Monthly Archives: December 2017

Squirm.

It’s what you’ll do if you watch Squirm (1976). It has bad American deep South accents, a stereotypical broken Southern small town, stereotypical useless Sheriff, and – in the category of ridiculous – screaming worms.

Plot? Why, yes, there is a plot, something about a southern lass asking a damn yankee to come visit her in her little town. The night before his arrival, a terrible, even demonic, storm hits the town and a power line tower falls over, inundating the ground – and the worms – with electricity. The worms multiply, grow fangs, and proceed to start lunching on the proprietor of the local worm farm, then moving on to other delectable specimens of humanity. The sheriff, for example, is caught by the worms having sex with his girlfriend in a prison cell. Isn’t that fun?

Now, judging from what I’m seeing in my search for pictures, our TV version chopped out almost all the sex scenes and, perhaps, some continuity. Still, it’s clear this is a stinker, what with tubs full of rubber worms, bad acting, and some OK makeup. Gotta like this guy:

Those worms are on their way in, not out.

But whether you like him or not, Squirm really isn’t worth your time.

Inimitable:

impossible to copy because of being of very high quality or a particular style:
Louis Armstrong’s inimitable gravelly voice [Cambridge Dictionary]

I realized last night that I had little concept of this word, despite having heard it all my life.

When I started this blog I did not anticipate it turning its focus on the political world to the extent that it has, but then I did not anticipate a Trump Presidency, and all the dangers that brings to our liberal democracy. I do tire of it.

So when I finally opened the most recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer and found an interesting survey, I decided to talk about it a bit: the results of the Chapman University survey of America concerning the American citizens’ beliefs in the paranormal. I really like their snazzy chart:

In fact, I’m so taken by the chart that I haven’t read the blog post it’s embedded in. I think I’ll freehand this and then read their blog post.

Belief in Bigfoot or Yeti, at 16%, is one that has never bothered me; indeed, the acceptance that there are biological creatures which we have not yet found, categorized, and characterized is a good one for any society which needs to progress in the future in order to survive. A society which believes it knows everything it needs to know is doomed – at least in that form. It might even go extinct. That all evidence of Bigfoot has been discredited is probably a fact not known to the public that chooses to believe in the big guy.

Fortune tellers & psychics, on the other hand, are well-known dangers to the naive person. Why? Because their advice may divert the trusting from a proper course of action, such as accepting a conventional course of treatment for an illness, for some course of treatment of no value – but perhaps benefiting the fortune teller. It appears some 19% of the American population remains credulous.

At 25%, telekinesis is of limited danger. I can dream up some scenarios where someone might get hurt, but to tell the truth, I probably won’t value their contributions to society anyways, if they’re adults.

The idea that aliens have visited Earth recently is, for me, at an unexpectedly low value of 25%. A physicist will give several reasons why it’s nearly impossible that it has happened, but I think hope springs eternal. The higher value for a visit in ancient times (35%) actually makes sense, given the unexpected achievements of Egypt and the various South American empires, not to mention the different span in time between ‘ancient’ and ‘recent’ – whatever that might be.

However, the places haunted by spirits at 52% is discouraging, given that no one has ever captured any evidence of a spirit. Usually they are shown to be hoaxes or natural phenomena – yet we continue to give such stories credence.

And at 55% is the contention that ancient ‘advanced’ civilizations once existed. I wonder about the reasoning behind this – that is, how many of those who assented to this question are simply trying to be open-minded? How many ran across such contentions in reading sensationalistic publications such as National Enquirer? And how many, disconcerted by the variety of human experience, would prefer to see current society as doomed to return to a simpler time, and in this question they see a way to confirm that such will happen.

Perhaps I’m just a little cynical today.

Finally, the survey notes that 25.3% have “no paranormal beliefs,” which I believe is a misstatement – properly, given the context of the table, those folks just don’t have any of the listed beliefs. I am uncertain as to whether I should be reassured or aghast.

Regarding Trump’s aborted desire to talk about his accomplishments, a reader reacts:

Trump is telling it like he see’s it, not what people necessarily want to hear. And then there is Hillary, nobody with a brain would believe her. Trump lets you decide what to believe, Hillary assumes you are going to believe her so will tell you anything..

How do we know that, though? Trump continually issues statements at variance with reality. In fact, I think the reader is precisely wrong – Trump says what his base wants to hear. All part of being in a winning club. The rest of us?

But what I find more interesting is the reference to Mrs. Clinton. Why? Has she said anything of interest recently? Or is the reader influenced by the frantic need of the GOP to run against someone who will almost certainly never run again? I suspect they’ve invested so much capital is demonizing Mrs. Clinton that they need to pull her into the national spotlight again just to get a little more return on investment, which is all very silly.

I would also very much like to point out that Mrs. Clinton was investigated a large number of times, 8 that I know of, mostly by hostile, Republican-controlled committees, and they never found anything. This suggests that Mrs. Clinton, as horrible a political strategist and tactician as she may be (she should have stomped both Obama and Trump), is either far, far brighter than your typical GOP Congresscritter …

… or there was nothing to find …

… or both.

Your pick.

Steve Benen is puzzled over the behavior of Trump towards the various 2017 special elections:

Over the holiday weekend, the president did it again.

“Remember, the Republicans are 5-0 in Congressional races this year. In Senate, I said Roy M would lose in Alabama and supported Big Luther Strange – and Roy lost. Virginia candidate was not a ‘Trumper,’ and he lost. Good Republican candidates will win BIG!”

To paraphrase Luke Skywalker, every assertion in that tweet was wrong. For example, Trump never predicted Moore’s defeat, at least not publicly. Virginia’s Ed Gillespie, who wasn’t a congressional candidate this year, went out of his way to run a Trump-style, anti-immigration campaign, which played a big role in his nine-point defeat. …

For those eager to argue that a 5-2 record in congressional special election is pretty good, that’s fine. Barack Obama’s Democratic Party actually went 5-0 in the first year of his presidency, the year before a Republican wave ended the Dems’ House majority, but GOP partisans looking for good news can find some if they look hard enough. (They should probably ignore how surprisingly competitive the Democratic candidates were in this year’s Republican victories.)

What they shouldn’t do, however, is put Democratic victories in some kind of blind spot. Responsible parties examine defeats and try to learn from them; they don’t pretend the losses never occurred.

Right. For those of us concerned with reality and truth, this doesn’t make sense. But that’s not Trump nor the GOP – although since this is a Trump Tweet, that’s who we should focus on.  It’s been said many times Trump is a branding guy, and this is a branding effort.

A brand is a club, basically – and who wants to belong to a losing club? This is how you attract people to a brand, by being a winning club – or, in Trump’s world, making it seem like a winning club. This is what he does, he spreads a patina of success over everything he does, with no regard to its relationship to reality. He’s the worst caricature of the conscience-less marketeer, the patent-medicine huckster, the homeopathic vendor, who doesn’t care if you die of your mistaken allegiance – for him, it’s all about him and his success.

So he proclaims his brand is 5-0 in special elections. No surprise. Sounds better than 5-2. And for those voters who suckle at his Twitter nozzle, gulping down the President’s verified fake news with little regard to reality, this is what gets their dopamine levels up in their brains, the idea that their brand is WINNING!

But if you’re a Trump voter and want to know the truth, here it is:

1. In the most conservative state in the union, Trump lost. He lost backing a candidate who is arguably even more Trumpian than Trump.
2. The Democrats won a seat they already held, easily.
3. And in this link Steve covers 4 of the 5 wins for the Republicans. The summary? Each victory was far closer than the previous election for each seat, even though each was considered a “safe” Republican seat. I expect at least three of the five to flip in the midterm elections.

If my reader is Trumpian, you may think the numbers are favorable, even if Trump is misstating the fact of the matter, but I think a peek behind the curtain shows another Trump club going up in flames, much like his Trump University. If being part of clubs is your thing, is this a good club to join?

The back side of the snow-dumpers, December 24.

It was heavy snow one moment, blue skies the next.

Your ambulance is suffering a minor malfunction. Would you care for another?

When a space-going EMT vessel receives a message from a notorious personality on an unapproved communications link, calling for help, the crew of Nightingale 229 must decide whether to respond or not to a possibly dubious communication, and, true to their calling, they do respond. Unfortunately, the interdimensional jump kills the ship’s Captain, and they emerge in the midst of a damaging meteor-filled region, with a high-gravity blue giant star just nearby.

Thus starts Supernova (2000).

The surviving crew is led by the second pilot, a hardened veteran, who manages to keep the ship mostly intact, with the exception of maneuvering fuel lost to the meteor field. But far more dangerous is the blue giant, which is dragging them in to a fiery doom, and in order to survive they need to wait for the dimensional drive to recharge, which it turns out will be just a moment shorter than when the blue giant will incinerate them.

And then an escape pod, or something small, arrives with the author of the distress signal, who claims to be the son of the man whose name was on the message. Self-confident, he is a man left behind by an informal team of salvagers, he claims, but when his small ship is investigated thoroughly, an alien artifact is found.

And eventually the survivor is revealed to be something akin to a God. A God who intends to take the artifact to Earth – and detonate it.

So the science is somewhat spotty, the plot has some holes in it (an example being that the crew believes the Captain deliberately used a defective jump pod for the rescue trip, but never explain why he did so), and defeating a God in one-on-one battles is always a chancy business.

But this is a movie relentless in its pacing. Even the slower parts are full of tension and puzzlement: why is the rescued man so sure of himself? What draws the med-tech so consistently to the alien artifact? And why is that other med-tech making such poor choices? Is it the rescued man’s powers? Or is she just an idiot? And why why why, oh rescued guy? But such is the pacing, the obstacles dodged or overcome, that the questions may come later, after the movie has finished and you’ve come down from the little adrenaline high you’ve been riding.

If you buy into it in the first place. And that could be dicey. This is not a hidden gem, and most reviewers appear to hate it. But if you’re looking for a late night adrenaline run and are not feeling too critical, this might be the right one for you.

Refugia:

As [Professor John] O’Shea looked at the map and envisioned what this ridge might have looked like in the past, he realized that around the end of the last Ice Age, some 9,900 years ago, it would not have been submerged. Rather, it would have been a land bridge, with icy lakes on either side and the receding glacial ice sheet just a few hundred miles to the north. The ridge would probably have remained much colder than the mainland, offering a refuge in a slowly warming world for animals and vegetation adapted to very cold environments. Such isolated pockets of archaic ecosystems that endure after broad continent-wide climate shifts are known as refugia. [“Where the Ice Age Caribou Ranged,” Jason Daley, Archaeology (Jan/Feb 2018)]

CNN/Media has an implicit question that’s easy to answer:

President Trump’s year of flouting presidential traditions and trashing the media isn’t quite over yet.

Trump left the White House on Friday without holding an end-of-the-year press conference.

While it’s by no means a requirement to do so, most presidents in modern times have chosen to hold a formal news conference in December to tout accomplishments and share seasons greetings before Christmas.

This is the first time in 15 years that a president has opted not to.

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny reported that Trump “wanted to hold a news conference, but aides prevailed on him not to.”

So let’s tout up his accomplishments:

1. Nomination and confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to SCOTUS. Note that Gorsuch qualifies for the denominative “IJ,” or Illegitimate Justice, but this is Trump’s fault only in part, as while it is true he publicly encouraged Senator McConnell’s dishonorable actions in regard to Obama’s nominee, Judge Garland, but many others of the Republican party also participated in this action that brought heaps of dishonor upon themselves and their Party.
2. Nomination and, in most cases, confirmation of numerous highly conservative Party members for the federal judiciary. This would be a true accomplishment if they were qualified, but most apparently have not been, which can found not only in the proceedings comments from Republicans, who expressed their dismay at certain nominees but then went on, to their discredit, to vote for confirmation anyways, but also in the fact that two were outright rejected in the last couple of weeks by Senator Grassley, Judiciary Committee Chairman, and another, after being humiliated by a Republican who questioned him, withdrew.
3. Recent passage of a tax change bill (I cannot consider it a reform). However, as he contributed virtually nothing but his signature to it, this is a little difficult to credit. Still, in the spirit of Christmas generosity, we’ll give him some credit for a bill that was written in great haste, has low regard in popular opinion, and appears to have ignored all non-partisan evaluations in preference to the expert (or lack thereof) opinion of the politicos who have the most to gain from it. And if my reader is puzzled at my assertion that this is of low popularity, keep reading.
4. The Executive Order that immigrants from certain nations be banned from entry to the United States. He certainly managed to issue that order. Then it ended up in the courts where it lost and lost before finally winning some sort of wan victory at the Supreme Court. Given the lack of terror attacks from immigrants in the United States since, oh, say Obama took over, it’s hard to define a useful measuring stick as to the efficacy of this Executive Order. Oh, but he got it out.
5. Highest churn rate in White House staff, etc, in quite a while. From The New Yorker, we learn
   

   This degree of churn is “off the charts,” according to Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has spent years tracking White House turnover rates. Next month, Tenpas will release her findings about Trump’s first year in office. The data—some of which she shared with me this week—is striking: even if every one of Trump’s senior aides stays put until January 20th, the anniversary of his Inauguration, his first-year turnover rate among senior staff—some sixty positions in total—will reach or exceed thirty-three per cent. Turnover, as Tenpas defines it, includes resignations, firings, and shifts of position within the White House. Trump’s first-year turnover rate will be three times higher than both Barack Obama’s (nine per cent) and Bill Clinton’s (eleven per cent) and double Ronald Reagan’s (seventeen per cent), which is as far back as Tenpas’s analysis goes. And this, almost certainly, is just the beginning.

Yeah, not much, so perhaps his aides had a solid reason to dissuade him from leaping to the dais. But I suspect this piece from Steve Benen may be even more instrumental in explaining their fears. And I do encourage the conservative reader to consider this piece carefully, as it fits in with all we know of Trump from public records and his recent behavior.

Donald Trump boasted two weeks ago that that the more Americans learn about the Republican tax plan, “the more popular it becomes.” Even at the time, that was wrong to the point of delusion.

And yet, there was the president this morning, describing the regressive GOP package as “very popular.” …

Does the president believe the nonsense or is he trying to deceive the public? Billy Bush, to whom Trump bragged about sexual assault during the infamous “Access Hollywood” recording, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times, which included an interesting anecdote.

In the days, weeks and months to follow, I was highly critical of the idea of a Trump presidency. The man who once told me – ironically, in another off-camera conversation – after I called him out for inflating his ratings: “People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you,” was, I thought, not a good choice to lead our country.

“People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you.”

For the reader who thought the tax bill is popular needs to seriously reconsider their sources of news. This should be a red flag that your approach to news gathering is defective. First rule of thumb – disregard everything the President says. Find independent news and facts – Fox News does not qualify – to verify or refute something that worries you OR pleases you.

And I think this is why the aides really discouraged him from a press conference. I think every time he opens his mouth, another 1000 independent voters go negative because they’re willing to look at what he says and realize that it doesn’t correlated with reality, while when he keeps his yap shut, he gains, to a very small degree, some credibility. Heck, he’s been relatively quiet recently and his Gallup Approval rating is almost 40%. That’s after approaching 30% every time another indictment of one of his former aides/campaign managers/friends, who he now reportedly never heard of, is handed down.

So it seems to me that keeping Trump quiet may be the long-term key to success. However you define success in this case.

From WaPo’s Answer Sheet:

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis [of hiring only technologists] by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despitetheir technical training, not because of it?  After bringing in anthropologists and ethnographers to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs that, initially, [Google founders] Brin and Page viewed with disdain.

Emphasis mine. I suppose as a software engineer I should be horrified. But I don’t know that I was ever a technologist, whatever that might be. Coming out of high school, I thought I wanted to be a novelist someday, but I knew I wasn’t ready for that and didn’t really believe you could train to be one, so I found a forward looking career and took a shot at it. Fortunately, writing code tends to agree with my temperament – and it let me be lazy as well.

I wonder how much influence this study will have on industry and education. For years the soft sciences having been getting short schrift from everyone, from technology students to the educational institutions themselves. Perhaps this will mark the end of a pendulum swing and now it’ll start to swing back to accepting there’s value in those hills as well, as they’ve constantly argued themselves (talking hills? Must be Christmas morning around here). And, in turn, this will make the those educational institutions stronger, rather than turning them into simply a skills-development academy.

I wonder if the University of North Carolina is listening.

Depletion gilding:

All the [golden] objects were initially subjected to “depletion gilding,” in which copper is removed from the surface through hammering, annealing, or both, producing a golden surface that belies the metal’s true contents. This gilding was later deliberately removed, bringing out the copper’s pinkish tones. “We suggest that at a particular moment, it was desirable for an object to be golden, and at a later point, it was desirable to have the gilding removed,” says Martinón-Torres. He adds that red has been associated with the feminine in the region, so objects may have been turned pink when a woman took ownership of them or when a female owner entered puberty. [“The Pink Standard,” Daniel Weiss, Archaeology (Jan/Feb 2018)]

Bonus word!

Annealing:

Annealing, in metallurgy and materials science, is a heat treatment that alters the physical and sometimes chemical properties of a material to increase its ductility and reduce its hardness, making it more workable. It involves heating a material above its recrystallization temperature, maintaining a suitable temperature, and then cooling. [Wikipedia]

Dickens and his guidance counselors.

Whether fictionalized or not, The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) gives its audience a peek into the chaos that may have been Charles Dickens, and in particular the act of creation which brought his classic Christmas story into being.

Our story begins with the sources of tension in Dickens’ life: two failures after the phenomenal success of Oliver Twist, a fifth child on the way, a new house, expensive tastes, financial strains, and finally a father whose limitations distress Dickens. And no book incipient, a key problem when his publishers insist on the repayment of a loan necessitated by the failures of his last two books.

But when those publishers apply their business acumen to his spur of the moment book proposal and spurn it, he impulsively decides to publish the book on his own dime, complete with illustrations – and only six weeks left to complete the non-existent manuscript, get the illustrations and all to the independent publisher, and onward to the shops. Thus would seem to be the tale to be told.

But it’s not, really. The story is not the race from nothing to something, but concerns his own form of authorial semi-insanity which comes from vivid characters beginning to populate his mind, characters who talk to him when he’s stuck, feed him his story – and then refuse his demands when the story he wishes to impose on them doesn’t meet with their approval.

When your fictional characters fight back, you have an insurrection on your hands.

And Charles doesn’t handle it all that well, subjecting himself, his friends, and family to mercurial moods which may alienate those who love him best. Some parts of constructing a new story are fairly mundane, although I do not mean mechanical or easy: the gathering of names for characters, locations, and ideas. But the harder parts of great stories come from staring at the very pillars of society, strong or crumbling, obvious or hidden. Dickens may be wealthy, or keeps up a good front, but right in front of him are the dregs of society, the children living in abject poverty, abused by parents and others for ends which leave the children in miserable places. And the best stories come from the insights the author believes they see – such as the attention paid to wealth in Dickens’ London society, over that attention that should be paid to friendship and uplifting the poor of society.

And that’s what this movie works hard to lay bare, for Dickens is hardly without fault himself. He virtually despises his own well-meaning father, a man beset with his own demons and deficiencies. And while I empathize with the problems caused by interruptions of the creative process, firing a maid for the conveyance of a message is hardly the act of a just employer; his failure to manage his time is used to put a metaphorical arrow through the poor woman. So when Scrooge himself laughs at his own author and proclaims no one ever changes, it’s the challenge for Dickens, not only in his story upon which he’s laid so much hope, but for his own life.

As a meta-story it works fairly well. The acting is excellent, I enjoyed the cinematography and sets, and if it sometimes feels like Dickens dominates the movie, what did I expect? I’ll admit I have a poor ear for London accents, so I occasionally lost bits of dialog, but I and the audience clapped at the end. Go and have a good time.

Amazing. Simply fucking amazing. Such legends as Tom Smothers, Carol Kane, Paul Reubens, Eve Arden, and others in a single film. And it’s such  wretched piece of trash.

Pandemonium (1982) is the movie. Presenting as a horror film spoof in which a cheerleader’s camp has a history of being stalked by a killer, and upon its reopening it’s being stalked again, the movie never even nearly jells. Between constant juvenilia, even in the sex scenes, and much very dated humor, its main connection with horror today is the morbid fascination with which we watched, wondering just how terrible it could get.

We finished it. This should not be taken as a commendation, but more of a commentary on our disbelief at just how bad this got.

And why does Carol Kane’s eyes beam lasers?

Don’t take that as a challenge. Really.

You want to play Duck Duck Goose? AGAIN?

The Shape Of Water (2017) is a classic Other story that explores the precarious positives of being outsiders in an existentially-endangered society. They’re much like defective supports in a skyscraper – perform to expectations, no matter how absurd, or be squashed. Pursue the objectives everyone is expected to pursue, or become an object of abhorrent curiosity. Love who you’re expected to love.

Or be outcast.

Elisa, Zelda, and Giles are part of the informal Other community in New Orleans when they become aware, mostly because of Elisa’s curiosity, of a new member of the community – the captive of a research facility for which Elisa and Zelda work. Who is it? What is it? It’s the latter question that motivates Elisa, feeling alienated from society and with little to lose, to explore a relationship with… it. But all is endangered by the man who enslaved the creature, a raging ball of ambition who embodies the very attributes of conventionality, xenophobia and arrogance.  And all is reinforced by those damaged fingers of his which have a symbolic significance that I’d rather not consider.

And that leads to the question: How do you rescue something when you’re not even sure what it needs?

This is a Guillermo del Toro movie, so you know the visuals will be detailed and fascinating, and as my Arts Editor remarked, the color palette was lush and the setting stunningly rendered.

But there are some open questions which might have been better answered. For example, Elisa is mute, which is attributed to someone cutting her vocal chords when she was very young – the scarring is subtle but present. Indeed, her origins are entirely mysterious. But WHY? That bothered me. It’s as if a deus ex machina had occurred, and it struck me as some sort of lost opportunity, although exactly how to take advantage of it is unclear. But it’s such an oddity that it should have been addressed.

And why the Soviet agent in the mix? While Other, he’s not part of the Other community. He certainly suffers the emotional stringency of mixing the fundamental drives of a scientist with the decisions of a ruthless political hierarchy.  I have not quite sorted out his treatment by his peers, though, unless the Soviet hierarchy, another example of a dominant and xenophobic society, serves to reinforce the horror and continuous errors of the orthodox.

All that said, it’s a fascinating story to follow. Information comes out slowly and plays with the intellect, and if unexpected events occur, they seem mostly organic, although younger viewers may find the Soviet actions somewhat artificial. However, the reputation of the Soviet Union for brutal use of both enemies and their own colleagues renders those scenes believable by those aware of that history.  And if that history is false, perhaps only those who lived in the Soviet Union of the time will know.

There is a scene or two of explicit sex, so be aware if you object.  There is also violence, but nothing gratuitous, although you will flinch and empathize with the victims. As a friend who recommended the movie says, each scene of violence serves a purpose in the plot.

Recommended.

One of the primary elements in the discussion selling of the tax bill to the public by the Administration has been the occlusion of questions about the financial health of the nation as a whole by concentrating on the immediate benefits many are expected to accrue. This has been enhanced through the provision of online calculators that supposedly will help you calculate how much you’ll benefit when your taxes fall. And these calculators are not necessarily government-supplied; the media provides such tools in the belief that this is a good service.

This concentration on the individuals’ drop in tax rates cripples the far more important discussion of the impact of the tax bill on the Nation as a whole. By concentrating on the individuals’ gain, by the immoral appeal to the avarice of isolated person, the Administration continues an extremist strategy to divide & conquer. How so? Because not everyone will benefit immediately from this tax cut. After all, it must be paid for, and some of that will be through immediate cuts to programs that service the unfortunate, those who are far down the socioeconomic ladder.

This year.

Next year, it may be cuts to more general entitlements, such as Social Security, a favorite target of the extremist right (remember Bush II’s proposal to privatize Social Security?). This is how you dismember those services that someone thinks they know better about. One piece at a time, with a financial distraction for the non-targets at the same time.

Oh, look, a squirrel!

So what about that important discussion? The extremist right-wing is depending on the Laffer curve, the idea that cutting taxes will lead to economic prosperity. It’s worth reiterating that Bush I called it voodoo economics, and if that’s a bit of a blunt instrument in that it dismisses context as unimportant, the addition of the context of today, as we discussed elsewhere, indicates that, much like the tax cuts during the Bush II Administration and the more recent and disastrous example of the Brownback tax cuts, eventually rejected by the local Republicans themselves, the tax bill recently passed and signed may lead to not much economic activity at all – and quite possibly, and sadly, a recession (which will quickly, and appropriately, labeled the Trump Recession; I look forward to his denials that there’s any recession going on, desperately trying to dismantle the institutions which puncture his balloon of fantasy – but I digress).

In the engineering world, we’d call this an unnecessary risk. The country’s perking along at a more than acceptable unemployment rate of 4.1%, we’ve slowly recovered from the last Republican-induced economic meltdown, and those economic problems left over from the Obama Administration, which I tend to see as a resulting from the GOP‘s refusal to responsibly compromise with President Obama, are correctable with minor adjustments. Perhaps the biggest problem has nothing to do with taxation, but with monopolies which may be stifling the economy. But that’s a different discussion.

So, as you go off to find out just how much more money you’ll keep in reduced taxes, try to remember that someone else has to pay to cover your reduction in obligation. And, as has been well advertised, it’s not the commercial world bearing more of the burden. It’s someone else. And don’t depend on future economic activity stimulated by the tax cut. Kansas is a smoking example of how that can burn down the economy. You may have more money in your pocket, but when the mob burns down the city in anger at economic catastrophe, well, I fear those dollar bills are flammable.

In case you’re following the foreign emoluments cases against the President, and were disappointed when Southern District of New York Judge George Daniels dismissed one of the cases for lack of standing, Leah Litman and Daniel Hemel provide an overview and reason to hope for reversal on Take Care. I particularly enjoyed this part of the analysis:

Source: Alice In Wonderland

Finally, and most surprisingly, the district court concludes that the plaintiffs’ foreign emoluments claims “are not ripe for adjudication” because Congress has not chosen “to confront the defendant over a perceived violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause.”

This is stunning. The Foreign Emoluments Clause says that the President cannot accept emoluments from foreign governments without Congress’s consent. The district court’s opinion implies that the judiciary can’t do anything about the President’s violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause until Congress explicitly expresses its nonconsent. This is an inversion of constitutional text that would make Lewis Carroll proud. Plus, when does the court think that the case would be ripe for adjudication? When Congress says what the Constitution already does: that the President is prohibited from accepting foreign emoluments without prior congressional authorization and cannot receive domestic emoluments under any circumstances? Or would it remain unripe because Congress still could change its mind?

The other reasons Daniels gives for lack of standing are more reasonable; this one strikes me, a non-lawyer, as a joke.

If we were in a normal political era, the proper procedure, to my mind, would have the President requesting permission from Congress to receive these emoluments, and then proceeding on from there once Congress has rendered a decision. But we’re in an era of childish self-centeredness in the current Administration, where procedure is much akin to that used in Wonderland; Judge Daniels has merely added to the ambiance with this bit of mysterious “reasoning”.

On Lawfare Jack Goldsmith admits to perplexity about publicly identifying North Korea as the perpetrator of the WannaCry computer attack:

I’ve been trying to figure out why the U.S. government thought it was useful to attribute the “WannaCry” attack to North Korea. WannaCry was a global ransomware attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers, cost billions of dollars in damage, and compromised U.K. healthcare computers in ways that “put lives at risk.” In a Tuesday, Dec. 19 press conference following up on a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, White House Homeland Security Advisor Thomas P. Bossert proclaimed the attribution and stated that other countries and private firms agreed, although as is typical, he provided no public evidence. (The Washington Post reported six months ago that the NSA attributed WannaCry to North Korea; the United Kingdom publicly attributed the attack in October.) Bossert also bragged about the United States’ great response to the attack, which left U.S. computer systems largely unscathed. In the process, he had to dart around the embarrassing fact that the WannaCry attack was based on an exploit called “Eternal Blue” that was stolen from the NSA. (As Marcy Wheeler noted, he didn’t do a very good job.) This embarrassment might have been worth it had there been a good reason for making the attribution public. But Bossert didn’t provide a good reason.

Jack makes the mistake of thinking the domain of the announcement – cyberwarfare – defines the goals of the announcement. I don’t think it does.

The Trump Administration has been, not to put to a fine point on it, a continuous example of incompetency, chaos, and destruction, mitigated only by a non-partisan bureaucracy constructed to deliver services to the American people, and a military with which he’s been unwilling, or perhaps unable, to interfere. This announcement serves as a counter-example of competency. Keep in mind that President Trump’s greatest successes have been those in which he’s put on a show, not those where he’s delivered the goods.

This announcement is the show. This is where he proclaims, via a proxy, that he’s a success, and it’s more believable than these occasional farcical Cabinet meetings.

Sad for him, it’s also rather weak tea. But perhaps the audience doesn’t realize it.

Bilious:

1. a biology : of or relating to a yellow or greenish fluid that is secreted by the liver and that aids especially in the emulsification and absorption of fats : of or relating to bile (see bile 1b)
   b biology : marked by or suffering from liver dysfunction and especially excessive secretion of bile • a bilious attack • a bilious patient
   c : appearing as if affected by a bilious disorder • a sickly bilious face
2. : of or indicative of a peevish ill-natured disposition • bilious commentary • her bilious humor
3. : sickeningly unpleasant • the bilious weather
   • with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow —Sinclair Lewis

[Merriam-Webster]

My Arts Editor’s opinion of the inside of a holiday envelope: “Oh, it’s a bilious green!” I thought it was rather harmless.

I was a little appalled at this passage from a print-only column from the Archaeological Institute of America President Jodi Magness in Archaeology (January/February 2018):

Recently I returned from Jordan, where I was hosted by Hungarian colleague named Gyõzõ Vörös who directs excavations at Machaerus, a fortified palace of King Herod the Great that overlooks the Dead Sea. It was a Machaerus that Herod’s son Antipas had John the Baptist beheaded. During one of our visits to the site, Gyõzõ pointed to several men illegally excavating on the hill opposite, which we had surveyed the previous day. Another carload of men shadowed us, waiting until we left to begin digging. The latter group, Gyõzõ informed me, was not impoverished locals but affluent individuals who had driven from Amman in their luxury car. The trunk was loaded with hoes and other digging equipment. Both groups, however, shared a common goal: to find gold. My heart broke as we climbed around the pockmarked slopes of Machaerus and the surrounding hillsides.

One of the precepts of archaeology should be the ability to protect the finds made from illegal excavation. Perhaps this is impractical, or perhaps the scientist’s lust for knowledge (their equivalent of gold) is as much power as these local folks who lust for wealth and power, but the results are the same: irreparable damage to the archaeological record.

Concerning the damage being done to the country by the current leadership, my reader has a fascinating rejoinder:

I also refer you to this article: https://www.vox.com/…/donald-trump-plato-democracy… And also to any reference which talks about Plato’s 5 regimes. We’re headed directly for tyranny from the vestiges of our democracy.

The cited article discusses the parallels between Plato’s Republic, which is on my list of books to read that I never get to, and the rise of Trump. From the Vox article:

Plato thought political regimes followed a predictable evolutionary course, from oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. Oligarchies give way to democracies when the elites fail, when they become spoiled, lazy, profligate, and when they develop interests apart from those they rule.

Democracies give way to tyrannies when mob passion overwhelms political wisdom and a populist autocrat seizes the masses. But the tyrant is not quite a tyrant at first. On the contrary, in a democracy the would-be tyrant offers himself as the people’s champion. He’s the ultimate simplifier, the one man who can make everything whole again.

Sound familiar?

With Trump, we have a glimpse of what this sort of evolution looks like: A vulgar right-wing populism emerges out of a whirlwind of anti-establishment hysteria; a strongman fascist promises to stick it to the elites and says only he can make the country great again; he gives the people a familiar boogeyman, some alien other, on whom they can dump their resentment.

The author, Sean Illing, doesn’t push the analogy too far, I thought, and this is important because I doubt Plato would have possibly foreseen the institution of conservative talk radio or Fox News, the two most important factors in shaping the modern “conservative” through the exclusion of facts from their knowledge base – not that I mean to reference the technology, but the deliberate hobbling of significant parts of the populace by maleficent or simply self-centered citizens.

This, too, was interesting:

Oligarchies become democracies for predictable reasons: “As the rich grow richer and richer, the more they think of making a fortune and the less they think of virtue.” The inequality and corruption spread like a disease. “Democracy comes into power,” Socrates says, “when the poor are the victors, killing some and exiling some, and giving equal shares in the government to all the rest.”

Democracy, for all its charms, is said to be a poor substitute for oligarchy. It’s an “agreeable form of anarchy,” Socrates tells us. Like every other regime, a democracy collapses of its own contradictions. It’s full of freedom and spangled with every kind of liberty imaginable.

It’s a clear statement of the motivation of oligarchies, and even more importantly, we need to remember that the rise of Trump, the tyrant, reportedly is funded by the oligarchy. Again, this is outside of Plato, at least from what I can tell in this article, but it’s an important thought in that oligarchies and tyrants may co-exist, but it’s an uneasy co-existence because the base of power is confused. Who is really in control? Maybe neither. And that leads to chaos.

The article is somewhat vague on the triggers of these phase transitions, and perhaps Republic was itself. Perhaps we need to have more public conversations on the many facets of our current form of government – and why it’s superior to tyrants and oligarchies.

This guy is morose.

Before I Hang (1940) explores the researcher’s worst nightmare, the unexpected consequence. Dr. Garth is on death row because he helped a terminally ill patient, in terrible pain, kill himself. But the doctor at the penitentiary, Dr. Howard, has heard of Garth’s attempts to save that patient by inventing a serum which will stop death, and he persuades the institute’s warden to allow Garth’s research to continue, with Howard’s help.

They have one month before Garth is to be hung.

So they scurry about their business, and in the waning hours of Garth’s last night on Earth they have a serum, derived in part from the blood of an executed prisoner, that may work. Who better to test it on? Dr. Garth, scheduled to die in less than an hour. They administer the serum, take notes on how it should affect the body, and Dr. Howard will perform an autopsy to confirm their expectations.

Aaaaaaaaaaand then the phone rings. The governor has commuted Garth’s sentence to life in prison.

Garth collapses.

Next thing we know, Dr. Howard is observing that Garth appears to be aging in reverse in his hospital room, from his former age in his 60s to now his 40s. He no longer needs glasses, Even his hair is changing color. Naturally, the next test subject will be Dr. Howard himself, as he’s quite aged. But he never receives the serum, as Dr. Garth violently kills him and a prisoner who stumbles into their laboratory. Dr. Garth calls for help and collapses, and, conveniently, the dead prisoner is blamed for Howard’s death.

Garth is released from prison for his efforts towards the betterment of mankind, but all goes nauseatingly wrong, and soon he knows why: the blood taken from the nameless executed prisoner carries a taint that forces Garth to kill anyone who is a candidate for the serum. His friends start dying of strangulation, his daughter is endangered, and soon Dr. Garth dies, basically of shame.

It could have been a better movie. The various characters could have existed for reasons other than the plot. The plot could have had an interesting theme. I liked the acting and the cinematography was quite nice. So there were some good things going for it, but in the end it’s just a bit of fluff.

MPR has a fascinating report on that iconic Minnesota animal – the moose – and how it’s shrinking:

When scientists at Michigan Tech University examined the skulls of 662 moose killed by wolves over the past four decades at Isle Royale National Park, they discovered something surprising.

Over those 40 years, the size of those skulls had shrunk by 16 percent, even as the moose population on the Lake Superior island flourished, tripling in the past decade to about 1,600 this year.

The findings, published recently in the journal Global Change Biology, are part of a long-running study on the predator-prey dynamics between moose and wolves on the remote island, located about 25 miles off the tip of northeastern Minnesota.

The biggest reason researchers attributed to the decline in moose size is the increasing density of moose on the island, as the wolf population has collapsed. Researchers now say there may only be one wolf remaining on the island.

The study found that skull size was smaller for moose born in years when moose were more abundant, because more moose means less food for each animal.

Adaptation at work. I wonder how much more they have to shrink before they are considered a new species. This reminds me of the study of the pygmy mammoths of the Channel Islands of California, who also shrank down until they were roughly 1/20th the size of their ancestors.

I’m amazed at what I’m seeing. But perhaps you haven’t heard – in the recent election of a few weeks ago, several Virginia state elections went through a recount, and one went from a ten vote victory for the incumbent Republican to a one vote victory for the Democratic challenger – to a tie, on the basis of the reappraisal of a single ballot. WaPo provides a picture of it:

If you look at the top of the middle column, clearly – VERY CLEARLY – both ovals are filled in. There can be no doubt that both are filled in and thus the voter’s selection is invalidated. And if you’re going to try to divine the mind of the voter, it’d be for Simonds, the challenger.

I’m utterly appalled that this ballot is being counted for a race this close and controversial. The panel of judges should be ashamed and resign from their positions.

It’s a modern call to subtle rebellion against the ancient world of gods and stasis, for all that it hides behind a grin and a chuckle. Ghostbusters (1984) is the story of three New York City scientists who study the supernatural, beginning with reports of ghosts. Using technologically arcane instruments and tools, they capture the troublesome spirits, storing them in a custom prison, but begin catching hints of an imminent major supernatural incident.  When it breaks upon the city, they are the ones called upon to face down and destroy the ancient and savage Sumerian God Gozer.

Throughout the history of religious myths, mankind has rarely been more than a play toy for the divine multitudes, whether those are the Hindu gods, the Roman/Greco crew, those who inhabit Valhalla, or the more modern religions such as Christianity. At best, we can hope to join them if we play our cards just right. But in Ghostbusters, we see a modern take on what might be the reality of how a divine being would traditionally treat its subjects, and how we’d react, for Gozer is an unrepentant representative of the old divinities, with the attributes of arrogance, disdain, and self-confidence on full display as she makes a New York City skyscraper her gateway into the modern world.

But we can push her and her fate aside for a moment, for in more than one way this movie attacks the old model of the human plaything, and the submission to the religious hierarchies implied in that mythos. It’s rare that Gods discard their dignity and ambiance of power in the face of their human subjects. (Perhaps the Hindu god Ganesha might be an exception, although I’m not very familiar with that pantheon; another exception would be the drunken Pan of the Greek mob). But while we might excuse the excesses of the ghosts captured and restrained as nothing more than playfulness on the part of the storytellers, the depiction of the actual divinities is more important.

A sweet puppy, no? But is it a gate or a key?

For Gozer to enter the modern world, her supernatural representatives, the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster who forcefully possess the bodies of modern humans, must come together to open the way. The Gatekeeper is deliciously divine.  When possessed, she becomes a sexual hottie ready to sleep with whomever is available; but the Keymaster? He, played by comedian Rick Moranis, is a chronically ineffectual and socially awkward accountant with a grating voice who, upon becoming possessed, may have become quite powerful, but loses none of his other characteristics.  He is still ineffectual and socially tone-deaf. It’s only through luck that he finds the Gatekeeper and gets to do, well, whatever it is when a key meets a  lock that holds a divinely mad creature at bay.

But it’s also worth taking a look at the scientists, who are distinctly non-stereotypical. Recently kicked out of their university jobs, and thus deprived of funding, they are forced to turn to the commercialization of their recently conceived technology, capturing those ghosts who trouble the living and restraining them in a powerful laser grid. While the initial three all hold doctorates, their leader, Dr. Venkman, might be considered the Everyman, and is the hero of the movie – not so much because of what he does, but because of who he is, a man full of hormones who doesn’t bother to conceal it, a cowboy ready to chase the ghosts without restraint, even if without understanding. As such, he is very much an anti-expert, and his success at his work might be attributed as much to his trying as to his knowledge – which appears spotty. His fellow scientists, perhaps more accomplished, are somewhat less distinctive characters. (It occurs to me to wonder how Ghostbusters would have done had it been paced much like Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), with its long, significant pauses and slow dialog delivery.)

But their opponents are not confined to the supernatural realm. A representative of the EPA shows up, demanding access to their work. Much like the priests of old, the scientists’ denial of his demands spark a self-righteous anger and a mad belief that the official can do no wrong.  When he shuts off the power to their ghost-prison, causing not only a release of ghosts, but the near-destruction of the building, he denies all responsibility and doubles down at his game. It’s clear that he represents the old clerical hierarchy at its haughty, offended worst, and I suspect is a hint of what was to come for the Catholic Church: humiliation at the long-delayed revelations concerning pedophilia and its coverup, and the destruction of its Irish branch. Just as the EPA agent does not come to a happy ending, nor do those in the religious hierarchy in real-life.

But now let us return to Gozer, because the mocking of this divinity, and divinities in general, comes in three ways.

First, her aforementioned attributes of arrogance, disdain, and over-weening self-confidence are a slap and a reminder to the audience that divinities have rarely treated humanity well, assuming the former ever existed. This makes sense.  Gods are created in order to explain the world.  A world of ease and comfort needs little explanation, but a world of famine, disease, and war; the death of  the innocent and the sudden destruction of cities and civilizations by the hand of man or Nature, these need explanations – and those explanations need not be pretty. A child-killer isn’t a nice God, no matter which pantheon you favor.

Second, the gibes of our movie’s heroes, the defenders of humanity, reflect the sensibilities of the era in which the movie was made. It’s a deliberate reminder of the self-centeredness of humanity and how the supposed eternal moralities of the divine, which include the divine’s supremacy, prove to be inferior to the technology of humanity. One might say that this is a optimistic jab at religious orders and their ever-unseen divinities.

It’s Mr. Stay Puft to you!

Third, and I scarcely need to mention it, but transforming the visually impressive Gozer into the monstrous “Stay Puft Marshmallow Man” for a rampage through New York City is a mockery difficult to exceed.  Upon Gozer’s destruction, a white slime (a sly dig at manna?) rains down upon a citizenry rapturous with victory over this God.  It would be a delicious moment if it weren’t for the slime in everyone’s hair.

Think about that for a moment. A victory over a God – a God bent upon exercising her usual privileges, much to the disservice of humanity. It gives the audience hope, I should think.

All that said, Ghostbusters suffers from some brittleness, much like that of British movies of a certain era, and the special effects are spotty. But the story is fairly organic, with interesting dialog and plot twist choices, particularly for Dr. Venkmann, whose lust for the lady soon to be the Gatekeeper is a lot of fun, especially when he must admit to his fellows that, after an unfortunate transformation, she is a dog.

Not a god.

Taken just as a fun movie, it’s OK. Thinking about how it plays with the religious sensibilities of millions of Americans? A lot more fun.

Enjoy!