Monthly Archives: November 2017

Do you adore your leaf blower? Do you consider sleeping with it tucked under one arm because it makes fall so easy? David Dudley in CityLab would like some words with you:

• The crude little two-stroke engines used by most commercial backpack-style blowers are pollution bombs. “Simplest benchmark: running a leafblower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles,” [James] Fallows writes. “About one-third of the gasoline that goes into this sort of engine is spewed out, unburned, in an aerosol mixed with oil in the exhaust.”
• Those emissions—plus all the other fine-particulate crap that the blowers kick up—constitute a public health hazard for anyone in the vicinity, but especially for the poor bastard running the thing. In most cities and suburbs, those most afflicted are low-wage employees of landscaping companies, not residents or homeowners.
• SWEET JESUS THE NOISE GAAH MAKE IT STOP. A gas blower at full cry can exceed a 100 decibels for the operator (OSHA requires hearing protections at 85), as these Sacramento blower foes explain, and it carries for hundreds of feet in every direction, irritating all who dwell therein.

Having just raked again, yesterday, I still don’t have much sympathy for those who use the gasoline-powered things (I should imagine there are electrically powered versions). It may be another example of chasing leisure and labor-saving to the nth degree, and seeing as exercise has once again been singled out as a positive, this time in the realm of memory retention, I gotta say that these little beasties are not cute enough to keep around.

As usual, the GOP seems to have lost contact with reality. From WaPo:

President Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, looked out from the stage at a sea of CEOs and top executives in the audience Tuesday for the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting. As Cohn sat comfortably onstage, a Journal editor asked the crowd to raise their hands if their company plans to invest more if the tax reform bill passes.

Very few hands went up.

Cohn looked surprised. “Why aren’t the other hands up?” he said.

He laughed a little to lighten the mood, but it didn’t cause many more hands to rise. Maybe the CEOs were tired. Maybe they didn’t hear the question. It was a casual poll, but the lukewarm response seemed in tension with much of the public enthusiasm among corporations for a tax overhaul.

The president and his senior team have kept saying that the tax plan would unleash business investment in the United States — new factories, more equipment and more jobs. But, perhaps as the informal poll suggested, there are reasons to be doubtful that a great business investment boom would materialize.

This actually shouldn’t be surprising in light of this academic work that we talked about a while back concerning the lower-than-expected level of business investment occurring right now. If enough companies are not feeling the edge of the knife at their throats because they’ve become dominant, then why should they invest?

I suspect that taxation is not the horrible burden that many Republicans believe. Some companies use creative tax dodges, while others recognize it as simply the price of doing business – and perhaps a welcome price at that.

Smaller business owners will, of course, welcome the lower taxes – but the general lowering of taxes will generally not help competitive positions, because in most cases everyone gets the break.

If the President is serious about unleashing business investment, perhaps it’d make more sense to look into breaking up the big companies. Restore competition – and redundant jobs. Remember, monopolistic practices and giant corporations are antithetical to the American mythos.

Laicize:

What happened was this: The Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, under pressure from victims, posted on its website the names of eight priests who had been laicized — “dispensed from the clerical state” by the Vatican — for sexually abusing children. [WaPo]

How about a battery? Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com suggests hydrogen isn’t really a fuel:

For a very long time, I have been skeptical of hydrogen as a fuel, because, in fact, it isn’t a fuel so much as it is a form of battery. Right now, most hydrogen reformed from natural gas, so it is a fossil fuel; the fans of hydrogen are pushing electrolysis, which uses a lot of electricity, so it was often promoted by the nuclear industry as a justification for building more reactors. It would then be turned back into electricity in fuel cells and drive electric motors, which is what batteries do. But hydrogen is a tiny molecule that is hard to keep bottled, and the whole process seems less and less efficient or straightforward when batteries keep getting better and cheaper. …

Ben Spurr of the Toronto Star notes:

Because the fuel is stored for later use after it’s produced, it could be produced during off-peak periods overnight, which would lower the cost and allow the province to tap into its considerable electricity surplus. Hydrogen would also allow Metrolinx to run clean trains while avoiding the expensive and disruptive work of erecting overhead wires along hundreds of kilometers of track.

Those are both key points; hydrogen as battery could use off-peak power to run trains at peak times. It could help flatten out demand and help pay for those multi-billion dollar refits of the nuclear fleet.

Changing a viewpoint or definition often leads to insights, so I appreciate this recasting of hydrogen as just an irretrievable fuel to a cyclical battery element.

I think dear old dad is about to blame you!

The only character in Drowning Mona (2000) who is not exhibiting a host of tics, neuroticisms, or various forms of narcissism is the police chief of Verplanck, NJ, Wyatt Rash, who is faced with the discovery of Mona Dearly’s body in her son Jeff’s car. And where’s the car? In the lake.

Hidden in this cacophany of emotionally damaged families is a fair murder mystery, for Mona didn’t go willingly into this lake, but all the while madly pumping the miscreant brakes and screaming profanities, the latter being her normal operating procedure for her adult life. Much like the Tunguska Event trees, Mona’s influence has been negative, even nasty, and it’s left her family and, ah, business associates more or less in shock before she died, from her husband, hesitant from beatings, to her son, hell-bent on beer, to her son’s co-business-owner, who has learned not to express emotion. Even the waitress sleeping with a father and son has the twitches at the thought of Mona.

You won’t unravel this mystery before Chief Rash does. Not only don’t you have information he has, but his motivation is the greater – his pregnant daughter’s fiancee is one of the suspects, and things are looking bad for him – and the chief’s daughter. But when another body appears in the lake, pressure begins to build in this farce – is there a mad killer on the loose?

Or is the killer just a bit pissed?

Well acted and with some big stars, if that matters to you, this is a fun little romp; there’s not much of serious interest here, but it’s a well-made movie, full of quirky characters and other bits (my favorite is the funeral home – “As Seen On TV!”), and a story which is in no hurry to reveal big secrets.

From Steve Benen on Maddowblog:

In 1991, former KKK leader David Duke won a Republican gubernatorial primary, and GOP officials from across the country wanted nothing to do with him. The party explored a variety of alternatives, but eventually, even Gov. Buddy Roemer (R) officially endorsed the Democratic nominee, Edwin Edwards.

This wasn’t easy – Roemer had previously taken an “Anyone But Edwards” posture – but when the Republican nominee was considered outrageously unacceptable, it made sense to announce support for the rival candidate.

Edwards was burdened by a series of corruption allegations at the time, leading to a famous bumper-sticker campaign: “Vote for the crook, it’s important.” (Edwards ultimately defeated Duke by 22 points.)

It might be embarrassing, but it’s a unique bumper sticker.

percipient:

1.  : one that perceives
2.  : a person on whose mind a telepathic impulse or message is held to fall [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in the Short Circuit column of The Volokh Conspiracy:

Federal agents investigating company that may have ripped off the VA want to interview eight potentially percipient reviewers who criticized the company online. Must Glassdoor, a platform that allows employees to anonymously review employers, reveal the reviewers’ identities to the gov’t? Yes, says the Ninth Circuit; there is no protected right to anonymous speech here.

In a very long piece (which I did not yet finish), Dave Blair and Karen House discuss the issues facing remote drone operators on Lawfare:

We were struck by the concept of concurrence, this personal form of the Just War tradition, while listening to our crews discuss the strategic logic of various strikes conducted with the goal of stopping the Islamic State. Alongside ethicist Joe Chapa, Dave has argued that when one sees the killing inherent in strikes as a means of personal glory, it risks damaging the soul. This is distinct from properly celebrating technical excellence or collective achievement in a mission, even if the subject matter is the same. Such grasping at fame also leads to a culture of cut-throat competition, which is problematic for a community whose tactics are based on collaboration. For both ethical and tactical reasons, the chain of command ensured crews received as much information as practical about targets, and made a point of discussing strikes as team accomplishments. The crews that finished the target successfully concluded months or even years of finding and fixing that target. The endgame was a capstone achievement done on behalf of all who contributed.

We found that, given adequate access to information and a culture where it was safe to discuss such things, crews would engage in deep and nuanced moral reasoning during the quiet hours of watching a target. The RPA community would come to a consensus about the ‘why’ of a strike, and that agreement provided purpose and focus in the pursuit of the target. When crews ratified the eventual intent to strike, a collective determination helped bring the strike about, providing a tactical edge that proved decisive on more than a few occasions—steely resolve gave the crews a reserve to keep laser focus over long hours. …

The better the crews knew certain targets, the less traumatic the strike was to them. The crews were not only making judgments about the moral logic of the strike, but they were also making assessments regarding the character of the targets as people. In short, what sort of person the target is matters.

In Grossman’s model, most of the people in the crosshairs are ‘tragic enemies,’ people who are fighting under understandable circumstances—the king’s soldiers, answering their nation’s call to arms; Robert E. Lee, fighting for his homeland of Virginia; perhaps even Rommel or Vo Nguyen Giap, depending on one’s historiography. This is why stories of the First World War’s Christmas Truce and Hal Moore and Nguyen Huu An’s 1993 staff ride at Ia Drang move us on an intensely emotional level: Reconciliation between tragic enemies tries to build a better peace in which we do not need to fight each other.

This is not true of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, nor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There is no world, barring a radical road-to-Damascus transformation, where a reconciling staff ride of Kobani would make any sort of sense. The acts these men personally committed—raping children, murdering aid workers, mass beheadings, drownings and immolation on the basis of insignificant differences of religious law, taking sex slaves and creating license for others to do all of these things—place them into a different category. These are not tragic enemies; they are malicious enemies. By their very nature, they are a clear and present hazard to the innocent, and a world where they are free to achieve their objectives is a worse world for humanity. This squares the Grossman model with the remote warrior’s experience. The better a tragic enemy is known, the more traumatic killing them becomes; the better a malicious enemy is known, the more compelling the need to stop them becomes. Thus, there is no real way basic human empathy for a target can be reconciled with the duty to protect the innocent.

While this may tend to bring down collateral damage figures, it may multiply the guilt when that does occur.

I think Dave & Karen’t piece is worth taking a longer look at it than this fragment presented here.

Shit, I don’t know. I was just about to quit reading for the night when a last glance at Retraction Watch yielded up this pointer to an alleged paper in IOSR Journal of Research & Method in Education on, well, the title should probably tell all:

Nobel Prize Physiology 2017 (for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm) is On Fiction as There Is No Molecular Mechanisms of Biological Clock Controlling the Circadian Rhythm. Circadian Rhythm Is Triggered and Controlled By Divine Mechanism (CCP – Time Mindness (TM) Real Biological Clock) in Life Sciences.

Can an artificial intelligence – of which we have no known general forms – suffer from dementia? Or – as I am far more inclined to think – is this just a randomly generated collection of nonsense? The author is …

Dr V M Das, Das Nursing Home, Fatehgarh, India University Of God.

In case you’re wondering, there is a University of God website, but whether or not they’re connected to this is not clear. Back to the fun, here’s the start of the Abstract:

Mind, the inner most box of nature has not been investigated by modern physicists. Mind has not been incorporated in Standard model. Mind can only be studied by participatory science. Having searched Basic building blocks of the universe i.e. mass part of reality, we have also investigated mind part of reality and finally two fundamental particles with mind and mass realities are hypothesized. Now we discuss how to further investigate mind so as to know their structures and functions. Atomic genetics is the branch of science where we investigate about fundamental interactions of the universe i.e. atomic transcription and translations. New words have been coined to understand hidden science of mind part of reality.. We are set of informations (Code PcPs). Informations (Code PcPs) never die. The theory predicts that Informations (Code PcPs) could be recreated. Hence dead cell could be made Alive only by Highest center of the universe (Almighty B.B.B). To understand real biological clock and to understand circadian rhythm triggering and regulation , we have to understand Basic Building block ( mind CCP, Code PcPs and CP , mass realities ) ( Fig 1)

I think I’ll just hope this is another hoax paper, used to expose journals as merely predatory. But it’s impressive hoaxing, because it’s giving me a headache even as I chuckle.

But this cost caught me by surprise. NewScientist (4 November 2017) reports on how much energy it takes for the “mining” that supports Bitcoin, and it’s non-trivial:

We have known for a while that bitcoin hogs energy. That is down to the way it works with the blockchain. Each transaction starts with a user broadcasting the details of that transaction to a network of linked computers, where it is duplicated in thousands of identical, unfalsifiable ledgers. “A blockchain, including bitcoin, has to operate on the assumption that no other computer can be trusted,” says Teunis Brosens, economic analyst at ING. So instead of trusting anything, each computer independently verifies part of the transaction, in a process called mining.

Mining prevents computers creating fake ledgers. They need to show “proof of work”, a gruelling cryptographic puzzle that takes so much processing power that generating false entries becomes prohibitive.

All that processing guzzles a lot of electricity. That’s still peanuts compared with the energy use of the internet, but one recent estimate put the annual electricity consumption of bitcoin mining at 23.07 terawatt hours, roughly the amount of electricity used by Ecuador each year.

I had no idea it was that high, and it really calls into question the scalability of this approach to electronic currencies. As someone who’s taken on scalability and performance issues a time or two, this doesn’t sound like it’s solvable simply because it’s designed to make false entries far too expensive.

That is, you solve the scalability problem and your trust level will deteriorate something approaching zero.

So, as NS reports, a new approach is being evaluated:

The latest solution is a radical one: change the way blockchain works altogether. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of cryptocurrency network Ethereum, announced last month that he would adopt a completely different way of doing transactions, known as “proof of stake”.

He adds his voice to a chorus who think that instead of proving a computer is trustworthy by taking out a “proof of work”, they could vet themselves by placing a small amount of money into a fund, which they get back if the validation turns out to be authentic, says Brosens. In a similar way to proof of work, it is difficult for fraudsters to replicate.

I’d hesitate to jump right on that bandwagon until it’s been fully evaluated by people smarter than me. Experts. By which I mean computer-savvy criminals.

I don’t read Retraction Watch enough, but I found some time this weekend and they came up with this bit of AUGH!

This week, we received a press release that caught our attention: A company is releasing software it claims will write manuscripts using researchers’ data.

The program, dubbed “Manuscript Writer,” uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate papers, according to the company that created it, sciNote LLC. A spokesperson explained the software generates a first draft the scientist should revise, and won’t write the Discussion, “the most creative and original part of the scientific article.” But can it provide any coherent text?

Oh, no doubt coherent. But the point of anything you write is to find a way to communicate the essence of your subject to the reader. While I understand that in the field of archaeology it’s often a problem getting researchers to put their shovels away and actually write their field reports and findings, I think most researchers are motivated simply because that’s the only way to advance from junior to senior, from senior to world class and people actually respect you. And that should require you to sit down and write that damn prose.

Not have some machine do it for you – and maybe foul it up.

I found this opinion to be of particular interest.

David Moher of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute said the program also raises a different concern:

The product appears to be geared to maintain the publication mill – publish or perish. Many universities and research institutes are trying to move away from this model. Today, there are many avenues to make research accessible, such as Open Science Framework and a host of preprint servers. Most importantly, research needs context and I’m not sure this tool can or should be providing the necessary human involvement in generating research reports.

Getting away from publish or perish – it certainly sounds good. I wonder what unintended consequences will come of it.

If he upsets you, just imagine what he looks like naked, Mrs Hoffman.

In general, when I hear the word propaganda, I automatically expect dishonesty and incompetence, but in The Man I Married^[1] (1940) I found neither. Carol, a successful New York editor, married Eric Hoffman, an immigrant from Germany, eight years ago, and they have a son. Word has come from Germany that Eric’s father needs help with the factory he owns, so Eric is taking his family there to help his father settle matters.

The era? The late 1930s. A little background for those who didn’t follow along on the World War II section of your history studies. World War II didn’t start on December 7, 1941, when America entered the War. It started in stutters and stops. Some might include the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), although that was more of a proxy fight; the annexation of the Sudetenland in September, 1938 might be a proper start, although no actual fighting took place. For actual fighting, the invasion of Poland in September 1939 would be the beginning, at least for Europe. Based on some dialog, this movie appears to be set in perhaps August of 1938.

As they prepare to leave, a medical doctor of their acquaintance visits them and asks for a favor, the conveyance of $500 to his brother, a philosopher Gerhardt, who has been imprisoned at Dachau. They are happy to oblige, and embark on a passenger liner for the trip.

The movie makers take advantage of the disembarkation to surprise their audience, undoubtedly American, who may not understand how the dominance of Adolph Hitler has saturated all of German life at this juncture. Every social interaction ends with a Heil Hitler, and the tension on the dock is palpable to the audience, if not to the families coming off the ship. In the Hoffman family, all are delighted, both for the novelty and for the return home.

But it is on the train, in a compartment they share with a German, where the real propaganda kicks in. Eric is reading bits and pieces from a newspaper he’s picked up – radios are sold to the citizens by the German government for only 40 marks! After several other references, including Volkswagen, the German sharing the compartment politely sweeps up his belongings and leaves the compartment, but with a short monologue – yes, the radios are 40 marks, but you cannot use them to listen to Moscow, Paris, or London, and why, he says sarcastically, would a loyal German citizen need to listen to those when the German newspapers are right here?

It’s a lovely commentary on the importance of the control of information for a dictator, and conversely the gathering of true information from diverse sources for citizens.

They eventually arrive at Eric’s father’s home, an elderly man who is careful with his words. Why? Because one day after a gathering there, someone was arrested and taken away for disrespecting Hitler, and the old man suspects his man-servant for reporting the crime.

From here on we see the consequences of Nazi domination of Germany. There is the brutalization of non-Germans by Germans, but done with nuance: some of the Germans remonstrate with those Germans who are cruel, and those who are cruel are also coarse. I suspect the idea was that the lowest classes suffered the most from the incredible inflation caused by the World War I reparations demanded by France, and so given the opportunity to be dominant, they seized on the opportunity. There are other incidents, and then, of course, the caution that wafts throughout society: do not disrespect Hitler, do not cause trouble, do not help the bullet ridden neighbor stumbling through the night.

Carol, of course, wishes to convey the money to the doctor’s brother, and to this end she contacts an American foreign correspondent named Delane in Berlin, with whom she discovers that Gerhardt is dead. Delane then tricks the address of Gerhardt’s widow from a German official, and they visit her to give her the money. When the widow asks how her husband of forty years died, they report that he died of appendicitis.

She remarks that as being a bit funny, he having had his appendix out twenty years earlier.

Meanwhile, Eric has been captivated by his return to German society, and having only been gone for eight years, its improvement in terms of tangible wealth and intangible pride makes it entirely plausible. He has been trying to sell the factory, but has reported little luck; during this period, they attend numerous social events, from dinners to a full-on (and fascinating) political rally. But eventually an offer comes through, and now he won’t accept it – no one accepts a first offer, he explains to Carol, who now wants to return home.

Skipping some propaganda-motivated, yet organic plot-twists, we may know where this is going, and eventually Eric admits he’s cheating on his wife with a proper Aryan woman he knew growing up. The marriage is at an end, and Carol gives up on it. But there is still one thing to have a tug-of-war over: their son. In an era where a divorced woman always gets the children, he insists this is a German child and will remain in Germany, despite her protests that he is American and should come home with her.

In the climactic scene attended by Eric’s new girlfriend, the fight over the child appalls Eric’s father. He appeals to tradition, to good sense, even to patriarchal authority, all for naught. But in the face of the good Aryan woman of Eric’s dreams, so contemptuous of the old German man who refuses to subordinate himself to the new, better ways, Eric’s father drops the A-Bomb, the hidden fact.

Eric’s late mother was a Jewess.

The look of shock on the girlfriend’s face before she sprints horror-stricken to the door is fucking priceless – what, did he have cooties? Eric, already listing to port from having refused his father’s direct orders, capsizes and sinks before our eyes, a man caught in a system where he is suddenly no longer on top, but in the sewer with shit flowing all over him.

And it’s a system where he can never, ever hope to climb out of the sewer. Such is the nature of authoritarian systems where irrelevant, permanent attributes of a person are used to classify and assign people to economic categories. The opposite of a meritocracy, is means the best are stuck in their meaningless categories, while the incompetent can rise to the top, spreading disaster around them until the very ground beneath their feet opens and consumes them.

Eric is lost, but Carol and her son are not; they depart for America. So the story is neither happy nor noir, but like most of life, a mix. While I shan’t quite recommend it, for the audience concerned about the politics of today it’s worth a viewing, if only to admire the artistry of a propaganda piece that must have been made in quite a hurry.

¹While I don’t care much for the title The Man I Married, the alternative title mentioned on Wikipedia is infinitely worse: I Married a Nazi.

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare look into the recent allegations of a kidnapping plot with intent to deliver the victim, Fethullah Gulen, to his political enemy, President Erdogan of Turkey, to be implemented by former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. They look with the hard eyes of experienced National Security lawyers, and so it looks a little grim for Flynn and his son, Michael Jr.

But that’s not all:

Flynn would be barred from continuing to act as a foreign agent after January 20, when he took office, and that offense (a felony) would not be able to be remedied—as Flynn has sought to do previously—with retroactive filings.

Finally, there’s the matter of what all of this means for President Trump, who famously asked then-FBI Director James Comey to back off of the Flynn investigation in the period before he then fired Comey. This request has always represented a grave matter, particularly in the context of President Trump’s larger set of interactions with law enforcement over time. It was, after all, a profound violation of the principle that the President does not direct law enforcement on investigative matters. It is, however, a far graver matter to the extent the investigation of Flynn involved potentially violent felonies. If Flynn is really suspected of involvement in a kidnapping plot, the question of what the President knew and when he knew it goes from being merely important to being acutely crucial.

The public needs to know what precisely President Trump was asking his FBI director when he said to him: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

It’s a little hard for me to understand what might be going through Flynn’s head at the time, although the simple love of money is well known to make men do stupidly dangerous things.

But it’s not yet clear why Trump was so deeply involved that he appealed to Comey to take the pressure off of Flynn. Perhaps here merely didn’t want a hint of mud on his administration, never mind that buckets of it were on the way.

While watching The Man I Married (1940 – note the date) I could not help but take note of a short monologue in which a German notes that the German government is selling radios, not yet a commodity, very cheaply, yes, very cheaply indeed – but “you can’t tune in Moscow or Paris or London …” and then notes why would a loyal German want to hear anything from anywhere but good German newspapers?

Single sourcing of news, sounds familiar to me. Does it to you?

Or regression to the mean, maybe.

Catherine Rampell of WaPo says the United States is falling behind:

Employers say they can’t find workers with the right skills. The average job vacancy now takes 30 business days to fill, according to a metric based on Labor Department data. That’s close to a record high. The National Federation of Independent Business survey likewise found that in October, more than half (52 percent) of companies reported few or no qualified applicants for positions they’re trying to fill. That’s also nearly an all-time high.

Worldwide comparisons also show that our workforce leaves something to be desired.

The United States is falling behind the rest of the developed world in education, and particularly postsecondary education. In 2000, we ranked among the top five countries in share of 25- to 34-year-olds who had completed postsecondary schooling, which covers anything from vocational programs to doctorates in advanced research.

Today, we’re 10th, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. We also don’t seem to be building up skills in the right things. Less than a quarter of Americans age 25 to 64 with a bachelor’s degree or higher studied in a STEM field. That places us in 19th place among the 28 developed countries for which the OECD publishes data.

In a recent report on skills, the OECD noted that the United States now specializes in “technologically advanced industries, particularly more complex business services and high-tech manufacturing.” But it emphasized that maintaining this success will be challenging given growing global competition and the fact that the “skills mix” of our population doesn’t match the requirements of these industries.

He Used To Be #1.

And it makes sense, of course. When you’re #2, you try harder – right^[1]? But when you’re #1, and your greatest threat has been vanquished, then why keep trying? It’s time to work on those more important things, like theological studies and ideologies idiosyncrasies.

After all, you’re #1. A big Navy, a big Air Force.

It’s the classic in-looking that many empires end with, the best example being Imperial China, about whom stories are told that they assembled a fleet to explore the world – and then abandoned it when the emperor decided it was inappropriate to the perfect China. When your rivals are far behind, there’s no longer the existential threat that will motivate the citizenry to greater, more effective efforts.

Today, we arguably are mismanaging our country into second-rate status.

1. We don’t value education as we should. As Catherine points out, the latest tax bill will discourage post-secondary education even more than we do today, and today we ask those students to pay a greater percentage of their income towards that education than we have in the past. I got my Bachelor’s without taking on debt by using some of my parents’ money – not a lot – and working some summers. These days? Ludicrous amounts of debt, or you can fall into the clutches of the scholarship vultures.
2. We’re taking less and less interest in the world outside of the United States. Not the average citizen, who never had much interest, but our leaders. Neither the Bush nor the Trump Administrations have had positive outlooks on how to lead the world when it came to global crises, and Obama’s efforts are being erased by our current President.
3. We encourage narcissism when it comes to one’s role in society. Oh, sure, plenty of folks join the armed services – but how many of us go on to follow careers in STEM or Medicine, all areas in which we are deficient in terms of the supply of such people for the jobs available? I have my Bachelor’s in computer science – why didn’t I go back for my Master’s?

If we want to remain number 1, we need to consider how to enable a supply of well-educated citizens capable of doing those jobs. In years past, we could depend on a reasonable number of immigrants to cover the gap, but with the tarnishment of our reputation, immigration may no longer be sufficient.

What then?

The Decline And Fall of …

¹For those readers of a certain age, I refer to the old tagline used by Avis Rent-A-Car, #2 to Hertz: “We Try Harder“.

Related to the elephant ivory trade is the rhino horn trade. Recently there’s been discussion of farming the rhinos in order to harvest their horns in a sustainable way – the horns will grow back. NewScientist (4 November 2017) reports on the objections to this approach:

But others object. “It is a terrible idea,” says David Blanton of Serengeti Watch.

Instead of merely meeting existing demand, the extra supply might boost it – keeping prices high and poachers incentivised.

Legalisation “creates the perception that buying these products is fine”, says Andrea Crosta of the Elephant Action League. China’s growing wealth is creating “hundreds of millions of consumers of rhino horn”.

Worse, the legal trade could be subverted. An investigation by the Elephant Action League revealed Asian dealers moving products via a web of couriers, including the Chinese navy. They could exploit a legal trade, says Crosta. “The legal system will create an opportunity to launder all rhino horns from Africa and Asia.”

I agree. This is entirely the wrong approach to the problem of illegal rhino horn trading – because it doesn’t reinforce the idea that rhino horn is not a medicine, traditional or not. And even if it were, the resource is now at a critically low level.

The second problem of the harvesting of rhino horns – that of it being a trophy – is of a somewhat different nature. As humanity continues to overpopulate this planet and, critically, doesn’t upgrade its primitive morality, more and more species will face this conundrum, and many will fail. It’s a simple mathematical proposition. We saw an iconic incident a few years ago when an idiot local dentist, Walter Palmer, went out trophy hunting and killed a lion. The consistent hunting of lions will inevitably lead to their end, because they simply don’t have our firepower. In a sense, this is an example of taking things to the “nth” degree – it used to be they killed us, so we figured out how to kill them, and, as a group, humanity has never quite figured out that now they’re no threat to us in general, there’s no need to kill them. Instead, we keep at it with better and better weapons (although, in Palmer’s case he shot the lion with a bow and arrow – twice!) and tools, as if it proves something. In point of fact, Nature is no longer the bountiful source of wealth it once was, and wantonly killing wildlife, particularly predators who keep the herbivore populations stable, keeps pushing the human species closer to its own tragedy.

Because Nature is still our undergirding necessity.

Looks like a nacho!

Y’all remember Terror Birds (2016), that sterling example of mixing dinosaurs with humans? Well, tonight’s head cold movie is Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs (2015), which pretty much runs in the same vein as Terror Birds, only not nearly so clever. My selected adjective for tonight is preposterous, as in every angle of this movie is preposterous, from the idea that the dinosaurs survived for millions of years in an iridium mine in the American West, to the thought that they’ve adapted to that mine’s atmosphere of methane by running various flammables through their veins (that’s right: Exploding Dinosaurs! But only sometimes), to the horses that are placidly munching on their feed while the dinosaurs are running hither and yon. Oh, and the special effects? Preposterous. The acting, I regret to say, is somewhat better than my chosen adjective, but they should still all keep their day jobs.

Throw in a tug of war over a pretty lady and some guy with a big ol’ jaw, and it’s pretty much a bourbon movie. Just how much bourbon will you need to finish watching it? I couldn’t guess. I’m still goggling that someone actually made this thing.

Daniel Byman on Lawfare bewails the Trumpist approach to international diplomacy:

Even worse, the U.S. abandonment of the wingman role allowed U.S. adversaries entrée. To escape its isolation and to put its thumb in Riyadh’s eye, Qatar is expanding ties to Iran. Similarly, Iran is exploiting the chaos between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq to increase its influence there, and any further escalation of violence there could present opportunities for the Islamic State to regain its foothold. In Yemen, Iran is increasing its ties to anti-Saudi Houthi fighters, who need Tehran’s support now more than ever before. Even Russia is taking advantage of the situation by playing a bigger role in Iraqi energy politics and, thus, increasing its sway in both Baghdad and Irbil. In the end, it’s America’s regional foes that are benefiting when America’s friends fight.

What to do is obvious and, unlike so many foreign policy challenges, not all that difficult. The United States should call together the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE and press them hard to end their squabbling. The leaders of the states’s biggest concern remains Iranian meddling in the region. But without the United States, even the most powerful of these countries, Saudi Arabia, lacks the strategic capacity to mount a serious challenge to Tehran. All of them are waiting for the United States to take a leadership role. In Iraq too, the United States should use its close ties to the Kurds and extensive relationship with Baghdad to try to stop the fighting and find an acceptable settlement. America has influence; it’s just not using it.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz called for American diplomats to spend much of their time “gardening”—working with allies constantly and especially in the early stages of a crisis. Unfortunately, it looks like the Trump administration is waiting for crises to emerge and only then will it pay attention to the dangers that could have been avoided.

The easy answer is amateurism. For the simple reason that I muttered that automatically, I went back and thought about alternatives. How about this one?

This is a deliberate ploy by the Trump Administration to stir up divisions in the Muslim world. Remember, the Trump Administration has (or had) several Muslim-phobes in important positions throughout the Administration. This may be the fruit of their labors – withdrawing our calming influence on that area, letting the flames of mutual hate and distrust flare high, until once again it’s all chaos.

And never mind the damage done to the American reputation.

Purely speculative. I actually incline more towards the amateurism explanation.

Fred Bauer in National Review has a prescription for the GOP:

Unless Republicans want to follow the 2010–14 downward trajectory of Democrats, they should consider making a course correction: Adopt a more moderate tone, defer austerity politics, and promote policies that help shore up the working class. A big-picture infrastructure bill could deliver resources to struggling communities, win over Democratic votes, and give voters the rare sight of a functioning Washington. Health-care reform that prioritizes cutting the cost of medical care (not slashing subsidies for the working class) could be an opportunity to combine a conservative belief in markets with a populist interest in the social-safety net. Tax reform could be recalibrated to deliver sustained benefits to working families — less estate-tax repeal and more credits for children. Policy reforms to advance the economic interests of Americans of all colors and creeds could win support across the socioeconomic spectrum.

So what? The GOP has shown precious little interest in reform or moving back to the center of the political spectrum – and there’s been a tacit admission of such an inability in the horde of Republicans who have signaled their intention to retire at the end of this cycle – or are already gone.

Indeed, following Fred’s prescription would be an admission of error by whichever donor is running the GOP these days. Between a horrendous ACA ‘reform’ bill, awful judicial picks, and a tax reform bill which the public, by and large, doesn’t believe is needed, the GOP looks less like a governing party and more like a party in crisis, jerked around by the puppeteers’ strings – and puppeteers who are intent on getting what they want.

I rather suspect this is what you get when you have government by Man, rather than government by Law. The divergence from public opinion over issues which, frankly, have little urgency and could have been treated with minor modifications and optimizations, but instead appear to be amputative, suggests someone with an ideological axe to grind, and not a thoughtful person in close contact with the issues on the ground.

I also found this off-the-cuff deceit by Fred to be fascinating:

While the American press has often treated President Trump with a hostility that would make a partisan super PAC blush, the administration’s own decisions play a considerable role …

A clear implication of an unfair treatment of the President, rather an acknowledgement that President Trump’s behavior patterns in terms of mendacity and treatment of women, subcontractors, wives, etc, has been dishonorable and undesirable in a Presidential candidate. Fred is actually missing a huge story in how the President’s character flaws are not only damaging his Administration, but also inflicting long term damage on the United States as he fills the judiciary with unqualified personnel, and damages the Party itself by facilitating the admittance of more flawed characters when it desperately needs to move away from extremists with unrealistic ideologies.

In his automatic reaction to maintream media, he misses out on one of the most important stories of the year decade.

Pixar/Disney

There are many mundane descriptions which might be applied to Monsters, Inc. (2001), such as perfect timing, engaging music, well-drawn characters, a plot of twists and surprises, the tremendous attention to detail in the artwork, and I’m sure they’ve been applied many times before. So let me point out that this is an environmentalist’s movie.

How? On entry, this movie opens on those who are alien to the audience – the monsters in Monster City. And, in this respect, this is also a fine example of the anti-xenophobe movie, perhaps a theme for another time. As it goes, we soon discover how humans figure into this story.

They, or more precisely human children, and their fear and terror at the sight of monsters, are a natural resource harvested by Monsters, Inc, for conversion into energy usable in the city. To go along with that, the children who are the easiest extraction source are also considered toxic. Just the rumor of a child loose in Monster City can cause chaos.

And it’s through the chaos caused by just such an intrusion that our two protagonists, Sully and Mike, begin their own journey from xenophobes to lovers of diversity, thus reinforcing the theme that I’m ignoring. That same transition, though, also applies to the status of the children which they have been deliberately terrifying – beginning the journey from toxic sheep, as it were, to the status of reasoning beings whose dignity they are trampling.

This leads to the scene in which the necessary changes to the moral systems Sully and Mike use to get through life become apparent, and the storytellers helpfully bring out the high points by contrasting Sully’s improving morality with Mike’s stubborn clinging to his old morality. We already Mike to be a materialist, who now clings desperately to the old morality which had brought him so many tangible benefits, from a speedy sports car to a girlfriend. When we see Sully grimly push forward to follow what his new morality tells him is right – saving a human child from torture and likely death at the hands of the antagonists – we also see Mike, still trapped in his old morality which valued things more than the Other – even though he knows the child is more like a Monster than he ever imagined – separating from his best friend, Sully. Mike is headed for a friendless, bitter existence, while Sully may be heading for destruction, and the audience can see that. Sully’s death is only aborted when Mike adopts the new morality and fortunately comes on Sully’s death scene and rescues him.

But lurking in the background is our subject, barely touched on, that the abuse of a natural resource can lead to its cessation. To scare a child is to wear out the fear reflex. This is most vividly exemplified by a fast subscene in which a monster stumbles out of the human domain, terrified itself by the children he had been dispatched to frighten. But it’s also a lingering descant in the continual grousing of the owner of the factory, as he exclaims over the problems of meeting the quotas, and how children just don’t scare as before. In the minds of the antagonists, this developing problem needs to be met by continuing to do the same thing that lead to the problem in the first place, but to the nth degree: children will be captured and the very essence of their fear will be forcibly extracted by machine. With little thought given to the consequences of kidnapping children and quite possibly destroying them, there’s an insistent parallel between them and, well, the parts of modern Western civilization that many environmentalists find offensive – or terrifying.

From here, it’s easy to see the harvesting of laughter from the children, a far more sustainable resource, rather than fear, as a metaphor for striving to find a better solution, no matter the inconvenience, or how it might upset existing power structures. And so we see the story the environmentalist wants told, where we discard that which is harmful, whether physically or morally, for solutions which will hold up for the long-term.

Or, if that was all too silly for you, then just watch this because it’s fun. And pay attention, the detail work is amazing.

Strongly Recommended.

But so does China.

The building’s mass extrudes upwards from the site and is ‘punctured’ by a spherical auditorium in the centre. Bookshelves are arrayed on either side of the sphere and act as everything from stairs to seating, even continuing along the ceiling to create an illuminated topography. These contours also continue along the two full glass facades that connect the library to the park outside and the public corridor inside, serving as louvres to protect the interior against excessive sunlight whilst also creating a bright and evenly lit interior.

Makes me wish I lived in Tianjin. More here.

Robert Carlin on 38 North finds the North Korean knot a gnarly one, and thinks President Trump’s advisors are not up to the task of unraveling this worn sleeve:

On the US side, the President may well believe that his personal style has thus far proved successful on any number of policy fronts. That’s up to him. But on the North Korean issue, I can only say, no, it is not working here. I know it is not, and with all humility, I’d tell him so if he asked. Whether he subsequently adjusted his approach would obviously be his choice.

Up to now, the North Korean issue is one on which he is apparently listening to his advisers. They are failing him. The President’s senior White House advisers may well believe—and believe fervently—that history shows diplomacy with North Korea always fails because each time the North takes what it wants and then breaks the agreements. On this, they are—plain and simple—wrong. This wouldn’t matter on some arcane problem (people misread history all the time), but there is the mistaken notion that using this interpretation is a solid platform for a “new” policy on North Korea. Actually, it is a rotten plank. A misinterpretation of the facts here will not support anything but still more failed policy, repeating the same failure that has marked US policy on the Korean issue since January 2001.

I note that he excludes the Clinton Administration from failure, so Robert must be another believer in the agreements the Clinton Administration reached with the North Koreans, and thus the Bush Administration gets another grease spots on its report card.

This is a known scene stealer. If she’d been in The Seven Seals, Death would have lost his entire wardrobe.

Post-Throw Momma from the Train (1987) I was bemused. This story about two evil women bedeviling innocent Professor Donner and his student, Owen Lift, and the men’s escapades in trying to rid themselves of their female counterparts seemed to be the lightest of fluff, and yet I found it easy to keep on watching. This is abnormal for me, as my taste in fluff does tend to be a trifle eclectic. Think The Video Dead.

I think, perhaps, it was the dynamic between Owen and his ever abusive mother, a mother who may have supped so strongly upon the stew of the traditional high hopes of a mother for her son that it had turned her emotionally inside-out, until his ever apparent inadequacies, physical and mental, have reduced her to a quivering screaming hulk of a woman. Demanding every service from her son (and I’ll just say AUGH! here), and finding them continually defective, he is now smothering under her demands for his improvement until he’s ready to … to …

Well, perhaps throwing Momma from the train might be a bit much for him, but when it seems she’s a better wordsmith than Professor Donner, that’s it. In the resulting fracas, Owen finds his inner goodness, and his mother, who just possibly maybe might have underhandedly planned this entire episode in a last ditch effort to get her son over the hump, finally finds good in her son.

And the Professor? His wife returns from the dead and, as one might expect from such a creature, becomes his muse, in a way, perhaps a zombie muse if we’re feeling expansive, resulting in a pop-up near disaster for him and his mental health.

And if you can’t decide if you’d like to see this movie from this review, you’re probably the wiser for it. The only other advice I can suggest is to watch it with a head cold, like I may have done.

A few weeks ago, the Trump Administration modified the ACA rule requiring employers to offer birth control services, and the University of Notre Dame, being a Catholic institution, jumped right on board that wagon, as NPR reported at the time:

In an email to faculty and staff, which the university shared with NPR, a spokesman wrote that the school “honors the moral teachings of the Catholic Church.”

Much to my surprise, they’ve fallen right back off that wagon, CNN/Money is reporting:

In his annual faculty address Tuesday, Notre Dame’s president, the Rev. John Jenkins, said the university had decided to keep the accommodation for employees in place.

“As I have said from the start, the university’s interest has never been in preventing access to those who make conscientious decisions to use contraceptives,” he said. “Our interest, rather, has been to avoid being compelled by the federal government to be the agent in their provision.”

A university spokesman confirmed that students would continue to have access to no-cost birth control, as well.

Notre Dame’s initial response was based on its belief that it could no longer utilize the accommodation because the new rule would prompt insurers to discontinue providing no-cost contraceptives. It then learned that carriers would maintain the coverage anyway.

That’s not really congruent with their rationale for removing the accommodation. In fact, it sounds like frantic face-saving to me. My best guess is that Notre Dame administrators suddenly realized that pack of unsavory characters inhabiting the White House these days are more or less the equivalent of Satan, and it reflected poorly on Notre Dame to be taking a handout from them. They decided to look to the future when the GOP was not in charge, when the current Administration had been consigned to the dustbin of history with an almighty thump, and decided they didn’t want to occupy that same dustbin.