Monthly Archives: December 2017

Andrew Sullivan on President Trump:

In his speech last Wednesday night in Missouri, for example, he claimed that his tax proposal was the biggest tax cut in history (not even close); that it was “going to cost me a fortune, this thing, believe me … I have some very wealthy friends. Not so happy with me, but that’s okay” (an absolute inversion of reality); and that the stock market had been flat before his presidency (the Dow was at 7,000 when Obama came to office and 20,000 when he left).

Or cast your eyes back a few days and consider his condemnation of various sexual abusers and harassers (such as Al Franken and Matt Lauer). Why on earth would someone who has been personally accused by a dozen women of sexual assault get on his high horse with respect to others? Because in his own mind, he never committed assault. Every single woman who accused him really is a liar and the tape that recorded his bragging of assault was in fact as faked as Obama’s birth certificate. And this is not the only indelible delusion we discover he still clings to. He believes — alone among the leaders of every single other country — that climate change is a Chinese hoax, even as the Chinese, for some unfathomable reason, invest heavily in renewable energy; he is adamant that Russia did not meddle in the U.S. elections last year and that the U.S. intelligence community is lying about it or full of “hacks.” He believes that every poll that shows him as unpopular is fake; and that virtually everything the mainstream media reports about his administration is fabricated.

And this is the result of building your entire identity on your success, to the n^th degree. For Trump, reality is a tertiary concern, to be repressed when it interferes with his perception of success.

To me, one’s first allegiance should be to reality, the truth. Which is why I find myself so much alienated from the GOP than the Democrats these days.

The Magnificent Seven (1960) is not your average Western film. The story of seven gunslingers hired to guard a Mexican village against a group of bandits, it pulls back the romantic reputation of the gunslinger to reveal its hollow, desolate core. Each of the Seven has a story to tell, from the young wannabe, searching for a reputation and the prestige to go with it in order to rise out of his humble beginnings, to the has-been, tormented by nightmares of not being good enough, to the leader and his number 2, both sadly aware that no place has a hold on them, no woman waits for them, there are no children to care for.

It’s this awareness of a hollow at core of their existence, perhaps, that permits this movie to open with a funeral scene – or, more properly, the trip to the burial site. A man has died of a heart attack, his funeral expenses have been kindly paid for by a stranger, and the undertaker reports all is ready on Boot Hill.

Except for the small group of men who object to an Indian being buried on Boot Hill.

Chris and Vin volunteer to take the body in, showing off their pinpoint shooting skills by shooting one man’s gun out of his hand, and another in the arm, and successfully taking the body to his final resting place. But why? Why not, perhaps? Or perhaps they’ve discarded that prejudice that so many early settlers had against the Indian, discarded it because of their own bleak future.

So when three villagers show up, looking for help against the 40 or so bandits who demand tribute from their village, Chris takes on the job, recruiting Vin and the others, each coming for their own reason, from the wannabe to the man still looking for the big score, which he’s convinced is somewhere in the mountains of the village, to the has-been, a quiet cipher who may be looking for redemption – or the final way out.

Once at the village, they direct the villagers in building defenses. Each step is careful to show the inner lives of the men, such as when they realize the villagers are giving them the best food and subsisting on a few beans a day – the Seven then turn around and host a feast using the food, making sure everyone is well-fed, if only for that night.

When the bandits show up, all hell breaks loose – but now we’re invested in these Seven, along with the villagers. They win the first battle, but when the second ends in their disadvantage, some would say they were lucky to walk away with their lives. Why do they return to the third and final battle? To rescue the villagers? To salve their wounded pride?

To do right? To fill, for a moment, that hollow core?

Strongly Recommended.

Andrew Sullivan celebrates the British royals’ influence on society:

One note in favor of the monarchy. I’m an unabashedly Tory royalist. This is not because I have anti-democratic impulses (if I’d stayed in Britain and at some point been offered some kind of aristocratic title, like many of my friends in the elite, I would refuse it on principle). And it’s not even because I love royal news and gossip. It bores me to tears. It’s because I see the enormous value, especially in these tribal times, of institutions that can unite people with each other and with the past. The British monarchy brilliantly performs both functions. The country is currently bent on an act of economic suicide in its pathetic attempt to leave the E.U.; it is riven by the same tribal divides as America; it has an identity crisis around race, religion, and even the boundaries of its own territory. But everyone loves the Queen. When she dies, the nation will fall silent. She is the living embodiment of that Burkean idea of a national compact between the generations, past, present and future. She gives an apolitical meaning to being British. I remember vividly watching Netflix’s The Crown in the wake of Trump’s victory. Queen Elizabeth II represented the polar opposite of President-elect Trump. Utterly self-effacing for decades, stable, rational, devoted to protocol, insistent on political neutrality, devoting her entire life to constant service, she is, in some ways, a living rebuke to the polarizing, showboating American presidency we now have to endure.

The contrast of Queen Elizabeth II and President Trump neglects one important challenge: when the Queen dies, how do you know her replacement, whether it’s son or grandson, will have her virtues? History is full of monstrous Kings and Queens, and in fact that’s some of the motivation for the American form of government.

I want to say the antidote is composite institutions, such as Congress, but recent experience has cast doubt on that assertion. Perhaps the most that you can say is that even if a majority of the institution has been perverted, they do remain individuals capable of random, even honorable acts. As each has individual ambition, they may occasionally neglect their sad, un-American allegiance to Party and whoever controls that Party.

Occasionally.

So long as we have institutions of power, we may suffer through periods like this.

Perfervid:

adjective
extremely fervid; ardent [Collins English Dictionary]

Noted in “America Is Trapped in Trump’s Delusional World,” Andrew Sullivan, New York:

At its center is mental illness. It radiates out of the center like a toxin in the blood. And this, again, is nothing new. On Trump’s first day in office, with respect to the size of his inauguration crowd, he insisted that what was demonstrably, visibly, incontrovertibly false was actually true. At that moment, we learned that all the lies and exaggerations and provocations of the previous year were not just campaign tools, designed to con and distract, but actually constitutive of his core mental health. He was not lying, as lying is usually understood. He was expressing what he believed to be true, because his ego demanded it be true. And for Trump, as we now know, there is no reality outside his own perfervidly narcissistic consciousness.

A lovely word. The context of the United States electing this chump, however, makes me ill at my heart.

They say I look good as a porcupine.

The best way to describe the genre of Kung Fu Hustle (2004) is as a cartoon come to life. For the movie’s director, Stephen Chow, the laws of physics are mere play things for characters whose actions and natures are amplified by Chow’s special effects team, frequently using ideas borrowed from cartoons. Running involves the classic spinning legs of the Coyote from the Roadrunner cartoons; fights can move at ludicrous speeds; and when the fat lady sings, look out.

But these are not merely affectations to mark the movie as novel, but also serve to notify the audience of the moral dimensions of this movie, because this is a movie that disputes the notion that there is little connection between the behaviors, or morals, of a person, and his capabilities as a fighter. For example, every time the hero of the story attempts an evil act, he fails spectacularly. No, catastrophically. His own weapons wound him, he is detected and pursued, escaping only through happy happenstance. He’s never committed arson, murder, rape, or anything else – despite a stated intent to do so. Rebuffed at every turn, his most evil attainment may be his pick-lock skills, which save his and his partner’s life when he’s about to be executed by the very gang in which he covets membership.

These tricks highlight a plot of some intricacy and anticipation that has playful references to other movies, some of which I’m sure I missed. But the running theme is how there is always a sufficiently skilled fighter for good to defeat the almost magical powers of the kung fu master for evil. And if some magical Chinese thinking is necessary to bring forth the final fighter for good, so be it, for he’s been with us all along, and simply needed to be released from the chrysalis that had constrained him.

My Arts Editor may not care for this movie, but if you don’t mind some bright whimsy – no, a lot of whimsy – and a hidden smile behind almost every scene, then this movie is Recommended.

It appears that anytime the ‘I’ word comes out, the American public perks up, shakes its head sadly, and discounts the Trump Administration, as we can see in the Gallup Presidential Approval poll. With a 33% approval rating, President Trump has achieved a new low, while the 62% disapproval rating ties a high.

If we just look at these numbers, it appears Trump is in trouble – but how long will these numbers persist or even worsen? The Manafort indictment resulted in a similar reaction, only to recover shortly thereafter.

So I’m hesitant to actually read much into these numbers. Now, if Trump’s approval rating were to reach 30%, then I’d grant a permanent effect, but at the moment, it’s more like a shock to the system, causing one’s hair to stand on end before the cardiac arrest returns.

And in the end, how much does this affect Speaker Ryan? In his hands are the ability to start the impeachment process, and so far he hasn’t shown any willingness to use it. Honestly, it’s hard to say if his loyalty to the Party leader is greater than his loyalty to the country, or if in his opinion there’s not enough evidence to justify impeachment – despite Trump’s increasingly dangerous and incomprehensible ways.

Stay tuned, I’ll be interested in tomorrow’s numbers – although I expect a recovery for President Trump.

Benjamin Wittes and a small team of his colleagues present a first cut at interpreting the implications of the Flynn indictment on Lawfare. Among the many takeaways:

The most important revelation here is that contrary to [Trump’s attorny, Ty] Cobb’s statement Friday morning, Flynn is saying clearly that he was not a rogue actor but was operating at the behest of the presidential transition team. He states that a “very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team,” a “senior official of the Presidential Transition Team” and “senior members of the Presidential Transition Team” were involved in directing his actions. The stipulated facts also make clear that Flynn reported back to the transition on his conversations with Kislyak.

Second, take a moment to remember the context in which Flynn’s underlying conduct took place: He and apparently the Trump transition team were working to undermine U.S. foreign policy goals endorsed by both parties. In December 2016, President Obama authorized sanctions against Russia in response to cyber-enabled election interference. He did so with broad bipartisan support to deter such activity in the future against the U.S. and its allies. The shared bipartisan—even nonpartisan—goal was to protect foundational elements of democracy and legitimacy. To the extent that there was mainstream criticism of the action, it was for being too weak, not for being too aggressive with respect to Russia.

And so Flynn is just part of the team, which means there will be more indictments. Will this Greek tragedy come to an end, or is Trump going to try to ride this right into the side of a mountain? I’m guessing his ego won’t let him resign and let the nation get on to the task of healing – we’ll have to endure some sort of impeachment, even possibly a criminal trial.

It’s an interesting article, seeing how experienced lawyers interpret a plea agreement in one of the most unusual contexts in American history – the investigation of a Presidential campaign and even Administration.

Andrew McCarthy on National Review prefers to see corruption in the Obama Administration:

Obviously, it was wrong of Flynn to give the FBI false information; he could, after all, have simply refused to speak with the agents in the first place. That said, as I argued early this year, it remains unclear why the Obama Justice Department chose to investigate Flynn. There was nothing wrong with the incoming national-security adviser’s having meetings with foreign counterparts or discussing such matters as the sanctions in those meetings. Plus, if the FBI had FISA recordings of Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak, there was no need to ask Flynn what the conversations entailed.

Flynn, an early backer of Donald Trump and a fierce critic of Obama’s national-security policies, was generally despised by Obama administration officials. Hence, there has always been cynical suspicion that the decision to interview him was driven by the expectation that he would provide the FBI with an account inconsistent with the recorded conversation — i.e., that Flynn was being set up for prosecution on a process crime.

While initial reporting is portraying Flynn’s guilty plea as a major breakthrough in Mueller’s investigation of potential Trump-campaign collusion with the Russian regime, I suspect the opposite is true.

Speculation that Flynn is now cooperating in Mueller’s investigation stirred in recent days due to reports that Flynn had pulled out of a joint defense agreement (or “common interest” arrangement) to share information with other subjects of the investigation. As an ethical matter, it is inappropriate for an attorney whose client is cooperating with the government (or having negotiations toward that end) to continue strategizing with, and having quasi-privileged communications with, other subjects of the investigation and their counsel.

Nevertheless, as I explained in connection with George Papadopoulos (who also pled guilty in Mueller’s investigation for lying to the FBI), when a prosecutor has a cooperator who was an accomplice in a major criminal scheme, the cooperator is made to plead guilty to the scheme. This is critical because it proves the existence of the scheme. In his guilty-plea allocution (the part of a plea proceeding in which the defendant admits what he did that makes him guilty), the accomplice explains the scheme and the actions taken by himself and his co-conspirators to carry it out. This goes a long way toward proving the case against all of the subjects of the investigation.

McCarthy seems to ignore the possibility that Mueller may select a different strategy than McCarthy sees and interprets. He also forgets that Flynn may be protecting his own son, Mike, Jr., who is thought to also have been a part of this scandal – although he’s not charged. He may function as extra leverage for Mueller.

Here’s the choices given to the survivors of the spaceship Shenandoah, located on the Saturnian moon Titan:

1. Try to salvage stuff from some unnamed alien ship, which just happens to be a charnel ship.
2. Try to fix the Shenandoah, which is unfixable, and is about to become a charnel ship.
3. Try to take an unnamed German ship off the surface and return home. BTW, this is a charnel ship.

And they thought it was part of a butterfly collection!

An unhappy choice for the survivors, a shrinking number, in the movie Creature (1985). The remains of a ship – I think – are found on Titan by the crew of a ship owned by the corporation NTI, and as the researchers / archaeologists / crew (again not sure) are in the midst of trying to document it, something comes popping out of one of the containers they’re puzzling over.

A few hours / days / months later, an unknown ship apparently piloted by one of the crew crashes into a manned satellite in orbit around Earth. Why? Uh, I’m not sure.

So now, of course, another ship, the Shenandoah, is sent by NTI to see what might be there. On getting there, they find a ship owned by their chief competitors, Richter Dynamics, or RD for short, is there. The commander of the mission, a corporate flack, orders an immediate landing over the objections of the Captain, with no research as to the best place to land, and moments after landing, Shenandoah bursts through the crust and the ship is effectively disabled.

Well, after this it gets messy, what with bodies hidden in cupboards (the monster is apparently related to squirrels), dead bodies springing to life, a German survivor who has a thing for the tall, silent security officer who hasn’t an effective weapon, and, well, a lot of screaming.

It was fairly awful.

If it sounds a little like the classic Alien (1979), I assure you this felt like a thin ripoff, from the plot to the persistent fog on the surface of the moon, even the landing reminded me of the Nostromo landing sequence.

But not nearly as good. Just like the rest of this movie. Don’t waste your time.

When they build them (or specify them, since private industry builds them), NASA builds them to last:

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Voyager spacecraft against a backdrop of stars.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA scientists needed to reorient the 40-year-old Voyager 1 — the space agency’s farthest spacecraft — so its antenna would point toward Earth, 13 billion miles away. But the “attitude control thrusters,” the first option to make the spacecraft turn in space, have been wearing out.

So NASA searched for a Plan B, eventually deciding to try using four “trajectory correction maneuver” (TCM) thrusters, located on the back side of Voyager 1. But those thrusters had not been used in 37 years. NASA wasn’t sure they’d work.

Tuesday, engineers fired up the thrusters and waited eagerly to find out whether the plan was successful. They got their answer 19 hours and 35 minutes later, the time it took for the results to reach Earth: The set of four thrusters worked perfectly. The spacecraft turned and the mood at NASA shifted to jubilation.

“The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all,” said Todd Barber, a propulsion engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. [CNN]

Wow!

An old friend has sent me an article by Brent Bozell concerning the sexual harassment problems at the long-time American institutions NPR and PBS:

The swift revolution against sexual harassment is ending the careers of a series of media “icons,” left and right. But perhaps nowhere is this hypocrisy more notable (and deeper) than at PBS and NPR. These were the entities that made sexual harassment the boiling feminist issue when Anita Hill testified during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing in 1991.

Here’s an easy question: Why didn’t this sudden spirit of self-discovery and investigation happen back then? Or in any year since? It could have happened when then-President Bill Clinton settled with Paula Jones in 1998, or even last year as these networks enjoyed reporting on sexual harassment scandals inside Fox News. All along the way, it appears that very same sexual harassment was alive at both PBS and NPR.

I’ll just interrupt the tirade to note that this is a very typical rant. PBS and NPR have been long time targets of the right-wing due to both content and the fact that they’re funded through taxes, one of the evils of government. More importantly, though, is that leadoff statement:  “These were the entities that made sexual harassment the boiling feminist issue when Anita Hill testified during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing in 1991.” This assertion is provided without proof, and, in actual fact, this would be exceptionally difficult to prove or disprove. Brent slips it in as a way to ratchet up the emotional content of the article, and he wants that for a very specific reason.

After a series of shots at the current shooting gallery members, Brent finishes:

In what way, then, is “public” broadcasting morally superior to corporate broadcasting? And how deep is the hypocrisy on the left considering it waited decades to hold sexual harassers in its own taxpayer-funded ideological sandboxes accountable? They don’t deserve one more red cent from taxpaying Americans.

And did you catch the sleight of hand? He’s tried to suggest that public funding is all about paying the salaries of sexual harassers.

Well, no. We all know that’s false, we just need to be reminded that PBS and NPR missions have nothing to do with hypocrisy, they have to do with public service. The fact that powerful men and women^[1] may use their positions for morally dubious purposes is not confined to any one ideology, although some do not condemn it or may even celebrate it (not common in the American milieu, though). We see it at Fox News, NBC, and it seems positively rife in religious settings – although I’m sure an intellectually honest measurement would show it to be sparse.

But the proper response is to correct the situation, not to indulge in an impulsive termination of the entire enterprise, and that’s what we’re seeing – powerful people being fired. The enterprise should be judged on how well it fulfills its mission, and how important that mission is to the nation. Note that the question of sexual harassment does have an impact on the performance of the mission, because sexual harassment has a negative impact on the productivity of those who are victimized. An organization demoralized by a boss whose proclivities are not properly restrained will not be a successful organization.

Also, note Brent’s intellectual dishonesty of implying “the left” even knew about these offenders in their midst. It would be equally dishonest for me to suggest that the fans (or former fans) of Bill O’Reilly, ex-employee of Fox News and host of their “O’Reilly Factor,” the most popular cable show for 16 years, were aware that he was a serial sexual harasser, and Fox News had actually made substantial payoffs to settle lawsuits resulting from his behavior, and they continued to watch regardless because they all approved. No, of course they didn’t know, because the entire sexual harassment phenomenon embarrasses the victims, and then if they do lodge complaints, they’re going up against people in powerful positions who can make their lives quite difficult. By the same token, “the left” has no general knowledge that some leader X is actually a sexual harasser.

Bozell should be ashamed that he wrote that sentence.

I’ll also note in passing his mistaken conflation of “the left” with PBS and NPR. The fact of the matter is that all of us pay, or have paid, taxes, and that gives all of us a stake in these enterprises. If they appear “liberal” to viewers of a conservative bent, this may be more indicative of the state of the world than the ideological mindset within these institutions.

Up to here, this is just a simple close reading of Bozell’s prose and being sensitive to the use of emotional currents to cover up intellectual weakness. But now I want to address one more point, using one of my hobby horses that’s been out to pasture for a while. Long time readers are aware of my analysis of the sectors of society, which boils down to realizing that categorizing our various sectors also reveals their differing goals, and how those goals necessarily affect the selection and optimization of processes for achieving those goals – and explains why attempting to import one sector’s processes into another sector is an intellectually suspect project, also known as “elected business leader Y because he has leadership experience.” And then he flops (with some exceptions). Interested readers should click here.

Brent asks,

In what way, then, is “public” broadcasting morally superior to corporate broadcasting?

Of course, firmly fixed in the pliant reader’s mind is the entire sexual harassment episodes, linked to hypocrisy, and how surely this compromises the entire “left” – a position I think is quite weak. But implied in that is a right-wing frustration that the private-sector model of news reporting is always considered a little suspect when compared with public broadcasting.

First, we need to understand the importance of accurate news and information dissemination in our society. We function and do well on good information; we misfire, we make poor decisions, we elect bad leaders, when we have poor quality information.

The processes and goals of our news sector should be bringing the best quality news and information to its viewers, uncontaminated by political and commercial concerns. That is the ideal. The roles of competition, innovation, delivery modes, gathering modes are interesting but irrelevant here. A key problem is that the viewing audience should reward those who do this task best, but that requires rationality from a species that is only capable of rationality, but is not rational itself.

So? Corporations have financial, political and commercial interests that can, and sometimes do, contaminate the information that reaches the audience. I’ve commented before on the ongoing disaster which is Fox News, and Bruce Bartlett’s analysis of same. Another example, which may become worse if the government neglects its role in preventing and dismantling monopolies, is the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is trying to buy Tribune Media and thereby gain a dominant position in the market – and stifle competition. How are they contaminating information? From The New York Times (which might be considered a competitor, but has a long and honorable history in the news sector):

They are called “must-runs,” and they arrive every day at television stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group — short video segments that are centrally produced by the company. Station managers around the country are directed to work them into the broadcast over a period of 24 or 48 hours.

Since November 2015, Sinclair has ordered its stations to run a daily segment from a “Terrorism Alert Desk” with updates on terrorism-related news around the world. During the election campaign last year, it sent out a package that suggested in part that voters should not support Hillary Clinton because the Democratic Party was historically pro-slavery. More recently, Sinclair asked stations to run a short segment in which Scott Livingston, the company’s vice president for news, accused the national news media of publishing “fake news stories.”

Yes, because a news company is qualified to issue “terror alerts”. Nothing like amplifying the bad news and minimizing the good news in order to keep your audience cowed and compliant, eh? Compliant for what? Voting the way SBG wants.

So how does this connect to Brent’s plaint? Funding sources. Corporate broadcasting is necessarily tied to a company, which, to reiterate, will have commercial, financial, political, even religious desires – because corporations are motivated to deliver good news, but to make money, whether it be directly, or by manipulating the audience into doing what’s desired.

But public broadcasting? Readers who believe the funding is direct might complain that it, too, is susceptible to political influence – which is why the funding goes through a separate entity, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, thus insulating them from the strong political taint that might otherwise apply. Not that this will stop the determined leader at NPR or PBS from possibly tainting their productions – but that is not the mission, and employees will let that be known, as they appear to be a dedicated bunch.

And corporate broadcasters know the importance of appearing to be bringing you the best news. Consider Fox News‘ recently retired “Fair and Balanced” motto – anything but, but bought into by an audience eager to hear what it desired to hear, rather than what might be true but unpleasant. NBC, ABC, and CBS all have put together strong news rooms throughout the years, and exhibit journalism prizes and awards with pride and joy, for both journalistic and corporate reasons. A corporation is not staffed only with corporatists, but by specialists such as journalists.

Ditto the newspapers to varying degrees.

In a perfect world, the news sector would not have to intermingle with the private sector, and would produce news and information without contamination from those corporate interests, but that’s not the world we live in. The public funding of NPR and PBS is an attempt to inject some independence into a sector otherwise flooded with corporate intrusions and potential contaminations. By their very existence they are a reproach to the corporate broadcasters and publications who have failed the test of the ideal news sector, sometimes purposely. And, thus, the right’s anger – the reproach stings when one believes the private sector can do no wrong.

But the private sector is not the cure for all ills.

[h/t Greg Edmonds]

¹While no women have yet been caught up in this nation-wide scandal, Disclosure (1994) is a graphic reminder that women may abuse their positions, too.

Back in the old days, when “personal computers” were just starting to come out, the epithet hackers had positive connotations, and I suppose I was one of them, although I never sought the label, or much of any label. Since then it evolved to more negative connotations, although those who think of themselves as hackers will often disagree.

But now it may be returning to its roots in the guise of bio-hacking, where the skilled try to modify genomes for their individual purposes. It started out with the genomes of simple creatures, but with the development and availability of CRISPR technology, which permits editing genomes with few errors and fairly cheaply, bigger game can be tackled with confidence.

Such as ourselves.

NewScientist (18 November 2017, paywall) notes the growing controversy over the ethics of, well, self-editing a genome – that is, modifying your own gene-set. It’s unsettling a lot of people:

These biohackers believe it is a basic human right to access and edit one’s own genome. “I am of the opinion that your genome is your own,” says [bio-hacker David] Ishee. “I think that it is important that people have the ability to choose what kind of gene expression they want for themselves.”

This ethos of “my body, my choice” is used to underpin arguments for health, reproductive and disability rights, but should it extend to the right to edit our own genes? What about the potential unintended effects of using untested technology? And will allowing broad access to CRISPR risk creating a group of “superhumans” with enhanced senses and abilities? …

These are some of the many issues that have plagued scientists and ethicists for years. Recent papers from the US National Academies and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the UK have attempted to grapple with these questions, including whether there is a moral difference between gene editing for medical therapy versus enhancing ordinary abilities.

John Harris, a bioethicist at the University of Manchester, UK, who has written about human enhancement since the 1980s, does not believe there is a significant difference. He thinks the biohackers could help move the arguments along and hasten the safe use of CRISPR in humans.

“There is a long and noble history of both doctors and scientists experimenting on themselves,” says Harris. “It has proven tremendously valuable in the public interest.” …

And what if “the next guy” is a future Olympic medallist? The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced last month that it would ban all forms of gene therapy or gene doping from international competitive sports from 2018. However, it’s unlikely that international testers will be able to detect most forms of gene editing, and with all the free-flowing information about various experimental enhancements, it seems even less likely that WADA will be able to enforce this ban. “WADA is a joke,” says Ishee.

Günes Taylor, who also works with CRISPR at the Francis Crick Institute in London, says she is conflicted by these home-brew experiments.

“Part of me is, like, ‘that is so awesome’… but it won’t work,” she says, insisting it will be more difficult than the biohackers think. “CRISPR has been sold as a cure-all… but actually getting it to do the thing that you want it to do successfully is more complicated.”

The article is somewhat more muddled than need be, dancing around the ethics controversy without ever getting a good balance of dueling views. Still, the muddling itself suggests that the ideology of individual autonomy – for which I have a lot of sympathy – is the rock over which a lot of folks are stumbling.

I don’t have an answer, since I’m not a specialist in this technology, but I think a re-think of ethics might be helpful, along with some questions that might illuminate the way.

So, not one to let my lack of training stand in the way of opening my mouth, ethics. Ethics discusses, at its core, how people ought to conduct themselves, which can be mostly seen as how we interface with each other – honestly, dishonestly, with flowers or with knives in our hands. There is, implicitly, a goal of having a peaceful society.

But why a peaceful society? Briefly, it’s about survival. Think of society as an engine; a society with ethics that lead to harmonious relations between its members can be thought of as a well-oiled machine quietly humming along; a society in which relations are acrimonious is the machine which is starved of oil and off-balance. In the latter case, as time passes the machine’s performance degrades, until pieces are flying through the air and its hostile neighbors dismember it.

So when we’re talking about individual conduct that does not directly interface with other individuals – which is a good representation of this situation – it becomes valid to ask whether the behavior of the bio-hackers might harm society as a whole. Here are some questions which might guide the answers.

1. Is it possible for a bio-hacker to change oneself, without regard to intent, such that one is an implicit, physical danger to others? Not being a biologist, I can only wonder, as a single example, as to whether the virus DNA found in the human genome could be accidentally set to, say, manufacturing some deadly illness that can be easily spread. Sound dumb? Sure. But reassure me. I’m just a dumb hacker.
2. I can easily accept bio-hacking when attempting to repair a deficiency in oneself, by which I mean some capability of survival value which most members of the species has. Here is one example. But what is the likelihood that substantive improvements can be attained beyond the above-average member of human society? Can we really expect to double the strength of our strongest current members without substantial damage to other physical faculties? Improve our IQs beyond 300, if that even means anything? If vast improvements seem unlikely, then perhaps the question is moot, and autonomy may be left undisturbed.
3. But if the answer to (2) is yes, then we must ask, can society survive with the capabilities of certain of its members so far beyond the capabilities of others that it might as well be two different species? Or will that rip the society apart into hostile constituents? While the bio-hacker may argue that individual autonomy trumps such concerns as the latter seem trivial, I’d suggest that our profound interdependence, which we so often ignore, puts everyone at great risk if society starts ripping itself apart – a torn, broken society will soon drown in its own wastes, if it doesn’t die of starvation itself.
4. All that said, what if some competing society – say, Russia – made bio-hacking the national past time? What sort of risks do we then face?

Got others? Let me know.

If you’ve been depressed by these appointments to the Federal bench, remember these come with the caveat – no misbehavior. WaPo has a report on a State judge – yeah, it’s different, but the same principle applies – who fouled up:

A juvenile and domestic relations judge in southwest Virginia was removed from the bench Monday by the Virginia Supreme Court, effective immediately, after he admitted contacting two key witnesses in a pending federal corruption case against his wife.

Kurt J. Pomrenke, 64, was elected to the bench in 2013 to oversee juvenile and domestic court cases in Washington and Smyth counties and Bristol City along the Virginia-Tennessee border. He is only the second Virginia judge in the past 23 years to be removed by the state Supreme Court, court records show, with the other being a juvenile and domestic judge who resolved some visitation issues with a coin flip.

Pomrenke also has been found guilty of contempt of court by a federal judge in Bristol in connection with his wife’s case and on Thursday was sentenced to two months in prison and ordered to pay the maximum allowable fine of $1,000. His wife, Stacey Pomrenke, a former chief financial officer of Bristol Virginia Utilities, is serving a 34-month prison sentence on multiple charges of conspiracy, extortion and wire fraud, as well as contempt of court, in part for her husband’s contact with potential witnesses in the case.

The point being, fouling up like this will get you lifted right off any bench – and you can just bet some of these brand new judges are going to let their worst urges get the best of them, because that’s what often happens with the GOP.

Not that it’ll be enough to save the nation, but it’ll provide some nice schadenfreude.

Trammel:

1. (trammels) literary Restrictions or impediments to freedom of action. ‘we will forge our own future, free from the trammels of materialism’
2. A three-layered dragnet, designed so that a fish entering through one of the large-meshed outer sections will push part of the finer-meshed central section through the large meshes on the further side, forming a pocket in which the fish is trapped.
3. An instrument consisting of a board with two grooves intersecting at right angles, in which the two ends of a beam compass can slide to draw an ellipse.
4. US A hook in a fireplace for a kettle.

[Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “On Waiving the Jerusalem Embassy Act (or Not),” Scott R. Anderson and Yishai Schwartz, Lawfare:

The Clinton administration, however, raised strong objections while this legislation was  debated. From a policy perspective, this debate was happening shortly after the celebrated Taba Agreement wherein Israel and the Palestinians had just agreed on interim governance arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza. Hope was high that this momentum would lead to a lasting peace, and the Clinton administration arguedthat a “premature focus on Jerusalem” could “undermine negotiations and complicate the chances for peace[.]” The Clinton administration also maintained that section 3(b) of the act was unconstitutional, asserting in a memorandum by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that “the Constitution vests the President with the exclusive authority to conduct the Nation’s diplomatic relations with other States[,]” including recognition matters, and that “Congress cannot trammel the President’s constitutional authority to conduct the Nation’s foreign affairs and to recognize foreign governments by directing the relocation of an embassy” through limitations on funds. On both grounds, the Clinton administration threatened to veto.