Monthly Archives: November 2017

Tetrachromacy:

Rich Lee, a biohacker in Utah who is colour-blind, says he wants to use Zayner’s kit to not only cure his colour blindness, but take his eyesight to the next level. He wants to see into the ultraviolet spectrum, a rare genetic mutation called tetrachromacy that is sometimes found in women. [“Biohackers are using CRISPR on their DNA and we can’t stop it,” Alex Pearlman, NewScientist (18 November 2017, paywall)]

The 18 November 2017 leader in NewScientist was interesting more for what it didn’t say than what it did. But that first, of course:

THE plot of P.D.James’s dystopian novel The Children Of Men revolves around a provocative thought experiment: what would happen if humans stopped being able to reproduce? In the story, set in 2021, no child has been born in the past 25 years and Homo sapiens is heading for extinction. With no future to plan for, society is spiralling into the ultimate fin-de-siècle decadence.

By the time 2021 comes around for real, life may be starting to imitate art. In July, Israeli scientists reported that sperm counts in developed countries have declined by more than half in the past 40 years and continue to fall by about 1.6 per cent a year. “Shocking” and “a wake-up call” were two of the responses from other scientists.

The cause of the fertility crisis in The Children Of Men was a global disease. The cause of ours is not known (see “We’re heading for a male fertility crisis and we’re not prepared“). To say that we urgently need some research into it is not an exaggeration. We are almost certainly not heading for a total collapse of male fertility, but sperm counts are approaching dangerously low levels. Around one in 10 couples already experience fertility problems. And yet our scientific understanding of male infertility remains rudimentary, with some researchers complaining that they struggle to get funding to do the long-term, large-scale studies needed to get to the bottom of the problem.

For many women, the news that men are suddenly in the spotlight will feel like a welcome role reversal.

And so on and so forth. But what came immediately to my mind was to wonder whether this could be classified as a natural response to human overpopulation. From nature studies, we know that overpopulation by a species doesn’t end well – if they’re lucky, the predators rebound and the species returns to some sort of rhythmic stasis by having the old and infirm eaten; if they’re not lucky, famine, plague, ecological ruin are all cards in the deck awaiting overpopulated species. Even cannibalism has been observed, although that study was of imprisoned rats.

I believe those are very real possibilities in the next hundred years. But what if Nature has gentler ways? What if most of the men of the next few generations die off childless? To some small extent, polygamous men might make up for it. But we might see a sizable decline in total human population, which would relax both political and natural tensions.

It’s quite possible that systemic pollution is affecting men’s gonads. Or it might be the increasing CO₂ in the air – remember the studies indicating our food is becoming less nutritious, in correlation with CO₂ concentrations? Just as our food evolved in an environment with lower CO₂ concentrations, so did we – it’s not hard seeing how that might make our current performance sub-optimal. Now, we may argue that this is man poisoning himself, but in reality, given the common definition of Nature, man is just another critter running around, and if his own waste acts as a natural brake on his reproduction, I’m cool with calling it natural.

But I think NewScientist really missed an interesting bet by not pursuing this question, but rather pointing out that women are not on the spot for once. It, too, is an interesting subject – but when we’re talking about mass deaths through war or famine, it seems quite secondary to me.

I see there’s also a major article, which I’m partway through. The claim of male fertility dropping is apparently limited to the developed world; the developing countries do not exhibit it. Maybe this is just the result of sedentarianism.

In WaPo Gary Sargent muses on the Trump behavior pattern:

To date, Trump has made over 1,600 false or misleading claims as president. Routinely, the lies are demonstrably false, often laughably so. But this actually serves his ends. It is impossible to disentangle this from his constant effort to undermine the news media, seen again in today’s NBC tweet. In many cases the attacks on the media are outlandishly ridiculous, dating back to the tone-setting assertion that the media deliberately diminished his inaugural crowd sizes, even though the evidence was decisive to the contrary. Here again, the absurdity is the whole point: In both the volume and outsize defiance of his lies, Trump is asserting the power to declare the irrelevance of verifiable, contradictory facts, and with them, the legitimate institutional role of the free press, which at its best brings us within striking distance of the truth.

Press critic Jay Rosen has surmised that Trump represents something broader, “an organized campaign to discredit the mainstream press in this country,” which “takes many forms.” To wit: When conservative activist James O’Keefe got busted trying to bait The Post with a false accuser of Moore, to discredit the believable charges against him, O’Keefe skipped over questions about whether he had employed the woman, instead citing laughably meaningless video “evidence” to cast further doubt on The Post’s commitment to reporting the truth. Those who claim O’Keefe is now “on the defensive” miss the point. He isn’t trying to win an argument. The goal is to render fact- and evidence-based inquiry itself a cause for suspicion.

But it’s important to remember this behavior was not born with Trump. The right-wing has been disregarding the great importance of truth, if the steady stream of falsehoods and truth-shading and misleading claims I find in every single piece of conservative email I receive is any indicator – and I believe it is – for years. Trump is simply the leading proponent.

But I’ve now run across an old term in today’s reading twice now, and that’s agitprop. Short for agitational propaganda, it’s a form of propaganda credited to the old Soviet Union, although I suspect it’s much older than that. Its purpose is not to inform the public of important facts so that decisions can be made and etc. The content of agitprop, as determined by those who control its distribution, has little connection to truth, to reality on the ground. Instead, the content is that determined as best for manipulating the consumers of agitprop into doing what those who control the agitprop want them to do.

Source: Wikipedia

It’s basically an intellectual wrist lock that the victim doesn’t notice, even as he’s escorted into the required position; meanwhile, the astute reader can sometimes hardly believe their eyes.

At this point, the unknowing victim of agitprop, on reading this post, will no doubt assert that the “mainstream liberal media” also engages in agitprop, and will cite the occasional inaccurate article as evidence. But there’s a problem with this objection.

The mainstream media knows their audience wants truth, not lies, and so they fact-check and fact-check. When they fall off the wagon, they jump back on. Even in today’s world of reduced revenues, the best ones soldier on, because journalism is an honorable profession with expectations of its practicioners; if they become known as liars, they’ll lose their readership and become another has-been.

But let’s consider the producers of content labeled agitprop today, which would be Trump and O’Keefe, from the article above. Trump, in less than a year of his Administration, has more than 1,600 documented lies. These are not claims and assertions, but documented in the finest sense of the word – his words on tape, in legal documents, uttered at rallies, at press conferences. It’s in black and white, as our grandparents would have said.

And consider his little re-tweet of today. In the finest tradition of agitprop, as noted by The New York Times:

President Trump touched off another racially charged furor on Wednesday by sharing videos from a fringe British ultranationalist group purportedly showing Muslims committing acts of violence, a move that was swiftly condemned by Britain’s prime minister as well as politicians across the spectrum.

The videos Mr. Trump retweeted were titled: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” But the assailant in one of them was not a “Muslim migrant” and the other two showed four-year-old events with no explanation.

If you’re a Trump supporter, did you watch those videos? How did they make you feel? All steamed up? Congratulations, you’re a victim of agitprop. Didn’t feel the wrist lock, did you? But you’re not feeling any too friendly towards Muslims right now, I’m guessing.

And now you may be mad at me, because, well, I’ve just insulted your ability to make your own judgments. But before you flip me off, read just a little bit further.

This Thanksgiving I shared with my wife’s family in Michigan, and we know a couple of the family voted for Trump – I can only guess that they are still Trump supporters, as my mother-in-law absolutely forbade political talk during the get-together. But I’ll tell you what, they are really nice people. They have grown up kids that work hard, they go to church, help out at various things, while holding down their own jobs. Probably give their shirts off their back if need be.

And this is no surprise. I like them. They’re good, honest folks.

And that’s their downfall.

See, many people – most people – walk around with a hidden assumption in their brains. It’s a really good one, too. That assumption is that other people are about as honest as I am. And it’s a good assumption to have within our community, because it helps set expectations, predict the behavior of others, and when someone violates that assumption, you can label them as untrustworthy and to be avoided (if they went off the low end), or worthy of leadership positions (if they exceed expectations).

The problem is that Trump is so fucking aberrant (my friends know I rarely swear, so you can take that adjective as a serious word selection) in the honesty department that folks who rely on intuition and how what he says makes them feel are completely mislead. He is totally off their radar screens. Think about it.

From the objective evidence, he has no allegiance to truth.

We’re not talking “liberal opponents,” or “fake news”, or any other convenient misleading statement that makes my conservative reader feel good. We’re talking truth, facts on the ground, invincible documentation. The things that our parents and grandparents would have held in deep respect. Remember that? Remember when you were paddled for lying when you were a kid?

Evidently, Trump never got that paddling. When he told us that we were suffering through a terrible crime wave during the Presidential campaign, someone should have swatted him so hard one of his buttocks would have fallen off and rolled away, because the FBI statistics – the best in the world – show us near a historical low.

But that’s agitprop for you.

And in case you’re the odd person who thinks the “truth” doesn’t matter, let me address that. I could give you a hypothetical situation about how awful it’d be to just shout lies at each other until the Nation collapses, and the importance of recognizing the truth as politically neutral, and how it’s our best tool for determining our way forward, and how we should virtually worship at the alter of truth. And I completely believe that.

But this’ll catch your attention. Imagine you’re following Trump through a jungle. There’s the great leader, hacking his way through the path, machete in hand just to show how macho he is. Whack Whack!

And then he comes to a sign. It’s new & clean, and it says

WARNING: MINEFIELD

You’re going to skirt that field, aren’t you? But wait – Trump has grabbed the sign, he’s tugging away at it, oh it’s out of the ground and tossed aside! And then he snorts and proclaims, “That’s where we’re going. There are no mines here.”

And then he gestures at you to lead the way.

This is why truth is important in life. Lying may seem like a useful shortcut to get what you want, but in the end it just dooms you to disappointment, being shunned, imprisoned. That’s why Trump’s Administration, despite his frantic self-congratulations, has been such a disappointment to both sides of the political spectrum.

In case your head was turned by Professor Calabresi’s arguments about not having enough Republican judges and the Democrats have too much influence on the judiciary, you should take a look at Asher Steinberg’s analysis on The Narrowest Grounds:

I don’t know if Calabresi seriously believes that we should expect 60% of active judges on every circuit to have been appointed by Republican presidents because Republican Presidents will have held the White House for 60% of the time between 1969 and 2021, or actually thinks that there’s any Carter “court-packing” left to unpack.  Probably the more charitable assumption is that Calabresi understands the current composition of the courts isn’t a function of Carter and Schumer/Reid’s “court packing,” and that he is merely attempting to provide a thin veil of spin to politicians who might support his plan.

However, supposing that Calabresi means what he says seriously, the reason Democratic appointees control the circuit courts in spite of Republican control of the White House for three-fifths of the 1969–2021 period is not anything that Carter or even Schumer and Reid did, but death and senior status.  The lifespan of the average circuit-court judge is simply too short, the temptation of senior status too great, and the age at which circuit-court judges are appointed too high, for Republican control of the White House through much of the ’70s, or even Republican control of the White House through all of the ’80s, to have much effect on the composition of the circuit courts in 2017.

To begin with, it is nonsense to say that we should expect anything about the composition of the courts because of Republican control of the White House in 2018, 2019, and 2020, which, it should hardly need saying, haven’t happened yet.  When those years do pass, we should expect the courts to become somewhat more Republican, but they have to pass first.  So the relevant years, taking Calabresi’s start date of 1969 as a given for a moment, are 1969 through 2017, and Republicans have controlled the White House for twenty-nine of those forty-nine years.  To be sure, that’s still 59%.  But then we come to the matter of Calabresi’s start date.

Well, I shan’t grab anything more from Asher. Either the professor is dissembling mightily, or he doesn’t understand that as time passes, the influence of each President will fade due to simple biology – as Asher basically says. For example, Asher has done the footwork to ascertain that all of Nixon’s appointees – and there was a lot of them – are dead or in retirement (or senior status, which I take to be much like retirement).

Basically, Asher puts cleats on and stomps Calabresi into the ground.

There’s only a few holes in me, I’ll be fine!

The bodies begin piling up early and fast in The Naked Face (1984), a story about a Chicago psychoanalyst, Dr. Stevens, who suddenly loses a patient, a secretary, and then nearly his own life to a mystery killer. Another pair show up in a nearby (?) building. In response, the cops send a detective with a grudge against Stevens, along with his assistant, but there are plots within plots here, as the grudge-carrier discusses the potentiality of a fake resignation with his boss – but the assistant is merely informed that the resignation letter has been delivered.

Meanwhile, Steven ducks his way through more attempts on his life, loses a private detective, and eventually delays his own death just long enough to be rescued.

It’s not a particularly great movie, although information is withheld quite nicely. What struck me the most was the clashing moralities of the killer and society at large. This has been explored in other movies as well, but it’s always worth being reminded that not everyone shares the basic morality that encloses most of American society – and it’s worth considering how to make the case that such should be binding on everyone in such a way as to be persuasive. The attempt to make that argument can often be revealing about one’s own biases – and gaps in knowledge.

But otherwise, this is a fairly forgettable story.

While working and reading today, the insanity of the Trump Administration just became another part of the pattern that my head is trying to match. DeVos wrecking Education, Pruitt at the EPA. Long time readers, and readers with some curiosity about political life, know the drill. Then came yesterday, when Steve Benen took note of Tillerson’s gutting of the State Department:

The picture painted by the Times is alarmingly bleak. Senior Foreign Service officers are leaving in droves; career diplomats and civil servants are being bought out; and Tillerson and his team have forced many to resign “by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether.”

In some cases, some diplomats returning from high-level assignments, have been ordered to “spend months performing mind-numbing clerical functions beside unpaid interns.”

For most observers, all of this is simply baffling. The secretary of state’s principal responsibility is to oversee the nation’s diplomatic efforts, and yet, Donald Trump’s chief diplomat appears determined to undermine his own department’s capacity. In a rather literal sense, it defies explanation.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently wrote, “The purposeful gutting of American power abroad is mystifying. If you didn’t know better, you’d think some rival government was running our foreign policy.”

Senator Murphy’s remark set things off for me. The moves we’re seeing are the sort calculated to push the United States – and the greater ideology that it pushes – into the second rank of nations. Our universities may be first-rate for a long time to come, but we need everyone to be pushing their educational boundaries, not struggling with the silliness of for-profit schooling. Pruitt doing terrible things to the environment. And the Tillerson behaviors at State are mystifying only so long as we try to attribute those behaviors to personal avarice or idiosyncratic beliefs – hard to really see in isolation.

But Benen reminded me in some earlier post that Tillerson has long been an ally of Russia. The same Russia that is now considered to have interfered in our 2016 elections.

I’m entertaining some thoughts here. The Mercers, the Kochs, Adelson, maybe even Murdoch and the Sacklers. These are all known bogey-men of the liberals. What if they’re not free agents? What if each of these groups, known for their conservative positions and donations to extremist causes, have been bought or are being blackmailed?

What if the big bad Koch brothers are just puppets? What if someone has something on Tillerson, and he’s just bouncing along to their string-jerks?

And what if the puppeteer turns out to be Russian?

Yeah, it sounds like something a conspiracy theory nutcase would say, and I think generally I don’t fit into that box. But try as I might, I find most of the explanations for the patterns we’re all seeing to actually be of low probability, a low enough probability that I’m left thinking there must be a better explanation for this incredible cock-up of an Administration than simply he’s a fucking egotistical incompetent who can only hire people who are worse than he is at his job.

I hope someone can come up with a less fantastical explanation for this that fits the pattern better, because it all really makes me sick.

Matthew Kahn on Lawfare notes that a number of “acting officers” in government are approaching the limits of their authority under the law. What happens next?

So where does that leave the acting officers who as of Nov. 18 (the 300th day of the Trump administration) have begun to fall out of compliance with the [Federal Vacancies Reform Act]?

The FVRA does not provide a mechanism for removing officers who continue to act beyond their statutorily authorized period. Though the statute requires the comptroller general to report such cases to Congress, which may employ oversight tools to bring the executive branch into compliance, there is no guarantee of efficiency or effectiveness.

If the president does not nominate officers to those positions, then any actions taken after the 300 days of vacancy have no force or effect. The Supreme Court intonated in National Labor Relations Board v. SW General that such actions are “void ab initio,” or “null from the beginning.” (Courts cannot allow void acts to proceed under harmless error doctrine, as they can with “voidable” acts.) A party who has standing to challenge an action taken by a non-compliant officer might argue that the action was void. But in the absence of clearer enforcement language, it may take further litigation to understand how the FVRA applies to the uncharted territory we’ve entered.

Sounds like chaos to me. Or, as they say in the tennis world, a whole mess of unforced errors by the Administration.

Again.

WaPo is having a deserved moment of schadenfreude:

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.

For those who think the media just makes up stories, this is either another bit of fake news, or, if they take life a little more seriously than most, a counter-example of just how far the mainstream media goes to substantiate its stories.

In other words, they don’t just make shit up.

But there’s a deeper point here. One of the phenomenon associated with the Internet has been the diminishment and demise of traditional newspapers – that is, mainstream media. Staffs are down, coverage is shallower, and overall, we find that we may have more information, but its quality is far poorer than it used to be. For instance, if you get your news from Fox News or, referencing back to here, WorldNetDaily, you’re getting awfully thin gruel.

But this is a demonstration of how a good paper works on stories, getting details, worrying away at inconsistencies, until it has something – or nothing. Does this strike you as good, honest journalism? It had better – the vapid crap at Fox, et al, is often slanted to get an emotional reaction that it can work with to manipulate your actions.

Your votes.

And do you pay for your access to a reputable news source? Yes, I pay for the digital edition of WaPo – started a month or two ago as I began to realize how much I used it.

And, yes, I too am amused by the idea that Project Veritas, which means Truth, resorts to lies and subterfuge as it searches for its hated “bias”. Boys, maybe you should consider just what media bias really means.

And here I thought I’d found a way to convey the loneliness of being an asteroid in orbit around the Sun.

Just a rock on a picnic table. Not half so much fun.

Grabbing at random from the email bag left me with this noxious bit of jellyfish on my hand.

Chrislam!

FYI: Below Leo Hohmann (WND news editor/author of Stealth Invasion) excoriates Christian church leaders who allow the reading of the Quran in their churches:

“Allowing the Quran to be read inside a church is the equivalent of the ancient Israelites setting up an image of a false god in the Holy of Holies,” Hohmann declared. “It’s blasphemous. Why? Because the Quran denies the deity of Christ, denies that God is a Father or that he had a Son, and also denies the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. What’s left of Christianity that Islam and the Quran do not deny?

Hohmann also exposes heresy in the Catholic church where Tri-Faith Initiative of Omaha, NE, members perpetrated lies against Christian scripture:

“During his address to the Omaha Catholics, the imam [Mohammad Jamal Daoudi, spoke for 30 minutes in front of the altar at St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church in Omaha] denied Christ, denied the crucifixion, denied the resurrection and denied the authenticity of the Bible – all with the blessing of the church’s priest, Father Tom Bauwens.”

If not the anti-Christ, this Deceived Pope is at best, destroying Catholicism with heresy (Universalism, too?)…passing it on to his Deceived cardinals/ priests…and onto their flocks.  More proof of creeping Sharia, civilization jihad.  c

http://www.wnd.com/2017/11/quran-sneaking-into-christian-settings/

And then more, which I omit.

On its face, it seems a standard bit of hatred-sowing, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Once I decided to research it, the first thing I noticed was the source – wnd.com. News is rarely real news when it’s single sourced, and when it’s not, then you may be able to get different viewpoints and a better understanding of the issue, so as I started searching I looked forward to hearing other views.

And here’s the thing – the wnd.com site listed in the mail came out right on top of the listings – but nothing else did except the Church announcement that this talk would take place. I didn’t find a transcript, I didn’t find a discussion, I didn’t even find similar outrage from other right wing sites.

So back to our source. This is WorldNetDaily, a well-known right wing extremist Christian site (which is why I was initially very wary). What does that mean in this context? Well, you could go look for yourself. Right at the moment, I see they’ve bought into the accuse your ideological opponents of those things you or your allies have been caught doing, as their top headline is Obama Used ‘Illegal Propaganda’ On Americans. The article is quite a stretch, and I didn’t try to verify that it actually speaks to anything in particular. The balance of the front page actually descends into, well, gibberish. No kidding. Maybe if I had taken that Creative Grammar class in college … or, to borrow from my Arts Editor, could speak in tongues.

And I was also struck, as I read the original article from which this email was extracted, how this really isn’t standard, honorable journalism, because peppered throughout the article were ads for the author’s book, which appears to be on the same subject. This isn’t how journalism’s done, folks.

But the point is, of course, that it’s single sourced “news” and even their allies aren’t paying attention to it. Did these things really happen?

Hell if I know – and I do mean that precisely. I wasn’t there. No one who was – excepting perhaps the author of this screed – seems to think it was worthy of mention. On the church calendar, the event actually included a rabbi, another reverend, along with Bauwens and Daoudi. These events are actually fairly common, as the various faiths look for commonality rather than mutual hatred.

And, for whatever reason, that hatred is the goal of the screed. They’ve taken what appears to be an attempt at building a stronger heterogeneous community, good for everyone, and tried to use it as a poison. Using it to accuse those who pursue peace of engaging in heresy – one of the silliest concepts in the theological landscape – has about as much moral weight as the Massacre of the Cathars for whatever little change they made to theological interpretations.

It’s a poison to the community of the reader.

And I lied a little bit up there. I said, “And, for whatever reason …” But I think I know the reason. If you’re honest, you know the reason as well. It’s for power, isn’t it? It’s for knowing that they’ve persuaded a few more people to leave the path of peace and move to the pursuit of war. Can you see The bulging eyes as the man holds the Bible over his head and invokes all sorts of terrible curses on those he hates? He does this because he knows there are those who let themselves get all het up without actually checking on the facts and the motivations. And he can use that, because then the reader will come back and read wnd.com for more of those emotional ups and downs.

You’re just a pair of eyeballs to them, full of cash and votes. But you have free will. You can decide if you’re going to be rocked by this dubious piece of trash – or if you’ll give it a good going over and then maybe not pass it on to your friends.

Climate Central, using information from the Energy Information Administration, is reporting that transport now produces more emissions than do the sources we use for electricity generation:

The change comes as U.S. electricity generation relies less on coal and more on renewables and natural gas (a less carbon-intensive fossil fuel). Transportation emissions have also declined from a peak in 2008 due to steadily improving fuel economies, although there has been a small uptick recently as a result of a drop in gas prices. The projected growth in electric vehicles suggests decreases in CO2 transportation emissions are on the horizon. Even when accounting for how electricity is generated, an electric vehicle emits less carbon dioxide than a comparable gasoline car in a majority of U.S. states.

Influence Map, a site dedicated to monitoring government lobbying efforts, notes this is no surprise as the car manufacturers are lobbying a no doubt sympathetic Trump Administration to relax fleet requirements:

The current US federal authorities have moved to dismantle a regulatory framework for automotive efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions set in place by the previous Obama-era administration. InfluenceMap’s analysis of US auto industry lobbying shows an accelerated pattern of aggressive opposition to weaken climate-motivated policy since the election of President Donald Trump. The pattern of lobbying suggests an opportunistic effort from US auto lobby groups, particularly the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (AAM), to sway the regulatory regime on behalf of members GM, Ford, Toyota, FCA and others. This lobbying activity by the AAM contrasts significantly with the top line statements from many of these member companies on climate change.

There seems to be some uproar over the selling of Trump-branded wine at National Parks. Perhaps they just need to re-brand it:

Get your 10-gallon jug of CORRUPTION WINE! Sub-standard, and if you buy it, you can display it around the Christmas tree in years to come, saying that you, too, were taken in by this master con-man who rose all the way to the Presidency! Just think of your pride!

If you’re looking for a primer on the climate change hypothesis, including the basic science from which it starts, and including the basic retorts to the objections raised by the, ah, “skeptics”, you could do far worse than A Global Warming Primer: Answering Your Questions About The Science, The Consequences, and The Solutions, by Jeffrey Bennett. I skimmed it on the way home from Michigan and found it nicely confirmed what I knew, added in more details, derails the skeptics’ objections while noting where knowledge is weak and how error bars are important, and delves into how to resolve the problem without destroying the world economy. All in common English, a few charts, and that lack of hysteria denoting an academic (in this case, a PhD astrophysicist) who’s here to solve a problem, not defend entrenched interests.

If I had known nothing going in, I would have learned a lot. And, finally, recommended to me by a retired climate scientist.

Like the hard rock streets and cliffs on which the members of this company die, The Secret Invasion (1964) uses its motivations like chunks of granite – big, hard, unchanging, but unwieldy. This is a World War II movie using the same theme as The Dirty Dozen (1967), in which a team of criminals are assembled for a special mission. Led by Major Mace, their mission is to free a certain famous Italian general from the Nazis in Greece, on the assumption that he will then lead the Italian armies against their uneasy allies, the Germans. As this will happen during the Invasion of Italy, this will split the German defenses.

Why is the Major leading this insane mission? When he was a Colonel, he sent his own brother on a mission into the same citadel as the one the general is now held in. He failed to extricate the younger Mace in time, and the brother died. The Major was demoted. Now he’s hot for revenge.

And what of the men he leads? While they’ve been promised freedom, or at least life, each has their reasons, mostly selfish, although the explosives expert is an Irish Republican Army member who might be able to see more than his own self-centered needs. But the glamour boy? He’s also an impersonator who can’t resist a good role. Rocca, the planner? It’s a fascinating challenge. Durrell, the mystery man to be executed for murdering his own mistress? Well, that’s a harder guess.

And the guy who’s an expert forger? Well, he doesn’t want to be here, and his quick attempt to escape nearly leads to the instant failure of the mission – and the movie. From here on out, we should see these criminals working together and transforming from selfish individuals into a working team, and this transformation is unconvincing – or left on the cutting room floor. For example, the cold-blooded killer falls for a local young widow, still nursing a child. Why? We’re not sure. The attraction, which may be mutual, is obscure. When he accidentally kills the infant by smothering it while Germans are close by, he’s broken by it – and she forgives him. There may indeed be a bond there, but it’s a dark one indeed, and not particularly convincing.

The mission itself is at least worthy of those sent on it – so ridiculous and brazen as to gain the attention of over-confident individuals. Fortunately, the story is clever enough to not let the plan work. Instead, the group, captive and under harsh questioning, hangs together, improvises a new plan, and make do in an inspiring vision of never giving up.

Once out of the prison with their target, members starting falling in self-sacrificing ways which may have been necessary to the plot, but never feel quite right given their natures, but eventually Rocca and Durrell make it out with the General and take him to his men, located in one of those Balkan towns made of granite and hard men.

And, in a lovely twist, it turns out the “General” is a double for the real General; they speculate the General is dead and this substitute was used to control his men. He is informed that he will now order “his” men to turn on the Germans, but when he’s brought out to exhort his troops, he smiles broadly and says he will not; if they kill him, they, known as partisans, will be blamed and the troops will stick with the Germans.

But wait! There’s one more chunk of granite flying through the air.

During the breakout, several of the group had donned German uniforms, including Durrell, one of the two survivors; he has a Gestapo uniform. Stripping off the monk’s habit he was wearing as camouflage, he leaps onto the parapet, sneers at the faux-General, and shoots him in the head. He then executes a few Sieg Heils!, just to drive home the point, before the assembled and outraged Italians shoot him down, and then go on to fight the now-enemy Germans.

This is not a movie that lingers,  you need to pay attention, but the failure to illustrate the hows and whys of the transformations of the former prisoners makes what could have been an exciting movie a bit of an enigma.

Too bad I only had a kid’s toy. During my trip to visit my Arts Editor in Traverse City, where I was sick as a dog, one night she came clattering down the basement steps saying there was a great sunset going on.

That wasn’t the half of it. It was marvelous. Reddish-oranges illuminating dark gray clouds in a very clear sky. My sister-in-law said she’d never seen a sunset that good. Nor had I.

And me with a smartphone for a camera. Here’s how they came out. I believe the first bunch were shot without using the zoom function.

And these were shot with zoom.

Long time readers may recall my occasional references to bell curves for measuring desirability of behaviors. The extremes of any given curve indicate undesirability, while the middle of the curve is the desirable, as in having positive consequences, portion. I’ve talked about this directly as well as in terms of extremism vs. moderation, or taking things to the n^th degree – and how that leads to undesirable consequences.

So while I was recently watching The Karate Kid (1984), it struck me that this is primarily a comparison / contrast of moderation vs. extremism – or where you’re located on this bell curve. This leisurely-paced and conventional movie follows the travails of 16 year old Daniel, whose mother has moved him and herself from Newark, NJ, across the country to a suburb of Los Angeles, CA. He swiftly becomes the target of a gang of teenagers at his high school, and as they are karate students, Daniel has trouble effectively defending himself.

When he looks into the local karate dojo, he discovers his tormentors train there, and that the teacher has no concept of the utility of mercy – opponents are to be rent and destroyed. Daniel is destitute of hope.

But a local man, Mr. Miagi, rescues him from a beating after Daniel plays a trick on one of the gang members, and, upon discovering there is no reasoning with the karate teacher, agrees to teach Daniel the form of karate he knows; the agreement is that they will face the gang members at a local tournament.

Mr. Miagi is from Okinawa, near Japan, but when World War II rolled around, he had moved to the United States and married; leaving his pregnant wife at a relocation camp, he volunteered for the nisei battalion of Americans of Japanese descent who fought for the United States during the War. Daniel is gradually introduced to the art of karate, the importance of patience, and the importance of caring for others. Between an off-again, on-again girlfriend, and Mr. Miagi, it’s a period of rapid learning.

And Mr. Miagi is an important sub-theme in and of himself. He may be a karate master, but that does not mean he is flawless. He is a reminder that the highest have their flaws, even if they are not the fatal flaws of theatrical yore. He drinks to mourn his late wife, who died in childbirth, along with their child, while Mr. Miagi fought for his adopted country. He’ll go out on the town, or out fishing, leaving Daniel to do important training.

The pace accelerates when the tournament begins. I liked this sequence, for though I’ve never been to a karate tournament, it reminded me of fencing tournaments, volunteers and refs working hard, competitors and all threading their way between ongoing matches, looking for where they will be fighting. It’s well-filmed and, even on the small TV I viewed it on, both exciting and clear enough to see the action.

And we really begin to see the consequences of the gang members’ training, as they become the roughnecks of the tournament; a loss results in shunning, rather than proper team support. But when Daniel gets on a roll, the opposing karate teacher orders one of his students to deliberately break the rules and cripple Daniel – an important transitional moment when we see how extremism, the absolute desire to triumph regardless of the rules, leads to the moral ruin of those characters involved – we’re at one extreme of the bell curve. The blow is delivered, along with an almost desperate apology as the student realizes he’s gone beyond the pale, and this may cost him in the future.

But Daniel stubbornly refuses to withdraw and is now in the gold medal bout, facing the defending champion and arch-tormentor. It’s a rich and tense scene, full of narrow escapes, comebacks, moves that skirt the rules, and a final roll of the dice. The opposing karate teacher is destroyed by the loss and may rain disaster on his students.

And leaves the audience wondering if that’s really the way to build community, through fear and shame.

The Karate Kid may be a bit too leisurely paced for today’s audiences, but for those who are willing to wait and put up with some squirmy high school scenes, it has its rewards.

This one was having a good time and showing some nice detail, so I took a couple of pics, which my Arts Editor then enhanced a bit.

For decades I’ve felt that such organizations as Focus on the Family and Moral Majority were little more than vehicles for those who grasped for power. A recent piece by Michael Gerson in WaPo reminded me of this – and lets me add a bit more to my internal narrative:

On sexual harassment, our country is now in a much better ethical place. And how we got here is instructive. Conservatives have sometimes predicted that moral relativism would render Americans broadly incapable of moral judgment. But people, at some deep level, know that rules and norms are needed. They understand that character — rooted in empathy and respect for the rights and dignity of others — is essential in every realm of life, including the workplace.

And where did this urgent assertion of moral principle come from? Not from the advocates of “family values.” On the contrary, James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family (now under much better management), chose to side with GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama against his highly credible accusers. “I have been dismayed and troubled,” Dobson said, “about the way he and his wife Kayla have been personally attacked by the Washington establishment.”

It is as if Dobson set out to justify every feminist critique of the religious right. Instead of standing against injustice and exploitation — as the Christian gospel demands — Dobson sided with patriarchal oppression in the cause of political power. This is beyond hypocrisy. It is the solidarity of scary, judgmental old men. It is the ideology of white male dominance dressed up as religion.

Michael notes the divergence between the behaviors of Dobson and the stated principles of his creation, Focus on the Family. In fact, it occurs to me that this is inevitable and diagnostic of just such a situation – that is, the hidden motivations, usually quite base, are at odds with the stated principles and, when a situation becomes critical, those hidden motivations rise and overwhelm the principles.

In all honesty, Focus on the Family has a long history of tawdry behavior, drawing on my memory of various news stories over the decades; I’m not aware of Michael’s reference that it’s under better management now. Then again, I haven’t seen any troubling statements from FotF in a while.

But for those who live their principles, they have less to fear from their behaviors. Not nothing; sometimes principles, even those you generate and enunciate, are ill-understood by yourself; or their implementation is flawed; or they are wrong, in part or in whole. This is ideologically blind, which is to say both left & right have such groups. The question is whether they are capable of self-criticism and mutation; if not, then like any biological species, they risk dying as the environment becomes unsuited to their uncouth conclusions. An extreme and painful example is the Jim Jones cult.

But the mendacity of the former can lead to difficulty in predicting their goals and behavior, beyond certain generalities. At least the latter can be trusted to cling to their principles; the difficulty is dissuading them from bad principles. You can apply this to your favorite group to distrust, whether they’re the too-shrill feminists, the antifa movement, or the anti-abortionists.

palynological:

Archaeologists working at the site of Forcello recently gained rare insight into ancient beekeeping when they uncovered the charred and melted remains of honey, honeycombs, and honeybees in a workshop that had burned down between 510 and 495 B.C. Researchers conducted chemical and palynological (pollen) analyses of the material to determine not only the composition of Etruscan honey, but also what types of plants bees were collecting pollen from two and half millennia ago. [“Itinerant Etruscan Beekeepers,” Jason Urbanus, Archaeology (Nov/Dec 2017)]

No, this is not a warning to liberal readers.

This is a warning to conservative readers who’ve bought into the entire “revoke Net Neutrality” argument.

Because Chris Reeves on The Daily Kos – yes, a progressive website – has a terrifying tableau just for you.

A taste:

Let’s say, in a large part of conservative America, Time Warner/Charter, AT&T, Verizon or some other entity decided boy, they sure don’t like the reporting of Fox News. Fox News has been kind of mean to them lately. The response? They slow Fox News website up. Maybe they don’t like Rush Limbaugh or they think Alex Jones online TV show is a bandwidth suck and they just don’t like him. Well, they can slow him up or prevent you from visiting the website altogether.

What choice do you have as a consumer if Net Neutrality is repealed: none.

In fact, we’ve already had cases where providers have done exactly that.

If you want to see more about how the end of Net Neutrality could emasculate conservative readers, click the link above and ignore some of the more ascerbic overtones.  Yeah, I know progressives are know-it-alls. Sometimes they’re right.

On WaPo, Professor John Bargh of Yale describes a recent experiment conducted online, and how invoking imaginary superpowers can modify political feelings:

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.

In both instances, we had manipulated a deeper underlying reason for political attitudes, the strength of the basic motivation of safety and survival. The boiling water of our social and political attitudes, it seems, can be turned up or down by changing how physically safe we feel.

This is why it makes sense that liberal politicians intuitively portray danger as manageable — recall FDR’s famous Great Depression era reassurance of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” echoed decades later in Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address — and why President Trump and other Republican politicians are instead likely to emphasize the dangers of terrorism and immigration, relying on fear as a motivator to gain votes.

Although I’m always a suspicious of Internet-driven data collection, and humanities experiments are always worth replicating, I have to say this falls right into my thinking, both intuitive and from multiple sources, such as the still unfinished The Persuaders. His conclusion?

Our study findings may have a silver lining. Here’s how:

All of us believe that our social and political attitudes are based on good reasons and reflect our important values. But we also need to recognize how much they can be influenced subconsciously by our most basic, powerful motivations for safety and survival. Politicians on both sides of the aisle know this already and attempt to manipulate our votes and party allegiances by appealing to these potent feelings of fear and of safety.

Instead of allowing our strings to be pulled so easily by others, we can become more conscious of what drives us and work harder to base our opinions on factual knowledge about the issues, including information from outside our media echo chambers. Yes, our views can harden given the right environment, but our work shows that they are actually easier to change than we might think.

Yes, yes, yes! Stop and think and question and wonder about the language used by the communicator. But of course I love this conclusion … because I may have confirmation bias!

Sigh.

A number of news outlets have reported on the possibility that Thomas Brunell, a Texas professor of politics, will be hired by Trump for “ … the top operational job at the U.S. Census Bureau …” This is not a job that requires Senate confirmation – it’s just an up and down hiring. Why is the man controversial? Because of a book he published: Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.

It’s an alarming title. I’ve not read the book. I doubt I ever will. The title rather tells it all, although I might be willing to propose a name change: Picking Your Winners For You Ahead Of Time Because We All Know Who They Are. Which is a title that might outrage voters in the recent state-wide elections in Virginia. Or even those in Alabama who are planning to vote in the upcoming Senatorial special election. Or all those flipped state-level seats throughout the nation since the Presidential election and its horrid consequences.

So just in contemplating the title, I can see that this is an attempt by the extremist right, threatened by nation-wide demographics, to move the political fight from the popular vote arena to another arena, a state-level fight over the districts. Similarly, by putting this professor in a key position in the Census Burea, which provides the rendering of demographics into the political (and others) realm, could be an attempt to freeze the demographics, already beginning to slip away from the extremist right after the populace’s brief and dubious fling with right-wing extremism.

And what does that say about the GOP and its embrace with the right-wing extremists? Their ideas are neither popular nor particularly persuasive, I think. Their share of the population, according to Gallup, has fallen, while the Democrats may have bottomed out. Their response? Or, better yet, whoever is sitting at the apex and directing ideology? Freeze themselves into power.

So this appears to be another attempt to cement themselves into power. We can only hope it turns into another instance of trying to impose your will on Jell-O. It’ll all run away.

Remember the recent excitement in astronomy circles over an extra-solar system visitor? The Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii has a sort of introductory update:

“What we found was a rapidly rotating object, at least the size of a football field, that changed in brightness quite dramatically,” according to Meech. “This change in brightness hints that `Oumuamua could be more than 10 times longer than it is wide – something which has never been seen in our own Solar System,” according to Meech.

“An axis ratio like that is truly extraordinary – we have never seen anything in the solar system that is this elongated”, says Lance Benner, a specialist in radar imaging of near-Earth and main-belt asteroids at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

`Oumuamua does have some similarities to small objects in the outer Solar System, especially the distant worlds of the Kuiper Belt – a region of rocky, frigid worlds far beyond Neptune. “While study of `Oumuamua’s colors shows that this body shares characteristics with both Kuiper Belt objects and organic-rich comets and trojan asteroids,” said Meech, “its hyperbolic orbit says it comes from far beyond.”

“We are continuing to observe this unique object,” added Hainaut, “and we hope to more accurately pin down where it came from and where it is going next on its tour of the galaxy. And now that we have found the first interstellar rock, we are getting ready for the next ones!”

The report in Nature would be way beyond me, of course, and it costs money, but this is from the publicly available abstract:

Our observations reveal the object to be asteroidal, with no hint of cometary activity despite an approach within 0.25 au of the Sun. Spectroscopic measurements show that the object’s surface is consistent with comets or organic-rich asteroid surfaces found in our own Solar System. Light-curve observations indicate that the object has an extreme oblong shape, with a 10:1 axis ratio and a mean radius of 102±4 m, assuming an albedo of 0.04. Very few objects in our Solar System have such an extreme light curve. The presence of ‘Oumuamua suggests that previous estimates of the density of interstellar objects were pessimistically low. Imminent upgrades to contemporary asteroid survey instruments and improved data processing techniques are likely to produce more interstellar objects in the upcoming years.

I’m looking forward to the future reports! (Ah, I’m such a kid at heart.) From the Institute of Astronomy’s press release is this artist’s impression, which I have fallen in love with:

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Of course, a visible spectrum picture would have been even more entrancing, in sharp focus and high resolution. I’m so demanding.

Probably should be put in the retirement home.