Yearly Archives: 2018

On Treehugger, Ilana Strauss wonders whether we’re fitting into the Universe – or just pushing everyone else off-stage:

In his books “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” Israeli world history professor Yuval Noah Harari points out that human spiritualism has gone through a series of stages. While humans were hunter-gatherers, people stuck to animism — a belief that humans, animals, plants, rocks and everything else has a soul and is an important player in the grand story of life.

As humans started practicing agriculture, the human world stopped being about animals and become more about humans and their crops. Polytheism and monotheism ushered in an era of humans and gods. Animals were relegated to the sidelines. Now that religion is fading, gods are disappearing too, and humans are alone, kings of an empty castle. Welcome to humanism.

“The world was now a one-man show,” wrote Harari. “Humankind stood alone on an empty stage, talking to itself, negotiating with no one and acquiring enormous powers without any obligations. Having deciphered the mute laws of physics, chemistry and biology, humankind now does with them as it pleases. When an archaic hunter went out to the savannah, he asked the help of the wild bull, and the bull demanded something of the hunter. When an ancient farmer wanted his cows to produce lots of milk, he asked some great heavenly god for help, and the god stipulated his conditions. When the white-coated staff in Nestlé’s Research and Development department want to increase dairy production, they study genetics – and the genes don’t ask for anything in return.”

Here’s my question: If humans think we’re the only relevant things in the universe, what’s to stop us from dehumanizing everyone else?

Generally, a bigger bully.

While I understand Ilana is dismayed by how we treat other species, and I tend to be as well, I’m more than a little wary of her reference to Harari. I cannot help but think of the American Indian’s buffalo runs (a little research suggests that buffalo jump may be the preferred term), in which entire herds of buffalo were guided over cliffs for slaughter. The past was not a Golden Age, and it’s a common error to assign better qualities to more primitive people than they have earned.

It’s worth considering that the difference between today’s people and yesterday’s people lay not in their wisdom or lack thereof, but in their capability for destruction. Even sending a buffalo herd over a cliff doesn’t compare to opening a manufacturing plant with some sort of toxic pollution spewing into a river or lake that your children happen to enjoy using for swimming.

And we can do that with a little simple-minded planning & a bit of trivial construction work.

So the question becomes, if we handed an aboriginal people the same power as we currently possess, would they really be all that much wiser using it?

PS Add overpopulation to the mix as well.

Readers remark on my review of Magellan (2017) and semi-related subjects:

We watched it last night, and mostly liked it. There were a few hard to explain or “buy” actions taken, but mostly it was an interesting movie.

Yes. The focus on a single character, with a couple of foils to keep him going, made it easy to throw up some interesting questions and answers, while highlighting the sacrifices he and his wife (or perhaps just his wife) are making.

Tonight we watched “Cowboys and Aliens” — no kidding. Have you seen this? It’s not nearly as bad as title might suggest. There’s a bit of horror, and bit less of SF thrown in, but mostly it’s action, a western and an episode of the X Files with several kinds of love stories thrown together in a blender, yet somehow still makes for a sensible and entertaining watch.

I saw Cowboys and Aliens (2011) back when it was on the big screen. I believe I remember enjoying it, being a little disappointed in it, but have seen far, far worse.

Another reading comments on Cowboys and Aliens:

Saw it in the theater and loved it. Will have to watch again. I love this type of humor-injected ridiculous adventure film. (See Hercules & Xena)😊

I was a fan of Hercules and Xena way back when. Silly, silly, silly. Watched some of Andromeda Ascendant when Sorbo (Hercules) started up that series.

Of course, if you were a fan of Cleopatra 2525 and have the series on DVD and treasure it, then I know you’re very silly.

I have it on DVD, but I don’t treasure it. Precisely.

On Order From Chaos, Tamara Cofman Wittes pushes back against the attempt to smear the reputation of Jamal Khashoggi, a man who was apparently passionate and followed those passions – but learned from those experience as well. I particularly liked this remark:

Yes, Jamal Khashoggi had many friends among the Muslim Brotherhood and, as his colleague David Ignatius reported days after his disappearance, had joined the movement himself as a young man before apparently shifting away from it later in his career. No one who knew Jamal at all is surprised by these facts, no matter with what lurid framing they are now “revealed.” Whatever sympathies and associations he may have had, they do not change the apparent fact that Jamal Khashoggi was kidnapped, murdered, and dismembered to silence his freedom of expression. Those on the right who have spent decades fighting for free speech on campus will leap to tell you, correctly, that freedom of speech demands respect regardless of the political valance of the views espoused—and that protecting the expression of unpopular views that challenge current political correctness is the acid test for the security of this right overall. So even if you believe that Jamal Khashoggi was a full-bore Brotherhood member with an agenda of Islamization for the Arab world, you should still condem his apparent assassination for the crime of speaking his mind.

It’s important, always important, to use the ideals and arguments of your opponents against them. Not necessarily those being employed against you or someone or something you wish to defend, but those which aspire to the highest moral level.

If you can’t find a way to do that, it’s quite possible their argument is correct; typically, fallacious arguments will involve either bad principles, or contradictions indicating the present argument is really lost to them, if you but persevere in pushing back the fog of fear and confusion such arguments usually employ. The fog is quite common and has been used by both right-wingers and left-wingers over the decades when they face the problem of actually engaging in a clash of ideas, rather than a clash of arms.

In his youth, Mr. Khashoggi may have had sympathies for certain extremist groups. Quite often, extremists group have legitimate grievances (something the “progressive left” needs to learn); the extremism comes in their response, both ideologically and tactically.

But Mr. Khashoggi was now a respected journalist who happened to be criticizing a theocracy whose links to the United States are merely those of utility, not of sentiment or shared political system. Worse yet, he was bringing to light what appears to be subterfuge by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), in which highly autocratic political maneuvers have been cloaked in apparent liberalizations of Saudi society. If reports are to be believed, MBS is attempting sleight of hand in the consolidation of power in preparation for the death of his father, the King.

Here’s the real threat for the Republicans attempting their smear: they may succeed. And then they’ll find themselves allied with a Muslim theocrat who is a hot-head and willing to wage war to enhance his reputation. This is not a desirable alliance for the right-wing. It’ll continue to damage their brand (to use their commercial jargon), disillusioning young voters even more. But … his bags of gold blind them to reality.

This smear campaign is extraordinarily short-sighted, even for the right.

As a software engineer, if there’s one thing I don’t worry about in my finished product, it’s how much energy it’ll use calculating the final result. That is, I take my electricity for granted, as well as my customers’.

And it’s funny, because I’ve been made aware of the fact that our calculations are becoming more and more involved, although not in my area (I’m fairly mundane as far as programmers go). Two examples are climate forecasting and crypto-currency calculations, where both are consuming so much power that it’s becoming a concern for the future.

But once again I’m surprised at the cost of computing, in a schadenfreude sort of way, in this fascinating report by Michael Le Page in NewScientist (13 October 2018, paywall):

It isn’t widely appreciated how incredibly energy hungry AI is. If you ran AlphaGo non-stop for a year, the electricity alone would cost about £6000. That doesn’t matter for one-off events, like an epic Go showdown. But it does matter if billions of people want their smartphones to be truly smart, or have their cars drive themselves.

Many potential uses of AI simply won’t become widespread if they require too much energy. On the flip side, if the uses are so desirable or profitable that people don’t care about the costs, it could lead to a surge in electricity consumption and make it even harder to limit further warming of the planet.

AI consumes so much energy because the technique behind these recent breakthroughs, deep learning, involves performing ever more computations on ever more data. “The models are getting deeper and getting wider, and they use more and more energy to compute,” says Max Welling of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. …

Take self-driving cars. These require all sorts of extra systems, from cameras to radar, that use power and also increase weight and drag, further increasing energy use. But the single largest consumer of energy besides the engine is the processor running the AI.

According to a study out earlier this year, self-driving cars could use up to 20 per cent more energy than conventional cars. That is a big issue for a battery-powered car, limiting its range and increasing running costs. What’s more, the study assumes the AI processor consumes about 200 watts, even though current prototypes consume in excess of 2000 watts.

For taxi companies using AI to directly replace human drivers, the savings in wages would probably far outweigh the higher energy costs. But for ordinary car owners this would be a major issue.

Wow! It brings up a host of questions, doesn’t it? Of course, Le Page notes the industry is frenziedly trying to get around this energy consumption problem through such tricks as reducing precision where it’s not necessary and the invention of dedicated hardware, analogous to GPUs (Graphical Processor Units). I note, purely because I can say something vaguely relevant, this:

There are more revolutionary designs in the works, too. Shunting data back and forth between the memory and processor wastes a great of deal of energy, says [Avishek Biswas of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. So he has developed a chip intended for smartphones that slashes energy use by around 95 per cent by carrying out key operations in the memory itself.

Which triggers a memory in me. Back when I was learning Mythryl and the functional programming paradigm (which is not related to C functions, but rather to the notion of functions in mathematics, meaning the same inputs to a Mythryl function always results in the same outputs, and there are No Side Effects), the late Jeff Prothero (aka Cynbe ru Taren), chief programmer, administrator, flunky, and janitor on the Mythryl project, mentioned to me that thread programming in Mythryl should be, because of the way data is naturally handled in functional programming languages, far, far more efficient than in other computing languages. That’s because it’s all about data labels rather than data variables, so there is no copying global data to and from processors as the data changed. Because it didn’t.

I see no mention in the article about actually using better computing languages. An oversight by the author? Or by the industry?

Anyways, back to my thoughts on the article, as the above was nothing more than a self-important digression on my part. As the article notes, human brains still far out-perform computers per joule consumed:

ARTIFICIAL intelligence breakthroughs have become a regular occurrence in recent years. One of the most impressive achievements so far was in 2016, when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI beat champion Lee Sedol at one of the world’s most complex games, Go.

The feat made headlines around the world as an example of machines besting humans, but in some sense it wasn’t a fair fight. Sedol’s brain would have been consuming around 20 watts of power, with only a fraction of that being used for the game itself. By contrast, AlphaGo was using some 5000 watts.

This suggests one of two possible explanations. First, our artificial-intelligence designs suck. I don’t give a lot of credence to this conclusion, because it’s self-evident that humans come equipped with intelligence-specific hardware, isn’t it? The brain is specifically constructed, in some large fraction, to be intelligent. That it’s evolved rather than designed doesn’t matter; there are areas of the brain dedicated to intelligence. So perhaps, through clever hardware construction, we can build more energy-efficient AI.

But that does lead to an alternative, highly controversial, and not yet supported conclusion:

Only quantum computers can hope to be as efficient as human brains because human brains work using quantum effects.

Yeah, I’m not going to be providing proof for that one. I understand from some pop-sci articles (so take it as you will) there are some high-level scientists who are researching this possibility, and, given the abilities of a biological organ consuming only 20 watts, there is a certain inclination to wonder if this could be true.

But regardless of whether or not it’s true, it’s always hard to say self-driving cars are the future when you realize that there is a surplus of brains, housed in convenient transport modules and equipped with working limbs, that can just drive the bloody things themselves.

Self-driving cars, even if achieved, and contra Kevin Drum, may end up sitting next to the 3-D televisions in the discard bin at Best Buy. The spinoffs of that effort may be more interesting than the final product. We already know how to drive cars.

Just when you thought you could start breathing again, I discovered that I had forgotten to publish THESE pics. So here’s some more pictures from last Sunday’s inch of snow.

The following were taken that same Sunday morning. Someone in the neighborhood likes to do straw animals as an art form. This one’s apparently in need of shelter.

Vox’s Alexia Campbell reports on a couple of organizations which want to continue to use superstition as one of their filters on employees:

Two conservative Christian groups in Texas believe that businesses and employers have the legal right to discriminate against LGBTQ workers on religious grounds, and they’re trying to get the courts to back them up.

The US Pastors Council and Texas Values, two nonprofit evangelical groups, filed multiple lawsuits in state and federal court this week, claiming that Christian businesses and churches have a constitutional right to fire — or not hire — LGBTQ workers.

One lawsuit challenges the federal Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against job candidates and workers based on their religion, sex, gender, and race. Two other lawsuits seek to strike down part of an Austin city ordinance that prohibits employers from discriminating against similar groups, and explicitly includes protections based on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”

In one of the lawsuits filed Saturday against the city of Austin, lawyers for Texas Values said the organization will not comply with the law.

Yes, you, too, can be divisive. Perhaps the Center For Inquiry, an atheist organization if I’m to judge from the mail I receive from them, should protest that it should not be required to hire Christians and other evangelical religious types because it fears that they will attempt to convert their atheist employees to their chosen sects, and that would be against the Center’s code of ethics.

Yeah, I can hear the hypocritical howls from those same organizations from here.

Campbell goes on to note:

The US Pastors Council says Christian employers are allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ workers based on protections in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The federal law, enacted in 1993, sets a high standard for government legislators when writing laws that might burden a person’s right to exercise their religion. The act states that such a law must further a “compelling government interest” and must be tailored to minimize the burden on individual religious practices.

The law has generally been used to analyze other laws that might infringe on an individual’s religious freedom. But in a controversial 2014 ruling, the US Supreme Court extended the protection to Christian-owned corporations. In that case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts superstore chain challenged the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, which required businesses to offer health insurance plans that covered the cost of birth control.

I’ll note in passing that a single-payer health care law would take care of that fairly awful exception to the ACA.

But that’s not really my point. A “high standard” might be enshrined in law, but, in view of my post on how society appears to be breaking up, I’d like to suggest that Texas Values and the US Pastors Council are contributing to that very breakdown in American society of which Senator Sasse (R-NE) writes. They may think it’s effective to “hate the sin, not the sinner,” but by rejecting the “sinner” who has done nothing wrong but find their own gender more attractive, they are damaging that person on an individual level, and sending a message to other persons of that class that they are not valuable parts of society.

Perhaps in other countries it’s traditional to suppress those minorities which are troublesome, but this is America, where the European invaders who settled here while and after hating the American Indian virtually out of existence, had to learn to do better, first with their fellows from other European countries, and then from China and other non-European countries. Many of those met initial hostility and xenophobia, but eventually – usually with some sharp raps across the knuckles of the “natives” (cough) – they were accepted, and now heritage is merely a matter of curiosity.

And it’s this tolerance and recognition of the trivialities of differences which has helped to make America great. By disrespecting this tradition, they disrespect a great American tradition.

These two groups may be merely trying to follow the supposed precepts of their faith traditions, irrational as they may seem to be. Or there may be a darker undercurrent going on, because it’s fairly well known that, by emphasizing some group as being adversarial or, better yet, theologically repugnant, it is easier to focus the members of the group on the group’s agenda and to be successful carriers of it. So you tell them that the Bible frowns on the LGBTQ (did I miss any letters?) community, that God hates them, and to associate with them is to be tainted by their sins.

What better way to feel superior than have God on your side?

Of course, I’d never dream of suggesting Jesus never hated oppressed minority groups. (Ooops!) Or that Jesus’ message was more or less just Love thy neighbor! (Ooops! Just slipped out. Won’t happen again.)

Even this simple-minded agnostic devotee to straight-thinking knows that much. Maybe this Pastors Council should go back and read their Bibles again. Or wait for Jesus to appear to them while they’re laying hands and praying over D. J. Trump hisself.

Or perhaps return to the rationality on which the United States truly functions and try to figure out if there’s any rational reason to reject LGBTQ folks, and, if they discover that they can’t find any such, welcome them with open arms.

That’d be more in line with proper spirituality.

So to reconnect with the title of this post, I think any rational court would laugh these lawsuits out of court on the simple observation that a divided, embittered society is not a desirable end state in the eyes of government. Stop sowing hatred, folks, or get out of the country.

Sanguinivorous:

1. Subsisting on a diet of blood. [Wiktionary]

Sanguinivore heard on the Vampires episode of Monster Science two nights ago.

Yeah, I’m disappointed, too, at the loss of the presagement of snow shoveling. So here’s a couple of pictures from a couple of months ago – the height of summer:

Almost abstract in result. I’ve already forgotten the actual subjects.

NOTE: I’m not an investment advisor, I am neither trained, licensed, nor bonded, and this is not specific investment advice, simply some observations after, oh, 30 years of investing in individual stocks. Think about how much you’re paying to read this and respect it accordingly. -Hue

If you’re new to investing in publicly traded companies, there can be a lot of baffling choices to make: go with mutual funds? Play the stocks like horses, resulting in many trades? Learn all about technical trading, wherein a stock’s past pricing patterns guide the decisions of the investor?

If you’re not going into technical trading, there come questions of interpreting a company’s financial results, operations, and market, and here it’s important to not let yourself be led around by the nose. Much is made about companies making their quarterly numbers, which usually means a bunch of business analysts make public their expectations, someone else averages them, and that’s the “market’s expectation.” But what do they know? They’re not sitting in on company strategy meetings, or anything else – they operate on the same information which is available to you. They are paid to take the time to read it and evaluate it, which you may not be able to do so.

And while companies are required to make public their quarterly results, they’re not required to make public their own expectations, although if they do so they’d better be honest about them, or a trigger-happy lawyer is likely to open up the next class-action lawsuit on them.

Worse yet, quarterly results are the hurdle most investors watch closely, even the mutual managers. If a “stumble” occurs and a company doesn’t make its numbers, what happens? The stock price tumbles and you’re a “victim.” You didn’t see it coming and you “lost” money.

But if you’re a properly skeptical & mature investor, your hackles should be rising at my repeated use of the word quarterly. Why should this be an important word to you? If you’re an owner of the company, rather than a trader of bits of paper, then the answer is that it’s not a primary information for you. If you find this a little puzzling, let me direct you to this article by Roger Lowenstein in WaPo, where he tells a small but pivotal part of the baffling story of struggling industrial giant General Electric:

The 126-year-old General Electric was once a company your grandparents knew; it made lightbulbs, consumer appliances and plastics.

In the 1980s and ’90s, a CEO named Jack Welch expanded into broadcast, defense electronics and financial services. Welch was fawned over by security analysts for seemingly making his numbers every quarter. He was lauded for managing earnings, a euphemism for gaming the numbers so he could hit performance targets.

Welch retired wealthy. But it turned out that pursuing a series of short-term managerial goals was not a ticket to enduring prosperity for GE. In finance in particular, quarterly results bore little relation to the long tails of liability or to the intrinsic value of the underlying assets.

Welch’s successor, Jeffrey R. Immelt, was left to clean up the mess. Immelt frenetically traded businesses, doubling down on fossil fuels, selling NBC, buying and later selling water filtration, getting into a predictive (and risky) health-care venture, and dumping most of GE’s assets in finance.

The old businesses were always one that didn’t fit. The new ones all had great potential and fit some strategic plan. Along the way, GE promised that Immelt would be paid only for performance — as shareholders prospered, too.

What GE really did was reward Immelt for a series of near-term goals without respect to whether GE’s value increased in the long run. Which it didn’t.

A year ago, Immelt was retired ahead of schedule. During his 16 years, GE shares (including dividends) returned a pitiable 1 percent annually, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 7 percent a year.

While compiling that abysmal record, Immelt collected hundreds of millions of dollars — $91 million in 2014-2016 alone. He exited with deferred shares and benefits worth an estimated $100 million, to help with the rent I guess.

It’s a good article for the new investor who distrusts mutual funds and technical trading, and therefore is faced with the substantial task of evaluating companies, because it’s contrarian – it always sounds good when a board says their new CEO will have his pay tied to meeting performance goals, but out in the real world this phrase is often code for Hit those short-term goals and don’t worry about long-term goals, we’re all here for the quick buck.

It is, in fact, another form of the infamous Pump ‘n dump stock trading scheme in which a company with little to no prospects is talked up by “analysts” who often have little or no training or experience, but merely sell their names and media mechanisms to the company that wants to be pumped. Via these analysts, the company acquires a reputation for having the Next Big Thing, the stock price zooms, and the pumpers who bought the stock before the pumping began sell out at the zenith, leaving the suckers naive investors holding worthless bits of paper. In this form, the companies are not worthless, but the long-term viability of the companies are jeopardized by executives whose pay is tied to short-term goals, rather than long-term goals.

For the short-term investor, who plans to hold stocks for no more than a few months to a year, this may not actually be a problem if they can find a way to recognize these companies before they experience their short-term jump in price. Get in at the right time, catch the pop, sell out. It’s investment fast food, not as awful as the speed traders who are busy raping each other by measuring their trading speed in microseconds (let’s call that sugar is my primary nutrient trading), but still short term investors are not a particularly healthy ownership model.

But the long-term investor, who hopes to find companies such as Berkshire-Hathaway or Amazon and hold on to them for twenty or thirty years, this is the central problem they have to solve. Are the senior leaders appropriately incentivized? This is probably the primary reason Motley Fool founders Tom & David Gardner tend to put a lot of faith in those companies in which the founders are still heavily involved in the leadership roles and have a substantial ownership stake. While there’s definitely a financial incentive, to my mind there’s going to be a reputational incentive as well, which is to say, I created this, I want it to succeed! Whether it’s a startup trying to build an AI to solve a difficult problem, or a janitorial services corporation, company founders more often than not regard their companies as their babies and want to see them succeed in the long-term. While there are no guarantees, at least their motivations are congruent with the long-term investors’ goals.

Quarterly results are of interest to the long-term investor who wishes to own more stock of some company, but feels the company is currently over-priced. A poor quarter, the naive short-termers and speed traders get out, the price drops 5-10%, and now maybe the long term investor has an opportunity to pick up some cheap stock in a favored company.

But using quarterly results to evaluate the long-term potential of a company is a tricky business, because the focus is often purely on profit & loss, and less on market penetration, the societal good the company’s product might engender, or whatever else is considered important by the investor. Those evaluations often come from somewhere else than quarterly results.

My reader continues the dialog on mid-term early voting:

Photo supplied by correspondent.

I’m sure I come off paranoid, but consider my community: wealthy, conservative, red. “Home of Denny Hastert.” Folks have been demanded of a photo ID to vote, and turned way if they lacked one. We also made front page of the Tribune with the attached photo of a beloved citizen. Go ahead. Call me paranoid.

Given the straits of minority voters in Georgia, my reader may have justified paranoia. And then there’s this new CNN article, also concerning Georgia:

One suburban Georgia county has become a flashpoint for concerns over voter suppression for rejecting hundreds of mail-in absentee ballots weeks before Election Day.

Gwinnett County, located northeast of Atlanta, now faces two federal lawsuits and accusations from voting rights activists who say the rejections disproportionately affect minority voters, particularly Asian Americans and African Americans.

The county has rejected 595 absentee ballots, which account for more than a third of the total absentee-ballot rejections in the state, even though Gwinnett County accounts for only about 6% of absentee ballots submitted in Georgia, according to state data analyzed by CNN Friday. More than 300 of the rejected ballots belonged to African Americans and Asian Americans.

Officials tossed out the ballots due to missing birthdates, address discrepancies, signatures that do not match those on registration records and other issues, according to the data.

I’m particularly appalled at the signature matching requirement.

1. It’s entirely a subjective judgment. The State already has required a match on addresses with no regard for human frailties and mistakes. Now they turn around and, using a judgment that’s entirely subjective, they want another match.Well, I’ll tell you what, if I was subject to that requirement, I WOULD FAIL. I’ve always noticed that my signature varies wildly from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. I don’t have that perfect signature, that perfect cursive form^[1]. A “handwriting expert,” which I tend to categorize along with astrologers and phrenologists, would laugh if he saw all my signatures, and write me off as MPD.
2. Mistake free identification. The purpose of signatures is not an early form of biometric identification, despite many attempts to use it as such (see previous point). The purpose is to have someone explicitly agree to a statement of fact. It becomes a legally binding document, especially when witnessed, such as by a voting judge. In the event, someone may be asked if they signed a document, and be shown the signature, but this is not biometrics; it’s a statement of legal fact by a person.

I think the ACLU should be bringing suit against Gwinnett County on an emergency basis on at least the signature requirement basis, if not all of it. If a judge agrees that the signature judging requirement is illegal, then all those ballots should be returned to the valid pool. I do see the Coalition for Good Governance is bringing a lawsuit. I really should finish these articles, as I see the ACLU has brought suit.

And if the County pleads that they didn’t keep track of why they invalided ballots, then they are ALL returned to the valid pool on a permanent basis. Sometime you need to wallop folks upside the head with a law volume. It does appear that they do track that, so there will be no whacking.

And now on to the reader-supplied appalling photograph. That’s the sort of pic which I hope is a joke, but given the grim look that woman’s face as she executes Nazi-like salute, she’s either a great actor – or quite resolutely anti-American. It’s an upsetting picture of someone terrified her society is going to hell and she’s all set to jump into a different Circle Of Hell, instead.

Here’s a message for her:

Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t. Kiss El Diablo for me, baby.

¹ Hell, I think the only reason I passed the handwriting portion of my schoolwork is my Mom went into the school and begged them to pass me! (I joke.) (She did require me to practice handwriting over summer vacation.) (I refused.) (That turned into a war.)

I tend to agree with Steve Benen and others that, while Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) can sure talk purty, when it comes to the actual voting, he’s no better than his Republican brethren, and given how the Republican Party has sped to the right in the last couple of decades[1], that’s saying something. Perhaps, though, I’m unfair, as his FiveThirtyEight-supplied Trump score as of this writing is only 87.2%.

But he is sensible enough to write up a useful op-ed column for WaPo warning about a subject already covered on this blog – deepfakes. This undetectable doctoring of pictures and videos may result in the complete collapse of the industry, or some sort of technical solution – I don’t know.

Along the way, Sasse brings up an exacerbating factor:

We are so domestically divided right now, about who we are and what we hold in common, that malevolent foreign actors can pick at dozens of scabs as they seek to weaken us. In many of the current domestic flash points — over guns and geography, race and gender, religion and institutions — the nation’s cultural, political and even economic leaders often seem more interested in fomenting discord than in rallying us around a shared battle plan.

I completely agree, but he’s put it so baldly that I thought about President Trump’s eagerness to terminate the Mueller investigation, and suddenly wondered…

Are we the victims of one of the longest-running, subtle, and grandest foreign societal influence schemes ever put together?

Sasse hints at it a little later, and probably unconsciously:

We can work hard to roll back the distrust of our opponents that makes us more susceptible to the effects of disinformation. Rising political tribalism, shamelessly exaggerating our opponents’ claims or behavior, is leaving us vulnerable: No one loves America’s internal fighting — and our increasingly siloed news consumption — more than Vladimir Putin.

Sasse doesn’t connect the dots, but I will: what if our societal uproar has actually been the result of Russian meddling? Robert Mueller’s indictment of the Internet Research Agency certainly hints at Russian aims. OK, it’s not a hint, it’s a fucking banner towed behind the Cessna passing overhead as you read this post.

It’s blatant.

But what if that’s just a small part of a scheme of ol’ Vlad to retain power and punish the United States, which is, after all, responsible for the destruction of the Soviet Union? Comrade Putin was a KGB Agent – revenge is not out of the question.

That opens up the subject of how? Influencing American society requires people with strong, undiluted messages to come to the fore, because a lot of Americans respect strong messages that lack nuance. Then those people take control of organizations to use for their planned goals. If Mueller is uncovering such schemes, then we should expect those personalities to begin drifting away, dropping out of sight, that sort of thing, as their Russian handlers get word of their schemes being investigated. On the left, that might include key influential academics who have discredited the reputation of the left through radical pronouncements and proposals. I’m not familiar enough with the left to name names, which may be fortunate for me.

On the right? Sharpening division requires the activation of System 1 thinking, and that’s certainly been a salient feature in the messages of many right wing leaders, both sectarian and secular. Voices from the National Rifle Association (NRA) certainly come to mind, as do the more extreme religious leaders, particularly those who’ve hopped up and down on the issue of abortion so many times that they no longer have ankles. This post from Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Poza concerning a program at the Heritage Foundation is also of interest, although I always have to consider the source when it’s the The Daily Kos.

So as Mueller continues to hint at an upcoming report release, we might expect to see a few people disappear. I don’t know if disappear means turn up dead or turn up in Moscow. Just think of it as getting out of reach of the enraged.

¹ Which brings to mind President Reagan’s comment on his former membership in the Democratic Party:

“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”

Which, when you think about it, should have given the Republican Party more than a little pause.

With regard to the best response to the Khashoggi now-admitted murder, I advocated the extreme response of demanding those responsible, and those who conspired to do so, be delivered to Turkey for trial. I have my doubts that’ll happen.

However, I forgot one important point. When it comes to Princes eligible for the throne, those of us in the West are not accustomed to a large selection. Two, maybe three princes or even princesses, but inevitably, like bad produce, one will have worms be crazy as a loon. But when it comes to the House of Saud?

The family is estimated to comprise 15,000 members, but the majority of the power and wealth is possessed by a group of about 2,000 of them. [Wikipedia]

Not all of those 2,000 will be eligible for the throne, but a sizable chunk will be. And while I know there are rules of succession and a council of Saudi princes who are supposed to select successors, it’s a monarchy. The King gets what he wants.

And if he has a lot of princes to choose from and a sense of responsibility towards the future of his kingdom, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), thought to be responsible for this plot, may find his head on the chopping block, metaphorically or literally, even though MBS is the son of King Salman. There are lots of potential successors, and King Salman may regard MBS’ performance as Crown Prince as an audition of sorts. And, along with the failing war in Yemen, this may be viewed as a failure.

My advice to President Trump? Go all in on demanding justice. You are, after all, in a role where you are to advocate for justice, not to protect economic advantage at all costs. There are reports that MBS is sacrificing aides and allies to divert responsibility, so he may be wobbly, giving the King the option of sacrificing the Crown Prince.

That would leave both the King and Trump smelling damn good, and that’s what Trump desperately needs – a good point with the independents with elections coming up.

But we know he won’t. He’s cunning, but not bright.

And that’s my thought of the day.

In response to my FB post announcing that I have already voted in the midterm elections, a reader writes:

I refuse! Earlier voters in my county found that, when they went to enter their ballot in the machine, it didn’t work. “The State sent us the wrong software.” Riiiiiiight….I’m waiting til November. So they can also tell me I need a photo ID. Please. Tell me.

The process for Minnesota early voting was simple: fill out an application, show them a driver’s license or other form of identification. They give you a ballot, you fill it out with your choices, put it in an envelope, put that in another envelope, and dump it in the box. The counting will occur at a later date.

The only computer involved was the one verifying we live in Ramsey County.

All that said, it’s regrettable that our country has polarized so much that what might otherwise be a simple, honest mistake has been transformed into a grim suspicion of incompetence or malevolence. Examples include my own writing with regard to Secretary of State Kris Kobach of Kansas and SoS Brian Kemp of Florida, candidates for governor of their respective states.

If & when the Republican Party is burned to the ground, metaphorically speaking, and rebuilt, hopefully honor will be part of the foundation of that new Party, along with a commitment to truth.

A few days ago Katrina vanden Heuvel asked an important question in WaPo:

Why isn’t the media covering climate change all day, every day?

She ventured a few of the standard answers:

So why isn’t the media covering this story all day, every day? There are several reasons, including the collapse of local daily newspapers and excessive conglomeratization. But the biggest reason right now is distraction. As [Margaret] Sullivan put it, “There is just so much happening at every moment, so many trees to distract from the burning forest behind them.”

And the Internet is the primary contributor to this. As the cost of disseminating information, true or false, has fallen, we’ve been inundated by the stuff. It’s like the locusts, not only in numbers, but even in their operationality. In case my reader didn’t know, locust swarms are about as you’d expect from the phrase, but the reason that they move en masse isn’t that they’re looking for something to eat so much as they’re trying to avoid being eaten. One locust will happily make a meal out of another, given the opportunity, so they’re all on the march in order to stay out of the maw of their cousin. Similarly, news comes fast and furious because each is pushing the others out of the way to get your attention.

Worse yet, the outlets have become ubiquitous. I don’t use “outlet” in the traditional meaning, such as a newspaper office, but, to select a concrete example, a device. It used to be that all the news was word of mouth; then came the printing presses, which permitted the creation of newspapers, dedicated, ideally, to the collection and dissemination of local news. The discovery and mastery of radio waves permitted their use as a new medium, and that led to its cousin, TV stations and televisions.

Now it’s the Internet age, and that 50 pound device sitting in the corner of the living room is now a 5 ounce smartphone in your pocket. Turn it on and it will ceaselessly blare “news” at you until your eyes cross and you get the jitters.

Literally. Metaphorically, literally.

As Andrew Sullivan has noted on several occasions, this may be the greatest damage the Web has inflicted on the United States, the near costlessness of information transfer cheapening and even blurring the information until we can’t truly evaluate whether information is true or false, trivial or monumental.

Speaking of, back to climate change. Heuvel (and her colleague Margaret Sullivan) want climate change to be on the front page of WaPo every day, but …

The corporate media seems to prefer distractions and even capitalizes on them. At least, that’s what veteran journalist Ted Koppel suggested in a recent conversation with CNN’s Brian Stelter. “CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump,” Koppel said.

Stelter rebutted later in a tweet that the cable news business is “more complex than he makes it seem.”

Is it? In corporate media, ratings are prized above all else. So, the president gets his reality show because scandal plays better — and pays better — than substance. Then-CBS chief executive Les Moonves admitted as much in 2016 when he said that Trump’s political ascent was “damn good for CBS” and bragged that “the money’s rolling in.”

Which is a fantastic affirmation of two things. First, it marks President Trump’s instincts concerning the news media and his election leading to great profits as being top-tier^[1], although some may argue this was obvious.

Second, it’s an affirmation of an observation and argument I’ve been developing and making for years, namely the transfer of processes and goals from one societal sector to another results in sub-optimal results, see here for more details. In this case, Heuvel and Sullivan would argue that the news media is not giving sufficient coverage to literally the most important topic in the world, climate change, while Moonves provides the description of the private sector process which motivates coverage selection and results in a sub-optimal selection.

Enough chest-thumping.

However, it would not be intellectually thorough to stop here. In this specific situation, it’s worth noting that the participation of the concerned individual common citizen or corporate entity, uncoordinated and possibly burdened with information of dubious quality, will be hesitant and possibly wrong. We’re facing a situation that, despite the Pentagon labeling it as a national security threat,

… has been described as a “catastrophe in slow motion.”

That is, it’s subtle, difficult to understand, and is larger than us.

That means we need the Federal government involved in a leadership position. EPA scientists have already sounded the alarm, in concert with scientists world-wide, fulfilling a critical function of government in detecting future disasters. But the balance of our government, with the exception of our vigilant military, is shirking its duty with respect to climate change. Elected officials run about with their hands over their eyes, shrieking No! No! No!

And this is where the dominance of the Trump Administration in the news cycle comes in. Through the constant drumbeat of negative results from the Administration and a GOP-dominated Congress across a spectrum of subjects, we’re becoming more and more aware of the necessity of replacing them. Clearly, the GOP has already rejected the science behind climate change, and so the paradigm behind putting climate change on the front page of all major newspapers every day is invalid – the responsible leaders^[2] have already demonstrated their ideological loyalty to the “talking point” that climate change is a hoax.

The dominance of brand-destroying news from the White House and Congress should, in an ideal world dominated by honest news services, result in the expulsion from their positions and disgrace of every elected member of government who engaged in these activities which has enabled a national security threat. Today? That’s where the rubber will hit the road. Will the conservative news outlets, convinced that climate change is nothing more than a liberal hoax, win their propaganda war and retain enough of Congress to continue to forestall action on this very difficult and existential problem? Or will their base, which is just beginning to be chastened by physical evidence of climate change that smacked them in the nose, begin discarding those news sources that continue their allegiance to ideology over reality, and return to questions of news quality as their standard for selecting news sources, rather than the intellectually inferior method of merely finding a source that suits their predilections?

Or, in other words, if your news source isn’t making you uncomfortable, maybe you need a different news source.

So, in answer to Heuvel and Sullivan, the dominance of news other than that covering climate change isn’t an unalloyed negative; it is, instead, a necessity if we are to address climate change effectively. It may feel like the old observation concerning democracy,

The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.^[3]

It’ll leave us more badly damaged than if we had acted wisely in the first place, but if we measure up to being the best Americans we can, every one of us, then we’ll find a way to get through this.

¹ I may consider Trump’s Presidency as one of the greatest incompetencies and calamities to ever grace the United States, but underestimating the true competencies, if any, of an opponent or adversary is the mark of the amateur buffoon.

² That is, those leaders who will be held responsible when all is said and done.

³ Legend gives credit to the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but apparently this is not true.

Antefix:

From the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal Volume 24 / 1996

A painted terracotta antefix, a covering at the end of a building for the joints of a tiled roof, once decorated the shrine of Mater Matuta [in the ancient Italian town of Satricum]. [Noted in “All Roads, Eventually, Lead to Rome,” Roger Atwood, Archaeology (November/December 2018, print only).]

The provided image is not from the magazine article, but appears to be the same artifact as pictured in the magazine.

When glaciers are old hat.

You just know that someone, somewhere, will try to turn this into the world’s biggest musical instrument.

Gotta wonder about this plan:

Southwestern China’s city of Chengdu plans to launch its illumination satellite, also known as the “artificial moon”, in 2020, according to Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co., Ltd.

Wu made the remarks at a national mass innovation and entrepreneurship activity held in Chengdu on Oct. 10.

The illumination satellite is designed to complement the moon at night. Wu introduced that the brightness of the “artificial moon” is eight times that of the real moon, and will be bright enough to replace street lights. [People’s Daily]

First thing that came to mind was to wonder if Chengdu is on the equator, but that’s not really necessary. A geostationary orbit should be possible so that the artificial object appears over the Chengdu at night and disappears over the horizon during the day. It might appear over Korea on its way to and back from the Indian Ocean, if my informal understanding of orbital mechanics is sound.

So it’s possible.

But why would you want to inflict so much more light on the city? People need periods of dark and light, our bodies evolved to expect it. Is Wu planning to force everyone out of the city? Maybe someone needs to show some ego?

It just seems weird.

On Lawfare, Elaine Korzak and Herb Lin are pushing a proposal for the computer industry, or, er, the world:

This article proposes the creation of an international organization modeled after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to provide assistance and relief to vulnerable citizens and enterprises affected by serious cyberattacks. Companies that have signed onto the Tech Accord principles would form the core of the organization, thereby filling an important gap in an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment. In this article, the term “cyber-ICRC” is intended to be suggestive of the role that such an organization might play but not to imply any kind of formal connection to the ICRC. Moreover, we emphasize that the proposal outlined in this article has not been vetted by anyone at the ICRC and is not endorsed by the ICRC in any way.

I’ve been going back and forth on this proposal in my mind. Why not let private industry continue to provide relief services? This is basically a socialization of the costs of cyber-attacks, and the responsible entity can be public or private.

That said, what about a corrupt private entity which provides relief services – for a price – and then engages in malicious attacks? Illegal and unethical, but also a special problem for the victim, as they may not have the technical smarts to detect that sort of activity.

Which suggests that a cloud computing solution may be a way around the problem, as that permits the concentration of qualified technical personnel who can repair and defend the computing system. But since we’re talking corruption, wouldn’t it make financial sense for a cloud computing organization to actually attack non-customers in hopes of chasing them right into their customer list?

Obviously, I got up a little too early this morning.

But corruption could certainly invade the hypothetical Digital Red Cross as well, and while some of the details will differ, as I suspect national governments would be more likely the malicious actors in our little dramas, the results may be the same.

So I’m fairly ambivalent. But I do note an implicit category error, which Korzak and Lin do not address. The ICRC saves lives, and life is an absolute necessity before we can do anything else. Computers and computing? They may seem like necessities.

But they’re not.

Just when you thought we were done with pictures presaging the barren wasteland of winter…

A couple of posts ago I ranted a bit about the GOP bubble mixed with the certainty that God is with them, and how that leads to an ossified Party that may seem strong, but is dangerously inflexible.

It’s rather like a badly infected cut on your finger.

The cure? It doesn’t appear to be reasoned arguments, because reason is no longer a respected part of the Republican Party.

But there are hints that there is a cure, or at least a treatment, and, while it’s not what I should hope for, it’s at least more likely to work than shouting at them.

It’s reality.

The first notable incident of reality deflating at least a few Republican members was the Kansas taxation and budget debacle, as I referenced in the rant, above. The executive summary is that the GOP dropped tax rates like a rock into a pond and expected the resulting tsunami to lift all boats into resultant economic miracle.

They waited around for several years, and while their state Party Leader Sam Brownback remained faithful to the vision, the resulting budget deficits and anemic growth persuaded enough of his cohorts to band together with state legislature Democrats to return tax rates to levels somewhere near which will restore the State’s budget.

Thus did the Holy Tenet of Lowering Taxes Is Always Good take a hit for Kansas Republican Party members.

The second incident, which brings me a sort of tired, just how big a bat will it take to beat some sense into these idiots?, hope is reported in WaPo yesterday, and concerns the recent spate of hurricanes battering my favorite toxic state, North Carolina:

It took a giant laurel oak puncturing her roof during Hurricane Florence last month for Margie White to consider that perhaps there was some truth to all the alarm bells over global warming.

“I always thought climate change was a bunch of nonsense, but now I really do think it is happening,” said White, a 65-year-old Trump supporter, as she and her young grandson watched workers haul away downed trees and other debris lining the streets of her posh seaside neighborhood last week, just as Hurricane Michael made landfall 700 miles away in the Florida Panhandle.

Of course, anecdotes aren’t worth much.

An Elon University survey taken in early October, after Florence hit, showed that 37 percent of Republicans believe global warming is “very likely” to negatively impact North Carolina coastal communities in the next 50 years. That is nearly triple the percentage of Republicans — 13 percent — who felt that way in 2017.

The percentage of Republicans who felt climate change is “not at all likely” to harm the state’s coastal communities dropped by 10 points over the past year —from 41 percent in September 2017 to 31 percent now.

“That suggests to me that there’s a very large minority within the Republican Party who are at least open to the first steps to accepting that climate change is a possibility,” said Jason Husser, a political science professor who directs the Elon poll. “It signals some sort of tipping point.”

Good old-fashioned polling is more interesting, not only because it’s statistical, but because it bypasses the leadership, which is naturally heavily invested in the ideology, or Holy Tenets, and goes right to the base. Furthermore, this contrast with the balance of the Republican base nationwide really drives the point home, doesn’t it?

Nationally, a wide partisan chasm remains, with only 11 percent of Republicans describing climate change as a “very big” problem compared with 72 percent of Democrats, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.

Remember, from years ago, North Carolina Republicans banning the use of climate change theories in formulating State policies, laws, regulations, etc?

Moreover, nearly half of Republicans surveyed said that incorporating findings from climate-change scientists into local government planning is a good idea and three-quarters said real estate development should be restricted along flood-prone areas.

This is the start of a story of painful hope. Hope, because people really can learn and change. Painful, because it’s going to take hurricanes and rising temperatures and possibly a lot of preventable deaths and misery to get their attention. And really painful because so many of these folks want to lazily put it in God’s domain.

Plenty of residents in North Carolina’s southeastern corner still reject the science, attributing changing weather patterns to God and the cycle of nature. A group of college students fishing off a pier on the barrier island of Wrightsville Beach last week called climate change a “load of crap.” A surfer taking advantage of Michael’s turbulent waves dismissed it as “propaganda.” A sunburned construction worker said it’s not worth worrying about because “God takes care of it.”

It doesn’t matter that I’m agnostic, the above attitude is laziness even if I’m a (insert favorite religion here), because we caused this. That’s what anthropocentric means. The scientists may have stopped using Anthropocentric climate change in some of their reports, but it’s the proper terminology for the phenomena they’re measuring and trying to understand. To blame it on a problematic supernatural creature about which nothing is known is simply a symptom of someone giving up on a hard problem.

I suspect a good cultural historian of the United States could point at a number of historical inflection points in which religious fervor swept regions of the United States, only to have it all fade away as reality impolitely intruded. Just think of all the Final Days cults we’ve had to endure, or, if we’re not personally injured by them, laugh at.

So know hope. It’s better than living in constant despair.

While reading conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin’s latest on the Kashoggi tragedy, in particular this part:

Trump told Fox Business Network on Wednesday: “We’re not going to walk away from Saudi Arabia. I don’t want to do that.” Is that because he foolishly built a Middle East policy based on a misreading of Saudi Arabia, or is it because he hates to walk away from Saudi money? In any event, he’s already signaling he doesn’t want to find out if Saudi leaders knew something. (“I hope that the king and the crown prince didn’t know about it. That’s a big factor in my eyes.”) Gosh, if he found out the unvarnished truth, he might have to react appropriately.

It occurred to me – as it did too many other Americans, I’m sure – if we weren’t addicted to oil and all of its products, this murder wouldn’t be such a tense drama for all concerned.

We’d conduct a due investigation, possibly in conjunction with Turkey, and, if as expected the Saudis are found to be responsible, we’d have a sane assessment of the best way to punish them. It might involve sanctions, it might involve demands that those who executed the deed be handed over for trial, and if President Trump was feeling particularly ballsy – which he wouldn’t even in this fantasy scenario – he’d demand those guilty of conspiracy also be  handed over, even if that included Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

Instead, we find ourselves in a bit of a hard place because the Saudis supply a great deal of the oil we, and our allies, consume. Yes, there really are consequences if we try to punish our uneasy ally in the Middle East.

Yet, in my opinion, shirking that duty would have knock-on effects down the line as well. International assassinations would increase. Maybe they’d even knock off actual American citizens of some importance, rather than just American residents of foreign origin. How would we feel about that?

Well, it wouldn’t matter because we’ve already rolled over for the Saudis. At least until Trump is chased out of power. Then we’ll have the unpleasant task of rebuilding our moral position in the international order. Not that it was all the strong after the Bush debacle, but Trump is making it far, far worse.

All that said, I can’t help but notice that this is also a bit of a hit on free trade. One of the results of free trade in which transport is cheap, as it is now, is that nations tend to specialize in what they do well and efficiently, and let other industries fade away as other countries take over in those areas.

In the past, as many of my friend will attest, I’ve advocated for strong trade ties via free trade because I believe the chances of war are lessened when there’s so much to be gained through free trade.

But a situation in which we become dependent on that free trade, a term which may be almost oxymoronic in some ways, places us in unpleasant situations when a strong trade partner indulges in repellent, immoral behaviors – such as murdering journalists residing in other countries.

Free trade certainly has some advantages, but, at the national level, it can also have some distinct disadvantages. Something to keep in mind next time you’re debating free trade – it’s neither an unalloyed good or evil.

When you’re absolutely committed to the premise that your Party and Leader are always right, you often get lead into the realm of surreal intellectual confusion. Consider WaPo’s absurd partisan columnist Marc Thiessen, who I only read when prompted, and his confusion about simple definitions:

Donald Trump may be remembered as the most honest president in modern American history.

Don’t get me wrong, Trump lies all the time. He said that he “enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history” (actually they are the eighth largest) and that “our economy is the strongest it’s ever been in the history of our country” (which may one day be true, but not yet). In part, it’s a New York thing — everything is the biggest and the best.

But when it comes to the real barometer of presidential truthfulness — keeping his promises — Trump is a paragon of honesty. For better or worse, since taking office Trump has done exactly what he promised he would.

There is a clear and easily understood difference between honesty and promises.

The former has to do with the deliberate assertion of facts, true or untrue. It requires a knowing use of deceit, or not; the stringent personality would demand that deliberately presenting an assertion as a true fact, despite knowing your own ignorance of the actual situation, also qualifies as dishonesty. Your mileage may vary.

A promise is an assertion concerning the future. It often concerns an action, sometimes that of the one making the action, sometimes others.

It’s possible to assert that a promise is made with no intention to fulfill it, but a dishonest promise is not in the same category as being honest or lying.

And what’s going on here? Thiessen is striking a blow in defense of his Leader in hopes of convincing voters who value honesty that honesty is promises kept, rather than simply being true assertions concerning the world. He’d like us to forget that candidate Trump claimed we were in the worst crime wave the United States had ever seen, when the honest fact, taken from FBI statistics, was precisely the opposite – our crime stats were, and are, down to nearly historical lows. He’d like us to forget so many allied lies, so many deceits, and so many instances of the lies’ dirty cousin, the taking of credit for others’ work, that major newspapers keep statistics on them, noting them on an incident per day basis.

Think about that. If those statistics could be credibly rebutted, it might be worth dismissing them, but they’re not. I’ve read a few. How many other politicians have made it worth the newspapers expending resources on counting the mendacious utterances of a politician? I can’t think of any, frankly.

And, as a deft bit of dog whistling for the Republicans, he inserted this little blooper:

… he did not pass his signature legislative achievement on the basis of a lie (“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it ”) — which is clearly worse than falsely bragging that your tax cut is the biggest ever.

Yep, Obama made a promise, and then broke it. But is that as bad as out and out menial lying? (Note the category error on Thiessen’s part as well.) Really? Or is it more reasonable to consider Obama’s promise to be in the same class as Trump’s promises – things he’ll damn well try to do, but not all political promises can be kept, because we’re all adults here and know that sometimes someone promises to do something and finds it beyond them.

But, absent evidence that Obama knowingly didn’t plan to fulfill that promise – and I’ve never heard of any such evidence – it’s merely a promise that he advanced but couldn’t fulfill. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made it. Perhaps he should have clarified that as something he’d attempt but couldn’t guarantee. Nuance like that rarely flies well with voters.

But I don’t think it was a lie. I think Thiessen merely wants to cloud the thinking of the voter predisposed to dislike Obama. Clouding the issue is a standard tactic for those pundits with a claim to advance they know to be dubious.

So let’s be entirely clear here. He’s trying to confuse voters who dislike Trump for lying by suggesting that promises kept, or attempted, should really be the currency of honesty, rather than the misleading lies that Trump is told. Is this the reasoning that adults should buy into?

Or should voters become even more suspicious when the defenders of a known liar decide to try to change the meaning of the words involved?

Addition 18 Oct 2018: I’ve noticed quite a few views of this post, but I have no idea how readers are coming upon it. I’d appreciate it if readers could let me know how this particular post came to your attention. There’s a mail link to the right, at the top of the page. – Hue White

Steve Benen confesses to perplexity when it comes to the mid-term election strategy of GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

A week ago, for example, McConnell spoke out against congressional oversight of Donald Trump’s White House, dismissing presidential accountability as “presidential harassment.” Earlier this week, the Kentucky Republican said he hopes to address the deficit he grew by cutting social-insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security.

And yesterday, the Senate GOP leader told Reuters that if his party can hold onto power after next month’s congressional midterm elections, Republicans are likely to try again to repeal the Affordable Care Act …

In a separate interview with Bloomberg News, McConnell also expressed support for a GOP lawsuit that would gut protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions.

It does seem like madness, doesn’t it? But I think you have to remember, or at least assume, that as the Republican Party has fled rightward, it has also fled deeply into the arms of earnest religious absolutists. These are folks who have chosen to believe their religion’s precepts without exception and without notice to the problems they raise.

I am not suggesting that any particular sect’s theology has an opinion on the ACA or social entitlement programs. It’s not nearly that simple.

Rather, the culture of those sects pervade the great majority of the Republican base. The attitude in particular is that God is with us, so we are never wrong. This has infected the Party and now lends its weighty authority to

1. The free market is always right.
2. Taxes are evil.
3. Regulations are evil.
4. Democrats are evil.
5. Big Government is evil.
6. America is great and doesn’t make mistakes. (A bit of a
7. etc

So McConnell is showing his plans as a clarion call, confident they’re based on the Holy Tenets of the Party, and, because of that, the true Americans will flock to the Republican banner.

This is the ossification of a political party, rendering it deeply inflexible, which may sound appealing until we realize that circumstance does change, and that requires changes in response. Just as morality is not the timeless set of inflexible dictates that many might like to believe, so must political parties be willing to change their specific responses to contextual changes, such as war & recession, as well as embrace the simple fact that their tenets just might be wrong. So far, the Republicans have shown only limited awareness, insofar as I can tell, of these facts: when Kansas’ budget deficit became unmanageable, the moderate Republicans overthrew extremist Governor Brownback’s strategy, but the Governor didn’t go down apologizing.

He called for President Trump to replicate his disastrous approach to taxation and budgeting in the Federal budget. Unrepentant, he was. It’s worth noting he has a strong religious background, beginning with an Evangelical church, before moving on to Catholicism.

When God is with you, you’ll scrabble for any interpretation of the results which will show that you, and God, were right. Don’t think so? From the same Kansas City Star article linked to above:

Kansas cut taxes in a move Brownback celebrated as a “real-live experiment.” It was the move that could have cemented the legacy of a man who once ran for president.

The Kansas cuts slashed income tax rates and created an income tax exemption for the owners of limited liability companies and other pass-through businesses.

What followed were revenue shortfalls and budget cuts. School funding became even more difficult. Brownback’s standing among Kansas Republicans deteriorated.

Yet he continued to stand by the tax cuts. He bemoaned the policy’s death when the GOP-dominated Legislature rolled it back in June.

He was still championing his policy on a recent trip to Washington, saying “it actually worked for our target.”

“Our target wasn’t revenue, it was growth,” he said. “And it did that.”

If you’d had the meteoric growth you were expecting, the revenues would have followed. Neither happened. And Kevin Drum has a helpful chart on comparative employment growth in Kansas and its neighbors:

That’s fairly much full & final condemnation.

Corbel:

a support for an arch or similar heavy structure that sticks out of a wall and is usually made of stone or brick [Cambridge Dictionary]

“Sticks out”? Sticks out? Come on, guys. “Protrudes” is far more graceful.

Noted in “Reimagining the Crusades,” Andrew Lawler, Archaeology (print only, November/December 2018):

While conducting research in European archives, [archaeologist Elisabeth Yehuda of Tel Aviv University] found examples of stone houses of similar design in urban Europe also dating to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Though not quite as fort-like as the Crusader structures, they reflected the growing prosperity of artisans and merchants through their sturdy construction and careful attention to detail. She then focused on the decorative corbelled fireplaces in the main room on the first floor of many of the Frankish dwellings.

[All typos mine]