Monthly Archives: July 2017

Kevin Drum wrote a post summarizing the various groups who are against doing anything about climate change, and while I think he skips over a couple of the more important psychological-religious reasons, I did enjoy this new viewpoint:

This is amateur economics, but listen anyway. We’ve had periodic recessions for the entire history of our country, but median earnings rose anyway. They took a small hit during recessions, and then rose more during the subsequent expansions. In 1973 that stopped happening. There are lots of reasons for this, but I think oil is a big and underappreciated one. It has made the global economy far less stable than in the past, and ordinary workers generally don’t do well in an unstable world.

So that’s another reason to take decarbonization seriously: it would return us to a more stable global economy, which would most likely be good for workers. Shed no tears for the rich, though. They’d do fine. They just wouldn’t gobble up nearly the entire value of economic growth. And in return, for surprisingly little pain, we all get a world that’s safer, more habitable, and economically more stable. What’s not to like?

The point that fossil fuels are an international commodity, and solar, while coming nearly 9 light minutes from the Sun, is really a local resource, is a point that had escaped my attention – and is worth some consideration.

For all the hubbub about there being more jobs in alternative energy industries than in fossil fuels, I have to wonder if this is apples to oranges – or apples to elephants. After all, energy extraction is an ongoing process, requiring labor, everything from manning the oil rigs to running the refineries to scouting for more. Is the extraction effort in the alternate energy industries as labor intensive? Is the labor numbers being cited expected to have some staying power, or are we seeing an installation hump and soon they’ll fall off? The couple of popular citations I’ve seen have that taste of, well, amateurism. That is, they may look good today, but wait a couple of days – or couple of years – and they may have changed drastically.

While watching Colbert tonight, I flashed on a scene from, I believe, the movie Minority Report (2002), a Tom Cruise movie in which he plays a futuristic cop whose prime mechanism for finding criminals is a group of three psychics who predict who will commit the next murder; it’s Cruise’s responsibility to find the soon-to-be criminal before the crime is committed, and arrest him or her for contemplating such an action.

In Cruise’s character’s backstory is the element that his own young son was kidnapped years earlier, and never found. Cruise hasn’t given up hope, and near the end of the movie he’s led to a hotel room where he finds a bed covered with photographs of his son on the last day he ever saw him.

This is supposed to manipulate him into killing the man who has rented the room and soon returns. However, as a cop with many years of experience, he knows that evidence is often scant and hard to see.

This looks wrong, he may have whispered. Or perhaps it was something else. I haven’t seen Minority Report in a while.

And perhaps this is what bothers me the most about Donald Trump, Jr.’s dump of his email into Twitter yesterday. Not only does it appear to be madness and ignorance on a grand scale, it’s a fucking avalanche of evidence. It’s as if he painted himself with glow in the dark rocket fuel and lit himself on fire. All eyes are on him.

So what are we all missing here? Mr. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, are you distracted by this as well? Or do you see a ball in the air that I, at least, seem to be missing?

I’ve written once or twice about bell curves before, mostly with regard to taxes, but today it occurred to me there’s another application of the bell curve as to a favorite topic, political activity:

Party loyalty and how it plots to efficient government^[1].

I’d like to suggest that one terminus of the bell curve, and hence in the realm of inefficiency, would be the random actors. These are folks who have never learned how to work as a team, how to sacrifice for the team, nor how to contribute to a team. Not only are they deadweight, but they’re destructive. In point of fact, they are not good Party members, and no doubt would not be welcome in any party.

The other terminus of the bell curve, and thus also inefficient, would be the opposite of the random actors in the sense of extreme loyalty. These are folks who, when the pedal hits the metal, they can be counted on to vote the “right” way. They obey party discipline. The Party is all.

And it’s this utter loyalty which betrays them and their country, because this is predicated on a leadership made up of good people. When it’s not, there is no fire ladder, no escape route – dissent, meaning refusing to vote as dictated, leads to expulsion – and the barren lands, for many.

This was brought to mind by Steve Benen’s remark today on Maddowblog:

But many observers keep waiting for the moment at which the bow breaks. There’s an apparent expectation that there’s a cumulative effect to Trump’s troubles, and at a certain, undermined point, congressional Republicans will feel compelled to pull their support and put his presidency in peril.

Yesterday was a reminder that this point almost certainly doesn’t exist. Most GOP lawmakers are quite comfortable with the idea of Trump and his team facing no consequences for their actions.

Their loyalty makes them ineffective in the interests of the Nation.

So how about the center of the curve? That’s where the Party members can dissent in a productive manner. By dissenting, by contributing ideas and evaluations and judgments, they improve the Party in a Nation-friendly manner.

Just like H₂O, O₂, taxes, and many other things, both too little and too much loyalty is a bad thing.

¹By efficient I do not refer to financial efficiency, but rather to government which fulfills its putative duties, such as being responsive to citizens’ needs, law enforcement, regulation, and the like, in an appropriate manner.

There are many ways for a campaign to behave when faced with ethical questions. The quagmire enveloping the Trump Administration due to its behavior during the campaign is indicative of what happens when you’re ethically challenged. But how about other examples? Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic, in the midst of analyzing how badly the Trump’s defensive wall is crumbling, provides this contrasing example from the Gore campaign of 2000, which I don’t recall reading about before:

How unusual is it? On September 14, 2000, former congressman Tom Downey, a close advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, received an anonymous package in the mail containing a videotape of George W. Bush practicing for the upcoming presidential debates and more than 120 pages of planned debate strategies. Downey and his lawyer contacted the FBI and handed the cache over that very day, and Gore campaign officials then immediately reached out to the Associated Press to provide a timeline of the events. The Gore campaign had no hint of who had sent the materials—nothing indicated the involvement of a foreign power; indeed, the package was eventually traced to a low-level employee at a media firm. But the materials were on their face likely provided to the Gore campaign as part of an attempt to damage Gore’s opponent, and that was enough to prompt a call to authorities.

The rightness of the Gore officials’ course of action is in no way diminished by the fact that, as suggested at the time, they were probably in part motivated by the desire to avoid the accusations of ill-gotten advantage that had rocked the Reagan administration. A couple years after the fact, it had been revealed that the Reagan campaign had obtained secret briefing materials on then-President Jimmy Carter’s debate strategy in the run-up to the 1980 election; those revelations in turn triggered long-running congressional and Justice Department investigations. Those investigations—which eventually ended in a whimper—raised questions about whether and what kind of crime had been committed, but note that the Justice Department concluded at the time that there was ”no criminal intent of any kind” and “no criminal wrongdoing” committed in connection with the transfer of the materials. This scandal too did not involve any indication of involvement by a hostile foreign power or its intelligence services.

Contrast with the most recent travails of Trump, Jr. Or, for that matter, the Bush Administration’s insistence of WMDs in Iraq – which turned out to be untrue, but permitted the execution of a War which should not have been pursued.

Steve Benen sees the continual crisis that is the Trump Administration progressing to the next step – where it’s everyone for themselves. I suppose we’ll see if he has that right over the next month or so.

Normative:

Establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behaviour.
‘negative sanctions to enforce normative behaviour’
[Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “How to stay pro-tech when social media can eat young lives,” Pat Kane, NewScientist (1 July 2017):

One might have a romantic notion – the agenda-setting SF novels of Cory Doctorow come to mind – that the kids from the wrong side of the tracks would be the ones who demanded something different, less managed, more edgy, from their communication platforms. (Freitas’s students are clearly attending prestigious universities, where pressures to succeed keeps things normative.)

IN this off-again, on-again feature, this entry may be a bit of a stretch. From Alison Frankel, for the want of a comma, I’m left uncertain as to whether Chief Justice Roberts has one heck of an oddball duty … or not:

On June 30, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts disclosed an intriguing tidbit about how he reads briefs to hundreds of federal judges and appellate lawyers gathered at a federal judicial conference in Pennsylvania.

And is it for their bed-time?

Time for my spa treatment!

The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959) is a “curses! my ancestor sucked!” movie, as the male members of a family pay for the savagery of one of their ancestors. So, too, do the instruments of death menacing them, an Amazonian savage and a man out of time with a secret to hide – and an internal compulsion to obey.

Unfortunately, this mystery has little grounding in reality, even those ties which are important. Thus, men collapse in terror at the mere sight of the guy with curare, rather than fight-fight-fight, that bamboo knife so easily cuts off heads from bodies, and, quite frankly, the professor’s daughter can’t act her way out of a paper bag.

Which is all too bad, because there’s some elements to a really creepy movie present. Perhaps, with a little work, they could have gone somewhere with this.

For example, the Amazonian savage has been reconstituted with a body that is mostly curare. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? He is eventually destroyed by being pushed into a fire, where he explodes. Handy, dandy, not even a mess.

And no cost, either.

See, that’s a key missing part of this movie. He’s made of curare, but so what? But what if his destruction had required some sort of sacrifice, or even gambit, from the good guys? Perhaps the cop has to depend on the professor’s daughter to administer a curative potion to him after he wrestles the savage into the fire, and then maybe the other bad guy grabs her …

Move, counter-move, potential sacrifice. Not only does this increase the tension in the story, it also makes it more interesting in that we see how potential prices are part of the calculations as the demise of the enemy is calculated.

That would have been fun. But you won’t find it in this slacking movie.

Modicum:

a small portion :  a limited quantity : had only a modicum of mathematical skills [Merriam-Webster]

Just a word of which I was not precisely aware.

I don’t keep a good eye on the various NASA sites, and for that I apologize, as they are inspirational and remind you there’s more to this Universe than some pack of idiots in Washington, or the sick friend who you’re worrying about. So, in that tradition, here’s a latest picture of Jupiter from NASA‘s Juno probe:

Yep, that’s on purpose.

Was she so awful?

A movie in the category of The Lost City of Z (2016) is a little harder to evaluate than most because, as a biography, the story is dictated by the actual events of history. In this case, this is the story of British Army officer Percy Fawcett, dispatched to Bolivia to map the border between Bolivia and Brazil by following a river. At its source, he finds advanced pottery and other signs of an unknown civilization.

Several years later, having returned to his family, he gives a presentation at the Royal Geographic Society on the subject, and proposes a return investigation. Along with his former traveling companions, a Shackleton companion also makes the trip. Another two or three years are spent in travel, only to have the companion become a nuisance and a burden; he is eventually sent back on a horse with an injury. Only after his departure do they find he sabotaged the expedition, although why he’d do such a thing is a little mysterious. The damage is done, and they fail to make it to the head of the river. They return to England, and soon their erstwhile companion shows up, full of brimfire for being abused and abandoned; the dispute is invigorating.

World War I then intervenes, and Fawcett spends several years serving in France, eventually being severely injured by chlorine gas. Upon his recovery, however, the war is finished, and his son persuades him to make one more trip up the river in search of that civilization. They disappear into the forest, and once the letters stop, there is only one more communication received, a wordless message indicating only that success has been achieved. Nothing more is ever heard from them.

Why? Why go the second and third times? Because adventure calls? Because they enjoy risking death by disease or snakebite or hostile natives? Each trip takes several years, and the movie portrays him as deeply attached to his wife in an enlightened relationship – so why virtually abandon the family? One may infer that today’s society would be quite unlike that of the naughts of the 2oth century, but a little work on the motivations of men & women back then would have made the story more engaging.

Those frustrations aside, it’s a technically competent movie, and sometimes the tableaus can be breathtaking, as when they discover an opera in full blast in the middle of the jungle. But the central question of why, why, why? distracts too much from an otherwise fine movie.

Insouciant:

free from concern, worry, or anxiety; carefree; nonchalant. [Dictionary.com]

My Arts Editor often remarks that the many rabbits in our yard have become quite insouciant due to the passing of three of our cats, and the aging of the two survivors.

… then, according to this article in NewScientist (1 July 2017), eat termite-processed mud.

“The important thing is that this isn’t just any mud, it’s termite-processed mud,” says team member Mrinalini Watsa at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Analysis showed that the mud can absorb cations – positively charged particles – so could mop up potentially toxic metal ones from other substances in the monkeys’ diet (Primates, doi.org/b82k).

“This was key,” says Adams. “A large part of a saki’s [a small primate] diet is seeds from unripe fruit, and these are packed with toxic chemicals.”

The region’s [Amazonian Peru] other major seed eaters – macaws and parrots – fly to clay-rich soils on riverside cliffs for stomach-calming intestinal mudbaths. Sakis have found a solution closer to their homes.

Next question: instinctual or cultural behavior?

Which is exactly what came to mind as I read Greg Fallis’ furiously satirical piece concerning gunners, the NRA, and gun manufacturers:

Wait, that’s not all! They are going to use their ex-president (you know, that Negro one? The one from Kenya, with the funny ears?) to “endorse the resistance”! That guy, he doesn’t even have a birth certificate thing, and they are going to use him for endorsing! Probably on an award show! Where he’ll be given an award for assassinating the real news to death! And an actor — or maybe even a singer — will give him the award!

Is that what you want? Do you want your children to grow up in a country where singers give awards to ex-presidents for assassinating real news? Then you’d better go out RIGHT NOW and buy as many guns as Jesus wants you to buy. If you think I’m kidding (I’m totally NOT kidding…would I kid about this?), just listen to what this extremely angry woman has to say.

I’ll omit the video. Given the reported scarcity of gun ammunition encountered during the Obama Administration as gun owners, frightened by the pronouncements on high of how they’d have to fight off rabid Democrats coming for their guns (for those with bad memories, it never even came close to happening – only the mass killings happened), bought all the ammo in site, it’s hard to see NRA members as anything but sheep.

Sheep armed with guns.

Oh, Gary Larson, we miss ye with a vengeance.

Battlefield weapons continue to edge towards the use of AI as controllers, since autonomous weapons may be necessary given how the recent rash of improvised drone weapons are being countered. Christian Borys comments on costs and defenses in NewScientist (1 July 2017, paywall):

Islamic State (ISIS) has deployed consumer drones carrying grenades in the battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul, creating the most daunting problem US Special Operations Command troops faced in Iraq during 2016, according to their commander Raymond Thomas.

Groups around the world are taking advantage of the increasing accessibility of drone technology to build and deploy them as weapons (see “Home-grown drones“). And it’s not hard to imagine them being used in an attack in the West; the bomber responsible for the May attack on a concert in Manchester used parts purchased locally and may have been trained in Libya. …

And now, according to Thomas ISIS is using drones in an “almost swarm level capability” – deploying multiple fliers to the battlefield that can act and move as one. …

On the battlefield, even basic drones are proving to be such a problem that militaries are going to absurd lengths to shoot them down. In March, the BBC reported that a US ally had used a $3 million “Patriot” missile to shoot down a $200 quadcopter drone.

That’s why the hunt is on for an alternative take-down method. One possibility is the Drone Defender produced by Battelle, a military contractor based in Ohio.

The device has a range of 400 metres and looks like a rifle with a radio mast for a barrel. It was first spotted on the battlefield in Iraq in 2016. It operates by shooting a directed radio pulse, disabling the operator’s control of the drone or disrupting its link to GPS satellites, causing it to fall out of the sky.

Which points to the attraction of building an autonomous weapon. The more it can operate on its own, the more attractive it’ll be to militaries around the world – and the closer to an AI it must become, with the attendant uncertainty which I believe will accompany such a development.

A dismal future.

President Trump’s decision to strike our membership with the Paris Climate Agreement was just one step of the United States’ withdrawal from our world-wide leadership position.  Given the distaste of the current occupants of the White House and majorities in Congress for, well, the study of reality, I suppose it’s unsurprising. It tastes like someone lost their nerve.

But the world isn’t stopping in the face of American intransigence, and the latest sign that the world began accelerating away the moment we stepped off the podium comes from France, as reported by The Guardian:

France will end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of an ambitious plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced. …

Nicolas Hulot, the country’s new ecology minister, said: “We are announcing an end to the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040.” Hulot added that the move was a “veritable revolution”.

Hulot insisted that the decision was a question of public health policy and “a way to fight against air pollution”. The veteran environmental campaigner was among several political newcomers to whom Macron gave top jobs in his government.

Pascal Canfin, the head of WWF France and a former Green politician who served in François Hollande’s government, said the new policy platform to counter climate change went further than previous administrations in France. “It places France among the leaders of climate action in the world,” he told France Inter radio.

As later noted, Norway is also moving in this direction, and similar noises are erupting across Europe and India. Seeing that car makers such as Ford and General Motors are global in nature, this will impact them, and hopefully they are preparing for it even now. But it’s important to note this is happening without American leadership. While it’s tempting to blame this on the GOP incompetence and provinciality in Washington, there is a second factor to consider:

The European nations have recovered from World War II and the Cold War.

For those unfamiliar with history^[1], World War II was physically and spiritually devastating for nearly all the European countries; one might argue that Sweden and Switzerland, avowed neutrals, escaped damage, but even they had their losses, intangible as they might have been. The rebuilding was more than physical, for in the cases of the Axis powers, entire governing structures had to be redesigned and implemented. The Allies, so sorely pressed, needed to query themselves as to their errors in the run-up to the War, and how to avoid repeating them. These are blows to efficiency, certainty, and national self-confidence.

Then the Cold War came on the heels of World War II, casting a foreboding backdrop on the events of the world as China’s warlord system collapsed and reformed into the image of the deadly Cultural Revolution.  The mutual menace of the Cold War and North Korea’s invasion of South Korea forced two countries, the Soviet Union and the United States, into the leadership positions of their sides, the former due to its aggressive nature, the latter because of its size, immense resources, and superior strength relative to its allies outside of the Communist world. The United States’ strength, due to its geographical isolation during World War II, made it the natural leader through the conflicts which have occurred since, as well as the responses to catastrophes, both real and hypothetical, during that time.

But now, I think, the United States has entered a period of exhaustion. The free enterprise system, whatever you may think of it, has increasingly brought change in its role as the purveyor of creative destruction, to borrow a libertarian term. That change is at odds with the temperament of much of America, those who have invested themselves in the old ways of doing things – in the old power structures, be they religious hierarchies, fossil fuel industries, or moral systems based on old assumptions. Even the stock exchanges of today do not resemble, in implementation, those of 20 years ago.

And in a country often described as one of the most religious, this is a problem, because religion does not teach change; religion teaches stasis. It speaks of eternal morality systems, not of improving and evolving morality systems. If the reader doubts it, consider the reaction to every attempt to improve our public morality since the beginning of the Republic. When Northern public opinion turned against slavery, did the slave-owners politely dispense with their slaves?

No. The forces of conservatism rallied and instigated a Civil War, calling upon Biblical references to justify their position that slavery is good.

Therefore, for those who have been taught and absorbed the ideas of the eternal and changeless, the changes brought by the Internet, science, and by those obsessed with selective justice, reek of something else: immorality is as good a word as I can imagine at the moment.  But depending on the issue, a multitude of negatively connoted words apply.

Scientists, seeing change in their data collections and worrying about its negative effects for current civilization, are disbelieved by those who have been taught that what we have done for 100 years has been good.

Gay marriage, unimaginable in the 1980s, is now permitted. In some states, a majority of the citizens even voted to allow it prior to the Supreme Court decision. Yet, from pulpit and podium, homosexuality has long been a target of those embodying “right” thinking.

Some industries depart, others arise. Where are the good old days, of working in the steel mills or descending into the coal mines? Even a black President came, who somehow survived constant rhetorical assault to resolve a host of problems.

And then arose, as we all know, the man who promises to bring back all the good times. Coal miners: we’ll use coal again. We’ll build a wall to keep out those bad immigrants who steal our jobs. We’ll reduce taxes and increase military spending because, by God, our military just sucks. Old, good jobs sound so great, and when they’re impossible, at least a finger can be pointed at something tangible. And military spending? That plays so well to those who remember the Cold War, the constant armament building, and how that brought money flooding into communities, and honor as well – contributing to the nation’s defense is always honorable, no?

As an agnostic, I find the roots of religion repugnant, but I do recognize that it brings a morality to the citizen which does not require the hard work of building a secular philosophy that compels what we call moral behavior. At its best, religion brings the simplicity of the Golden Rule to society; at its worst, it espouses a ridiculous theology resulting in the condemnation of millions of people for a multitude of dubious sins, thus hindering that same society. But the underlying teaching of stasis, of an eternal set of rules leading to Godly approval, is a dismaying facet of the institution of religion, for two reasons.

First, it leads to a brittle citizenry, a citizenry trained to expect stasis in a world of change, a training so strong that, when faced with contrary evidence, a howl of disbelief and scorn is raised, rather than the sober, mature reflection necessary for good decision making.

Second, when that brittleness snaps, the citizens tend to toss away all the rules, even as they continue their devotions. We saw this in the vote for our current President, a man of dubious public morality, who lied and lied and lied.  And the Christian nation approved him anyway because he promised a return to stasis, when times were good and they could bask in their Godly approval.

That generation, I fear, is too old to change. We may see another twenty years of GOP fumbling in governance, in combination with Democratic incompetence, before enough of its current base dies off to force it to change – or perish. Younger generations, for the most part not heavily invested in a holistic mythos venerated by this older generation, may not replenish the ranks of the GOP to any great extent, although many currently isolated in areas where conservative ideology and news organizations hold sway may be lured into the fold.

And the question will be whether or not we inadvertently  cause the destruction of the current civilization, or if the rest of the world can contain and ameliorate the damage while the exhausted generation dies off. In the latter case, I am thinking of car-makers forced to abandon fossil-fueled cars because the world outside of the United States has ceased demanding them, and as a response, manufacturers begin to phase them out even within the United States. But that is speculative and narrow; those same manufacturers, recognizing the climate change catastrophe approaching, may switch of their own accord. Some commerce actually employs strategic vision and recognizes the necessity of change.

The aphorism still holds true: change or die.

But, in the meantime, we should expect to see European and Chinese leadership taking over for the increasingly timid Americans. The simple denials of reality, the pursuit of false fantasies, are simply not acceptable in world leadership circles. So leadership returns across the ocean, most vividly to France and Germany, and China. And the United States regenerates, and relearns the lessons of fantasies.

¹As I become more decrepit with age, the temptation to shout Well, get educated about history! greatly increases.

In this case, from Carl Reiner to Justice Kennedy, in The New York Times:

I would like to start with congratulatory wishes on your forthcoming 81st birthday.

As someone who has almost a decade and a half on you, I can tell you this: It may well be that the best part of your career has just begun. As a nonagenarian who has just completed the most prolific, productive five years of my life, I feel it incumbent upon me to urge a hearty octogenarian such as yourself not to put your feet up on the ottoman just yet. You have important and fulfilling work ahead of you.

I am still aiming at making it to the year 2100.

In a sad finale to this vision of transportation, Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com reports that the Transit Elevated Bus appears to have simply been an illusion:

Source: Jalopnik

And now, it turns out, it’s a scam. According to the Financial Times,

On Sunday Chinese authorities said they had launched a probe into the company for alleged illegal fundraising through Huaying Kailai, an online financing platform founded by Mr Bai. [CEO of the Transit Elevated Bus Company]

He was one of 32 people working for Huaying Kailai arrested for using the bus to raise money illegally, after buying the rights to the bus from its inventor, probably the poor uneducated Song Youzhou. The authorities claim that this was not a vehicle for transporting people but for transporting money from investors to Mr. Bai.

A pity. Ambitious visions should be pursued by the obsessed. It keeps the unbalanced out of politics, if nothing else.

The lead-off paragraph of this post by Professor Aaron Brantly, Army Major Nerea M. Cal, and Army Major Devlin Winkelstein on Lawfare sparked a thought:

Most Americans might consider the events occurring in Ukraine—a distant conflict somewhere along the border between the Russian Federation and Western Europe—to be someone else’s problem. What that perspective fails to appreciate, however, is how these seemingly distant events set the stage for a new form of hybrid warfare that is already targeting Western citizens. Many of the techniques we are observing in Ukraine, especially those in the digital realm, are not meaningfully constrained by international borders; if left unchecked they could significantly undermine Western digital, physical, and political structures.

That lack of constraint remark made me wonder: are we talking about a single organism? Does the Internet have a meaningful analogy in the idea of it being a single organism, made up of smaller, contingent pieces, perhaps a creature of emergent evolution, but also subject to attack by other organisms?

It certainly seems so to my untrained eye. The Internet, much like any fair-sized critter, is often physically unaware that it is hosting many other organisms, many of which have a purpose unconnected to that of the host (these are the parasites, biologically speaking, or the spammers, scammers, and associated criminals), while others have a purpose connected to that of the host (these, the symbiotes, and, in terms of the Internet, the various computers and associated organizations dedicated to the survival and promotion of the network, as well as, to greater or lesser extents, the commercial operations which benefit, in part or in whole, from the qualities of the Internet). The analogy may be unsurprising.

But an analogy can lead to beneficial conclusions drawing from the known case. Can we appraise our knowledge of processes and approaches to disease, for example, and find application to the problems of the Internet? Perhaps, if they exist, medical philosophers might have some thoughts on how to approach some of the problems with criminals on the Internet. It’d be an interesting project to pursue.

Source: Wild About Harry

For a movie which focuses on a supposed fixation with death, Houdini (1953) misses a bet. A Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh vehicle, the movie presents a rags-to-riches story of the life of Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess, beginning with his start as a performer in a Coney Island carnival, where he meets Bess, through the simple magic circuit, until he begins his famous escape stunts, which gain him fame and fortune.

In the midst of his success, tragedy strikes when his beloved mother passes away, and he stops his tour in order to investigate mediums, attending seances in order to attempt communication with his late mother – all for naught, though.

Finally, he returns to the escape tricks, and Bess threatens to leave him if he attempts the “Torture Cell”, feeling that it is emblematic of a death wish on his part, a death wish that started when his mother died. He promises to discard the trick, but an audience, having seen the advertising for it, demands he attempt it, and he nearly dies in the attempt. Fin.

For me, what made the man was his public persona, because it embodied his impulses, thoughts, even his philosophies, and while his escape tricks are displayed (mostly without the insiders’ view, darn it), the obsession with mediums is only barely touched upon. It could have been so much more, an investigation into the credulousness of the common man, perhaps. After all, it’s reported that Mr. Houdini scorned the common shyster medium as a plague on mankind. But because nothing more than a single seance and some newspaper headlines are deployed, its importance in his life is effectively downplayed.

In the end, though, the missed bet relates to his own real-life death, which was the famous punch to the stomach which supposedly ruptured his appendix (if you’re interested, Wikipedia has a belabored section on his death). Having death thrust upon him makes for an interesting juxtaposition to the death wish he harbored.

If, indeed, he did. Not being a Houdini enthusiast, although I enjoy what I do run across in my readings, I do not know if this is from his life, or merely from the writers’ imagination.

In the end, it’s a movie that explores the Houdinis, and yet doesn’t really seem to show us a great deal, perhaps because this movie feels like it’s more in the tradition of star vehicles than of biopics. I was left wondering as much about Houdini’s motivations as I was about how he performed many of his tricks.

Couscousier:

The couscousier is a two-piece steamer with a lid. A stew of meats or vegetables is simmered in the bottom part of the pan. The upper pan has small holes and as the steam rises from the lower pan it cooks the couscous which is placed inside the upper pan. [Gourmet Sleuth]

Noted in Sephardic Cooking, Copeland Marks, p. XV:

In my collection I have a beautiful copper antique couscousier, which is shaped like an hourglass and is in two sections. The bottom half is a container for the meat, fish or poultry stew. The top half has many round holes, quarter inch in diameter, which allow steam from the stew to permeate the couscous deposited in the top.

On National Review, Charles Krauthammer indulges in a spotty view of history while analyzing the North Korean situation:

Nukes assure regime survival. That’s why the Kims have so single-mindedly pursued them. The lessons are clear. Saddam Hussein, no nukes: hanged. Moammar Qaddafi, gave up his nuclear program: killed by his own people. The Kim dynasty, possessing an arsenal of ten to 16 bombs: untouched, soon untouchable.

Here’s the problem: The Soviet Union. In one of the most awesome empire dissolutions of the last 500 years, perhaps rivaled only by the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the nuclear armed and ready Soviet Union fell peacefully apart. Mostly.

Why does this matter? After all, Charles himself doesn’t really have any recommendations. For me, though, it indicates, first, intellectual laziness, and all that implies.

Second, it suggests a possible misunderstanding of the Kim’s (I’ll specify them as a family or clan, since this is a multi-generational project) motivations. After all, I see no mention of the East Asian practice known as saving face, or more generally the idea of gaining and keeping respect.

And, third, his failure to mention the Soviet Union – and the resultant gap in the knowledge of the trusting reader – deprives both Krauthammer and that reader of the lessons learned from the Soviet Union experience, whatever they may be.

Charles, time to retract that column. It could have been so much more.

Andrew Summers in New York comments on the nature of the GOP:

And in [Trump’s] latest war against the media, he is clearly winning. Close to 90 percent of Republicans believe the most patently mendacious president in history over the flawed, but still generally earnest, CNN. More to the point, as one new paper suggests, they support him even when they know he’s lying. And he has used this near-blind support to construct, in just six months, the close equivalent of a disciplined state-run media, across various platforms, from Fox to TMZ, to Sinclair and One America, from the National Enquirer to talk radio across the country, and potentially even Time Inc. in the future. In some ways, this media complex operates for Trump the way RT does for Putin. Yes, in America, unlike Russia, there’s a vibrant alternative, but, in some parts of America, that alternative barely peeks through …

At one time, the GOP would at least pay lip service to the importance of the truth. Indeed, the Clintons were demonized as terrible liars. But now? The GOP base idolizes power over truth.

That can have terrible consequences for the country.

In case you were wondering if it’s actually legal for President Trump to leave a lot of Executive Branch jobs empty, here’s  Christopher Fonzone and Joshua Geltzer on Lawfare to answer that question – with a sophisticated version of It Depends. Then they get to the heart of the matter:

But these questions, to our mind, are secondary; they are about the redressability of the president’s illegal conduct, not about the conduct itself. Many “[c]laims concerning constitutional violations . . . cannot be addressed to the courts,” but understanding the legal nature of those issues helps all of us appreciate their significance. The first and most important point, as laid about above, is that the president’s desire to leave certain Executive Branch jobs unfilled “because they’re unnecessary” raises significant statutory and constitutional questions that shouldn’t be overlooked. If he feels otherwise—if, for example, he regards these statutes as properly read not to demand the filling of these roles, or if he views such a demand as unconstitutional—then he owes it to the American public to make explicit his understanding of the statutes and the requirements they impose on him as well as the legal reasoning behind that understanding. Without that, he’s not just failing to govern—he’s actively defying the law.

A reader protests an observation concerning the ghosts of each side of the political spectrum:

“while the left has the bloody spectre of Stalin, Mao, and full-throated Communism looking over their shoulder.” There is absolutely nothing leftist about the real policies and behavior of Stalin and Mao, who were just totalitarians like so many before and after them. Nor has Marx’s communism ever been implemented as described, and so-called communist regimes in the world barely pay lip service to real ideas — ideas which are mostly flawed by their agrarian/industrial revolution worldview.

A couple of thoughts concerning the left side of the political spectrum and Communism.

First, I’ve put forward the popular viewpoint. I’m hesitant to get into a discussion about the familial connections of the various political ideologies, since I would no doubt show a lot of ignorance, not being a political science junkie. I also haven’t read the Communist Manifesto in at least 25 years, if not more, and don’t remember a word of it. And, beyond the Manifesto, I have not actually read Marx. I’ve seen copies of Das Kapital and was daunted (horrified?) by the size of the text; I’ve heard it’s fairly unreadable.

That said, it’s not hard to observe a relevant similarity: the nationalization of many industries by the Brits during their socialist past (and future? Mr. Corbyn‘s views are quite retro), are akin to baby steps compared to the wholesale takeover of virtually every business in the Soviet Union. The same cannot be said for the National Socialists, or, for that matter, the various authoritarians of South America, excepting perhaps Nicaragua during the Sandinista days. Granted, a business that went against the authoritarians risks its independence, but I do not see there being an ideological requirement that the means of production be secured for the good of the workers.