Monthly Archives: June 2017

Alexander Vorontsov on 38 North summarizes the current situation and ponders the future of the United Nations:

Being in contact with a wide circle of international experts professionally studying Korea, I am assured that I am not the only one frustrated by renewed attempts by the UN, presented as the main agent of justice and peace in the world, to impose a de facto economic embargo on the DPRK, a state with a population of 25 million people; in essence, it is an unarmed war.

If the habit to discriminatorily punish “bad guys,” selected by the “stakeholders” in the UN’s elite at their own will persists, the majority of the ordinary members of the UN General Assembly may rebel and start asking rather sticky questions: if such a practice becomes standard, what will become of the UN itself?

How did we get to this point, using the UN in such a provocative way? In my mind, it is very simple: Washington wants to force Pyongyang to start talks from a position of capitulation, while Pyongyang wants to enter talks from a position of equality. Frankly speaking, this is nothing special or new.

While the popular belief these days is that negotiations with North Korea have never worked, it is important to remember the progress made under the US-North Korea Agreed Framework. For the time the agreement was in place, key components of North Korea’s nuclear weapons infrastructure were irreparably shuttered while the two countries worked toward normalization of relations. Had it been kept in place, it might have found a suitable way to deal with issues of cheating. But its abrupt end made subsequent efforts to negotiate difficult to start, with mistrust high on both sides, leading to the complex and dangerous situation we are in today. In order to get back to negotiations now, which most stakeholders seem to want—conditions for talks would need to be seriously discussed.

The US-North Korea Agreed Framework was signed in 1994 by the Clinton Administration, and foundered in 2003 during the Bush Administration. Will GOP aggression work well with the North Koreans, or will it just piss them off? Hard to say.

Aquafaba:

Egg whites aren’t the only option for foamy meringues. It was recently discovered that the liquid from tins of chickpeas, known as aquafaba, whips up just as well. [“Proof in the pudding: Myth-busting 15 common cooking tips,” Sam Wong, NewScientist (27 May 2017, paywall)]

As London recovers from another terror attack, it’s worth asking ourselves what those who are directing these attacks are trying to accomplish^[1]. While these stabs at the vulnerable citizenry have little direct effect, the real question regards the veiled goals of the directors.

In other words, what do these extremist fear the most from the West, and are therefore trying to change?

Religious extremists, seems to me, always have as their putative goal a societal adherence to the most extreme version of their religious tenets, whether or not they can actually be found in their sacred tomes.

And the Western countries, such as Britain? To lesser and greater extents, they have left such societal rules behind. While I could spend all day enumerating such instances as gay marriage, I’d prefer to abstract it to a rational approach to justice. At one time we used the Biblical rules to run our societies and called them just, but that led to chaos and death; now we try to use reason to define our justice, and if that leads to results that dismay some of our citizens, I must say that most adjust admirably. One example is that of gay marriage, and watching much of society adjust to the idea that our gay members should have the option of marrying those they love has been an inspiration and a pleasure.

But for those who believe in a very strong version of God, the extremists, this is repugnant. Thus, they wish the rule of God, as decreed by the clerics; the West is transforming from the rule of God to the rule of Law^[2]. In our particular case, the extremists see their favored ordering of society endangered by the West.

Not through direct attack, necessarily, but through the very existence of those principles of the West.

Why? Because they are attractive. Because they promise peace. They, perhaps even more importantly, demonstrate prosperity.

The Magna Carta, an early attempt at Constitutional Law.
Source: BritRoyals

Speaking abstractly, any principle is a good principle in that it leads, eventually, to a positive outcome for the individual and/or the society in which the individual is embedded; a negative outcome decreases survival and reproductive opportunities, if not directly, then by degrading that society. Sufficient degradation of society by an individual can easily lead to a Pitchforks and Torches ending for the individual pursuing a negative principle (say, I will enrich myself without treating my fellow societal members justly), as his fellows find a way to remove his riches and/or his life.

A set of principles can and should be judged on several metrics. One often ignored is that of robustness, which is to say that as external stressors change, do the principles continue to deliver positive outcomes?

So that was a fairly laborious approach to the question posed earlier in this post, that being (yeah, I almost forgot, too) the goal of those directing these terrorists. I believe they are trying, as with any war, to modify the behaviors of their opponents; in this case, they are trying to subtly modify our very principles. They are repugnant to those directing the fight, and so they make the most logical target of the extremists.

Therefore, while we properly worry about our physical security, we must devote even more concern to our future, as it is formulated, in a sense, by our principles. While I worry about the Brits, as their various Party leaders seem to currently be wanting, that’s their problem. We in the United States have our hands full with an Administration run by an individual from the private sector who has never, and cannot be, troubled to think beyond the private sector. His basic incuriosity, which is much like former President Bush’s, is leading him down the same mistaken path which took Bush (II) into the infamy of authorizing torture. Filling his White House with pretty faces and empty heads, and putting someone reputed to be a white supremacist as well as a follower of Leninist principles – both in opposition to our commonly held set of principles as Americans – the current President has attempted to fulfill campaign promises which contravene American principles.

While I believe his latest attempt to push his Muslim ban order, as the Times of India reports –

US President Donald Trump on Sunday slammed London’s Pakistani-origin mayor Sadiq Khan saying it was not the time to be “politically correct”, and touted his controversial travel ban in view of the London Bridge terror attacks that killed seven people and wounded several others.

“We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse,” Trump said.

is in earnest, the problem for Mr. Trump is that this has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with the principles which have brought us peace and prosperity. I don’t think he, or nearly any member of his Administration, has the capacity to even consider these objections to their proposed set of actions, or why those proposals are ultimately against the law – and anti-American.

The real war is these attacks on our principles, from both religious extremists and the leaders of Russia. They are both in an existential war – because their competing sets of principles, of religious extremism and strong-man rule, respectively, have been doing poorly. It’s our job to show that our principles work better, and in all conditions.

And to better educate ourselves concerning those principles. After all, it is Trump in the White House.

¹Assuming, of course, that these aren’t just religiously motivated individuals acting without direction.

²The rule of Man came before either, and consisted of the strong-man ordering of society; changes at the top came through blood-shed, and could be devastating.

A little chive supper for the bee.

He has a lot more to go.

And there’s some Indigo rushing somewhere.

A HuffPo report on Rep Tim Walberg (R-MI) typifies the rank amateurism that seems to be gripping the GOP these days:

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told a constituent last week that God can solve the problem of climate change if the global phenomenon truly exists.  …

“I believe there’s climate change,” Walberg said, according to a video of the exchange obtained by HuffPost. “I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time. I believe there are cycles. Do I think man has some impact? Yeah, of course. Can man change the entire universe? No.”

Source: Phys.Org

Of the 4 footed, millions of years old variety. On Dead Things, Gemma Tarlach remarks on a find named Zuul crurivastator, a new member of the ankylosaur, or club-tailed herbivores:

The new-to-science dinosaur’s genus name reflects its block-headed, short-snouted resemblance to Ghostbusters’ Terror Dogs. But that vicious tail club inspired its species name, crurivastator, which translates to “destroyer of shins.”

Destroyer of shins. Heh.

Heh, indeed. But this is a specially cool find:

The virtually complete, partially mummified specimen was unearthed in 2014 and is still being prepared. Researchers started at either end (the spectacularly well-preserved skull and tail club) and are working their way toward the middle. In about two years, when the work should be complete, lead author Victoria Arbour of the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto thinks Zuul will measure about six meters, or 20 feet nose to club.

Stegosaurus Ungulates
Source: National Park Service

Nearly complete, details in place (unlike Stegosaurus, wherein the paleontologists first thought those plates would act like a roof), and even the possibility of recovering proteins. Proteins from an estimated 75 millions years ago.

Makes me feel like a kid again.

And, in honor of my late friend Nancy, who loved to eat dinner with a bunch of computer geeks and listen to them geek out (her eyes would cross and she’d start drooling, she claimed), here’s a bit of tech talk from the academic paper, from The Royal Society:

6. Skull

The skull is complete, missing only the tip of the right quadratojugal horn and the ventral edge of the vomers (figures 2, 3 and 5). The skull has undergone plastic deformation, with some dorsoventral compaction and mediolateral skewing evidenced by the bilateral asymmetry of the skull overall, and flattened, oval orbits [33]. The lateral sides of the snout taper gently towards a squared-off premaxillary beak. Laterally, the skull is relatively flat dorsally, unlike the arched profile of some specimens of Euoplocephalus, Anodontosaurus, Scolosaurus and Ziapelta, but this might result from taphonomic compaction of the skull. As in other ankylosaurines, the antorbital fenestra is absent and the supratemporal fenestrae are obscured. In dorsal view, the skull has a trapezoidal outline. Apart from the three known skulls of Ankylosaurus (AMNH 5214, AMNH 5895 and CMN 8880), ROM 75860 is the largest ankylosaurine skull recovered from Laramidia (table 1).

Andrew Sullivan is perplexed by the failure of the reactionaries to overwhelm all of Europe:

A funny thing is happening to Theresa May’s unstoppable march to a massive new majority in Britain’s parliament: It appears to have stopped. I’d like to think this may have something to do with Trump: He is so repellent to almost anyone in the civilized world outside the U.S., he appears to be weakening reactionism’s appeal in Europe. After the Dutch far right stumbled this spring, and Macron beat Le Pen more decisively than expected, we now see Angela Merkel’s polling having perked up since March. But in Britain, the collapse of the Tories in the polls since the campaign started has been nothing short of remarkable. They began the campaign with a lead of close to 20 points; the latest poll — probably an outlier — gives them a mere 3 percent lead over a Labour Party led by someone (Jeremy Corbyn) slightly to the left of Noam Chomsky. In the poll of polls, Labour has gained 12 points in the last few weeks and the Tories have gone nowhere.

And is it impossible for the Europeans to watch the ugly results of the election of Donald Trump … and say “No fucking way?” Why not? After all, he’s been notorious virtually from the beginning of the Presidential campaign; the actual Presidency is simply the (very noxious) cherry on the top. The ugly incidents, the idiocy in Congress and the White House – I have no doubt the professional watchers in Europe have been relaying these dismaying results to their colleagues in the non-reactionary parties, and the word went out: bloody well vote, none of this crap about not liking your own candidate – take a look at the reactionary candidate and tell me you want him or her running this nation. The way Macron defeated Marine was quite reassuring to those in the United States who’ve never been under the Trump spell; we can only hope our fellow Americans will have such vastly bad experiences that they’ll awaken and regret.

I don’t live in Britain, nor correspond with any Brits, so I don’t know if Andrew’s speculation that Prime Minister May is mismanaging the early election she called – but I do know from readings that she and her cohort seem to be scientifically illiterate, and I wonder if that may have something to do with the apparent disaffection with the government.

It’s too bad the other side also appears to be quite radical, in just that way that political-junkies can be. Otherwise, May might be ripe to be rolled off the log.

Professor David Wirth on Lawfare discusses Trump’s intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on Climate, noting there’s a cooling off period which will push the actual notification off right into the heated part of that wonderful season we’re already stepping into – Presidential election season:

In the context of the Paris Agreement, this structure provides a number of useful insights—all of which, as intended, exert a moderating influence on what might appear in retrospect to have been a rash decision in the heat of the political moment. They may also create quite a bit of unintended discomfort for the Trump presidency.

In terms of politics, this means that Trump’s abandonment of the Paris Agreement, not yet having taken effect and still subject to reconsideration, could well be a live issue during the next presidential campaign. It is not difficult to imagine that the timing of the effect of the U.S. withdrawal could well be a gift to aspiring presidential candidates from both parties, entirely contrary to Trump’s own interest in securing a second term.

Having watched this Administration boot the fumble right down the field, it’s not surprising that they didn’t think ahead here, either.

But in the presence of this incredible string of incompetent incidents, it’s also possible to credibly contend that Trump, along with the most of the GOP, truly believes the assertions of fake news. If so, then polls such as this one (left) from Gallup will not impact their thought processes – or perhaps they’re not even aware of them, seeing as Fox News is seen as a credible source in the White House these days.

Therefore, in the bubble of the GOP, as Andrew Sullivan & many others declared them years ago, they only hear themselves and think that’s the world – and everything else is the production of the enemy, even science. So perhaps Trump thinks he’s doing what the United States wants.

And that’s a useful way of thinking about this, because we can compare and contrast with another hypothesis – that being the GOP is simply out to erase the legacy of President Obama. The ACA is under assault, although watching the passing of the AHCA and the reactions of even GOP Senators puts me in mind of the great rubber hammers of the cartoons. President Obama also contributed to the Paris Agreement.

Now, whether this is endemic racism, not unbelievable given the presence of white supremacists in the White House, or GOP fear of Democrats taking full credit for the improving healthcare situation, as has been rumored, or the religious sensibility (a term I use with hesitant humor)  of the GOP finding it unbelievable that their sworn enemies, the Democrats, could do anything good under the Sun, I don’t know.

Returning to Professor Wirth’s commentary, I found this interesting:

The modest requirements of the Paris Agreement have been largely overlooked during the Agreement’s transformation into a political football.  Much of the Agreement is not legally binding, and those provisions that are involve primarily reporting and updating each country’s voluntarily identified “contribution”—purposely not a commitment that is legal enforceable. The Agreement’s generality and flexibility, in response to U.S. demands and experience with Kyoto, is a principal reason the deal was launched so quickly, less than a year after its adoption in December 2015.

Quite simply, the Paris Agreement puts “America First,” with our domestic policy agenda driving U.S. engagement with the Agreement and not the other way around.  During the lengthy public debate leading to the President’s recent announcement, even the principal negotiator for the United States concluded that the existing agreement could accommodate a relaxation of the U.S. contribution of the sort anticipated by Trump’s recent domestic proposals.

Given this modest description, it becomes more and more a question of “why did you bother?“, just like their persecution of the ACA, than anything else – a ripe reason to go looking for skulking motivations.

Scott Chamberlain on Mask of the Flower Prince has his own list of ten pieces of Mother’s Day music – for the imperfect mother in your life:

Barber: Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance.  Medea is the star of Western Civilization’s earliest custody-battle-gone-horribly-awry soap opera.  Furious that her louse of a husband is taking their kids to live with a new trophy wife, Medea decides a little infanticide will even the score.  It’s a story with something for everyone in the family.

Cherubini: Medea. A follow-up to the above entry, because sometimes a 12-minute work about a mother killing her children isn’t enough, and you really need a full-blown opera to do the story justice.

He also includes links to the music. G’wan – you know you want to!

Hit a home run or I’ll scratch your toenails off!

We ran into an unexpected pleasure. There are certain movies which make our teeth itch; we identify them by how predictable they appear to be, and how good for us they appear to be. Such was the apparent case with Rhubarb (1951), a movie about a millionaire leaving his fortune to his cat, Rhubarb, and how the cat becomes a good luck charm for the formerly failing baseball team he had owned.

Sounds painfully predictable, doesn’t it?

But – at least for those of us fortunate enough to be cat owners – it’s a heckuva lot of fun, watching a bedraggled, nasty stray who hoards golf balls turn into a beloved pet who then transforms yet again into the team owner. Along the way there’s a vicious daughter of the deceased, cut out of the will and jealous of it all, and her clever machinations; the quite naturally terrified bookies and their scheme to negate the good luck charm; the soon-to-be married cat guardian and his sweetie, who is allergic to Rhubarb; and a passel of terrified pooches who’d rather not go toe to toe with the big tomcat.

I think one of the keys to this movie’s unexpected success with us was that the very personality of the cat is key thematic material for the movie – gumption, in a word. The millionaire takes delight in the cat, from his golf ball hoarding and dog chasing days to his independence; not seeing that in his daughter induces him to cut her out of the will. It becomes a running undernote of the movie, not insistently played up, but more a wistful minor key melody of persistence and guts in the face of mild problems. The acting is competent, the plot bounces right along, and the millionaire’s home is just as ridiculously ornate as you might expect.

That and the occasional word play. How can I resist a movie with the following dialog?

Lawyer: But that cat may have been powdered or sprayed with some irritant, such as pepper or mustard!

Judge: Point well taken, Mr. Dill.

I shan’t actually recommend it, but if you run across it one rainy afternoon, you could do worse than give this one a ten minute trial.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog contributes some analysis which fairly well backs up my thoughts on how the failure to train our politicians in the basics of societal sectors is leading to disaster:

That’s not a throwaway line. What we have here is the White House’s budget director suggesting it may be time to eliminate the Congressional Budget Office from existence.

Note, Mulvaney may believe that the CBO score on the Republican health care plan is “absurd,” but he’s offered no competing data. Either the far-right budget chief doesn’t have alternative numbers, or he does have competing data that he prefers to hide out of embarrassment.

What’s more, given that Mulvaney just unveiled a budget plan with a jaw-dropping $2-trillion mistake – a colossal screw-up he says was intentional – perhaps the OMB director should avoid questioning the reliability of others’ budget analyses for a while.

But it’s the broader disdain for objective sources of information that really rankles. I’m reminded of a piece from the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman in March:

This is straight out of President Trump’s playbook, one that tries to convince everyone that there’s no such thing as a neutral authority on anything. If the CBO might say your bill will have problematic effects, then the answer is not to rebut its particular critique, but to attack the institution itself as fundamentally illegitimate. If the news media report things that don’t reflect well on you, then they’re “the enemy of the American People.” If polls show you with a low approval rating, then “any negative polls are fake news.” If a court issues a ruling you don’t like, then it’s a “so-called judge” who has no right to constrain you.

The Teapot Dome Scandal:
Crap like this happens when you’re ignorant, again and again.

And I’m sure Mick, Donald, & most of the company really don’t understand why things are structured as they are structured. The reason is that the government is not in place to make a profit, but to govern, and governing has little to do with how corporations run.

In this particular case, the CBO exists to evaluate proposed legislation in terms of at least the costs, and in the case of the AHCA, how well it accomplishes its putative goal, all in a non-partisan manner. This is just one aid in responsible planning and legislating.

In the corporate world there are other ways to do this – mainly by letting companies try things and if they fail & sink, too bad for them.

That doesn’t work in the government world. There’s little competition, and when there is it must be strictly regulated in order to avoid negatively impacting the citizenry.

So when Mick says,

“At some point, you’ve got to ask yourself, has the day of the CBO come and gone?” Mulvaney said…. He said, “The days of relying on some nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to do that work for us has probably come and gone.”

The proper response is, “No, Mick. Your time has come and gone. It was back in the 1800s. And the CBO was originated to stamp out scum like you.”

Back on May 24 Slate reported on some more GOP jiggering in government in the realm of “ringless voicemail,” wherein a couple of companies have devised a method for inserting messages into your voicemail without ringing your phone first. While actually not strictly a new technology, the FCC has been asked if this is legal, and the Republican National Committee has weighed in on the matter:

She’d jump his bones if she could.

Perhaps the worst facet of The Detective (1954) is the overly bland title, which gives little to munch on until the movie is underway and you realize the detective is a certain Father Brown, Catholic priest, which is significant for those who watch the later TV series. This is the introduction, wherein we learn Father Brown is humble yet overly-confident, charming yet exceptionally shy, eccentric and yet a priest.

The attentive audience members will swiftly recognize the genre as being the British comedy-mystery. The details of the plot may mystify and even delight, as when Father Brown slips a man’s cigarette box from a man’s hand into his own (voluminous) sleeve, the victim none the wiser, but it’s clear the end point of this movie will be the recovery of the stolen cross, and, more importantly, the guidance of the soul engaged in high crimes back to the path of … well, whatever it is. It’s difficult to argue with the moral & teaching of the story, but the mouth of wisdom is, to the modern ear, accustomed more to accusations and acknowledgements of various crimes perpetrated by clerics, somewhat untrustworthy; and for those who do trust clerics, there is the urge to advise them to be more circumspect in their selection of authority figure.

The acting is the usual British competent to excellent, the staging is fun, and, overall, it’s an enjoyable movie.

Oh, and I lied. Really, the stage combat was, at best, unconvincing.

He’s a bit coquettish in this pic.

But I still ate him in the end.

KIC 8462852 continues to dance for us, as NewScientist (27 May 2017) notes:

On 19 May, Tabby’s star began to dim, carrying on its history of strange dips in brightness. Astronomers are scrambling to decipher the mysterious signal from the star, which is 1300 light years away in the constellation Cygnus.

Back in January 2017 Phys.org published a possible explanation for unique phenomenon:

But in what may be the greatest explanation yet, a team of researchers from Columbia University and the University of California, Berkley, have suggested that the star’s strange flickering could be the result of a planet it consumed at some point in the past. This would have resulted in a big outburst of brightness from which the star is now recovering; and the remains of this planet could be transiting in front of the star, thus causing periodic drops.

For the sake of their study – titled “Secular dimming of KIC 8462852 following its consumption of a planet”, which is scheduled to appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society – the team took the initial Kepler findings, which showed sudden drops of 15% and 22% in brightness. They then considered subsequent studies that took a look at the long-term behavior of Tabby’s Star (both of which were published in 2016).

They then attempted to explain this behavior using the Kozai Mechanism (aka. Kozai Effect, Lidov-Kozai mechanism), which is a long-standing method in astronomy for calculating the orbits of planets based on their eccentricity and inclination. Applied to KIC 8462852, they determined that the star likely consumed a planet (or planets) in the past, likely around 10,000 years ago.

This process would have caused a temporary brightening from which the star is now returning to normal (thus explaining the long term trend). They further determined that the periodic drops in brightness could be caused by the remnants of this planet passing in high-eccentricity orbits in front of the star, thus accounting for the sudden changes.

Shifting back to current time, Science is reporting something interesting:

The first sign of the star’s recent dimming came on 24 April from Tennessee State University’s Fairborn Observatory in southern Arizona. But it wasn’t until late last week that astronomers were sure it had entered a new dip. It was 3% dimmer than its normal brightness on 19 and 20 May and is now moving back toward normal. “It looks like the dip has mostly ended,” Kipping says. “But … in the Kepler data we saw an episode of multiple dips clustered together over the span of a few weeks.” The progress of the dimming over the past few days also bears a passing resemblance to some detected by Kepler, supporting the idea that the same object is repeatedly passing in front of the star.

Thus the suggestion of debris. It’d have to be an enormous amount.