Monthly Archives: May 2017

From the email bag comes another bit of parasitism: the story of Irena Sendler (misspelled in the mail I received, although no doubt an honest mistake). I’ve poked around online a bit, but not found this exact article, nor a more honest version from which it might have been derived, so I’ll reproduce it, sans pictures and formatting.

WHAT A  WOMAN

Irena Sender

Died: May 12,  2008 (aged 98)

Warsaw , Poland

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.

Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids. Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.

During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. Ultimately, she was caught, however, and the Nazis broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled out in a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and tried to reunite the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected. Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming. Later another politician, Barack Obama, won for SIMPLY BEING THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT. It is now more than 65 years since the Second World War in Europe ended.

This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, In memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, Now, more than ever, with Iran, and others, claiming the HOLOCAUST to be ‘a myth’, it’s imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.

This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide! Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world. Please send this e-mail to people you know and ask them to continue the memorial chain.

Please don’t just delete it.It will only take you a minute to pass this along.

Of course, the shots at Al Gore and Barack Obama are gratuitous. The former Vice President, in using his position to alert the world to an imminent and widespread threat, was certainly a valid candidate for the award (which this mail misleadingly doesn’t note is actually a joint award, the other party being the Panel on Climate Change), and while Irena certainly should have her champions for the award, the committee may have felt it was more important to help save humanity from an imminent scourge than celebrate someone who courageously fought a vanquished scourge. Intriguingly, Snopes.com notes the names of nominees are not actually released for 50 years, yet I see The Independent claims to know at least some of the nominees. A leak, perhaps?

Of course, the award to President Obama is rather harder to defend. I’ve often felt the award was along the lines of “thank God, an Administration not headed by war-lovers!”, which hardly seems adequate. However, the “first black President” remark is quite simply racist; and, in any case, Sendler had passed away at this point, and Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.

And that leads in to the real point of this missive – This is the story of an extraordinary woman, who received many awards over her lifetime for her self-sacrifice, including from both the Vatican and various Jewish organizations. And it was used for base political ends, and, worse yet, to spread the diseases of racism and petty resentments. It’s subtle, it’s vile, and the writer should be ashamed.

I see on CNN that President Trump issued a signing statement when he signed a bit of legislation over the weekend. I’m so tired of these damn things. Either bloody well litigate what you don’t like, or get yourself elected to Congress, Mr. President. You are only the President with Executive duties, not some lawmaker.

I must be cranky this morning.

Coffin birth:

There was a fourth skeleton in the grave: that of the woman’s near-term fetus, estimated to be 39-40 weeks old. After death, gases build up inside a body which can, for women who were pregnant at time of death, cause the expulsion of a fetus. This is known as post-mortem fetal expulsion (also called post-mortem fetal extrusion, as it is in the most recent paper) or, more commonly, coffin birth. [“The Coffin Birth of Liguria: The Science Behind A Sad Story,” Gemma Tarlach, Dead Things]

A tree in Shoreview, MN:

Immotile:

lacking motility

a free-form sculpture that manages to suggest movement while remaining an immotile object [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in the NewScientist Aperture column (22 April 2017):

The place is significant for Barker, for it was here, in 1816, that marine biologist John Vaughan Thompson was posted as a military surgeon. In Cobh harbour, he became the first person to observe the small, immotile organisms known as plankton.

I suppose it should be noted that, in the context of the column, Barbie Doll legs are considered to be immotile.

Ever wonder about those textiles made of “Egyptian cotton?” Didn’t seem to be all that special? They may have been fake. Menna Farouk reports on steps taken to stop the fraud and how this is helping the Egyptian economy in AL Monitor:

In August 2016, a US retail chain accused India’s textile manufacturer Welspun of using cheaper, non-Egyptian cotton in bed sheets and pillowcases. The Indian manufacturer acknowledged the accusations, admitting that some of their products were falsely labeled as 100% Egyptian cotton.

Following this announcement, internationally, retailers have begun to more closely monitor their products labeled as 100% Egyptian cotton, many requiring manufacturers to provide attestation for products labeled as such.

In an effort to crack down on these fraudulent practices and ensure quality, in 2016, the Cotton Egypt Association started licensing the use of the Egyptian cotton logo to suppliers and manufacturers all over the world. Carrying the logo means that the association certifies the authenticity of the Egyptian cotton through DNA analysis. …

Economist Ahmed el-Shami said that if Egypt’s cotton industry returned to its previous glory, the economy would flourish, the spinning and textile industries would boom, and stalled factories would reopen.

A large enough number of fraudulent cases can drag an economy to the edge, apparently.

When Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister of Australia in 2015, I had some hopes that he was conscious of the cilmate change problems facing the world, seeing as he dismissed his predecessor’s overly political approach as “bullshit.” Sadly, he seems to fall into a similar category, as noted by Alice Klein in NewScientist (22 April 2017, paywall):

The scientific consensus is clear: the increased frequency of mass bleaching events is being driven by global warming – both directly by warming water and indirectly by extreme weather that ravages corals. The only way to save the precious remains of the reef is to rein in our carbon dioxide emissions.

So it might come as a surprise that the Australian government seems hell-bent on doing the opposite. Last Monday – the same day the latest reef report card was released – Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was in India finalising a deal with multinational conglomerate Adani to build the largest coal mine in Australia – just 300 kilometres from the Great Barrier Reef. Will this seal the reef’s fate?

The emissions certainly won’t help. Coal from the A$22 billion (US$16.5 billion) Carmichael mine will go by rail to the Abbot Point coal port in the central section of the reef and shipped to power stations in India, where it will pump out more than the annual carbon dioxide output of New Zealand.

The coal will also have a more direct effect: dust blowing from shipments at Abbot Point is likely to poison nearby coral. Coal dust exposure can kill coral in as little as two weeks.

Australian citizens are against the Carmichael mine, as noted in the guardian:

Three-quarters of Australians, including most Liberal voters, oppose the government giving a $1bn loan to Adani to build a rail line between its proposed Carmichael coalmine and the Abbot Point shipping terminal.

But there may be a greater objection raised to Turnbull’s plan, as Klein reports:

Because while the Australian government has insisted that India needs coal to power the lives of 100 million impoverished people, the Indian government has plans to move away from fossil fuels. Last last year, it announced it would harvest 60 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2027. The rapidly falling price of solar energy is making it an increasingly attractive alternative to coal for India and other lower-income countries.

And all this in contrast to the coal miners’ own efforts to leave the industry in its own hole in the ground.

Testator, testatrix:

A testator is a person who has written and executed a last will and testament that is in effect at the time of his/her death.^[1] It is any “person who makes a will.”

A female testator is sometimes referred to as a testatrix, particularly in older cases. [Wikipedia]

The latter noted in my wife’s will today. Seeing as how at one time she made a living grading test papers in the area of English Composition, I was a trifle confused.

Paul Rosenzweig on Lawfare remarks on the ongoing efforts to differentiate people from bots in the broad contextual problem of fake news:

A recent project by “Truthy” at the University of Indiana gives a good window into how the technology might work (and how difficult it may be to implement at scale).  The project, known as BotOrNot, is an academic project partially funded by NSF and DoD.  The objective is a limited one — to try and assess whether the traffic from a particular twitter account can be analyzed to determine whether the account is connected to a real human being or whether it is controlled by a bot network.  Because the assessment is probabilistic rather than definitive the “score” assigned to an account is a numerical percentage rather than an absolute “bot or not” determination.

And thus my contingent humanity.  The analytics of my own Twitter account (@RosenzweigP) assign me a score of 13% as a bot (or, reciprocally, as 87% as a real human being).  The analytics rely on things like the timing of my tweets, their language structure, and my use of hashtags as a way of gauging my genuine nature.  Interestingly, the area in which I most resemble a bot seems to lie in a sentiment analysis—apparently, my tweets have been angry of late (you can imagine why) and that is indicative, at some level, of artificiality.

That last bit concerning the operationality of the software touched my contradictory nature. What if I were a bot writer, dedicated to retweeting fake news, and this came up? What would I do?

Actually, I’d write my bot to be trainable, and then I’d train it – on known human Twitter accounts. Let it learn how humans write, when they write, the patterns that emerge. And then it can use those same patterns when it goes about its dark business. I’m not saying it’d be easy – you’d need some training and experience in the Big Data arena, I’m sure – but it’s probably doable.

Maybe it’s the Rock of Sisyphus

I’ve been trying to write a review of The Red Turtle (2016), a 2016 Oscar nominee in the animated film category, for nearly a week now, but it’s gone poorly. This is a movie which dispenses with subtlety and ambiguity in the tangible parts of the story, as there is no doubt to the actions taken by an anonymous man washed up on a deserted island, from his basic nourishment to his attempts to escape the island, nor does dialog exist to cloud the issue. Even his dreams, if initially misleading, are swiftly clarified as to their true nature.

The motivations of his antagonist, however, are less clear, as it blocks his attempts to leave. The actions are, again, beyond dispute, but the motivations are the bridge to the other part of this story – that of symbolism and metaphor, and these are quite ambiguous. In contrast, the concrete actions of the man, the violent and terminal destruction of his antagonist, are such that the audience may not be able to empathize or understand those actions.

And then we are treated to a metamorphosis, a puzzling occurrence that makes no tangible sense, nor does it really work for this viewer in the metaphorical realm, although I suspect there are several competing explanations. In tangible terms, a turtle sheds her shell and transforms into a beautiful human woman.  The two become a mated pair and make the island their home. They reproduce and age.  We see their son grow up and eventually leave the island.  After a full life, the man dies – and his mate resumes her original form and returns to the sea.

Without a convenient explanation, it’s difficult to argue for, or against, The Red Turtle‘s thematic material, but I’ll give it a bit of a try. It was, in a word, punchless. If there’s a lesson to be learned & debated, it was too subtle for my rather straight-ahead temperament. I did not see an argument made for the integrity of the metaphor, whatever it might have been, or the validity of the thematic argument. As much as I enjoyed the minimalist artwork, the unusual story-telling style, and the very comedic crabs, my primary final emotion was neither exhilaration nor introspection; just puzzlement.

Taken as pure mythology or allegory, the story kind of works.  But for someone who doesn’t deal well with ambiguity or unexplained lapses of logic, this film leaves the viewer with more questions than answers.  I don’t know, though.  Maybe that’s the point.

Steve Benen wrote something which triggered a sudden logic process. Here’s what he said:

I’ve long been fascinated by the degree to which America’s current Republican Party is an international outlier. Our GOP, for example, is the only major party in any advanced democracy on the planet to reject the science of climate change. It’s the only major party that believes citizens should have largely unfettered access to firearms. It’s the only major party to oppose the international nuclear agreement with Iran.

And it’s the only major party in any advanced democracy on earth to oppose health care as a core benefit of citizenship.

Now let’s throw a couple of proper names into the mix, such as Albert Einstein. Madeleine Albright. Felix Frankfurter. The point being that we’re really a country made by our immigrants.

And something must attract those immigrants. Honestly, it’s a competitive landscape out there – unlike, say, the time of Einstein, where it was America or persecution. Albright escaped Communism. Frankfurter came as a boy with his family, who no doubt were looking for opportunity.

So now, as Steve points out, the GOP wants to tell prospective immigrants that healthcare may only be available to the rather well-off – and those who are willing to use the counter-productive, in both the financial and health senses, emergency rooms. For the desperate immigrant, this may not matter much. But for the skilled immigrant – say, a PhD in a biology-oriented discipline – who may have his or her pick of countries to go – what does the United States offer?

Health care forced into crisis by the GOP. A xenophobic President. A legislative body dominated by incompetent ignoramuses, who don’t realize that they just crippled this nation in the field of attracting highly desirable immigrants.

The health care debacle, if it comes to that, may be more costly than we know.

In a long dormant thread, I asked when light pollution could be addressed. In Colorado, they’ve done just that, as Melissa Breyer reports on Treehugger.com:

But if it’s up to the residents of Westcliffe and Silver Cliff, two small towns in western Colorado that comprise Wet Mountain Valley, the great night sky will not be lost. After some 15 years of hard work, they’re finally seeing the light. And in fact, they boast some of the darkest skies on the planet, luring in stargazers from near and far to feast on the delights of pitch dark heavens studded with stars.

In their (approved) application to become Colorado’s first designated International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) community, they decribe their work as “a long 15-year process to change the mindsets of these old western communities from one of ‘Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do’ to ‘How can we protect our beautiful Wet Mountain Valley’s rural charm from being lost to big-city problems like light pollution?'”

And there’s a lovely video that goes with it. And I admit I laughed when a local resident, who I must admire (and envy!), say that the Milky Way (the galaxy in which our solar system resides) “… is the most magnificent thing in the world.”

Kelly Macias on The Daily Kos notes Alabama’s regressive politicians and their attachment to monuments for slavery:

Oh, Alabama—forever taking a few tiny steps forward toward progress and a whole bunch backward. The state that represents the tenacity and determination of the civil rights movement just took a giant leap back toward its “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever” George Wallace days with the passage of its latest bill. Alabama lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a measure on Thursday forbidding any changes to Confederate or long-standing monuments in the state. The bill now heads to the Senate for approval.

Seems to me an enterprising developer could put out a smartphone app which, when viewed through the camera, recognizes all these monuments and labels them with the appropriate information concerning how they related to slavery, and perhaps some useful addendums such as the cruel punishments used to keep the slaves in line, the lynchings, etc. It’d be a little like Pokémon Go.

Monuments have consequences, but the consequences won’t reflect reality so long as historical revisionism obscures them. The Civil War, from the very speeches of the rebellious politicians, was about slavery. In the end, so are the monuments.

So we’re not unique in our practice of helping comrades when they’re hurt. NewScientist (22 April 2017) notes that ants do it, too:

Megaponera analis, a species found in sub-Saharan Africa, feeds only on termites. It sends armies of 200 to 500 individuals to raid their nests. However, the raiders often sustain serious injuries. Ants that lose limbs are severely handicapped immediately after the injury. But if they are carried back to safety they adjust within a few hours and can run almost as fast as uninjured ants.

“At first, they kept tripping over, because they thought they [still] had six legs,” says Erik Frank at the University of Würzburg, Germany. “Inside the nest, they were safe to adapt and change their locomotion.”

Frank and his colleagues observed 54 raids by these ants in Comoé National Park in Ivory Coast, using infrared cameras to see inside their nests. On average, three ants were carried back after each raid. Most had a termite clinging on to them, and some had lost a limb. …

Frank thinks that several traits of this species made this behaviour likely to evolve: they hunt in groups, they have a high injury rate, and they have very small colonies, which means each individual is valuable.

There is something reassuring about ants assisting their wounded, even if it appears to be a numbers game. It does make you wonder about why we help our own, even in the era of massed armies. I suspect it has to do with a social contract – people won’t venture out for war if they know they’ll just be left on the field of battle when an arm gets blown off. The commitment, so strongly expressed by many military forces, to bring back the hurt, even the dead, is a reassurance to the potential soldier – and may take the place of other bonds present in smaller, more homogenuous groups, who might be motivated to fight by religious or xenophobic reasons. In more heterogenuous societies, the appeal to a more primal urge will be more effective.

No doubt you’ve all heard the news – the GOP House members took a deep breath and trod the first step down the path of destroying the ACA in order to replace it with their own structure (known as the AHCA). It’s worth looking at how they did it – much like the confirmation of Justice Gorsuch, IJ, literally hundreds of years of tradition were discarded in the effort, and this should concern American citizens regardless of their Party loyalties. Here’s Steve Benen on MaddowBlog on the process:

If House Republicans were scrambling to vote on a bill that overhauls the health care system before receiving a CBO score, that alone would be astonishing. But no one should lose sight of the fact that the Republicans’ American Health Care Act has also faced no meaningful scrutiny from lawmakers themselves: there have been no public hearings, no testimony from experts, and no public debate.

Adding insult to injury, the legislation that’s scheduled to receive a floor vote in about five hours wasn’t circulated to members yesterday or published online for Americans to review. Take a moment to consider why Republican leaders in the House wouldn’t want anyone – the media, industry experts, voters, or even their own GOP colleagues – to be able to read the legislation in advance.

It would not be unjustifiable to call this a secret law. But perhaps some readers will believe that amounts to ad hominem, since the law will eventually be examined … we hope.

So take a look at the facts, as enumerated by Steve. No evaluation by themselves or by the independent experts, the CBO, a fierce belief the American electorate wants this, when every poll disagrees, all of which translates to a terrible disconnect with reality. In another article, Steve argues that an obscure clause in the new law will result in potential negative changes – he uses the word “gutted” – even for those of us with employer-supplied insurance. Thus, every American citizen should consider this “GOP victory” and recognize it for what it really is – a ghastly misuse of the sacred offices of the legislature.

I do not use the word sacred easily, understand, but in the context of the American government, that’s how they should be considered. The occupants pass legislation which leads to laws, the laws by which we live. All due consideration should be given, much as the Democrats did for the ACA (which, you may or may not recall, was only passed after long debate over many months – not after an afternoon of debate over a document written up over a few nights). It is their task to sniff out the collateral damage of legislation – not pass it pell mell in hopes that a fool of a President will sign it and then pretend it’s better than what it’s replacing.

So, when I see this blatant disregard for good policy making, all in hopes of scoring political points, then this is what I’d like to see:

Every single legislator, regardless of party, regardless of this legislation’s ultimate fate, who voted for this with no chance to evaluate it, to see the CBO scoring, should be replaced. My prescription for those replacements? That they pledge to observe good citizenship when it comes to legislation, and that means due consideration for the public welfare. Republicans or Democrats, that’s what the replacements need to do.

And this should happen immediately, if possible, through recalls.

My Representative is Betty McCollum, and she didn’t vote for it. How about your’s? Did she or he just betray their responsibility?

Here’s the list of Reps and their votes from WaPo.

I suggest you look your Rep up. Maybe it’s time for you, dear reader, to consider leading a recall effort, or a replacement effort. I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat, you owe it to your nation to give strong consideration to this effort, regardless of how you feel about the ACA. The disastrous way the House of Representatives is run calls for your deepest, most sober consideration of these suggestions.

As they went to sleep last night:

Ouch. No, wait. That’s “artsily out of focus.” Yeah.

Finally returning to this dormant thread, Scott Chamberlain is starting to goggle at the depths to which the management of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra (FWSO) has sunk, particularly in regards to some promotional pictures released by management. I’ll leave most of the pics on Scott’s Mask of the Flower Prince:

But wait.  Others on social media are calling out that something isn’t right with that picture.

In fact, this is what that original picture looks like, uncropped:

In fact, its an edited version of a photo that appeared last year. The key difference?  A number of audience members in this shot are wearing green. As in, they are wearing green shirts in support of the musicians.  But the photo that the FWSO has used in its Facebook ad has been cropped to remove many of them… and some audience members have their green shirts Photoshopped… into different colors.

It appears to be a win at any moral cost situation for FWSO management / board, doesn’t it? They’ve taken a position – that musicians simply make too darn much money – and turned it into an anchor around their own necks. Of course, I don’t know how FWSO musician pay compares to other top flight orchestras across the nation, adjusted, of course, for geographical location. But when you move into the terrain of falsification, of fraud, you really leave that important issue behind. Now the paramount issue becomes the moral and ethical lapse of management, and the important follow-on question:

Can you ever trust these chappies again?

I don’t know what Scott thinks, but I think it’s time for the replacement of FWSO management / board. Even if they blame this on an over-zealous rogue employee, they still have to go – because the cumulative implied incompetence, as the leaders of the organization, makes them unworthy of their positions.

And note how this is an illustration of the positive power of the Internet. Too often – such as yesterday’s Google scam – we hear how the Internet is used to take advantage of people. Here we see how the cumulative power of massed eyes picked up on an immoral tactic. And apparently is jamming it right down their throat.

I hope next Scott writes on this issue, it’s to report a whole lot of resignations.

parthenocarpic:

Some “seedless” fruits just have very small seeds, and still require pollination. But completely seedless – or parthenocarpic – fruit like the edited tomato do not require pollination at all. [“Gene editing opens doors to seedless fruit with no need for bees,” Alice Klein, NewScientist (22 April 2017)]

The Iranians have held the first televised debate between the candidates for the Presidential election, coming later this year. While we Americans may think our politics can get convoluted, I think the Iranians have more kinks and folds than we do. For one thing, Supreme Leader Khamenei and the Guardian Council add additional centers of power which must be placated. Alireza Ramezani reports how the public reacted to the first debate in AL Monitor:

[Current First Vice President Eshaq] Jahangiri’s booming popularity is widely attributed to his attacks against Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a conservative candidate, who has been Tehran’s mayor since 2005. Ghalibaf, who is running for president for the third time in 12 years, was criticized during the debate over his management of Tehran municipality and his hard-line political approach.

According to the online poll, conducted by Tabnak news website and republished by Aftab Online on April 30, 42% of respondents believe Jahangiri took the most advantage of the debate. About 34% said Rouhani was the best, while 15% voiced support for Ghalibaf. Other candidates, including Ebrahim Raisi, the custodian of the holy shrine of the eighth Shiite Imam and believed to be favored by the supreme leader; Mostafa Mirsalim, representing the conservative Islamic Coalition Party; and Mostafa Hashemi-Taba, a marginal pro-Reform competitor got the least attention from the public, the poll showed. …

Hossein Shariatmadari, the managing editor of the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, claimed in an interview with Fars News Agency on April 30 that the Reformist leadership would be shifting from Rouhani to Jahangiri in the days running up to the May 19 vote. …

Some observers believe that the conservatives have made their claims about Jahangiri to sow division among Reformists. But there are signs that they are pursuing another strategic goal. The hard-liners know they have little chance to win this year’s election. Thus they may be after replacing Rouhani, whose stances have repeatedly been criticized by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with Jahangiri, a politician who ultraconservatives believe would take a softer position against them. In other words, Jahangiri might be a pro-Reform candidate who can be managed more easily.

The potential selection of Jahangiri as an alternative to Rouhani is not a new idea. Conservatives have been discussing this prospect for months. In November, a person with close ties to the right-wing parties told Al-Monitor that Jahangiri could be a “preferred candidate” if a conservative candidate has no chance of winning the vote. “It depends on how [Khamenei] predicts his own health conditions,” the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in a reference to Khamenei’s alleged prostate disease. He was implying that the supreme leader prefers Jahangiri to be in office in case his health conditions get worse in the next few years.

So if Khamenei expects to die soon, he may prefer a different candidate win? And former President Khatami has also gotten into the act, endorsing Rouhani again. How this is all going to play out should be quite interesting; and I don’t get a feeling as to whether Jahangiri’s early lead introduces stress into any relationship with Rouhani, or if this is strictly business.

Over dinner we noted the following.

• An oculist brings things to a sharp focus.
• An occultist obscures things.

So, a lack of a ‘t’ brings clarity to all.

OK, OK, and a lack of a ‘c’. But it loses its zip.

Spidroin:

Spider silks are the toughest known biological materials, yet are lightweight and virtually invisible to the human immune system, and they thus have revolutionary potential for medicine and industry. Spider silks are largely composed of spidroins, a unique family of structural proteins. To investigate spidroin genes systematically, we constructed the first genome of an orb-weaving spider: the golden orb-weaver (Nephila clavipes), which builds large webs using an extensive repertoire of silks with diverse physical properties. [“The Nephila clavipes genome highlights the diversity of spider silk genes and their complex expression,” Paul L Babb, et al, Nature]

On Lawfare Jane Chong, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes lay out the known facts about the Russian intervention in the American Presidential election and then construct seven theories which are consistent with the facts. I like #3:

Theory of the Case #3: The Russian Operation Wasn’t Really About Trump at All

Before turning to more menacing possibilities, let’s pause to consider a theory somewhat orthogonal to the axis of ascending menace along which we have arrayed these theories: Perhaps the true explanation of the Trump-Russia connection is that the Russian operation wasn’t really about Trump at all—but was really about Hillary Clinton.

There’s reason to believe that the Russian objective here was not specifically to get Trump elected President; like the rest of the world, the Russians seem to have believed that Clinton was going to win. The goal may well have been to injure her legitimacy and popularity as much as possible, weaken her domestic legitimacy, and retaliate against her perceived interference in Russian internal affairs when she, as Secretary of State, supported anti-Putin protesters. In this scenario, Russian support for Trump was largely ancillary to this effort to hurt Clinton.

There is some public evidence to support this theory. Earlier this month, Reuters reported on two strategy documents prepared by Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, the Kremlin’s primary foreign policy think tank, one of which emphasized Clinton’s likely win and argued Russia should shift from pro-Trump propaganda to messaging designed to undermine the legitimacy of her predicted electoral victory and ensuing presidency.

It’s attractive because I don’t see the Russians comfortable with Trump’s erratic behavior – but I do see them disliking the Clinton opposition to their plans. She had the experience, training, and outlook to recognize threats and do something about them. Trump? He’s a real-estate developer with a mouth and not much brains.

Continuing this thread this morning, I see the CO₂ concentrations, as measured by the NOAA monitoring station at Mauna Loa, continue their usual pattern:

Here’s the full data graph,  just for fun:

Just something to think about.

John Schilling on 38 North provides an overview of cyberwarfare with North Korea, and how it might be most effective:

A successful attack, then, will likely be aimed at something other than the missile itself. Note that the highly-publicized “Stuxnet” attack did not target Iran’s (probably nonexistent) nuclear weapons, but the uranium enrichment facility that would be used to manufacture them. North Korea positively brags about its computer-controlled milling machines; these can, in principle, be hacked to produce parts that aren’t exactly what the designer intended. Ovens used to temper and anneal alloys might also be computer-controlled, and subtle changes to the temperature profile can lead to parts that are visually perfect but will fail under load. There are numerous possibilities, and while most will not be practical to exploit, perhaps some will be vulnerable. North Korea’s factories might, perhaps, be “hacked” to produce defective missiles.

So how about that missile that blew a few days ago?

What we would not expect to see, from any plausible cyberattack, would be missiles exploding on the launch pad. The parts of the missile with the potential to explode, are most likely not controlled by software. And if we could somehow tailor built-in defects in the hardware that precisely, we wouldn’t want to. If the missile explodes within sight of North Korean engineers and cameras, they’ll have too many clues as to what went wrong. Similarly, while there are plausible attacks that could result in a defective guidance system or an improperly-calculated trajectory, anyone delivering such an attack would prefer the error be small enough that the missile is well out of sight before it goes visibly off course.

If we are seeing North Korean missiles fail very early in flight, as has been the case in two recent incidents, we should probably be looking for something other than a cyberattack. And we don’t have to look far. Consider the Vanguard rocket, intended to be America’s first satellite launch vehicle, which on its first flight ascended four feet, fell back to the launch pad and exploded—and then exploded six more times in seven launches over the course of a year. The first Atlas ICBM reached 10,000 feet before tumbling and exploding in mid-air. The next six flights suffered four more failures, though at least some of those flew far enough that the explosions weren’t visible to the crowds of spectators. The Titan ICBM, intended as a counter to Atlas’s unreliability, destroyed the launch pad on its first two tests, succeeded on the third, and then went on to a string of downrange failures.