From John Archibald on AL.com about a year ago:

… that Gov. Doctor Dr. Robert Bentley (he had his name legally changed to Doctor so it would appear on the ballot) has become nothing but a punch line.

Astrobleme:

Many impact craters have been found in the last half century. By studying their chemical composition as well as those of the scars known as astroblemes – the mostly destroyed craters that still leave identifiable impressions – we can begin to fill in our planet’s visitor record. The guestbook is the Earth Impact Database. [Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall,  p160.]

The political punditry has been rumbling about the race to replace Mike Pompeo, now the CIA Director, who had occupied the Representative’s seat for Kansas District #4, generally considered to be a safe GOP seat. In fact, Pompeo had won it with more than 60% of the vote the three times he’s run for the seat, the last being the 2016 cycle (Ballotpedia).

I haven’t run across any recent public polls of the current replacement race between GOPer Ron Estes (winner of two previous statewide elections) and Democrat James Thompson, apparently with little political experience, but the Wichita Eagle notes signs of panic in the Kansas GOP:

National Republicans are wading into a Kansas congressional race few analysts thought would be competitive ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas will join Republican candidate Ron Estes at an airport rally Monday in Wichita, a day before voters in southern Kansas head to the polls to pick a new congressman. Vice President Mike Pence is also scheduled to record a robocall on Estes’ behalf, according to a state party official.

Cruz’s appearance comes on the heels of last-minute spending on television ads by the National Republican Congressional Committee and a fundraising push by U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin on Estes’ behalf.

Parties often run private polls, and perhaps the GOP is unhappy with some private results. For me, it’ll be a fascinating insight into how much damage has been dealt the Republican brand. The first source is, of course, Trump, who has wallowed about, failed to run a competent Administration, and then lied about it. His one success has been the completion of the nomination of Gorsuch to SCOTUS.

But, quite possibly more damaging, has been the activities of the House GOP members. Representative Nunes forced to recuse himself from the Russian investigation; Representative Chaffetz trying to sell off public lands; and Speaker of the House Ryan failing spectacularly not only in his political job of ramming through the retraction of the ACA, but even in having a basic understanding of the workings of insurance. These visible lessons in how ideological extremists behave may be a learning moment for voters who consider themselves conservatives – and are discovering those who claimed to fellow conservatives are actually extremists.

But this is all hypothetical. Perhaps Estes will also win 60+% of the vote. Perhaps Estes has a reputation as a moderate. Whatever the result, a lesson will be learned by someone. And by me.