Monthly Archives: June 2017

One of the perennial debate questions among scholars of American government, pundits, and anti-government elements is the extent to which the power of the American President, relative to Congress and the Judiciary, has grown. It’s a serious question, and in my mind breaks into two parts:

1. The legal limitations, which are far more fluid than one might think. In some respects, the limitations are being discovered as Presidents choose to undertake certain actions. For example, was President Obama’s order to strike Libya without prior Congressional approval legal? Of course, in the minds of the hysterics and ideologues, this can get a little out of control. For example, this quote from Mark Levin: “When Obama is not in full Marxist mode, he’s in full Mussolini mode.”
2. The second part boils down to pure politics. How much influence on Congress does the President have? This is a volatile measure, affected not only by the parties controlling Congress and the Executive, but even their tempers of the time. The Republicans since 2000 are a far different, less responsible breed than those of the 1970s. But a President can exert a measure of control over Congress, depending on his influence.

This all came to mind while scanning Steve Benen’s commentary concerning Trump’s desire to privatize many of the functions of the FAA.

Circling back to our previous coverage, yesterday’s developments didn’t come as too big of a surprise. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who chairs the relevant Senate committee, specifically warned the White House that the privatization idea was unlikely to go anywhere. Perhaps Trump thought by throwing his weight behind the proposal, it’d create some momentum for the presidential priority.

It didn’t. The president’s political capital doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense.

Political capital is another way of describing influence. While politicians are often vilified for lying, in many cases constituents are the victims of the lies, or the predictions that didn’t come out, or the promises which turned out to be unviable. My point is that politicians, good politicians, don’t lie to each other as much.

But Trump? He lies and he lies and he lies. To everyone.

And this has consequences when it comes to influence. Influence is effective when people know that when you say you’re going to do something, you’re going to do it. Even failing, at least you swung at it. But if you’re known as a liar, then you end up on the Disregard List. When Trump changes one position for another because of something he’s seen on TV – on Fox News, no less – then his erstwhile allies, nevermind his enemies, realize that he’s not worth a shit in a fight. He may punch back hard, as he claims, but when it’s 450 lawmakers against one weak President, I don’t care what lies come spewing out of his Twitter account, he will lose. Especially when the Judiciary is unhappy with him.

And, surely, for those Mark Levins and others who worry about the power of the Presidency, this must be a relief, if they’re honest people. Because this makes President Trump one of the weakest Presidents since, oh, Harding? I suppose it’s hard to say. But between his poor international leadership skills and his waning influence at home, which is now mainly made up of what’s left of those who voted for him and are still enraptured by his style, he has little true political influence.

And, given the strong persona he projected during the campaign, this would greatly upset those supporters, if they could only sit down and think about it.

Noticed in our alley, again. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks these are interesting.

My Arts Editor doesn’t much care for pictures of trash.

Graph of a non-linear system.
Source: NROC

Ever heard of the butterfly effect, when a miniscule change in an input to an algorithm results in monstrous changes to the outputs? This is an example of a non-linear system. WaPo’s Wonkblog has a report on two recent studies of Seattle’s raising of its minimum wage to $15/hour, and how those two studies came to different conclusions:

When Seattle officials voted three years ago to incrementally boost the city’s minimum wage up to $15 an hour, they’d hoped to improve the lives of low-income workers. Yet according to a major new study that could force economists to reassess past research on the issue, the hike has had the opposite effect.

The city is gradually increasing the hourly minimum to $15 over several years. Already, though, some employers have not been able to afford the increased minimums. They’ve cut their payrolls, putting off new hiring, reducing hours or letting their workers go, the study found.

The costs to low-wage workers in Seattle outweighed the benefits by a ratio of three to one, according to the study, conducted by a group of economists at the University of Washington who were commissioned by the city. The study, published as a working paper Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, has not yet been peer reviewed.

While on the other hand …

“I think they underestimate hugely the wage gains, and they overestimate hugely the employment loss,” said Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley who was part of a group that published its own study of the minimum wage in Seattle last week.

Reich’s study uses more conventional methods in research on the minimum wage, relying on a publicly available federal survey. His group’s data did not allow the researchers to distinguish between high- and low-wage workers at a given firm, but they were able to separate large firms’ locations in Seattle from those outside the city.

Their results from the University of California accorded with past research. The minimum wage increased wages for workers in the restaurant industry, without reducing employment overall — in contrast to the findings from the University of Washington.

Past research (Card & Krueger, 1994, with replications) had suggested that raising the minimum wage brought more benefits than costs for the average worker, just to round out the background.

The balance of the entry discusses, with a lot of hand waving, the differences in methodology and how that may have caused the two studies to come to divergent results. I shan’t go over them, as I don’t really have the qualifications. What interests me is two things.

First, the entire question of minimum wage and raising it strikes me as an instance of a non-linear system. In one situation, some small factor of value X may make raising the minimum wage a non-sequitur – such factors as the mix of businesses, the schooling available to the working poor. And then there’s the measurements themselves, just to gum up the works.

Secondly, there’s the politics. Ideologues are notoriously blunt objects, willing to bash themselves bloody to remain true to their principles. Non-linear systems, though, rarely behave how the ideologues want them to behave, for ideologues are unsubtle people. But that won’t stop them, and they’re the ones in power these days, at least on the GOP side of things. We can look forward to a lot of banner waving and proclamations of victory in the light of this study – with little reference to the more important academic battle (properly, critique) waged on this paper. Indeed, in the unhappy chance that it ends up on Retraction Watch, would the ideologues who celebrated it acknowledge the failure of their paper?

No.

And that’s how you know ideologues are not your friends.

Update: a mention of this paper has already surfaced on WCCO TV, last night. I don’t see the story on their website, but it’s a poor website.

Is it as blue as ours’?

Almost eye-searing.

A reader sends a link in response to the commentary on the GOP’s Senatorial efforts. From that article, “The Real Reason The Elites Keep Killing Single-Payer,” Caitlin Johnstone on Medium:

This isn’t about money, this is about power. The wealthiest of the wealthy in America haven’t been doing everything they can to stave off universal healthcare and economic justice in order to save a few million dollars. They haven’t been fighting to keep you poor because they are money hoarders and they can’t bare to part with a single penny from their trove. It’s so much more sinister than that: the goal isn’t to keep you from making the plutocrats a little less wealthy, the goal is to keep you from having any wealth of your own.

Power is intrinsically relative: it only exists in relation to the amount of power that other people have or don’t have. If we all have the same amount of government power, then none of us has any power over the other. If, however, I can figure out a way to manipulate the system into giving me 25 percent more governmental power than anyone else, power has now entered into the equation, and I have an edge over everyone else that I can use to my advantage. But that edge only exists due to the fact that you’re all 25 percent less powerful than I am. If you all become five percent more powerful, my power is instantly diminished by that much, in the same way a schoolyard bully would no longer enjoy the same amount of dominance if everyone at school suddenly grew five percent bigger and stronger.

Here’s where I’m going with all this: the ruling elites have set up a system where wealth equals power. In order for them to rule, in order for them to enjoy the power of kings, they necessarily need to keep the general public from wealth. Not so that they can have a little more money for themselves in case they want to buy a few extra private jets or whatever, but because their power is built upon your lack of power. By keeping you from having a few thousand extra dollars of spending money throughout the year, they guarantee that you and your fellow citizens won’t pool that extra money toward challenging their power in the wealth-equals-power paradigm that they’ve set up for themselves.

I found myself mumbling, Gosh, I’d be happier with a recording saying just that by Sheldon Adelson. And that was really the problem with that article – where’s the proof? It marks a lot of boxes, it’s congruent with a lot of what we observe happening – but it’s all circumstantial evidence. It ascribes a singularity of purpose to a perhaps diverse group of people. Does Warren Buffet fit into this group? Is Bill Gates good buds with Sheldon Adelson? (Maybe they are.)

It all fits – but it’s not really conclusive. It tastes slightly of conspiracy theory.

As the start of the article, she condemns California State Speaker Rendon for killing a bill providing for single-payer health, claiming this politician, claiming to be a progressive, has been bought by the oligarchs. But Kevin Drum sails in with a load of facts to really spoil the party. Here’s a couple:

Prop 98. Like it or not, California has a school funding law put in place years ago by Proposition 98. It’s insanely complicated, but basically requires that 40 percent of the state budget go to K-12 schools. Using round numbers, if the state budget is $100 billion, school spending has to be at least $40 billion. If state spending goes up to $300 billion, school spending has to be at least $120 billion. Aside from being ridiculous, it also leaves only $120 billion for the health care bill. Oops.

As far as I know, there is no tricky way to get around this. It would have to be dealt with by a ballot initiative. That’s obviously not going to happen in this legislative session.

Waivers. This is the issue nobody pays attention to, but is probably the most important of all. To implement single-payer, California would need $200 billion in new funding plus $200 billion in federal money that currently goes to Medicare, Medicaid, veterans health care, and so forth. Without federal waivers to give California access to that money, the plan can’t go anywhere. As Duke University researcher David Anderson puts it, “If there aren’t waivers, this plan is vaporware.” What do you think are the odds that the Trump administration will grant all those waivers? Zero is a pretty good guess.

Along the same lines, Michael Hiltzik points out that self-funded health care plans are governed exclusively by federal law. That means California would need an exemption from the law. What do you think are the odds that a Republican Congress will grant that exemption? Zero again?

And there’s more. Perhaps Rendon is really just preserving political capital. In any case, assuming Kevin has his facts in a row, I think Caitlin didn’t investigate this subject deeply enough. And it spoils her article more. It really makes me wonder.

Oligarchy:

Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning ‘few’, and ἄρχω (arkho), meaning ‘to rule or to command’)^[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people. These people might be distinguished by nobility, wealth, family ties, education or corporate, religious or military control. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who typically pass their influence from one generation to the next, but inheritance is not a necessary condition for the application of this term. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The Real Reason The Elites Keep Killing Single-Payer,” Caitlin Johnstone, Medium:

If you say that America is an oligarchy (and it certainly is, which we’ll get to in a second), you’re not merely saying that there is too much money in US politics or that the wealthy have an unfair amount of power in America. Per definition, you are saying that a small class of elites rule over you and your nation, like a king rules over his kingdom.

An interesting article, incidentally.

A bit of a camera hog – stayed posed for me for a good two minutes, and on a windy day, no less.

Benjamin Wittes wants to find out if the FBI really did hate former Director Comey, as the Trump Administration has claimed – or loved him:

… a thought occurred to me: this is a factual dispute with a large body of objective evidence behind it. When you decapitate an organization like the FBI, managers have to tell their staffs, after all. They do this, I imagine, by writing an email to their staffs. In an organization “in turmoil,” one run by a “nut job,” in whom the rank and file have “lost confidence,” one might expect such an email to have a celebratory flavor, to talk about how the long national nightmare is over, say, or how there’s a great opportunity to restore sanity to the organziation. On the other hand, when a beloved leader is removed by a President in what is seen as an attack on the institution, one might expect an email with a very different tone. The FBI has lots of managers who will have had to send emails to their staffs.

What’s more, like many institutions, the FBI does regular employee surveys that ask employees across the institution about their views of, among other things, its senior leadership. The bureau has been running these surveys for years, so we might expect data from them to reflect on the question of whether confidence in the leadership on the part of the rank and file is increasing or decreasing over time. I suspect these surveys also give employees the chance to comment on things. It would be really interesting to see employee comments, positive and negative, about Director Comey.

So I submitted a series of FOIA requests for this material.

Gotta love it. Probably not meaningful in the greater scheme of things, but will fill out the story nicely. And perhaps boost Comey’s ego.

balaclavas:

A balaclava, also known as a balaclava helmet or ski mask, is a form of cloth headgear designed to expose only part of the face. Depending on style and how it is worn, only the eyes, mouth and nose, or just the front of the face are unprotected. Versions with a full face opening may be rolled into a hat to cover the crown of the head or folded down as a collar around the neck.

The name comes from their use at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War, referring to a town near Sevastopol in Crimea. [Wikipedia]

Noted in this CNN news report about violence in Venezuela:

Before the attack began, a man who identified himself as Perez appeared in a video online saying an operation was underway to seize democracy back from Venezuela’s “criminal government.” Flanked by a group of armed men in military fatigues and balaclavas, Perez claimed to be speaking on behalf of a coalition of military, police officers and civil officials.

The Petya ransomware is upping the ante over its predecessors. Not only do you risk losing your data, you may end up replacing chunks of hardware, as Lawfare reports:

… and this virus is much more vicious.  It overwrites the master reboot record, so you can’t even reload a clean operating system!

Ouch!

A Turkey Vulture with a Turtle Shell.

Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal (1982) melds the steadfast costume and stage creativity of Henson’s company with a story that is fairly and drearily predictable – for the seasoned story junkie. Jen is the last Gelfling, a species of humanoid form and big ears. As an orphan, he’s been raised by the slow moving and large nature wizards, living in a village. The wizards, driven from their castle ages ago by the monstrous Skeksis, number only ten, and have raised Jen since he was found after the massacre of his people.

Jen’s personal friend and mentor, the greatest of the wizards, instructs Jen to find Aughra, who has a shard of the Dark Crystal, and to use that shard to repair the Dark Crystal residing in the castle before the Grand Conjunction of the three suns of the sky occurs.  Jen’s mentor, bent with age, then dies and rapidly disintegrates, leaving Jen with obscure directions. In parallel, the Emperor of the Skeksis also dies, leading to a succession fight and the exile of the loser. Jen leaves on his quest, and as he does so, the new Emperor catches a glimpse of him through the magic of the Dark Crystal. As the Gelflings are prophesied to destroy the Skeksis, a certain disconcertment runs rampant through the Skeksis community, numbering nine after the demise of the Emperor. The personal guard of the Skeksis is assigned to dispatch Jen.

Jen reaches Aughra’s keep; she is a cryptic creature with a delightful attitude and not enough to do in this movie. As the Skeksis personal guard breaches her defenses, Jen escapes with Shard in hand and Aughra is taken prisoner.

As Jen proceeds toward the castle to complete his repair job, he encounters yet another surviving Gelfling, Kira. Getting to know each other through a mind meld, they agree to work as a team, and they stop at a local village of Podlings, akin to those who saved Kira from the massacre. Midway through their nightly feast, the Skeksis minions attack, but when all seems lost for the Gelflings, the exiled Skeksis appears to call off the guard and permit the escape of the Gelflings.

The Gelflings proceed on their way and reach the castle, even as the nature wizards leave their home for the castle. Various adventures ensue as the Gelflings find their way into the castle, endure a trap from the exiled Skeksis, and find their way to the Dark Crystal. The nature wizards arrive just in time to take advantage of the restoration of the crystal, returning to their former selves as they absorb the Skeksis and take the blame for breaking the Dark Crystal.  All is restored to what it should be.

The delight of the movie is the costumes and puppetry. The Skeksis are a work of art in terms of visual presentation, each a personalized version of a man melded to a foul-tempered vulture. There are too many to recognize each as an individual, but their collective insane rapaciousness certainly marks them as the antagonists. Jen and Kira exhibit more range of personality, if not as intense as the Skeksis, as somewhat painfully naive creatures with unexpected (and far too convenient) powers. The guards are adequately horrifying; the forest creatures are fun. The Podlings are full blown Muppets.

From the moment the nature wizards’ leader and the Skeksis Emperor die in concert, the story is somewhat predictable – at least, for the experienced audience member. For the younger set, though, there’ll be a certain delight in this story, the novel creatures and the basic lesson of Never give up having the usual charm and attraction.

But it’s difficult to say the story is compelling. We watched more for the creature novelty than for the resolution of the story, which we had guessed early on. But more importantly is the lack of interesting thematic material, which is made particularly insipid by the restoration of all to what it should be by the restored creatures at the end. A story like this is better terminated by acknowledging and bearing up under the sacrifices made, with either the faith that all will be better because of it – or even the proof of same. The restoration saps the story of this important lesson.

If you have kids, show them the movie. But you may be disappointed if you’re watching it for its themes. Enjoy the Skeksis, instead.

William Hitchcock reviews “Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe,” by Melissa Feinberg on Lawfare. A book concerning the propaganda facet of the Cold War, William finds the contrast between the inhabitants of Eastern Europe and their search for the truth, and today’s relative disregard for the truth in the search for intellectual & emotional comfort, disconcerting:

And here lies a crucial difference between Feinberg’s period and our own. In the Stalinist era, millions of captive peoples fought hard to sustain the idea that facts and truth existed beyond a world of state propaganda. Eyes and ears, honed by years of practice, learned to differentiate the base falsehoods in the media from plausible truths. Yet in our own era, when Americans are free to say, and read, and believe whatever we wish, millions of us choose to adhere to obvious untruths. From the grassy knoll to the faked moon landing, from Vince Foster to Pizzagate, outlandish conspiracy theories, none of them manufactured by state organs, have nonetheless been canonized as truth across much of the land. Eastern Europeans in the Stalin age yearned for truth and took risks to seek it out. Many people today prefer to hide behind our own curtain of lies.

It’s a little ironic that the winner of the Cold War, the self-proclaimed bastion of truth and goodness, is falling victim to political propaganda – and both sides of the political divide will claim that the other side is the trusting neophyte, of course. But will either side take an honest gander at the other side? While the left certainly earns the disdain of the right through its shitty attitudes, I suspect the right is the guilty party, based on the work of conservative Bruce Bartlett. Go read it, if you haven’t already.

The more comfortable life has become, the more we can indulge in fantasies that satisfy our biases. Only when a bias can become a life or death question will it be excised by the lazy. Even the energetic must work hard to remove them.

The chatter of late has been the fate of the GOP Senate’s health bill, which Senate President is reportedly determined to pass before July 4. Even as I type this, the Congressional Budget Office has released its scoring. Via CNN/Money:

The Senate Republican health care bill would leave 22 million fewer Americans with health insurance by 2026 than under Obamacare, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday.

The highly anticipated score answers key questions about the impact of the Senate’s controversial legislation made public last Thursday. The analysis also offers clarity to wavering Senate Republicans on whether to vote for the bill later this week.

The CBO also found the bill would reduce deficits by $321 billion over the next decade.

What are its chances? Steve Benen:

To be sure, every time a Senate Republican raises “concerns,” it should be taken with a grain of salt. Different members have different motivations, and many GOP lawmakers hope to extract some concessions ahead of Thursday’s vote. Don’t assume that every senator who sounds skeptical now intends to follow through with a “no” vote later this week.

That said, the chatter reflects an unsettled landscape, and even the most optimistic voices in Republican politics don’t yet believe there are 51 votes for the bill.

Nate Silver:

On [Maine Senator] Collins: Maine has not expanded Medicaid under LePage, but it has a ballot initiative to do so this November, which will probably pass.

Also, Collins is considering running for governor in 2018. And Maine is a poor state. McConnellcare is not going to be popular there.

Kevin Drum:

Do not believe any prattle about Mitch McConnell “being OK with a loss.” Or about “moderate Republicans” who will vote against it. Or about conservatives who are “revolting.” Or about “desperate attempts” to hold the Republican caucus together.

Next week the CBO will release its score of the bill. They will confirm that it doesn’t increase the deficit. The Senate will debate for a day or two; pass a few minor amendments; and then pass the bill. The vote will be 51-50, with Vice President Pence breaking the tie.

If Paul Ryan is smart, he will simply bring up the Senate bill for a vote and be done with it. It will pass because everyone will understand that this is their only chance. Either vote yes, or else give up on repealing Obamacare and give Democrats a big win.

And the GOP is allergic to giving the Democrats any big wins. Julian Zelizer on CNN takes a different tack:

President Trump, who has never been particularly invested in health care policy, will be happy to drop that issue so he can go on to deregulating and cutting taxes — issues nearer and dearer to his heart. According to the New York Times, McConnell also is much more interested in tackling taxes than dealing with healthcare.

Ironically, as in 1983 with Social Security, this could create an opportunity for Trump and the GOP to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, eventually allowing them to take credit for the program if it works better.

President Trump and the GOP can say they tried to repeal Obamacare and blame obstructionist Democrats for the loss. This could be their theme on Twitter for weeks.

Everything will become a bit clearer when the Senate takes its vote. Who knows? Maybe this has been Sen. McConnell’s real play from the start — let the bill die of its own weight so that Republicans can finally start to govern.

Ezra Klein on Vox already has a handy chart showing the results of the AHCA, compared to the already operational ACA:

For those paying attention, it’s a wonder that it even comes up for a vote. Me? I’m guessing a 50-50 split in the voting, forcing VP Pence to vote for it, which he may regret come 2020. Or even 2018.

Dustin Lewis, Naz Modirzadeh, and Gabriella Blum report on Lawfare that the Pentagon is moving into the killer robots field, which they call algorithmic warfare:

In April 2017, the Pentagon created an “Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team,” pending a transfer of $70 million from Congress. The premise of this initiative is that maintaining a qualitative edge in war will increasingly require harnessing algorithmic systems that underpin artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This realization is not unique to the United States: while the Pentagon’s algorithmic-warfare team gets up and running, other countries are also seeking to integrate AI and ML into various military functions. As armed forces race to secure technological innovations in these fields, it is imperative to match those developments with sound regulatory responses.

The broad remit of this new Department of Defense (DoD) team—to consolidate “existing algorithm-based technology initiatives related to mission areas of the Defense Intelligence Enterprise”—underscores that it is not just weapons that are of interest; far from it. Think logistics, communications, situational awareness, and intelligence collection management, among many other possibilities. And a May 2017 report from the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies explains that other countries—including China and Russia, as well as several traditional U.S. partner forces—are also pursuing an edge through diverse algorithmically-derived functions related to war.

They note that some nations have preceded us down this path, most notably China. The first task is monitoring video feeds from current battlefields. They worry:

Without context, a mere “data-labeling effort” might sound benign. But the setting for this Pentagon Team’s first assignment is reportedly U.S. operations directed against ISIS (and others) in Iraq and Syria. “Labeling” such data may implicate an array of IHL/LOAC concerns, such as the status of the individual under scrutiny: Does he or she qualify as a combatant, as a civilian, as a member of an organized armed group, as a civilian directly participating in hostilities, as religious personnel, as medical personnel, or as something else? The stakes are extremely high as, under IHL/LOAC, status is a key determinant for whether an individual may be subject to targeting in direct attack. In some cases, the determination of status is relatively straightforward. In many others, however, it can be very difficult.

For human operators as well, of course. I’m not sure I’d tag this as something to be especially worried about. The computer as a generic multiplier worries me more.

In related new, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is disappointed that a scheduled conference on the subject has been canceled:

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is deeply disappointed that the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) has cancelled a crucial week of formal discussions on fully autonomous weapons in August. This step was taken because of the failure of several states, most notably Brazil, to pay their assessed dues for the convention’s meetings. …

… on 30 May, the CCW’s president-designate Ambassador Matthew Rowland of the UK announced that the Group of Governmental Experts meeting scheduled for 21-25 August has been cancelled due to a lack of funds. Rowland issued several warnings that that the lack of payment of assessed financial contributions would mean the likely cancellation of CCW meetings planned for 2017.

Several countries have financial arrears from previous years, but according to the UN’s official summary, Brazil accounts for 86 percent of the outstanding contributions due to four core humanitarian disarmament treaties, including the CCW. Brazil last paid its assessed CCW contributions in 2010. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has appealed to Brazil to pay its outstanding contributions without delay and it challenges CCW states to achieve cost saving measures in other ways that do not require the cancellation of key meetings.

A final salute to the Back to the ’50s gang with this hot rod.

Maybe it’s a flying castle!

Vincent Price burns an airship (not a castle) in Master of the World (1961), but this airborne version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954), regardless of the parallels, is far inferior to the prior movie in all respects. The characters are little more than thin, illogical stereotypes, with the exception of government agent John Strock (Charles Bronson), who at least stays within expectations without chewing the scenery; an opposite example is the arms manufacturer Mr. Prudent, who is quite loud while being a stereotype. The audio and cinematography is adequate, but the plot, although akin to 20,000 Leagues, is far more sketchy.

We know the airship is far in advance of any other known technology. Run by Robur (Price), he seems driven by interior distress, as he mumbles about man’s foolish need for war. He’s caught the attention of the US government when something he does excites a local mountain into appearing to be a volcano. A government agent engages a local  hot air balloon for reconnaisance, owned by Mr. Prudent, and he and his daughter and her fiancee come along. They are shot down by unguided missiles (impressive for the 1830s), survive the crash and are taken prisoner. They watch as an American warship is destroyed through the use of aerial bombs, then the British fleet and, presumably, parts of Paris. Finally, they try to stop a war in Egypt, with lugubrious consequences.

The plot abounds with annoying inconsistencies. Prisoners are permitted to run about with little restriction, the suggestion that teeny little bombs from the airship are adequate to cow entire nations otherwise known for obduracy is taken seriously, the airship suffers mysterious failures with no explanation, and the ship’s master, Robur, places his ship in mortal peril for no particular reason.

And his apology to his first mate drew shrugs of puzzlement from myself and my Arts Editor. Perhaps that was the result of an unfortunate TV editing cut.

In any case, perhaps the best part of the movie are the baroque sets, much in the style of 20,000 Leagues, and after a while they grow wearisome. Add in ridiculous special effects, and this is really a time-waster, unless you’re a Price completist.

Even then, you may want to find something else to do while this dog’s playing, just to salve that bleeding wound that opens every time you see a worthless movie.

The controversy over an alleged, but disproven, link between various vaccines and autism recently erupted again in Minnesota after some Somali immigrants chose to listen to some mistaken activists and denied vaccines to their children. The result, easily predictable, was a measles outbreak, but the supposed connection between vaccinations and autism continues to be publicized despite the many studies performed and analyzed by scientists that found no connection between the two.

Now, in a bit of consilience, another study shoots down the supposed connection, but in an independent manner. NewScientist (17 June 2017) reports:

BRAIN scans of 6-month-old babies may now be able to predict who will show signs of autism by the age of 2. This means it could become possible to intervene to try to reduce the impact of some more difficult autistic behaviours before symptoms emerge.

“We have been trying to identify autism as early as possible… before the behavioural symptoms appear,” says Robert Emerson at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

And then they used machine learning to train an algorithm to use brain scans to predict which children will show symptoms of autism, and with quite some success. And the byproduct of this study?

“The study confirms that autism has a biological basis, manifest in the brain before behavioural symptoms appear, and that autism is not due to environmental effects that occur after 6 months, for example, vaccinations,” says Uta Frith of University College London. “This still needs pointing out.”

It does occur to me to wonder if the anti-vaccination forces have thought to connect vaccinations of the parents to the autism of their children.

If you aren’t buying misshapen organic veg in distressed crates made from reclaimed Radiohead albums, then your choices will probably be deemed fake. And by implication, you too will be fake.

– Anthony Warner in “Artisan sourdough? You may as well eat mass-produced white bread,” NewScientist (17 June 2017, paywall)

Mr. Warner is not a fan of diets.

As we were walking home through the alley, these discards caught my eye. I don’t know why. So I took pictures.

Maybe I just missed this report, but it caught me by surprise. The Mercury News:

… a colleague told Green he had something on his shirt.

Green, without thinking, brushed it off with his bare hand.

Within minutes, he fell to the floor.

“I started talking weird. I slowly felt my body shutting down. I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t respond,” Green told Morning Journal. “I was in total shock. ‘No way I’m overdosing,’ I thought.”

Paramedics were already at the station tending to Justin Buckle, 25, the driver of the car, and diverted their attention to Green. They gave him one dose of Narcan, an FDA-approved nasal spray version of a lifesaving medication called naloxone that can reverse the lethal effects of an opioid overdose.

Green was transferred to East Liverpool City Hospital and given three additional doses of Narcan, East Liverpool Police Capt. Patrick Wright told TV station WKBN.

The reason? The shrek on his collar was fentanyl, the same drug blamed for Prince’s death. Just a few grains was a terminal dose for the officer, to be accurate; only fast action saved his life.

Which focuses the mind on the combination of potency, its undeniable danger to casual brushes, with its use as a way to enhance the effect of heroin for high-seekers. It brings to mind the question of whether it makes sense to make those drugs illegal; the entire failed War on Drugs, which may be reiterated under current Attorney General Sessions, is once again brought into the stark light of reality and made questionable.

I think I’d be in favor of drug dens, wherein you enter, order & take your drugs, and cannot leave until a doctor certifies you fit to conduct normal business once again. Would there be deaths in the den? Sure. But is it right to endanger police just because someone wants an illegal high?

Continuing a theme from last season with a survivor of the winter….

Maybe he’s watching over that dead baby apple. I didn’t even notice until now.

I think I’m getting dizzy.

That whole focus thing appears to be overrated. Or under-emphasized. Smartphone cameras, rah.

This is a car with some ‘tude, seen just outside the Minnesota State Fair today:

If solarpunk is a new word for you like it is for me, Connor Owens will enlighten you at length:

Solarpunk is a rebellion against the structural pessimism in our late visions of how the future will be. Not to say it replaces pessimism with Pollyanna-ish optimism, but with a cautious hopefulness and a daring to tease out the positive potentials in bad situations. Hope that perhaps the grounds of an apocalypse (revelation) might also contain the seeds of something better; something more ecological, liberatory, egalitarian, and vibrant than what came before, if we work hard at cultivating those seeds.

Any speculative applications?

A solarpunk polity would replace centralised forms of state government with decentralised confederations of self-governing communities, each administering themselves through many forms of direct and participatory democracy, with countless kinds of horizontally-structured voluntary associations taking care of judicial, environmental, and societal issues in ways which seek to maximise both personal autonomy and social solidarity.

A solarpunk “economy of the commons” would dispense with both profiteering corporations and statist central planning in favour of worker-run cooperatives, collaborative exchange networks, common pool resources, and control of investment by local communities. The aim of the economy would be reoriented from production-for-exchange and industrial “growth” to production-for-use and increasing the bio-psycho-social well-being of people and planet. Production would be moved as close as is possible to the point of consumption, with the long term aim being a relative self-sufficiency in goods and manufacturing. Decentralist forms of eco-technology would be used to help make work more participatory and enjoyable – “artisan-ising” the productive process itself – as well as automate away dull, dirty, and dangerous forms of work wherever possible. After realising an appropriate degree of post-scarcity, local self-sufficiency, and labour automation, it may even be feasible to abolish money as an unneeded nuisance in the allocation of resources.

Other notations make reference to social anarchists; I ran across anarchists back in the good old days. As with the libertarians, there seems to be a disconnect between the ideal system and the people of today. Insofar as the solarpunk movement goes, I’ll settle on just one aspect: religious folks. There is little treatment, at least on this page, of how such a society would deal with the various and varied cults (a word I use in its non-derogatory sense) of today. As an agnostic myself, I can understand trying to gloss over this particular facet of human existence, but if you are going to propose the shape of tomorrow’s society, one must consider the centrality of supernatural divinities in many people’s lives – and how to transition them from that to your new society (along with everyone else who absorbed free market economics with their mother’s milk), or how to accommodate those cults in the new societal structure.

I see a blog is associated with this site, but entries stopped a year ago.

Hopes & Fears has covered solarpunk:

Solarpunk is the first creative movement consciously and positively responding to the Anthropocene. When no place on Earth is free from humanity’s hedonism, Solarpunk proposes that humans can learn to live in harmony with the planet once again.

Solarpunk is a literary movement, a hashtag, a flag, and a statement of intent about the future we hope to create. It is an imagining wherein all humans live in balance with our finite environment, where local communities thrive, diversity is embraced, and the world is a beautiful green utopia.

In the Guardian, writer Rebecca Solnit reflects on the uneven impact of climate change on poorer communities around the world. She writes: “Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.” If climate change is a slow violence on the Global South, then Solarpunk represents peace.

I wonder if Norman Spinrad is a proto-solarpunk, principally based on his novel Songs From The Stars. I get the impression that a typical climate denialist would never have even heard of a solarpunk, and would be quite puzzled by them. Author Kim Stanley Robinson claims some association with them, in this interview with NewScientist (10 June 2017):

Are you comfortable being the guy who pulls the world towards a plausible, not dystopian, future?

Yes. It’s a little bizarre. I have definitely done the hard work. I have taken the utopian road, the scientific road and ground out stories where it isn’t obvious why they should be fun to read. Most of my novels, I think, are actually fun because I’m doing realism in a way the world needs.

As for anyone picking up the mantle, there’s a group of young writers who call themselves solarpunk, and what they’re trying is all about adaptation.

As a philosophic matter, I wonder how to consider the whole of human history based on a solarpunk perspective. Consider this, from above:

Solarpunk proposes that humans can learn to live in harmony with the planet once again.

There is a naive, even maudlin taste to this suggestion which leaves me uneasy. I suggest there are some definite noir facets to the planet which we might consider before we embrace the concept, such things, for example, as whooping cough, scarlet fever, polio, and many other diseases which we now avoid through cures and vaccines, most or all of which were developed through procedures which PETA^[1] will tell you are brutal and definitely not in harmony with the planet.

And that’s the sticky wicket for me. If your philosophical goal is to live in harmony with the planet, does that mean I have to sacrifice half my children on the altar of illness? Does our brutality towards other creatures such as mice, rats, and bunnies invalidate our hug of the greenways of the world. I am not mocking the sentiment; it’s an important philosophical concern, and parallels the same concerns we express towards the results of Nazi science experiments performed on helpless prisoners – can we accept and incorporate the results into the corpus of science despite the unethical procedures?^[2] Similarly, can we use the results we obtained when we were in disequilibrium with the planet, or does this philosophical faux-pas carry costs which we should be unwilling to pay?

But I suspect the solarpunks see themselves as supreme realists. They see the world falling apart, but rather than advocate for, perhaps, extreme depopulation, or a wholesale embrace of capitalism with an unexplained faith that it’ll solve all our problems if we just get the regulators off the backs of corporations (and there’s definitely a strong undercurrent of that attitude among the libertarians), they prefer to look to the tools available and try to get to a stable state where the world we live on is no longer degrading.

I just don’t know if any such state exists.

¹People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

²Last I heard, the science was rather incompetent, rendering the question irrelevant. But as a hypothetical, it retains quite a punch.

I’ve mentioned Kevin Drum’s interest in lead in the environment. But I had always thought leaded gasoline^[1] was simply a mistake made through ignorance.

Turns out it’s the same old story we’ve seen over and over: man’s individual interest in wealth trumps the collective health of society.

In this case, the man in question is Thomas Midgley, and he not only invented and patented TEL (tetraethyl lead), but he knew it was poisonous, as Fred Pearce notes in NewScientist (10 June 2017, paywall):

From the start, medical researchers warned that it could poison the nation. In early 1923, William Clark at the US Public Health Service predicted that lead oxide dust would build up along busy roads. The following year, toxicologist Yandell Henderson of Yale University prophetically warned that “the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use… before the public and the government awaken to the situation.”

And some of his workers died or were taken away in straitjackets, but he denied, with aplomb, that there was any danger at all. It’s a fascinating article, and too bad it’s behind a paywall. It has a lovely ad emblematic of corporate advertising at its deceptive worst, and I managed to find an image of that ad on the University of Virginia website, so I don’t feel so bad reproducing it here.

I think the older man may already be suffering from lead poisoning.
Source: University of Virginia

Midgley also invented Freon for Frigidaire, although perhaps he didn’t realize how much that would endanger the world in the future. His fate? To commit suicide after catching polio.

Sutori has a presentation on leaded gasoline here, including some more fascinating ads.

¹The lead diminished the “knock” which made internal gasoline engines run poorly, but is also a neurotoxin. This is not the same as the “lead” in pencil, which is actually graphite.