Monthly Archives: October 2017

In the ongoing struggle between Constitutional law and the attempt to supersede it using arbitration, The Daily Beast reports on one person trying to bring it to public attention in an unique manner:

During Wednesday’s Senate hearing on the Equifax data breach, a protester dressed as the “Monopoly Man” from the board game photobombed Equifax CEO Richard Smith’s testimony.

While the CEO discussed his company’s breach that affected 145.5 million people, the protester gazed skeptically through a monocle at the back of his head.

The protester, who is named Amanda Werner, tweeted a photo fully decked out in Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags attire, complete with the top hat, mustache, and monocle. Werner is a campaign manager for the Americans for Financial Reform coalition and the nonprofit Public Citizen,

In the tweet, Werner explained that the prank, while distracting, was meaningful. “The Monopoly Man is here to raise attention to Equifax’s get-out-of-jail-free card, forced arb.”

Points for imagination. However, since Equifax collects information without permission, it’s a little hard to see how Equifax could force someone, say myself, into arbitration.

The decision on the pardon is in, and the judge is accepting it, according to the AP via Talking Points Memo:

President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s conviction for disobeying a court order in an immigration case will stand after a judge on Wednesday rejected arguments that it would encourage government officials to flout similar judicial commands in the future.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton cited U.S. Supreme Court precedent in formally dismissing the criminal case against the former six-term sheriff of metro Phoenix known for his harsh treatment of inmates and immigration enforcement crackdowns.

She held off on ruling on Arpaio’s request to throw out all orders in the case, including a blistering 14-page ruling in which the judge explained her original reasoning in finding that Arpaio was guilty of a crime.

“I have concluded the pardon is valid,” Bolton said.

I wonder if this decision can be appealed. It would certainly a first. On the Take Care blog, Bernadette Meyler wrote prior to the judge’s ruling:

Memory in these contexts is important. To take but one example: even though President Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence last year, uproar over the activities leading to her conviction by court martial recently led Harvard University to withdraw its fellowship offer to her. Should we let Arpaio get off more lightly and allow his violations of many people’s constitutional rights to be removed from the historical record?

Judge Bolton would be making a serious error if she were to vacate Arpaio’s criminal contempt conviction. But even if she does, let’s not let President Trump make us forget what Arpaio did.

Arpaio did wrong, and the fact that Trump would have us believe otherwise does not make it incumbent on us to agree with him. Arpaio is guilty of ignoring a court order, and even if he doesn’t have to pay for that error in judgment directly, the people should rightly distrust him with any further public responsibilities.

Continuing this horse ride, I can’t help but notice the continued foolishness of GOP officials of various stripes. Steve Benen on Maddowblog summarizes nicely:

White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney is signaling similar flexibility, saying on CNN Sunday that decisions about deductions remain up in the air as “the bill is not finished yet.” He took it a step further on Fox News Sunday, by adding that a tax plan that doesn’t add to the deficit won’t spur growth.

“I’ve been very candid about this. We need to have new deficits because of that. We need to have the growth,” Mulvaney said. “If we simply look at this as being deficit-neutral, you’re never going to get the type of tax reform and tax reductions that you need to get to sustain 3 percent economic growth.”

Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), summarizing the perspective of many in his party, recently said in reference to deficit reduction, “It’s a great talking point when you have an administration that’s Democrat-led. It’s a little different now that Republicans have both houses and the administration.”

He clearly wasn’t kidding.

And they aren’t thinking ahead, are they? The GOP vulnerability on the subject of their principles have suddenly become quite apparent and should be used by every single Democratic candidate as a baseball bat to suggest to the voters that perhaps those who they’ve been voting for are nothing more than cynical power seekers. Their excuse that they are changing their views in response to reality is invalidated by their own man Walker’s intemperate remark.

Indeed, the only unchanging principle of the GOP may be their certainty that they deserve power.

On Lawfare Paul Rosenzweig notes how Russia got a look at the source code to a critical computer security product in use in the American military:

According to this report from Reuters, Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) has allowed the Russian military to review the source code for ArcSight, a cybersecurity alert system widely used in the Pentagon and in the American private sector. The source code review was a condition required by the Russian government before it would purchase ArcSight for use in Russian systems–at least nominally for the reasonable-sounding purpose of assuring the Russians that the American government had not colluded with HPE to put a back door into ArcSight that might be used against the Russians. This troubling episode raises a number of questions:

• If the Russian request was facially reasonable (and it seems it was) why is HPE allowed to permit the Russians to do a source code review on systems that are used by the U.S. military? Perhaps as a condition of selling to the U.S. government, one ought not to be permitted to allow foreign nations to unpack the product

And even more startling revelations. So why is HPE permitting this Russian access? My suspicion is that HPE, being an international company, believes it must have a more equable attitude towards its customers, rather than an American-centric view.

Which leads to the question of whether American agencies should more carefully vet its suppliers insofar as their allegiance – to the dollar or to America? At this juncture, some critical holes in American cyber-infrastructure maybe assumed.

And HPE should be considered disqualified from all future American contracts, public and private. Maybe they should only expect Russian contracts from here on out.

Or is Decay and Renewal too pretentious?

Portulaca beset with a weed.

And grass, sensing imminent months of storm and wind and cold, prepares to let its seed fly away.

It’s hugging time!

Perhaps the theme of Godzilla 2000 (1999) is Your friends sometimes lurk in wolves’ clothing.

Seems a bit weak.

Or maybe it’s Sometimes you’re just the audience at the heavyweight fight. That might be more accurate, because this time it’s Godzilla, who’s been raiding the Japanese power grid, up against a flying saucer that’s thought to be 60 million years old. Somehow, the Japanese Crisis Control team has deduced that Godzilla’s secret is that his cells regenerate very, very quickly – sort of like the Borg in Star Trek, come to think of it. And, again, somehow, the Crisis Control team, or maybe it’s their rival, the guy with the smart kid and the broken windshield, has figured out that the creatures in the flying saucer want to harvest Godzilla for his secret. Oh, and somehow someone figures out the aliens in the spacecraft want to radically modify Earth’s atmosphere for their own comfort.

Well.

Eventually, there’s a second monster on the ground, and the Big G and the new guy have a rock ’em sock ’em time of it in the heart of Tokyo. Perhaps the best moment comes in the climactic fight when the new monster has a go at swallowing Godzilla whole, and Godzilla’s response is, well, let’s just say that was innovative.

Otherwise, though, it’s some rather awful special effects, some rudimentary plotting for the human characters, and some sort of muddled moral at the end. And definitely the feeling that Godzilla is just defending his territory and doesn’t give much of a crap about the humans, reinforced by some freeform arson at the end.

Definitely only watch at the end of a long day, waiting for the spouse to get home before you can go to bed. Or not at all.

While discussing this with my Arts Editor (she only viewed part of the movie), it occurred to me to consider whether or not Godzilla represents the United States, at least in this movie. After all, for all their efforts, the Crisis Control Team, the standin for the Japanese nation, are basically powerless to affect the behavior of the entity defending them. While they may be grateful that the attacking aliens are defeated, they are also trampled underfoot by a defender who really has his own concerns at heart – much like the Americans in post World War II East Asia. The entire nuclear thing may just be a decoy for the real message of the movie – Americans, get out!

In the wake of the Las Vegas tragedy, I was surprised to read that Pat Robertson, 700 Club founder, extreme conservative, and all-around God supporter, has taken a position that will end in the termination of gun rights. From Right Wing Watch:

“Violence in the streets, ladies and gentlemen. Why is it happening?” he asked. “The fact that we have disrespect for authority; there is profound disrespect for our president, all across this nation they say terrible things about him. It’s in the news, it’s in other places. There is disrespect now for our national anthem, disrespect for our veterans, disrespect for the institutions of our government, disrespect for the court system. All the way up and down the line, disrespect.”

“Until there is biblical authority,” Robertson continued, “there has to be some controlling authority in our society and there is none. And when there is no vision of God, the people run amok … and we have taken from the American people the vision of God, the whole idea of reward and punishment, an ultimate judge of all our actions, we’ve taken that away. When there is no vision of God, the people run amok.”

The problem is that, if liberty is to be retained, then so must be free will, and history teaches us that “Biblical leadership” leads to more discord in society, not less.

Therefore, without a doubt there will be those who will take up arms against any such Biblical leader, regardless of sect, who tries to impose their interpretation of the Bible on American society.

And therefore guns will be outlawed by this Biblical leadership.

As ever, Pat should really be retired to a rest home. His reasoning capabilities – or perhaps his familiarity with realities which he dislikes – appear to be impaired. Unless he was condemning President Trump, as Trump is guilty of many of these disrespects, plus a few more.

Yeah, I’ll keep that in my heart. Or is that sinful?

We’ve been out of touch since Sunday evening, only getting news on the massacre in Las Vegas second-hand. I’ve done a little more reading about it, but I thought I’d put some thoughts out there before I become weighed down with too many facts, not to mention the various opinions as the incident is politicized by those for gun control and those for expanding gun rights.

By too many facts, I should explain that I want to consider the problem of mass shootings, not the Las Vegas incident in particular, tragic and deserving of attention as it is. Particular incidents tend to magnify certain facets, while neglecting other facets of potentially greater relative importance; by removing particular incidents from the magnifying glass, perhaps a more effective strategy can be found.

So, to my eye, this appears to be a struggle between societal rights and individuals’ rights, wherein we can assign gun control arguments to the former and gun right arguments to the latter. By societal rights, I’m referring to the general American, and perhaps human, need to raise children in a safe environment; the needless loss of children is unacceptable to American mothers. We can see this in, paradoxically, the anti-vaxxer movement, as the American mother in particular, no longer sensitive to the deadliness of certain diseases for which we now vaccinate, react to the probability (false, as it turns out) that vaccinations increase the possibility of autism, a diagnosis which can result in the loss of a ‘normal’ life, especially in the extreme cases characterized by brain damage of various sorts. They resist the vaccinations in this fear, resulting in the resurgence of such debilitating and potentially fatal diseases as whooping cough, smallpox, and others.

By individual rights, I mean the obvious – the right of an individual to own modern firearms for self-protection. The traditional libertarian / NRA (National Rifle Association) argument is that such guns should be available to those who feel they are in danger. Then the libertarians like to engage in a bit of handwaving that supposedly supports the argument.

The liberal reader, at this juncture, may be pointing at the Las Vegas incident and proclaiming the failure of that philosophy. Lacking the facts of this specific incident, I am going to bypass this dead end of an argument, because I think there’s a better way to approach it.

The individual rights argument has an implicit assumption in its holster, and it is this: these incidents will occur and we need to fight back.

Well, this assumption, unexamined, contains at least two problems inimical to the individual rights position.

First, by permitting the expansion of gun rights, it puts more and more firepower in the hands of the good and bad guys. The individual rights argument may be that they are equally balanced, but this is a handwave that ignores the activities of gangs and other organized crime. While we may hope that, a la the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the bad guys will fight each other, we really have a vivid example just south of the American border where the drug gangs, unintentionally presented with riches by the American War on Drugs, not only massacre each other, but the good guys as well.

And, as anyone who’s served in the military will tell you, organized usually beats disorganized. (Appeals to asymmetric warfare will be denied, as they are organized use of warfare, but in an atypical mode. The mistake is to believe that small and faced with overwhelming odds either implies or equals disorganization. The protest is amazingly weak on examination.)

But second, the assumption that these incidents, as enabled by #1, will occur is actually an argument killer. Recall that Americans, by any measure, do not want a society punctuated by mass killings. This is disruptive to the development of children, emotional and intellectual, and ultimately is deleterious to the future of society, i.e., America.

So the individual rights argument claims the gun is needed for self-protection, but the societal rights riposte is to observe that the moment that first gunshot occurs for that momentous gun fight that is at the heart of the individual rights’ argument, the individual rights argument is defeated because society is now disrupted, made less safe – and therefore the future of America is threatened by the individual rights argument.

Given human nature, this result is inescapable. The prevention of such mass shootings should be first priority, not the chance to battle it out.

All that said, given how many people view government as a potential enemy of liberty, and not its enabler, not to mention hunting and even general fun with guns, it is necessary to find that balance between gun rights which does not alienate that part of society, and gun control, where mass shootings are minimized. That has long been a difficult part of politics, as it should be. But the Republican approach of giving the NRA all the rights it wants is not a proper approach to the problem, for the NRA does not have the burden of finding the proper balance; it merely advocates on the side of gun rights.

It’s the role and responsibility of Congress to deny those rights which, if implemented, will lead to a disruption of society. If that results in denying the NRA some of its demands, then good. I would prefer to see politicians with backbones, rather than the current crop in the majority who seem bent on bending over for industry and pressure groups.

And the same for societal rights. Those restrictions which are draconian without increasing the security of society should not be permitted.

This report in Roll Call on a Congressional failure to renew a Federal student loan facility named Perkins Aid reminds me of a short discussion I had on Facebook years ago concerning the entire college/aid ecosystem. Basically, I was, and remain, suspicious of the attempts to provide more and more aid, whether it be loans or grants or scholarships to students, because it reminds me of the classic definition of inflation.

Inflation, informally, is the printing of money without reference to any set standard of goods or other standard measure of wealth; often times, governments will print money without such controls in order to satisfy governmental debts. The classic example is that of the Weimar Republic, faced with World War I reparations, printing money with such abandon that citizens were paying for loaves of bread using wheelbarrows of money.

If I might abstract this, this is the injection of money into a system.

The result of such injections is that the price of goods also rise. Now, this isn’t a problem if all the citizens’ income is similarly affected, but it’s a problem, even a disaster, for those on fixed incomes.

Now let’s map these elements into the student/aid ecosystem. The printing of money maps easily enough to scholarships and grants, perhaps even loans. The common citizens are the students. And the goods?

The goods are the seats in the school systems.

Here’s the problems: the schools see greater and greater injections of money into the system. They can do either, or both, of two things: increase the number of seats, or increase the price of each seat. Why the latter?

Because they can.

After all, it’s manna from heaven. So both prices and seats (remember this) have increased. And that’s not a problem for those students with income that adjusts to the increase in prices, that is, loans/grants/scholarships, or in other words student aid, because those will all increase as the suppliers see the increase in prices – because that was triggered by the earlier wave of increases.

But this is hell for the student with no access to student aid. And it’ll just keeping getting worse.

Any solutions? Well, nothing palatable, I’m sure – but I have to wonder what would happen if student aid was severely curtailed. Certainly, scholarships are immune to suppression because they are often provided by private sources or by the institutions themselves. But loans and grants? These could be suppressed.

And now remember all those seats? Consider this: the students can no longer get the aid. Those seats go unfilled. Now you have educators, first class people, often with Ph.D.s, suddenly without teaching duties.

And while those who are researchers might think it’s time to cheer – no rascally students! – the truth of the matter is that students are always the future, from research assistants to tomorrow’s Nobel Prize winners.

And prestige, prestige, prestige. Most schools, or more properly school administrators, crave it. That’s a good reason to have school rankings, because they bring prestige.

But a school shrinking in enrollment loses prestige. People will ask Why is the school being avoided?

So what happens? The money has been cut off from the system, and the system must adjust – either shrink seats, which is doable but not attractive, or drop prices.

To be honest, the other side of the discussion claimed to have years of experience in college administration and didn’t think it would work out that way. I don’t recall if he gave an explanation, but if he did, it clearly didn’t stick with me.

But whenever I hear a proposal to increase student aid yet again, I always quiver a little and wonder if we’re just wandering down the path to a slightly uglier hell.

Semasiographic:

At the time, Urton identified seven binary features, which would allow for 128 distinct signs. Including different colors would make over 1,000 signs. He did not think the system was alphabetic, with signs representing sounds. Rather, he saw it as semasiographic: Signs had meanings, similar to musical notes and mathematical symbols. [“Unraveling a Secret,” Bridget Alex, Discover Magazine (October 2017)]

Perhaps the most interesting scene in the movie.

The Ladies Man (1961) falls into the cotton-candy genre of stories – it’s big, it’s complex, but when you’re done consuming it, you’re not full and it wasn’t all that good for you. This is a Jerry Lewis vehicle, through and through. His character, who appears to be on the autism spectrum, has graduated college, been dumped by his girl for someone without a head, and is looking for a job, pursuing ads for “bachelors.” After some false starts, he lucks into Mrs. Wellenmellon’s establishment, which houses about fifty ladies who are trying to break into show business. He is used by them for general chores and errands. And where is this going? Hard to say. I took the ride and I still don’t know why I should have bothered. Jerry showcases some tap skills, along with his usual farce. But, in the end, I just shrugged and filed it under “foreign experience.” Maybe it has meaning for other people.

Or perhaps it was left on the TV channel’s cutting room floor?

For another viewpoint from an expert, here’s Jonathan Rosenbaum’s entry on The Ladies Man. It may be that you have to be of that era, or an expert in it, to understand the commentary Lewis is creating.

Shipping containers turned into a starburst? From what I’ve read, no – this seems to be all computer rendering.

Completely convincing.

One of the odder indoor configurations.

By Whitaker Studio, UK.

Halobacteria:

Halobacteria (also Halobacteriacea) are a class of the Euryarchaeota,^[1] found in water saturated or nearly saturated with salt. Halobacteria are now recognized as archaea, rather than bacteria. The name ‘halobacteria’ was assigned to this group of organisms before the existence of the domain Archaea was realized, and remains valid according to taxonomic rules^{[citation needed]}. In a non-taxonomic context, halophilic archaea are referred to as haloarchaea to distinguish them from halophilic bacteria. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the the Research “come on” for Earth to Sky Calculus:

Earth to Sky Calculus has been conducting research into the stratosphere since 2010. Their work has resulted in cutting-edge findings on halobacteria, cosmic radiation and other conditions 100,000 feet about Earth.

Dorota Kobiela decided she wanted to make a movie about the artist Van Gogh … in the style of Van Gogh.

By hand.

This link leads to a BBC report on the project.

The samples they show remind me faintly of another film, A Scanner Darkly (2006), in which the unusual visual element contributed substantially to a work in which reality itself has become uncertain. That would certain be echoed in a Van Gogh view of reality.

Ah, and here’s the website for the movie, Loving Vincent. It appears to be in limited release already. I’ll have to check this out.

Waddya guys do again?

It may be a familiar theme, but it’s still riveting. On The Waterfront (1954) examines the problems inherent in cultural xenophobia as well as the every man for himself mentality. In this examination we see what we can remain, much to our perplexed sorrow, or what we can become once we take those steps of faith – and the harrowing nature of those steps.

“A hawk has made the pigeons nervous,” former boxer Terry, now dockworker, says about his flock of racing pigeons. The obvious allusion of the hawk is to the mob boss, Johnny Friendly, who runs the Dockworker’s union to which Terry belongs. Friendly consistently manipulates the members of the union to ensure they won’t trust each other, nor anyone outside of their insular little community, so that the only grouping is his ‘muscle’, armed and unafraid to use those weapons to keep everyone in line.

But the real hawk is conscience, the conscience of men who understand, if only dimly, that evil is in their midst, gnawing at their souls, glutting itself on wealth scooped from the pockets of the workers. They know the never seen Joey was killed by the mob muscle, and that knowledge feeds their hawk, causing it to flutter about, stirring them to restless anger.

Terry’s own hawk is feeding on his inadvertent collusion in the murder of Joey. Joey had planned to testify against the mob bosses, and Terry helped lure him for his apartment; from the roof, Joey takes a short-lived wing, and in his fatal plunge becomes food for the hawks. Terry avoids his conscience, convincing himself that he thought that Joey would merely be persuaded not to testing, but is forced to face the talons as he discovers the classic interest in Joey’s sister, Edie, a woman driven to discover what happened to her beloved brother.

The authorities, ever distrusted by the working men of the docks, have come to investigate corruption and murder, and serve Terry with a subpoena. Terry dances and dodges, for it’s every man for himself and testifying would mean the mob descending on him, but the hawk is digging into his shoulders for the ride, and soon he finds himself with his brother, Charley. Charley, who years before had told Terry to throw the fight that could have put him in the big-time. Charley, who gave him a few bucks for ensuring the profitability of Friendly’s bet. Ah, short-term gain and fraud, and how did that serve you?

“I’m a bum.” Every man for himself.

Charley had been assigned to bring Terry to Friendly to ensure Terry would not testify, but Terry is making the transition from a bum to a man right in front of him, and Charley knows what that means. Charley, at least in this TV version, is not well-drawn, so the scene is not convincing from his point of view, but Charley cannot force Terry to his death, a costly decision for Charley. Terry is lured out of his apartment, nearly run over, and finds Charley’s body. He vows revenge, but Father Barry won’t permit him to throw his soul away, escorting him away.

Following his damning testimony, Terry discovers his pigeon flock destroyed by a boy who helped him with it: a pigeon for a stool-pigeon, the boy shouts as he throws a dead pigeon at Terry. Thus are those who ignore their consciences destroyed, no? Terry then descends to the pier, unconsciously looking to rescue another flock, for it’s time for the dockworkers to receive their assignments, and soon Johnny and Terry are fighting. When Johnny finds Terry has a backbone, he calls for help from his mob muscle, and as Johnny is pounded to a pulp, the silently watching dockworkers surge back and forth, the claws of the hawk urging them on, but their uncertainty holding them back.

They said there’d be a popsicle at the end.

Father Barry and Edie show up, push aside the battered Friendly, and minister to a badly hurt Terry. As they do so, a ship’s owner comes by and demands the union get work, but the dockworkers ignore Friendly’s harangue, stripping Friendly of his power. Terry now must walk that harsh path from what they all know, the comfort of familiarity, even when it’s the brutal mob muscle, short wages, and no futures, to the uncertainty that will come by working together, strongly and fairly. Terry makes that pain-wracked journey, step by horrible step, and the dockworkers follow him to a better place as they begin the work of the day, leaving the lash of their former masters behind.

A movie filled with stars and stars to be, it’s a lesson in the importance of ethics and honesty, not only with each other, but with one’s self as well.

Strongly recommended.

WaPo won the Pulitzer Prize in the category of National Reporting in 2016 for their ongoing collation and reporting on people who were shot and killed by police during the year in the entire nation. The 2017 database is here, listing, as of today, 737 dead. Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine uses this database to analyze the current uproar concerning NFL players kneeling during the national anthem:

The Post has indeed found that there’s a strikingly consistent number of fatal police shootings each year: close to 1,000 people of all races. But that figure includes the armed and the unarmed. Fatal police shootings of the unarmed — the issue Kaepernick and Reid cite — are far fewer. In the first six months of this year, for example, the Post found a total of 27 fatal shootings of unarmed people, of which black men constituted seven. Yes, you read that right: seven. There are 22 million black men in America. If an African-American man is not armed, the chance that he will be killed by the police in any recent year is 0.00006 percent. If a black man is carrying a weapon, the chance is 0.00075. One is too many, but it seems to me important to get the scale of this right. Our perceptions are not reality.

Since Andrew is not citing how many black men are armed, I frankly don’t have a lot of faith in this math. I should think the proper math for calculating the probability of an unarmed black man being killed in an encounter with police might be something along the lines of

P_b * (1 – G_b) * S_b

Where P_b is the probability of a black man encountering the police, G_b is the probability that the black man is armed (and does it have to be a gun?), and S_b is the probably that the police will shoot an unarmed black man. Decorate with some solid statistical numbers and do a bit of algebra, and I’d feel more confident.

His note concerning some work done by a Cornell Ph. D. student, based on data from the Police-Public Contact Survey, is more interesting:

It’s a big survey — around 150,000 people, including 16,000 African-Americans. And it provides one answer (although not definitive) to some obvious questions. First off, are black men in America disproportionately likely to have contact with the police? Surprisingly, no. In the survey years that Lamoine looked at, 20.7 percent of white men say they interacted at least once with a cop, compared with 17.5 percent of black men. The data also separates out those with multiple encounters. According to Lemoine, black men (1.5 percent) are indeed more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to have more than three contacts with police per year — but it’s not a huge difference.

On the key measure of use of force by the cops, however, black men with at least one encounter with cops are more than twice as likely to report the use of force as whites (one percent versus 0.4 percent). That’s the nub of it. “Force,” by the way, includes a verbal threat of it, as well as restraining, or subduing. If you restrict it to physical violence, the data is worse: Of men who have had at least one encounter with the police in a given year, 0.9 percent of white men reported the use of violence, compared with 3.4 percent of black men. (For force likely to cause physical injury, i.e. extreme force, however, the ratio is actually better: 0.39 percent for white men compared with 0.46 percent of black men.)

What do we make of this data? I think it shows the following: that police violence against black men, very broadly defined, is twice as common as against white men, and narrowly defined as physical force, three times as common, but that there’s no racial difference in police violence that might lead to physical harm, and all such violence is rare. (Recall that the 3.4 percent of black men who experience violence at the hands of the police are 3.4 percent of the 17.5 percent of those who have at least one encounter with the cops, i.e., 0.5 percent of all black men.)

Of course, there’s always some question about data collection, and here I’d have to ask if this is self-reported data or not. Self-reported data is always subjective, and therefore always a trifle dubious. Still, it’s interesting how it turns out.

I am a bit disappointed that that Andrew limits himself to violent encounters. After all, these incidents are not isolated, but are part of a spectrum and collection of every day behaviors. We’ve often heard of profiling – does this show up in the data? And what sort of effect do unsupportable traffic stops and harassment have on the black community?

Earth To Sky Calculus sent a balloon up to 100,000 ft during the recent eclipse, and here’s the result, as assembled by Ginger Perez:

Earth to Sky Calculus is selling a poster. Spaceweather.com has more information.

Joseph DeThomas on 38 North believes both North Korea and the United States have blinded themselves to acceptable conflict end states other than blowing each other into nuclear bits:

Due to a fatal error in North Korean strategic calculation, this environment has been destabilized. Pyongyang has chosen to: 1) add millions of US hostages to its strategy by pressing forward with development of a thermonuclear-tipped ICBM; and 2) craft and test a nuclear war fighting strategy that targets nuclear weapons on key US military assets and facilities which are critical to US and ROK defense planning. Leaving aside whether having American civilians in North Korean nuclear cross-hairs would undercut the faith of our ROK and Japanese allies in US resolve, the US and ROK militaries simply cannot afford to have key air, sea or logistics bases and debarkation points for US ground reinforcements neutralized by a DPRK nuclear first strike—not to mention the military and civilian casualties that would result from absorbing the North’s first strike. However effective US and Japanese theater missile defense might be, it is vulnerable to a barrage of missiles and the DPRK has hundreds available for attacks on Japan and South Korea. Any prudent US commander would have strong incentives to preemptively attack North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities at the outset of a conflict in order to limit the damage to vital US military assets.[1] …

Denuclearizing North Korea is a worthy goal. But it is not worthy of a nuclear war in East Asia—even one the US would win. There are less appealing but acceptable alternatives that would leave US alliances intact and allow the natural advantages of the US and its allies to erode North Korea’s hostility over time. The same logic should apply to Pyongyang. It has been remarkably successful at playing off its many neighbors and the United States. It has survived the worst of its economic maladies. The greatest threat to its survival is forcing the US into a war in which it believes its own people’s survival is at stake. The DPRK could easily return to its earlier deterrent strategy and survive for decades.

Something we always dreaded during the Cold War – mistakes on both sides. In this case, it’s mistakes made of ideology, mendacity, and misunderstanding.