Yearly Archives: 2018

Or flowers.

They tried to trade for DC’s Batman, but when DC asked for Stan Lee’s head, the deal fell through.

It’s tempting to simply label Avengers: Infinity War (2018) as tripe and move on. After all, the only discernible theme in this story appears to be the all-too serious question of over-population (except in this case it’s of the Universe, not just Earth), which the bad guy offers to fix by killing off half the population of the Universe, but it’s not developed in the least. After that, the movie seems to consist of

• Action
• Superheroes piled on superheroes with a few on the side as seasoning
• More action
• Screw character development
• Murder excused by theme
• More meaningless action

Yeah, it’s dull, outside of the occasional pop-culture reference, which is itself meta-associated.

My only caveat is that perhaps this movie thrills the knowledgeable Marvel Universe fanatic. Maybe. And if you happen to be such a fan, go see this movie.

But for the rest of us, it’s a waste of time.

The Civiqs website has some nifty charts, of which I’m lifting snapshots but not providing their full functionality. I think they’re interesting in showing how favorable / unfavorable ratings shift in reaction to events. First, the Republicans:

And the Democrats:

Relatively speaking, the Democrats should be feeling fairly good. Absolutely? Neither party is doing well. Perhaps this is reflective of political parties throughout the history of the United States, but I’d still be a trifle dispirited if I were a member of either party. The evident distaste for political parties suggest that both are doing something wrong.

We’re starting to harvest, just a couple, but it’s nice to be underway.

And then there’s the garage tomato plants…

I ran across more information concerning the decision of Judge Messite to permit the emoluments lawsuit pursued by the Attorneys General of Maryland and D.C. against President Trump to go forth. It boils down to John Mikhail researching the dictionaries available to the authors of the Constitution and using the information to rebut the Department of Justice’s defense of the President’s continuing business links. It’s at the Balkinization blog, as mentioned by WaPo, and here’s a bit from what appears to be the initial blog posting on the subject:

… why the Trump Justice Department’s narrow definition of “emolument” in CREW v. Trump cannot withstand scrutiny.

In its motion to dismiss in CREW et al. v. Trump, the Department of Justice (DOJ) defines the word “emolument” as “profit arising from office or employ.” DOJ claims that this “original understanding” of “emolument” is both grounded in “contemporaneous dictionary definitions” and justifies an “office-and-employment-specific construction” of that term. On this basis, it argues that the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution “do not prohibit any company in which the President has any financial interest from doing business with any foreign, federal, or state instrumentality.”

Unfortunately, DOJ’s historical definition of “emolument” is inaccurate, unrepresentative, and misleading. Particularly because the government may seek to utilize its flawed definition in subsequent court filings, this Article seeks to correct the historical record. It does so based on a comprehensive study of how “emolument” is defined in English language dictionaries published from 1604 to 1806, as well as in common law dictionaries published between 1523 and 1792.

Among other things, the Article demonstrates that every English dictionary definition of “emolument” from 1604 to 1806 relies on one or more of the elements of the broad definition DOJ rejects in its brief: “profit,” “advantage,” “gain,” or “benefit.” Furthermore, over 92% of these dictionaries define “emolument” exclusively in these terms, with no reference to “office” or “employment.” By contrast, DOJ’s preferred definition — “profit arising from office or employ” — appears in less than 8% of these dictionaries. Moreover, even these outlier dictionaries always include “gain, or advantage” in their definitions, a fact obscured by DOJ’s selective quotation of only one part of its favored definition from Barclay (1774). The impression DOJ creates in its brief by contrasting four historical definitions of “emolument” — two broad and two narrow — is, therefore, highly misleading.

Followed by some lovely tables demonstrating, I assume, the fallacy of the DoJ’s position. In some ways, I dislike the Internet, but WaPo suggests that, prior to the Internet, this research would taken years; now it takes weeks. But it’s also an incidental rebuttal of my own position that legal words shouldn’t change their meaning over time, since it appears emoluments has done so. Will legal proceedings become ever more slower as the years pass and we must translate every law from its original wording to contemporary wording?

And will there be a word describing this occupation?

Family reunions never went well for this family. Megalon was shy and hid his face, Godzilla was drunk and combative, and Gaiman showed off his spine ridge to the cousins, with whom he was desperate to sleep. They just giggled and hid in the wainscoting.

Godzilla vs Megalon (1973) might have been better entitled Godzilla & Jet Jaguar vs Megalon & Gaiman, Sans Referee!, or something similarly silly. The movie’s plot is awful: a nuclear test has damaged part of unknown underwater civilization Seatopia (“they’ve even built their own Sun!”). In retaliation, the Seatopians steal the just-developed flying robot Jet Jaguar and use it to release and control their monster, Megalon, who proceeds to stomp on a city or two.

The humans regain control of Jet Jaguar and send him off to Monster Island to summon Godzilla to the war, while the Seatopians summon Gaiman from another dimension. Since Godzilla has to do some traveling to reach the battleground, Jet Jaguar returns to find Megalon and inflates to the monster’s size, but when Gaiman appears and teams up with Megalon, he’s in trouble until Godzilla finally reaches them.

Then the stomping begins.

Yeah, it’s awful. I mostly watched this while making meals or trying to wake up in the mornings. It. Is. Terrible. Nothing to recommend it at all.

It’s always interesting glancing through a blog new to me. Some reveal what I consider psychosis, such as the blog devoted to proving another blog was engaging in Catholic blasphemy for suggesting that the Pope was blaspheming for … now I forget. Some demonstrate the eternal human need to be right with the Boss Upstairs, without ever wondering if he exists. Others are political, and they run around with their eternal prism before their eyes, interpretation guaranteed and rarely surprising.

Even technical blogs can be interesting. Balkinization, which appears to be devoted to legal issues of some sort, had this bit by Rebecca Crootof which surprised me. I just had to sift through the legal pieces:

Once upon a time, missing a payment on your leased car would be the first of a multi-step negotiation between you and a car dealership, bounded by contract law and consumer protection rules, mediated and ultimately enforced by the government. You might have to pay a late fee, or negotiate a loan deferment, but usually a company would not repossess your car until after two or even three consecutive skipped payments. Today, however, car companies are using starter interrupt devices to remotely “boot” cars just days after a payment is missed. This digital repossession creates an obvious risk of injury when an otherwise operational car doesn’t start: as noted in a New York Times article, there have been reports of parents unable to take children to the emergency room, individuals marooned in dangerous neighborhoods, and cars that were disabled while idling in intersections.

This is but one of many examples of how the proliferating Internet of Things(IoT) enables companies to engage in practices that foreseeably cause consumer property damage and physical injury. But how is tort law relevant, given that these actions are authorized by terms of service and other contracts? In this post I’ll elaborate on how IoT devices empower companies at the expense of consumers and how extant law shields industry from liability.

And while the legal issues are of only minor interest, the alienation we’ll experience as the absolute letter of the contract is enforced is the bigger issue.

I’ve seen this already, as I remember from many, many years ago an old friend of mine recounting his experience with the bank and loans. It used to be, he said, that if you were a day or two late on paying the monthly loan installment, no big deal. But then computers came into use, and now if you were a day late, you were charged up the wazoo for it.

He was livid. And he had a right to be. In the name of enforcing the contract to its absolute letter, the bank was disrupting the societal bonds which are so important in keeping societies functioning smoothly.

So now I’m wondering how much more damage the Internet of Things will be doing to those societal bonds, and if we’ll fragment even moreso.

There’s a hoary and slightly shady tradition of submitting for publication of papers of, shall we say, a dubious nature, and Gary Lewis recounts his successful entry into this tradition, in pursuit of the flushing out of predatory journals, on The Conversation:

I had what seemed like rather a good idea a few weeks back. Building on some prominent findings in social psychology, I hypothesised that politicians on the right would wipe their bum with their left hand; and that politicians on the left would wipe with their right hand.

Ludicrous? Yes – absolutely. But for once my goal wasn’t to run a bona fide scientific study. Instead, I wanted to see if any “journal” would publish my ass-wiping “findings”. …

My (fictional) research assistant camped outside the Houses of Parliament and essentially stalked “MPs”. She used a large folder of pictures to identify these politicians’ left vs right leaning tendencies. And when a potential participant was seen on the street, the research assistant walked up alongside the politician, indicated that she was a psychological scientist doing a study, provided a brief consent form, and then asked which hand they wiped their bottom with.

This yielded nine (fictional) participants in total, including “Boris Johnski” and “Teresa Maybe”, although one data point had to be discarded – that of “Nigel F. ‘Arage”. He, rather meanly, told my research assistant to “bog off” when asked the hand-wiping question. And so his data was necessarily excluded from the analysis.

But that didn’t matter – because the data from our sample of eight fully confirmed the theory. Politicians do indeed wipe their asses with the contralateral hand. I could scarcely believe my eyes – but of course the statistics never lie. …

Having submitted the bogus manuscript, I soon got an email informing me that the manuscript was safely received and under review. Just a few days later, I was informed that it was accepted for publication. With a request for US$581.

I told the journal I couldn’t afford any publication fees. So they dropped it to US$99 (for “web hosting charges”). I was tempted – but I’ve learned that you should never accept the first counter offer. So I went for broke. And it turns out that the paper was so groundbreaking that they agreed to publish it for free: “We do understand from you [sic] end. As per your previous conversation, I had a session with financial manager and have decided to provide complete waiver.” It must have been a truly magnificent session with the financial manager.

It’s quite the story, and a sad commentary on the disrespect certain individuals have for the importance of science in today’s society.

A reader can’t stomach the current politicians with regard to our attitudes:

I disagree, strongly. Yes, the letter does what you purport, mostly, and ends in some pretty slimy pro-gun sentiment. But you are extremely far too generous to sitting Congress members. Virtually all but a very few deserve every brickbat this letter delivers. It was not always that way, which is how we survived this long.

Yes, we’ve improved upon the system designed by the Founding Fathers, but we’ve also damaged and diminished it as well. It had faulty design problems from the start (e.g. voting rights distribution, technological changes) which are in desperate need of correction.

It’s the career civil servants, inertia and resting on the system of the past that keeps it going. If we really had to rely on Congress in the past 10 to 20 years in a serious way, we’d be screwed. In fact, we are pretty much in a big fat mess right now, much of it thanks to them.

My problem with the letter is that it doesn’t name names, it doesn’t make credible allegations. The attack is not on the current Congress, which would be far more reasonable, but instead it’s making accusations against the very structure of the institute itself.

Look, our representatives are those that we picked, and if they are not up to snuff, then we need to get a better quality of person to run and then elect them. To some extent, the current state of affairs is the result of a planned attack on those structures by conservative media outlets such as Limbaugh, and have resulted in such noxious, toxic, or pretentious personalities as Hastert, Gingrich, Coleman, DeLay, Jordan, Gohmert, Ryan, McConnell, and a number of others^[1].

But the hidden message of the letter is to permanently disaffect ourselves from Congress as an institution. If you look throughout the history of Congress, they often squabble, their issues are often provincial, and ignorance and ideology often gets in the way of getting things done. But the great advantage they also bring is to blunt the decisive mistake often made by the princes of monarchies and the leaders of autocracies. For all that Congress can be discouraging in any given period, at least its sheer weight means that it doesn’t often destroy the good quickly, but instead so slowly that it can often be stopped before the damage becomes irrepairable.

It is, in my view, almost certainly part of a long term plan to cripple one of the most important institutions in America by making it attractive to the second- and third-rate person, while discouraging the competent and self-sacrificing from running, and defeating them when they do run. Taking advantage of the resentment of those impacted by Federalism, and spreading revised history such as that the Civil War was about States’ rights rather than the poison of slavery, we’re now faced with a core GOP made up of extremists, and independents who are deeply suspicious of the Democrats, who have partly brought it on themselves through a variety of mistakes.

My reader sees a Congress full of dubious personalities, with which I agree, but I see a letter aimed at the institution, not its current occupants.

And, since we’re talking about Congress, I found this report interesting. From The New York Times:

Trying to ease gridlock in Congress, a bipartisan group of frustrated House members is coming forward with a rules overhaul intended to give rank-and-file lawmakers more say.

The proposal, to be formally unveiled Wednesday by the House Problem Solvers Caucus, also seeks to rein in hard-right Republican forces in the chamber that have wielded significant influence over the majority party in recent years. …

The rules proposal was drafted over months of negotiation among the 48 members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which is equally split between Republicans and Democrats. It would institute new standards for the automatic consideration of legislation with strong bipartisan support. The authors believe the plan, which has the backing of at least 75 percent of the group’s membership, would foster more bipartisanship and incite debate on major issues that are being sidelined by political considerations.

“Due to the House floor being controlled by a select few, most members of Congress are not able to bring their ideas and proposals to the House floor for a fair vote that would allow us to begin solving some of the most contentious issues facing our country today,” said Representative Tom Reed, Republican of New York and a chairman of the group.

The fact that they recognize there are problems and are looking for process solutions must surely count for a few points in their favor. There’s still the problem of team politics, of course, but the threat that their own proposals will not receive any consideration has to be a problem for Republicans (and Democrats!) with little political traction within Congress itself.

¹And no doubt a few Democrats as well, although I’m hesitant to pick any of them as they are often the targets of professional & misleading smear campaigns; the Republicans, on the other hand, distinguished themselves through direct actions as reported by reliable media.

A reader has more information concerning the medical device tax that may be repealed:

That tax was intended to fund ACA premium rebates for low income families and individuals to make their health insurance more affordable. Without that revenue stream, the ACA doesn’t work financially. Nothing more than a repub scheme to cripple the ACA when they lacked the votes to simply repeal it.

Shame on Klobuchar for caving to Medtronic who ships all their profits to Ireland anyway.

No doubt a bit of rock and a hard place for Senator Klobuchar, but at least it demonstrated that the Democrats were willing to differ among themselves when it came to a major piece of legislation – unlike the Republicans, who practice strict ideology and then whine and piss and moan when their unworkable legislation fails to get a single vote from the Democrats. A little compromise might have gotten them a long way, especially 8 years ago.

Remember when then-AG Loretta Lynch happened to run into Bill Clinton at the airport, chatted with him, and this was seized on by the conservative media as some sort of mysterious illicit meeting? Try this one on for size:

SPOTTED — ROBERT MUELLER and DONALD TRUMP JR. both waiting for their flights this morning at the 35X gate at DCA. And yes, there is a photo. Picture of the two waiting at America’s worst gate [Politico]

Here’s the thing: If the Trumpists who are so frantic to protect their blundering leader from were thinking deviously, they’d be proclaiming that Jr. and Mueller were having an illicit meeting (probably in the public loo), and thereby delegtimizing the Mueller probe.

It’d be odd, and somewhat unbelievable for those of us who are actually thinking, but the base would be too relieved to not buy it.

And the United States could assume the status of banana republic.

Sharon Bradford Franklin on Lawfare discusses the impact of Carpenter v. United States (2017):

Writing for the majority in Carpenter v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts called the court’s momentous Fourth Amendment decision “a narrow one.” The specific holding—that a warrant is required for law enforcement to access historical cell site location information (CSLI)—may indeed be narrow, and the decision rightfully cautions that “the Court must tread carefully” when considering new technologies. Yet, despite its limited scope, the opinion provides a framework for recognizing that the digital trails Americans create through their daily lives are protected by the Fourth Amendment. The decades-old “third-party doctrine,” under which Fourth Amendment rights are extinguished whenever individuals share their information with third parties such as banks and telephone companies, has appropriately been confined to the pre-digital age scenarios in which it arose.

As others have already argued, the Carpenter decision does not provide a clear legal standard for when the Fourth Amendment applies to data shared with a third party, and it raises many questions about the future of Fourth Amendment doctrine. But the decision does offer a resounding declaration that Fourth Amendment analysis must take account of the “seismic shifts in digital technology” and the power of modern surveillance tools. In particular, the Carpenter decision should foreclose, once and for all, any claim that bulk surveillance of Americans—or bulk collection of their digital records—would be constitutional. Through the USA Freedom Act of 2015, Congress ended the government’s bulk telephone records program, known as the Section 215 program, and provided new authority for collection of call detail records using a “specific selection term.” With reauthorization of this act to be considered next year, Carpenter’s analysis should preclude any attempt to retreat from the narrowing of surveillance authorities achieved under the 2015 law.

And so the judiciary is not insensitive to the implications of digital media and how they differ from other collectors of your information. I think this is as important as does Franklin, although it’s taken the courts 30-40 years to figure it out. I recall, back in the early to mid 1980s, a course in college concerning computers and society, and one of the hypotheticals of the day was using computers to track your purchases, and making deductions from that – and the computer’s recommendation that cash be extinguished so that the tracking would be more comprehensive. Not so different from this, is it? Of course, you can’t rule on hypotheticals … can you?

Why do we find the appearances of survival mechanism so amusing sometimes? Here’s our Amaranth:

Apothegm:

a short cryptic remark containing some general or generally accepted truth; maxim [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing,” Quote Investigator:

First, “The Quote Verifier” volume has my highest recommendation. The impressive research of Keyes is presented in a fascinating, entertaining, and fun manner. Second, yes, QI will try to trace this expression. Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill both produced apothegms that are loosely similar to the quotation under investigation but are unmistakably distinct.

WaPo points out that things are going according to prediction, not to plan:

In the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a record-breaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer.

This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.

Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfiresthat have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed 200.

Ouargla, Algeria, hit 124 degrees on July 5, a likely record for the continent of Africa. And the 109-degree reading in Quriyat, Oman, on June 28 amazed meteorologists because that wasn’t the day’s high temperature. That was the low . It was the hottest low temperature ever recorded on Earth. …

The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say. Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer.

It’s been a bit warm for us here in Minnesota this summer, but not too much out of the ordinary. We’ve been lucky. The hot, hot temperatures, wild storms, and wildfires world over are reported and bring home how we’re changing the weather.

But not in a planned way.

In the meanwhile, is President Trump trying to do anything to repair years of governmental neglect brought on by GOP disbelief? Or does he still think it’s all a Chinese-inspired hoax? Then again, I have no idea how to interpret any answer he’d care to give. He’s literally become that awful of a leader, of a man.

I do fear that an awful lot of us will have to die before this planet’s ecosphere regains its footing.

My reader continues the conversation concerning the 14th Amendment:

My reaction was only to what you wrote and quoted; I haven’t researched the issue closely. I do think the meaning of legal words does drift with time; how could it not? See arguments about the second amendment as a for-instance, although there’s a difference between legalese, the language of the amendments and the language of legislation, if one really wants to split hairs. I only know enough linguistics to be dangerous. :-)

Yes, words do drift in meaning; but I continue to believe it’s dangerous if legal jargon drifts in meaning.

Back to the main point of this thread, which was an article by Michael Anton claiming the purpose of the 14th Amendment was not to provide birthright citizenship, later rebutted by Elizabeth Wydra (same link as above), I have noted one or two more rebuttal articles in WaPo since, at least one of which suggested Anton actually misquoted Senator part of the debate to bolster Anton’s position. While I have no expertise in the area, it does appear Anton’s intellectual reputation is in tatters.

For readers unfamiliar with serial killer history, Ted Bundy was basically the archetypal serial killer, charming, raping and killing an unknown number of young women in the 1970s. My most recent dive into the ol’ mailbag reminded me of him in the slimy way this missive is written. It’s not a long one, so I’ll interweave my thoughts with the text.

What a marvelous, superlative, ingenious way to simply ruin a perfectly good weekend.  Read on, fellow travelers, read on!!  Remember, evil triumphs when good people do nothing!!

So we start with a reference to the famous quote^[1] concerning the need of men to take positive action when confronted with evil, and by so doing the author is attempting to wrap his devious message in the cloak of goodness. It’s a common rhetorical approach that attempts to manipulate the reader into accepting the hidden message of the following text. Indeed, the attentive reader will have noticed I used the exact same technique to start this post by referencing a loathsome & deceptive personality (Wikipedia’s description: “Many of Bundy’s young female victims regarded him as handsome and charismatic…“) to place the reader in a state of mind receptive to the idea that this mail, which many may have seen before, is actually a deceptive and destructive missive.

Not incidentally, the fonts used in the mail change in certain places, which I was unable to capture in this post. The point? To build up momentum for accepting the hidden message by suggesting that others have already accepted it. We live in a busy, busy world and it’s common practice to use secondary clues as to how we should react to a given message; it’s much harder to strip away clues which may be extraneous, or even malicious, and evaluate a message on its own merits.

Letter to My Boss,

I have enjoyed working here these past several years.  You have paid me very well, given me benefits beyond belief.  I have 3-4 months off per year and a pension plan that will pay my salary till the day I die and a health plan that most people can only dream about.

Withholding important information is a common and important story-telling technique. It builds suspense and lets the author channel the thoughts of the reader in such a way as to build a successful story. Note I don’t fault the author  for using it; after all, he or she is trying to be effective. But I do want to draw the reader’s attention to how it affects them intellectually and emotionally.

Despite this I plan to take the next 12-18 months to find a new position.

During this time I will show up for work when it is convenient. In addition I fully expect to draw my full salary and all the other perks associated with my current job.

Peeking ahead, I’ll let the Jack out of the Box: we’re talking about sitting members of Congress. This author would have the reader believe that members of Congress are lazy, underworked, overpaid, and feckless. This is the meat of the letter.

So let’s think about the assertion. Upstanding members of Congress must be knowledgeable about a large range of topics from the perspectives of policy and regulation. Think of it: agricultural policy, energy policy, death penalties, should we declare war, how do we monitor the Executive and Judicial branches, the list goes on and on. Sure, we can all point at members all both parties who slack the job, or even worse use their position in a self-interested way. If you want names, Menendez of the Democrats and Price of the Republicans come right to mind as members who’ve been accused, but not convicted, of corruption.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking a couple of examples of malfeasance characterizes all 538 members of Congress, along with all their predecessors. If this were true, the United States would have become the Disunited States way back in the 1800s simply through incompetence.

I think my reader knows where this is going, but let’s digest the next paragraph first.

Oh yes, if my search for this new job proves fruitless, I will be back with no loss in pay or status. Before you say anything, remember that you have no choice in the matter.  I can and will do this.

This lovely bit completes the exercise of making the execrable Congresscritter completely contemptible by giving him a high ‘n mighty air comparable to your favorite arrogant monarch. By instilling this bias in the reader against one of the three important legs of the governmental stool, this is, in reality, an attack on the American way of life. The form of government we use was not selected at random or to benefit those who can attain positions in it; it was selected by the Founding Fathers in reaction to the abuses of the English monarchy. As it’s been improved in the years since its formation, it has proved relatively effective compared to other forms of government.

And, for that reason, it comes under attack in letters such as these, letters designed to foment discontent and distrust of a government which, we are often encouraged to forget, is our government. Not the property of a monarchy, never to be transgressed upon. No, at its best, when we’re talking to each other, trusting we have everyone’s best interests at heart, and using our best intellectual efforts to understand the world around us, from science to politics, it’s highly effective.

We wouldn’t be the most influential country in the world, otherwise.

So that’s the real purpose of this letter, to discourage the reader from trusting that our government can work to our benefit. This mail came from a conservative source, but given the behavior of the GOP these days, a Democrat might take similar delight in it. Readers on the entire American political spectrum would be mistaken in accepting this message at face value.

Sincerely,
Every Senator or Congressman
running for re-election

I just find it funny that in one part of this mail the mythical author of the letter says he or she is looking for a new position, yet here they reference their re-election efforts. Apparently the real author is having trouble with their cognitive processes.

The 2018 Elections are just around the corner.

——
Are we stupid or what?

Our work is not over, it has just begun, good and faithful patriots!!

If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do, you are misinformed.  (Mark Twain)

This is simple reinforcement of the false trope that this mail was written for the reader’s welfare. Twain is a favorite of such authors, given his radiant reputation.

REMEMBER:  If you forward this, PLEASE REMOVE all email addresses before you send it on.

REMEMBER:  Please help stop email address harvesting and subsequent spamming your family, friends and yourself.  Use BCC when sending to multiple email addresses and also delete old email addresses BEFORE forwarding on emails.

One of those harmless reminders about removing mail addresses, isn’t it? But think about it: the author of this bit of destructive trash has just asked that anything that can be traced back to his or her mail account, and perhaps on to them personally, be removed. One more bit of deceit.

“Peace is that brief glorious moment
in history, when everybody stands
around reloading”
— Thomas Jefferson

An unexpected allegiance to the Chaos Theory of History in which nations eternally grind away at each other, rather than cooperate peacefully. The author is getting off message at this point, again perhaps indicative of a poorly disciplined intellect.

I saw a movie where only the military
and the police had guns:
Schindler’s List.

Here we wander off message some more. Which reminds me, I saw a movie where everyone with a gun shot law enforcement and innocent citizens dead: The Untouchables. See, we can find all sorts of examples supporting ideological positions from popular stories. I find it much more useful to ask what science discovers. But you know what? For years, government funded basic science, which constitutes most of the basic scientific research performed in this country, was forbidden by law to study gun violence and gun control. So there’s not much science out there with respect to guns and society.

In conclusion: read warily, my readers, bits of mail that impute terrible personal traits to our elected officials. Most of them labor at a thankless job for praiseworthy reasons. And without them?

We’d be fucked.

¹Quote Investigator reports the source of this quote may be famous British politician Edmund Burke, or perhaps the much less well-known Rev. Charles F. Aked.

Cousins and neighbors to our orange lilies, I like the color combo.

I think my Arts Editor enhanced the colors a slight bit. Gorgeous comes to mind. But not Gorgeous George.

… but this still struck me as cool. Finding correlations is an important part of just about any research being done, but this can be difficult with anything beyond single variable to single variable relations. Let’s let Donald Richards explain further in this interview from Quanta Magazine:

If you want to study the correlation between one batch of variables and another batch, then there is no single Pearson correlation to measure the strength of an association. A second problem, which people often overlook in everyday applications, is that the Pearson correlation coefficient should be used only when there is a reasonably linear relationship between the two variables. If the relationship is highly nonlinear then this method is inapplicable.

So what do you do then? Apparently, it’s a real mess to figure out the correlation coefficient, but Richards came up with a handy solution:

How does distance correlation work?

This is where the concept of a Fourier transform comes in. A Fourier transform is a way of breaking up a mathematical function into its component frequencies, similar to how a music chord can be decomposed into its constituent notes. All functions can be uniquely characterized by Fourier transforms, so people started to try to define the concept of a measure of correlation by using Fourier transforms. If you give me two probability distributions — the statistical spread of values that a variable takes on — and if I want to test whether the two distributions are the same, all I have to do is calculate their Fourier transforms. If these are equal then I know that the two probability distributions had to be equal to begin with. The distance correlation coefficient, in layman’s terms, is a measure of how far apart these Fourier transforms are.

I’m clueless on Fourier Transforms, but I think this sounds very cool – not only for what it is, but for this:

You wrote a paper last year giving examples where distance correlation improves on Pearson’s method. Talk about the case of homicide rates and state guns laws.

This was prompted by an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2015, by Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA. The title of the article is “Zero Correlation Between State Homicide Rate and State Gun Laws.” What he did was — you know, my eyes bugged out; I couldn’t believe it — he found some data on the states’ Brady scores, which are ratings based on the toughness of their gun laws, and he plotted the Brady scores on an x-y plot against the homicide rates in each of these states. And if you look at the plot, it looks like there’s no pattern. He used Excel or something to fit a straight line to this data set, and he calculated the Pearson correlation coefficient for this data set, and it came out to be nearly zero. And he said, “Aha, zero correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws.”

That’s not kosher?

I was horrified. There are so many things wrong with this analysis.

And I’ll leave off at that, but to note that not every blogger, even a highly educated one such as Volokh, is always right.

Back when the ACA was still under debate,  I remember the brouhaha over the medical device tax, mostly because of its impact on Medtronic and Senator Klobuchar fighting that tax. WaPo is now reporting that tax, not yet in force, may be repealed:

The House voted Tuesday to repeal the excise tax on medical devices, with nearly five-dozen Democrats joining all but one Republican in backing the bill.

The measure was approved on a 283-132 vote that comes before lawmakers leave Washington for their summer recess at the end of the week.

The 2.3 percent tax on some devices sold by medical manufacturers was created under the Affordable Care Act. It is not set to take effect until 2020, following a move by lawmakers to include its postponement as part of the deal that ended a government shutdown in January. But lawmakers of both parties have long sought to repeal the tax, arguing that its enactment could lead to higher prices for consumers as well as the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Image credit: “Totally Subcutaneous Implantable Cardioverter-defibrillator in a Child With Complex Congenital Heart Disease and Infection in a Previous Transvenous System,” Revista Española de Cardiologia

It seems to me that medical device demand should be fairly inelastic, meaning that people don’t generally consider a medical device to be an optional part of their life. From crutches to defibs, you get the device in order to keep on living and being productive.

It’s hardly ever for entertainment.

So when the lawmakers proclaim the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, I have to wonder. Is it because the more expensive devices will be avoided due to cost, with less expensive devices substituted in their stead? Or are lawmakers just pulling this out of their asses? In fact, doesn’t this imply we’re indulging in frivolous medical procedures?

Maybe I just don’t understand medicine.

David Post on The Volokh Conspiracy summarizes the finding of Maryland federal district court’s Judge Messitte that the suit by the Attorneys General of Maryland and D.C. concerning foreign emoluments paid to the President can continue:

So when a foreign government makes payments to the Trump Organization for the use of the facilities at the Trump Hotel in Washington – as several have done – this is an “emolument … from [a] foreign State” and therefore violates the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Similarly, the benefits received under the lease issued to the Trump Organization by the federal government for the operation of the Trump Hotel constitutes an “Emolument from the United States,” in violation of the Domestic E.C. …

The court adopted the broader reading pressed by the Plaintiffs, and I have to say that, at least on first reading, I find its analysis to be awfully persuasive. Judge Messitte looks pretty carefully both at internal, textual consistency and the “original public meaning” of the term at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, and all evidence – including pretty overwhelming evidence from Founding-era dictionaries and legal texts – does seem to point to the broader interpretation. …

But however this knotty little problem of constitutional interpretation is ultimately resolved, the ruling means that the suit will proceed for the time being. The political fallout from this ruling could be quite substantial, to put it mildly. Not because it will reveal any “emoluments” that haven’t already been reported on, but because the court could now allow the parties to proceed to discovery, and that could be the first time that the public gets a close look inside the Trump financial empire – at Trump’s tax returns, for example, which would almost certainly be relevant evidence in regard to the nature and scope of the payments that Trump has received to date. I think it is fair to say that that prospect makes Trump very unhappy; I can’t imagine many things he wants less than to have the Attorneys General of DC and Maryland poking around in his financial records. Those of us who harbor serious doubts about our President’s integrity and law-abiding nature have believed for a while that he’s hiding something in there, and we may be about to find out whether we’re right or not.

It’s a Gordian knot of a problem for Trump – to let go the profits he’s supposedly making on his businesses, or to let the process of discovery reveal the inner workings of his empire. The possibilities in the latter are endless – gross incompetency as a business manager, near bankruptcy destroying his mythical reputation, dubious loans from foreign sources … the Trump base will take a lot, but if the wrong thing popped up in those financial records, he could suddenly become dust on the breeze.

But will the judge permit discovery while the inevitable appeals drags on? I hope so, because the potential real damages to the nation are immediate and need to be stopped, if in fact they exist.

And, sure, I have a morbid interest as well.

Biotremology:

But Italian scientists have found a way to control leafhoppers without using chemicals or traps—in fact, their method isn’t even lethal. Using a laser device that picks up on tiny vibrations, researchers recorded the signals that males use to sweet-talk females. Then they attached small devices to plant stems to play back the pulsing noises they captured. It’s effectively shouting over the insects, preventing males from finding mates — though the sound isn’t audible to human ears. This experiment was also successfully tested on American grapevine leafhoppers.

This trick allowed the researchers to significantly silence males looking to hook up, which could help to deter their spread. It’s a clever method that could have broad implications for the agricultural industry, as more than 195,000 species of insect use vibrational signaling. The technology has emerged from a fairly new field known as biotremology, the study of vibrational communication in animals.

“There are a lot of pests that are not treated with environmentally-friendly strategies just because we don’t know their communication system,” says Rachele Nieri, an entomologist who worked on the project, along with two researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Valerio Mazzoni, an agricultural entomologist at the Edmund Mach Foundation. “If we want to manipulate the behavior of a pest that doesn’t use chemicals, but vibration, we need to know their communication, their language, to be able to disrupt it.”

From “Wine And Whines: Listening To Insect Booty Calls To Preserve Vineyards,” Tony Farah, D-brief.

Michael Dorf suggests on the Take Care blog that if the pro-choice decision Roe v. Wade is rescinded, and then Congress acts to restrict abortions nation-wide, overriding State laws, Congress may be rebuffed by SCOTUS thanks to the acts of one renegade … Clarence Thomas:

Jennifer Rubin of Right Turn remarks on President Trump’s contradictions:

Given these results and the dismal GOP numbers heading into the midterm elections, it is no wonder Trump is now crazily suggesting the Russians will interfere on behalf of Democrats. That raises the question as to why he’s been so lax in defending our election system, but more to the point it should serve as a warning signal that Trump might claim the 2018 midterm results are illegitimate.

If, as any sensible American hopes, the GOP takes a kick right to the family jewels, and Trump claims the mid-terms are illegitimate, then the proper response is this:

President Trump, you denied funding for election year security, you dismantled the cyberczar position, and therefore if any illegal shenanigans took place, domestic or foreign, it’s on you. You left this country wide open to it. Shut the hell up and be President. Or step down and face the legal music.

Don’t let him have his cake and eat it as well.