Yearly Archives: 2018

My Arts Editor responds to the gene drive report:

Yes, repercussions if they start sequencing human genes. But much more serious: there would be grave repercussions to the eco system if we, in our infinite wisdom, decide to eradicate entire species that we deem inimical to human life. Visit genocide on the mosquito and the fish, birds and bats that eat them also die, then the larger predators and environments that those species influence are affected, and so on. Just because you CAN do something to achieve a short-term benefit doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Humans have a remarkable myopia when it comes to playing God.

Much like my own concerns about disturbing the energy profile of the Earth, even through green systems such as wind farms and the like. Disturbances to such non-linear systems are difficult to impossible to predict, so, like my Arts Editor, I find the invention of the gene drive not a matter of celebration.

On a larger scale, I have to wonder about how we’d respond if we had rejected the idea of medicines long ago. Would our species have perished? Or would our numbers be far lower, leaving the ecosphere far more stable and suitable for us? But at what price anguish, not to mention the loss of elder’s wisdom?

Hackaday notes the failure of the latest Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) last night, and while the crew escaped unharmed on a bumpy re-entry, the ISS itself is now at risk:

The Soyuz MS-03 crew ship (foreground) and the Progress 66 cargo craft are pictured as the International Space Station orbits about 250 miles above Earth. Image Credit: NASA

ISS crews are rotated out on a six month schedule because that’s about how long a Soyuz capsule can remain viable in orbit. It has a design life of only 215 days, any longer than that and the vehicle’s corrosive propellants will degrade their tanks.

The currently docked Soyuz vehicle is the emergency escape vehicle for the ISS crew, so this is highly important for them. Meanwhile, the investigation into the failure could take months.

So ISS may be abandoned. This is a testament to the difficulties of getting into space.

For those readers who can’t understand why we “waste all that money” to go into space when there are so many problems down here on Earth, consider this: weather satellites have saved literally millions of lives by enabling accurate forecasting. Imagine recent hurricanes Florence and Michael hitting the American mainland with little warning and no real measurements of their strength.

And the spinoffs of the technological developments, which were amazing when I wrote a paper on this in high school, are jaw-dropping, from dental drills to smartphones. I’ve forgotten the estimated return on investment for the space program, but it’s well over 1.

So, yeah. I’m a fan. It’s an example of the American government doing its job. It could have quit after reaching the moon, but instead they saw we had more benefits by working in the hard environment of space.

This incident also illustrates how poorly managed the manned space vehicle program has been managed. Whether it’s Congress or NASA itself, someone needs to step up and fix things. Maybe private industry will work out, what with SpaceX’s FalconHeavy supposedly getting ready for manned flight, but it’s not there, yet.

It’s Nature’s art, savagely beautiful and uncaring about the audience’s sensibilities:

Greg Sargent in The Plum Line remarks on the response of the news media of candidate and President Trump’s endless lying:

It is a great irony of the current political moment: By broadcasting forth Trump’s lies in tweets and headlines — while declining to inform readers that they are just that, and while burying the truth deep within accompanying articles — the organizations that Trump regularly derides as “fake news” are themselves spreading a species of fake news.

That is, fake news authored by Trump himself.

There is little doubt that a deceiver as prolific and innovative as Trump grasps — whether instinctively or consciously — that those getting news from social media and on mobile devices often read no further than headlines or tweets, and that the transmitting out of disinformation that gets amplified in headlines and news feeds helps him exploit this facet of the shifting information landscape.

The audience bears a responsibility as well, particularly when someone like Trump has such potential and actual influence. When it became clear to me that candidate Trump lies and lies and lies, as fact-checkers pointed out during the primaries, I no longer took anything he says straight – in fact, I always have a very large grain of metaphorical salt sitting next to me at the table, because I assume he’s lying, boasting, grasping after unearned credit, etc.^[1]

And this, in my non-partisan opinion, is what every single American adult should be doing.

It occurred to me, during the final push on the Kavanaugh hearings, that the decisions of many Republican Senators, as well as a few Democratic Senators such as, in the end, Manchin of West Virginia, were made not with their solemn responsibilities in mind, but with an eye towards the mid-term elections.

Sure, there’s no real news there. because it happens all the time. I can accept it for legislation, because governing is hard and compromise is not failure, but the acceptance that maybe your side is wrong, or both sides are wrong, and the compromise is how you make progress without running into utter destruction.

But when it comes to a SCOTUS nomination, there’s little point in compromise, or deference, but to keep someone in power happy, be they elected or not. It sounds like politics, but it’s really corruption. The Senatorial duty is to ascertain whether the nominees meets the standards and has no stains on their background of a disabling or extortionate nature, and then vote him up and down.

And what of it?

Do you remember the rampant theme of the 2016 Election? Drain the swamp! the Trump partisans cried. No more Politics As Usual! because it looks so sleazy.

And here we are. The swamp is far, far worse than it was just two years ago. And the politics continue to control the decisions of our Senators.

But I’m not going to stop here, because it goes the other way as well. Long time readers may remember my remarks about the moral turpitude of the Evangelicals. They back Trump because, as a family member involved in Evangelical churches recently vented, of the abortion issue.

So long as he delivers on the abortion issue, they’ll back him. That’s corruption, folks, corruption not of the politician, but of the voter. Or, for the Evangelical reader, that’s selling your soul to the devil. You, my Evangelical Trump-supporting reader, don’t think so? Congratulations, the devil just won and is hanging your soul to dry on his clothesline. There it’ll flap in the Hellish breeze until, forgotten, it disintegrates, and the righteous Evangelical voter will be struck from the Rolls Of The Select Of God for that utter failure to understand morality.^[2]

Similar remarks can be made by the anti-immigrant crowd, the pro-business crowd, and no doubt a few others.

The corruption isn’t only in Washington. It’s in Michigan and Minnesota, Iowa and Kansas, any place where Trump’s gifts of SCOTUS justices and big border walls and xenophobic Executive Orders and excessive military spending buys the favor of Trump loyalists who otherwise avert their eyes every time he lies through his teeth, claims successes he’s never had, and the balance of his mendacity. After all, they got their’s. It’s the epitome of selfishness.

The corruption isn’t just in our leaders. It’s in our fellow citizens as well. And it can apply to everyone on the spectrum if we don’t all demand the highest standards of ethics and competency.

I wanted to say one more thing, and I suppose I could have put it in another post, but it connects with this as well, and, besides, it’a from the same Sargent post. The lead-in concerns how the media is transitioning towards a more responsible, fact-checking approach to news dissemination, and how a similar transition took place during and after the Nixon Presidency.

So we may be in the midst of another transition, similar to the one that unfolded a generation ago. The news media seems to be retaining its core institutional independence and appears to be finding new ways to adapt. But as Hannah Arendt put it in a famous 1967 meditation on “Truth and Politics,” back during that previous period of serious institutional adaptation by the press, those two things — politics and factual truth — are perpetually “on rather bad terms with each other.”

Thanks to the rise of Trump, those terms are particularly bad right now. Perhaps we will get through this. But we are learning all over again, as Arendt put it, that “factual truth is fragile in politics, and its survival is never guaranteed.”

Arendt’s observation is the reason we have norms in Washington. That horrid tension or even dislike of facts, brought about by overweening ambitions of so many of those in Congress, as well as the religious fantasies with no connection to the real-world of some, ill-informed provincialism that has been the complaint of virtually every President we’ve had, the suppression of scientific information, and a few other factors, is the reason we have norms. It’s why the FBI and other intelligence agencies are explicitly non-partisan, it’s why their Directors are supposed to be non-political. Every single bloody norm has come about in reaction to some self-interested abuse which threatened the stability of our government.

And that’s why those who conserve those norms, the real conservatives, whether they’re Republican (mostly ex- at this point), Democrats, or Independents, are horrified when norms are trampled. It’s not that the dike has been shattered and now the water, black and poisoned and full of dead fish, might leak in, but the fact that all that repulsively poisoned water HAS ALREADY RUSHED IN. Flynn, Miller, Bannon, Price, Pruitt. They, and so many others, are that water that sluiced through the broken dike of norms, ravaged the government, left it open to manipulation by adversaries and the malicious.

It’s not some mythical Deep State twitching at the sword chop of the hero into its hide. It’s the real conservatives valuing some of the most important institutions of the United States, watching them being shattered.

And, when this is all over, those norms will have to be recovered and reinstalled, all to the bitter howling of those who are convinced it’s the Deep State covering its wounds. Or those realizing they are once again barred from skimming profits off the people.

Never realizing how much they’re betraying the United States.

¹ His continual lying and aversion to nuance in favor of his own illusory world of racism, in fact, motivated me to label him President Irrelevant, because his tenuous connection to truth renders any opinion he wants to put forth suspect and, therefore, truly unimportant for the adults trying to find the best path forward on any issue. Any issue at all. Only the fact that he’s the President makes him worth a moment of our time.

² Sure, I’m an agnostic. Doesn’t mean I can’t use the logic of Christian mythology against Trump-supporting Evangelicals. Consider this a full disclosure.

Remember Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas and candidate for Governor, who found himself in charge of voting in an extremely close contest for the GOP nomination? As noted, his opponent conceded before any horrific ethical transgressions on Kobach’s part were discovered. Turns out there’s another situation in which a Republican Secretary of State is running for Governor, and being presented with some interesting ethical challenges, this time in Georgia, where a school teacher was attempting to teach a little civics to her students and discovered that, despite her excellent voting record, she had been stricken from the voting rolls:

She tried re-registering, but with about one month left before a November election that will decide a governor’s race and some competitive U.S. House races, Appling-Nunez’s application is one of over 53,000 sitting on hold with Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office. And unlike Appling-Nunez, many people on that list — which is predominantly black, according to an analysis by The Associated Press — may not even know their voter registration has been held up.

Tuesday is Georgia’s deadline to register and be eligible to vote in the November General Election.

Kemp, who’s also the Republican candidate for governor, is in charge of elections and voter registration in Georgia.

His Democratic opponent, former state Rep. Stacey Abrams, and voting rights advocacy groups charge that Kemp is systematically using his office to suppress votes and tilt the election, and that his policies disproportionately affect black and minority voters. [AP]

The AP story has a lot more, mainly Kemp trying to take the moral high ground, while Abrams and her allies continue to dispute his assertions, especially in regards to a pile of suspended voter registrations which Kemp’s office is apparently simply sitting on.

But, as Steve Benen notes, Kemp should have found a way to recuse himself from the situation as an interested party. It’s an interesting situation: Republican Kemp is a white guy, while Democrat Abrams is gunning to become the first black female governor of Georgia. If Kemp is caught out manipulating the vote, would it cost him anything in Georgia? Ordinarily, I’d guess he’s playing a dangerous game, but this time I’m wondering if he’s safe behind a wall.

And, of course, any such guilt in this matter would continue to blacken the national reputation of the GOP, something they can ill-afford.

Autocephalous:

An independent Ukrainian church — or “autocephalous” in ecclesiastical terms — would mean little in everyday terms for the faithful. But for Ukraine’s political leaders and others, it would mark another important symbolic break from Russia and its reach into Ukrainian affairs. [“Tensions between Russia and Ukraine spill over to Byzantine world of Orthodox church,” David Stern and Amie Ferris-Rotman, WaPo]

A gene drive is the insertion of a gene sequence onto a chromosome which automatically copies itself into the other chromosome of the pair, thus raising the odds of it appearing in the offspring of the organism which has had the gene drive inflicted on it. It’s a new bit of technology. So what, you say? Well, this report by Michael Le Page in NewScientist (29 September 2018) made my blood run cold:

MILLIONS of lives might be saved or transformed for the better by the first working gene drive. This piece of “parasitic DNA” could spread through mosquito populations, wiping them out by making them infertile and halting the spread of deadly malaria.

In the lab, the gene drive killed off all mosquitoes within 12 generations. “There were no progeny,” says Andrea Crisanti of Imperial College London, whose team’s gene drive is based on the CRISPR gene-editing method.

There are 200 million cases of malaria each year and half a million deaths. Those who survive may have lasting health issues, and can become trapped in a cycle of illness and poverty.

“Gene editing holds the potential to save millions of lives and empower millions of people to lift themselves out of poverty,” billionaire Bill Gates, whose charity is helping fund the work, wrote earlier this year.

Gene drives are pieces of parasitic DNA inserted into one of an organism’s chromosomes. Chromosomes generally come in pairs, only one of which is passed from a parent to its offspring, so such a piece of DNA would usually pass to half an animal’s progeny. But gene drives “copy and paste” themselves onto both chromosomes when eggs and sperm form, meaning they get passed on to all offspring and spread through a population.

And scientists found a way to ensure that mutations won’t affect the gene drive. Basically, a gene sequence can be spread throughout a population just by inserting it using gene drive into a few individuals of reproductive age and inclination.

The scientists are jubilant, but it strikes me that this could cause havoc in a human population if used with malicious aforethought. The dangers should be obvious.

I’m a day late and a dollar short, but this amused me too much not to put it up.

Steve Benen calls this a gender chasm:

I’ll call it a useful measurement of just how little men generally understand the sexual harassment problems of women. By nearly two to one, women disapprove of the Republican Party and intend to vote for the Democrats in the mid-terms, while men actually intend to vote for the Republicans by a 5 point margin.

Fortunately, for those men who think there’s nothing to the plaints of “their womenfolk,” there’s this video, which had my Arts Editor and I howling with laughter, available to instruct you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX5w_SjGSUs

And if you think she’s just  a freak or whatever, think again. Every sexual harassed women would love to do what she did.

As the Republicans continue to try to cover up their behavior during the Kavanaugh hearings, I suspect the numbers will just get worse for them. Stubbornly stupid is no way to live a life.

Professor Julian Ku discusses the strategic goals of China on Lawfare:

While China’s international organization influence strategy seeks to expand its global prestige in ways similar to any other great power, it also has narrower, “China-first” interests to pursue. First and foremost, China’s growing influence in international organizations is aimed at ensuring the government of Taiwan is excluded and marginalized. China has succeeded so well in this regard that Taiwan has not even been able to achieve observer status at technical, nonpolitical organizations such as the World Health Organization, Interpol, or the International Civil Aviation Organization

Second, China seeks to use its newfound influence to pre-empt criticism by international organizations on long-sensitive issues such as human rights. For instance, China has been able to shape the agenda and build support within the Human Rights Commission for its own state-centric concept of human rights protection. To a lesser extent, it has been able to leverage influence in the United Nations Development Program to win endorsements of its controversial Belt and Road Initiative from UNDP leaders.

I see this as a part of their offensive against American democracy, touting their combination of reformed communism + managed capitalism as superior to more democratic, less controllable forms of government.

While the first explanation for their sensitivity on human-rights and other issues in that category may be the traditional reputation or “face” argument, I think the second explanation has to do with metrics. That is, many people like to have metrics that indicate how good something might be. So much the better if someone else is doing the measurements. So if China can control those organizations which can be seen as measuring the various competing forms of government, then China has a better chance of having the dominant form of government in the future.

And it won’t matter if the United States is a province of China in that future, just so long as it’s form of government is something that China can understand and, preferably, control. Because then they look better, relatively speaking, and have a better chance of surviving in their current governmental form.

Because who wants to run for election in China when you can make your way up the ranks in the Communist Party instead?

I tend to place more value on the critiques of those in the camp of that which is critiqued, or former such members, over those claiming a place in the opposing camp. Not because I doubt the sincerity of the latter, but for the simple reason that the member, or former thereof, is more likely to be familiar with the important facets and critical, but obscure, details. Even if their observations function merely to confirm the criticisms made by the opposition, it remains a pivotal and extremely persuasive part of the entire assemblage of critiques cast against a philosophy.

Therefore, when conservative Max Boot writes something like the following, I tend to pay more attention than if the name were, say, Hillary Clinton:

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

The ur-conservatives of the 1950s — William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest — were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ideological conservatives viewed Eisenhower as a sellout; John Birchers thought he was a communist agent. Why the animus against this war hero? Conservatives were furious that Eisenhower made no attempt to liberate the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe or repeal the New Deal, and that he did not support Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. Worst of all, from the viewpoint of contemporary conservatives, Eisenhower was a moderate on racial issues. He appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren, who presided over the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, and then sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. [WaPo / from Boot’s new book, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right]

It’s an enlightening and affirming remark as to the nature of cultural conservatism, vs the intellectual and more respectable conservatism I often encounter. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Boot confirms my observations of the nature of current conservatism:

The history of the modern Republican Party is the story of moderates being driven out and conservatives taking over — and then of those conservatives in turn being ousted by those even further to the right. A telling moment came in 1996, when the Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole, visited an aged Barry Goldwater. Once upon a time, Dole and Goldwater had defined the Republican right, but by 1996, Dole joked, “Barry and I — we’ve sort of become the liberals.” “We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater agreed. “Can you imagine that?”

I have often written of moderate Republicans being RINOed out of the Party by extremists, and then in turn being RINOed out by the even more extreme. In fact, I can recommend the entire article as enlightening. Boot has been a long time Republican Party member, who worked in the intellectual sphere for the Party, and so he speaks from certain knowledge, not malicious opposition.

For those who are casual conservatives for reasons of tradition or sloth, it’s important that they understand that today’s Trumpist Republican would have little to do with Goldwater, Dole, Reagan, or many other honorable conservatives of the past. To them, the compromises and decisions they came to would mark them as apostates in today’s Church of Extremist Conservatives, where to be bipartisan is to admit to uncertainty and error.

This unrealistic certainty, the denial of realities which I’ve run into the ground in other posts, mark them as uniquely unsuited for governance of even a village, much less the Federal level of the United States. Boot provides the confirmation of the processes and attitudes about which I and many others have been writing. It’s now up to my conservative readers to decide if they will be fellow-travelers with such regressive and damaging attitudes, or if it’s time to begin removing them from the Republican party in the most effective way possible.

By making them losers at the ballot box. Again and again, until they learn that there’s more to life than righteous indignation and amateurism, or they all just die off.

In case you’re thinking a war with North Korea would be confined to the peninsula, think again. In the days of global trade, the backlash isn’t military, as Jacob Marx points out on 38 North:

A war with North Korea would have the biggest impact on the automotive industry in three states—Michigan, Alabama and Georgia. Between autoworkers, distributors and other supporting industries, nearly 25,000 Americans could lose their jobs.

In Georgia, more than 11,000 jobs would be eliminated. Some of those losses would be at the Kia Motors plant in West Point, Georgia, but lost shipping means the port cities of Savanah and Brunswick could be hit even harder. There would also be major layoffs at car dealerships, which, with average annual salaries of $57,200, could have an outsized impact on the Georgia economy.

While Georgia would lose the most jobs, Michigan would be hit hardest because its autoworkers earn relatively high wages compared to other states. With the average auto manufacturing job paying $73,100 a year, mass layoffs would be devastating for many Michigan families.

And asking them to make it without help would be despicable, so either taxes or the national debt would go up some more.

Not that we can’t go to war with North Korea if we must – but we should be aware that a war far, far away is not a war that stays far, far away.

Following President Trump’s criticism of Senator Murkowski (R-AK), The Hill is reporting the following:

Leaders of the Alaskan Republican Party are weighing a reprimand for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) for not voting to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Alaska’s GOP has asked Murkowski to send its state central committee any information she thinks may be relevant to its decision, The Associated Press reported on Monday.

The basic struggle between  the merciless competition decreed by theory of games and humanity of shared community is at the heart of Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993). This is not the literal search, but, as we’re told early in the film, the search for the transformation from game to art that Fischer supposedly had discovered.

Young Josh is a newly discovered chess prodigy, and he learns early in Washington Square Park, where chess hustlers, who are drug addicts, make scratch money from playing speed chess against park visitors. Under the tutelage of Vinnie, who unfortunately isn’t given enough of a load to be really significant, he becomes quite good, and his parents choose to take him to a local chess club for more formal training, where a retired chess teacher, Pandolfini, a man burdened with his own demons coming from having been a prodigy, reluctantly agrees to teach him.

The personal costs of complete victory, the pieces of the soul that must be given up in that pursuit, are illustrated as Josh is stripped of Vinnie, his other friends, and even his beloved father, who falls into the trap of the competitive parent. But his mother, another under-utilized character, has become wary of this work in progress, and it doesn’t help when a new rival, Morgan, appears, lacking friends, hobbies, or even basic humanity, but with his own chess coach. When Josh bows out early at the school championship he was favored to easily win, there’s a clue: he’s not enjoying it anymore.

Vinnie reappears and returns the focus to the excitement of the speed version of chess, and when, against the advice of his coach, they go to the national championships for Josh’s age group, the tension is high as it comes down to Josh and Morgan, and Josh demonstrates both his humanity and his capacity for synthesis in the final game of the movie.

As noted, some of the characters could have been better utilized, but it’s a gifted cast and they make it fly; I just wonder if it would have been better with more contributions from the mother and Vinnie. As it is, it’s a fascinating look into the hard-core chess world, and almost makes me want to play another game of chess. I don’t think I’ve played more than a couple in 30 years, since high school chess.

Oh,  yeah. I was terrible. But this film isn’t. I won’t quite recommend it because I didn’t like the pacing, but it’s worth a gander if you’re so inclined.

On Lawfare, Nicholas Weaver comments on a report of certain servers in use by various U.S. companies being compromised by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA):

Robertson and Riley report a scheme in which Chinese intelligence bribed, threatened or cajoled at least four separate subcontracted manufacturing facilities in China to modify the design of SuperMicro server motherboards to include a small chip—smaller than a grain of rice—that would insert the backdoor into the BMC.

This scheme is less crazy than it might seem.  Modern circuit boards are filled with small support chips, and the backdoor chip would appear to be just another faceless component to all but the most detailed examination. And while the Bloomberg article doesn’t go into the mechanics of how this would work, there’s one likely culprit: the serialEEPROM chip or a serial FLASH chip, which is used to store program and other instructions used during the startup process. The BMC itself loads at least some data from such a chip, which itself needs only two wires to communicate—so it would only take two connections for a rogue chip to mask the contents of a SEEPROM or SPI FLASH, replacing the contents and thereby corrupting the BMC by installing the backdoor code. …

Then there is the question of whether the NSA is aware of other supply chains compromised in similar manners. If so, a quiet nudge may be a good idea. This style of backdoor can be very hard to find until one knows where to look, but is reasonably discoverable once the searcher pointed in the right direction.

This is one of the problems with free trade with adversarial countries such as China that can supply components cheaply – we end up revealing our secrets without ever realizing it.

But it also suggests a business opportunity, the supply of components and servers certified to be free of industrial espionage. Manufacturers would probably be required to provide proof, probably through inspection, and perhaps even a bond for each server sold – although bonds may not be sufficient to restrain some avaricious businessmen.

In essence, it’s a trade war without the drama.

Another reason to distrust private sector folks who think it’s all about making money.

I thought the cut grinder at Kramarczuk’s was quite lovely. My Arts Editor insisted on some staged pics.

BTW, that grinder will be my lunch today.

Sometimes applications of mathematical fields can leave me boggled. Topology is about deformation of one shape into another, and include insights into which shapes can never be reached from a starting shape. This comes from “Shape Shifters,” Devin Powell (Discover, October 2018), which also includes this:

For a long time, these bizarre shapes — and others revealed by topology — were mere curiosities. But then they started showing up in surprising places, like black-and-white digital photographs. About 10 years ago, [Gunnar] Carlsson, the Stanford mathematician, was analyzing photographs a colleague had cut up into 9-pixel blocks when a pattern emerged. Plot the blocks as points on a graph with nine dimensions, one for the value of how dark each pixel is, and a shape emerges that looks like a Klein bottle. Carlsson applied this knowledge to invent a new way to digitally compress images to smaller sizes. A company he founded, AYASDI, has used topology to look for patterns in genes involved in different cancers, for instance, and bank transactions that indicate fraudulent activity.

Wait, what? How does this work? I can’t even guess, no intuition on this one at all.

But for all those who whine about the money that goes into obscure scientific investigations, results like this should be a redoubtable retort.

Noted just outside our window at work.

In Bloomberg, Stephen Carter puts forth a simple proposal to reduce the cultural wars over open seats on SCOTUS:

Suddenly everybody wants to explore term limits for Supreme Court justices. Welcome aboard. I’ve been on that train for almost a quarter of a century. The current argument is that life tenure is a leading cause of the increasing viciousness of our confirmation battles. But whether term limits would fix the process depends on whether we’re right about what’s wrong.

Term limits are popular. Some 61 percent of Americans support them. Whether categorized by party, income, race, gender or religion, in no demographic group does a majority oppose them. 1  Over the last decade or so, many legal scholars have embraced the idea of discarding life tenure in favor of either a mandatory retirement age or, more often, a specified number of years on the high bench – usually 18 or 15.

But the biggest problem with life tenure, especially in our polarized age, is that it makes a seat on the bench far too valuable. Political parties, whether in or out of power, invest considerable capital in securing seats for their own side, or denying them to the other, because the seats themselves are so scarce a resource.

What drives all this is that vacancies occur so rarely. Their scarcity drives up the political price each side is willing to pay in order to get one. We can’t reduce the demand, but we can increase the supply. If vacancies were more common, the value of the seats would fall, and there would be less incentive to contest each one so vehemently. 

Carter may have been talking this up for a quarter century, but this article is shockingly deficient in that it doesn’t talk about how it could preserve that which we must value the most about the judiciary: independence and integrity. As long time readers know, I worry enough about the bending of justice to the winds of public whim and human self-interest that I reject the entire notion of judicial elections. The summary is that judges who must depend on the whim of the electorate for election may be strongly tempted to change their legal interpretations to suit those whims, and this may lead to unjustified ruptures in the law.

That leads to the most important question: how would term limits affect judicial independence and integrity. I think this is a bit of a tangled question. My first inclination was that this might be a good idea if term limits are strong term limits, which is to say, once a term limit is reached, there is no possibility of being appointed to a second term. One and you’re done, so to speak.

But then I thought about it some more. In my discussion of how the Kavanaugh confirmation may redound onto the Republicans’ neck, I noted that this lifetime appointment means that Kavanaugh is now off the Republican leash. That is, licit Republican influence on Kavanaugh is now nothing more than persuasion. They cannot promise him further positions, or deprivation from same. The best they can hope for is to discreetly promise or threaten family and friends, but that is a somewhat more dubious business, and can be subject to FBI inquiries.

Image source: NGV

He has, in essence, the Golden Fleece.

The term limit requirement, however, would invalidate that assumption to some extent. We do have to keep in mind that there’s little enough to keep a Justice from helping move to the court to a position desired by some party, and then resigning from the Court and reaping whatever reward has been promised them; a term limit, however, will force all Justices from their positions, and thus perhaps multiply opportunities for corruption. But, in all honesty, a corrupt justice will find a way to benefit from their position, and while this may not obviate objections to term limits, it does blunt the objections. Let’s note this argument may merit more discussion at some other time and move on.

Carter notes his proposal would address a number of issues, such as the effect of aging on the intellect, “strategic retirement” (think Anthony Kennedy’s retirement), and that sort of thing, but I’ll confine myself to consideration of his primary point: that term limits will calm the political wars over seats on SCOTUS. I think there’s a number of problems with this position. First, I will repeat his contention and his summary reasoning:

What drives all this is that vacancies occur so rarely. Their scarcity drives up the political price each side is willing to pay in order to get one. We can’t reduce the demand, but we can increase the supply. If vacancies were more common, the value of the seats would fall, and there would be less incentive to contest each one so vehemently.

I am most bothered by the application of reasoning derived from economics, because it makes the intellectual error of borrowing analysis of causal activity from one domain for application in another without at least attempting to ensure the rules concerning isomorphisms are followed; if you think about how analogies can fail, you’ll understand my concern about isomorphisms. Granted, Carter’s is a pop article and not a deep analysis, but I am distinctly uncomfortable trying to accept his suggestion that SCOTUS seats are simply just another commodity that are for sale, and that by making more available, the price will drop, for it seems both intellectually lazy and, on the face of it, wrong.

First of all, commodity sales are most often independent events from most perspectives, with the exception that they do all occur. This is not true of SCOTUS  seats. The value of any given SCOTUS seat, if we wish to use the perspective of partisan politics rather than that of judges deciding points of law with respect to the activities of jurisdictional entities (this would be my Second point, BTW, which needs little more elaboration – I hope!), will be an equation heavily dependent on the current composition of the Court, and, to a lesser degree, on the pattern of predicted retirements from the Court, forced and unforced, and how they interact with the currently perceived ideological leanings of those seated Justices.

Third, equating a commodity consumer with the partisans who brought about the recent battle over Kennedy’s former seat seems naive. The Court has been successfully politicized, it appears to me, and while we can argue over which Party is responsible^[1], it’s a fact that happens to be at odds with the ideal American governmental system. Each successive war for a SCOTUS seat will inflame partisans, the tribal members whose first and final priority, with little thought for anything else, is the victory of their little tribe. By increasing the frequency of open seats, we may cause the heat of our infection of partisanship to simply grow higher and higher.

This may lead to an unintended positive consequence, and that lies with younger, as yet uninvolved generations of Americans. Substantial portions of them are watching these conflicts, and with some fair dismay, if the occasional demographic survey of political opinion is anything to trust. We may find that both parties continue to shrink in size as they display their worst aspects to prospective members during these more frequent fights over SCOTUS seats.

So, cutting this off here, I think to suggest that a greater supply will ensure less partisanship seems unlikely. I think it’ll increase it. I haven’t addressed questions about losing cumulative experience and that sort of thing, as I’m not sure how much importance there is for experience among Justices, and how much they can refer to former Justices when it comes to that.

But I think a question of term limits for Justices needs a lot more exploration in the context of current political realities.

¹ My familiarity with the history of SCOTUS appointments doesn’t go back much further than the rejected nomination of Judge Bork. My understanding is that he was rejected for his radical view of the judicial system, but I do have to wonder if there was an undercurrent of unease because Bork had been Nixon’s hatchet-man for the Saturday Night Massacre. The short recap is that President Nixon, then under special prosecutor investigation by Archibald Cox for conspiracy in connection with the Watergate incident, decided he wanted Cox out, and so ordered the Attorney General to do so. AG Richardson refused and resigned, and then so did Deputy AG Ruckelshaus. However, Solicitor General Robert Bork complied and fired Cox, which suggests to me a lack of honor on his part.

But not the consequences which you might expect.

Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), the second ranking Republican, attributed the divisions in Washington to wounds inflicted by Trump’s election in 2016, which he said “half the population can’t seem to get over.” [WaPo]

Yes, Senator. More than half of those voting voted for the President’s opponent, and thus feel cheated. Their new President is an utterly inveterate liar and cheat, a stealer of glory and unjustified boaster, and so they feel the reputation of their country and themselves is besmirched by not only their President, but by everyone who supported him and continues to support him. They can’t get over it? Are you kidding? You’re being told that you and your Party are incompetent failures, and you think you can’t get over it?

Senator, elections have consequences, but it’s not going to be just the theft of a SCOTUS seat or two, and the ravaging of the environment and possible demise of this country. We’re already seeing States modifying their Presidential selection criteria to properly reflect the popular vote. We’re seeing the Republican brand damaged by the extremists who’ve taken over the party, the incompetent governing, beginning with Trump and extending right down through the ridiculous antics of McConnell and Ryan, down to the candidates for the current mid-terms who think that being a good little Trump-lover is the essence of being a member of the national legislature, and they need to be nothing more.

And all of us who are not encased in the pathological Republican bubble are not getting over it. We may express it through anger, but the truth is often this:

We mourn your loss to us.

We mourn that your Party has decided to cling to power through mendacity, to ideas outmoded by reality, to deny realities which threaten our very survival when their existence erodes the dominance of your ideals, to illicitly tarnishing the reputations of your political opponents, to debasing our treasured political discourse, to the treatment of political elections as all-out warfare where gerrymandering, suppressing the votes of minority groups, and other such tactics are considered fair and proper.

Your behavior is diminishing for you, for us, and for the system of government to which we’ve sworn allegiance. We already know that China is taking advantage of your behavior to advance their propaganda that their system of government is better. Is this really what you want, Senator?

Think about that statement you made, Senator. You may wish to retract it.

An Angry Citizen

If your village is made of good, strong materials with lots of character, maybe you rent it out. That is happening to Corippo, Switzerland via a foundation:

The architectural pearl of the Verzasca Valley, Corippo retains its harsh and primitive charm. It fits into a scenario of rare beauty in symbiosis with the dominant nature. In 1975, the European year of architectural heritage, the village was designated by the Confederation and the Canton as a historic settlement worthy of being valued. The Corippo Foundation was established in 1975. An ambitious project is therefore born: the conservative restructuring of the dwellings to create a model of welcoming diffused with a tourist vocation. [translated from Italian]

In other words, a hotel for tourists that retains all the historic charm. I’m not sure this would work in the United States, but some dying communities might want to consider it, especially if there are attractions nearby.

When travel was more difficult, autocrats didn’t have so many problems facing them – such as so many of the best leaving as quickly as possible.  Kadri Gursel reports for AL Monitor on the escape of the brightest Turks from Turkey:

Speaking at an Istanbul fair Sept. 13, Turkish Industry and Technology Minister Mustafa Varank — a long-time chief adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before joining the Cabinet after the June elections — lamented that the country was “unfortunately losing its qualified human resources through brain drain.” It was a rather remarkable statement, for such admissions are rare in Turkish government quarters.

Varank’s statement is backed by newly released official statistics that speak of an accelerating, dramatic brain drain that is stripping Turkey of its well-educated youth — the sole strategic asset the country has for any quest of global competitiveness and prosperity. According to migration data released Sept. 6 by the Turkish Statistical Institute, the number of Turks emigrating due to “economic, political, social and cultural” reasons increased 42.5% to reach 253,640 in 2017. More than 42% of those emigrants were aged 25-34, and 57% were from big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya, Bursa and Izmir. In other words, roughly half of the those leaving Turkey are young urban people.

The staggering 42.5% increase in emigration last year stems from the political watersheds in 2016 and 2017.

And those were the failed coup in Turkey, followed by the referendum which, barely, gave President Erdogan much greater executive powers. Gursel talks to one of those emigres. Gezi is a reference to the anti-government protests of 2013 that took place in and near Gezi Park in Istanbul:

Sercan Celebi, a leading founder of Vote and Beyond — a Gezi-inspired civic initiative dedicated to election integrity — described a sense of despair among the Gezi generation. “Those who took to the streets with various motivations during the Gezi protests are now leaving the country because they are left with no other democratic channel to display their indignation. Since the street is no longer an alternative, abroad has become ‘the street,’” Celebi told Al-Monitor.

He added, “This is a productive generation that has truly equipped itself with science and technology and is capable of preparing the country for a new future and providing added value. They have lost hope in both the government and the opposition. Their dreams hardly mesh with the dream the [current] decision-makers have for the country, which is a totalitarian and isolationist dream that says ‘I want everything for myself, even if I settle for less.’”

For those Trump supporters who believe our future lies with alliances with “strong leader” countries such as Turkey and The Philippines, it’s worth noting that the flip side of emigre is immigrant. People leave home for a variety of reasons, not just war or famine, but key to the immigration issue is a happy home country – it resolves a host of reasons. Thus, my upset with Colbert a few weeks ago.

And for those “strong leaders,” they may be backed by large numbers of their citizens- but it’s a rare educated person who’s going to stick around waiting for the noose that may come for them. Autocrats have a finely tuned sense for those who internally threaten them, and move quickly to neutralize them – regardless of their status. Wise people leave before the blade falls – or strike first.

Finally, it’s hard to look at the American millenials and not see the same disappointment as the Gezi generation appears to be experiencing – the disappointment at the power struggles, the disillusionment. In both cases, the element of religion and its separation (I shan’t say divorce, as that has the wrong implications) may be one of the hidden keys to the disappointment. Here is a time series from Gallup on the American view of the centrality of religion in their lives. It covers about half a generation, I suppose.

Unfortunately, Gallup neglected to offer the entire graph, despite having the data – see the link, it’s about a 1/3rd of the way down the page. In 1993, Fairly Important was 29%, and Not Very Important was 12%; the respective values in 2017 are 23% and 25%. I think this is a significant movement, even accounting for those folks who think of themselves as ‘spiritual.’^[1]

But is the future of this graph to show an upswing in religious sentiment, or will the current downswing continue? Gallup offers no demographic breakdown, so, at least from this data source, there’s no answer. However, the Pew Research Center has some useful graphs from … it doesn’t say.

Clearly, the younger you are, the less certain you are that someone’s looking out for you – but odds are still over 50%.

And it’s importance becomes lesser as you are younger. It’d be interesting to see data on these questions for Turkey as well. I don’t personally see religion holding answers for a world that is becoming pathologically overcrowded; my experience with American Christianity ranges from a cautious semi-realism to complete denial. Given that the entire range’s foundation is a mythology grounded in a completely different context, it’s difficult to have confidence even in the semi-realists.

¹ Which I’ve found is such a nebulous concept that, despite having it explained to me several times, I still find completely forgettable. I speculate that the concept already has another name for me, perhaps less creditable, which lets me sweep the entire affair under the rug.

Anne Applebaum of WaPo has more details on the Russian GRU hackers and their goal:

These have produced a trove of additional information. Among other things, the Dutch have proof that some of these men have been to Malaysia, where they were spying on the team investigating the crash of MH17 , the passenger plane brought down by a Russian missile in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. They have proof that these same men hacked a computer belonging to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the organization that revealed the drug use by Russian athletes. They found train tickets to Switzerland, where it seems the GRU team was planning to hack the laboratory tasked with identifying Novichok, the chemical nerve agent that their colleagues used to attack an ex-spy in England. They even found a taxi receipt from the cab the team took from GRU headquarters to the Moscow airport. …

[The Dutch and open source investigation by the folks at Bellingcat] also represented a new turning point in the West’s fight against the onslaught of Russian disinformation, for this particular GRU team was not engaged in a traditional form of spying. They were not looking for secret information; they were looking for dirt. They wanted embarrassing stories, catty emails or anything at all that would discredit organizations that seek to establish the truth about Russian crimes: OPCW, WADA, the MH17 investigation, the Swiss chemical lab. Had they found anything, they would not have analyzed it in secret, they would have leaked it.

This is a familiar pattern. A similar search for kompromat was one of the motivations for the GRU’s hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, as well as of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign. The GRU agents who ran that operation were also looking for material, however banal, that could be leaked and then spun into compromising, distracting stories that would dominate news cycles and discredit Clinton. In any institution, whether a laboratory or a campaign office, there are private conversations that differ, in language and tone, from announcements made in public. The GRU seeks to exploit this distinction in order to create distrust and suspicion. They can’t alter the verdict of the OPCW or the results of the MH17 investigation, but they can persuade people not to take them seriously.

Anne believes the Dutch did the right thing by advertising the attempted hack around the world, and I have no intention of disputing that suggestion. She also notes that Bellingcat blew another hole in the Russian intelligence operation – it’s an article worth reading in full.

But I still think the Dutch should have dumped their asses in jail. And then issued an arrest warrant for Putin.

Finally, it’s worth reconsidering skeptical opinions my readers may hold on many subjects. How many are the result of false or misleading information released by the Russians? It’s a question worth considering – by everyone.

Which is, at least in my mind, the old, old question of how to put a map of the Earth, an oblate sphere, onto a flat piece of paper and have it be useful. Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny have worked out a new such projection, which they call the Equal Earth map projection, and describe it in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science, and go into detail at ResearchGate. While I, as well as my Arts Editor, enjoy maps, I’ve never looked into the technical details, so I thought this paper was interesting. They begin with their aesthetic sensibilities:

The first step in developing the Equal Earth projection for world maps was deciding on its basic characteristics. To create a world map with an appearance familiar to as many people as possible, it must have an equatorial aspect and north-up orientation. We rejected developing another equal-area cylindrical projection, such as the Gall-Peters. Transforming the spherical Earth to fit in a rectangle introduces excessive shape distortions. In the case of Gall-Peters, the continents in mid-latitude and tropical areas are highly elongated on the north–south axis. Conversely, the pole lines that stretch across the entire width of the map severely elongate polar regions in the east–west direction (Figure 1). We also rejected the concept of an equal-area projection that depicts the poles as points, such as the Mollweide and sinusoidal projections. On these projections, the meridians that steeply converge towards the poles present a practical problem for cartographers.

Etc. Then they move on to the technical details, including the equations to use to map to and from a projection. After that, they described their approach of combining two other approaches in order to find that pleased them.

They’re pleased with their continents in this projection, which begs the question: how about the voids, i.e., the oceans? Are they equally accurate?

Do they care?

Their motivation:

A wave of news stories that ran in late March 2017 motivated the creation of the Equal Earth map projection. Boston Public Schools announced the switch to the Gall-Peters projection for all classroom maps showing the entire world (Boston Public Schools 2017). The media reporting by major national and international news outlets, such as The Guardian (Walters 2017), The Huffington Post (Workneh 2017), National Public Radio (Dwyer 2017) or Newsweek (Williams 2017), largely focused on these all-too-familiar themes: the Mercator projection is bad for world maps because it grossly enlarges the high-latitude regions at the expense of the tropics (true); nowadays, the Mercator projection is still the standard for making world maps (false 1 ); and only maps using the equal-area Gall-Peters projection can right this wrong (false) (Sriskandarajah 2003, Vujakovic 2003, Monmonier 2004). The reaction among cartographers to this announcement, and to others like it in years past, was predictable: frustration (Vujakovic 2003, Monmonier 2004, Crowe 2017, Giaimo 2017, Mahnken 2017). It is noteworthy that most of the news stories did not publish comments from professional cartographers. Our message –that Gall-Peters is not the only equal-area projection – was not getting through.

A look into the world of cartography.

I’ve not shown a sample here because it is, after all, their professional product. Well, OK, here’s one:

Source: Shade Relief