Steve Benen has forgotten Trump’s primary motivation as he notes the President continues to mislead on the North Korean issue:

As Donald Trump’s policy toward North Korea unravels, the American leader decided yesterday to offer some evidence of progress: the Republican president released an image of a recent letter he received from Kim Jong-un.

“I deeply appreciate the energetic and extraordinary efforts made by Your Excellency Mr. President for the improvement of relations between the two countries and the faithful implementation of the joint statement,” Kim said in a translated letter tweeted by the president.

Trump added in his tweet: “A very nice note from Chairman Kim of North Korea. Great progress being made!”

No, there is no great progress being made. Trump is making that up, hoping we’ll all just play along with the fantasy.

President Trump, being what he is, only does that which will benefit Donald J. Trump. He sees the Presidency as a great money-maker, and therefore wishes to retain it. Given political realities, it’s incumbent on the incumbent to consciously construct the mythos of the stable genius, the great deal maker, the demi-god, Trump.

And thus he can’t be seen as having been taken in by the North Koreans. It would shake his cult right down to their roots to see their leader failing at, well, just about anything. But when it comes to an existential threat, he can’t permit himself to be seen by his followers as a clumsy amateur who endangers the country.

That’s worse than letting immigrants in, in their minds.

So I think Steve’s analysis is just so far out in left field it’s not even wrong. In Trump’s mind, the danger is not to the United States, but to himself. And that’s all that matters. He has to keep his base enthralled; admitting failure is just not an option.

Blazar:

The high-energy neutrino reported Thursday was created in the fast-moving swirl of matter around a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. When this black hole generates a brilliant jet of radiation, and that jet is aimed directly at Earth, scientists call the galaxy a “blazar.”[“In a cosmic first, scientists detect ‘ghost particles’ from a distant galaxy,” Sarah Kaplan, WaPo]

It appears to be orange, orange, orange.

The primary blogger at emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler, is (or claims to be, I’ve made no effort to verify it, but I ran across a mention of these qualifications in WaPo) a journalist with long experience in national security and civil liberties issues. Enough so that, she claims, the FBI chatted with her about some information she came up with, which incidentally caused a bit of an uproar as it was a reveal of a source, unusual in journalistic circles.

But this gave her an insight into today’s House interrogation of FBI Agent Peter Strzok, infamous for writing anti-Trump texts while on the job investigating Hillary Clinton during the Presidential campaign. Specifically:

So tomorrow, as House Judiciary Republicans spend half the day or longer publicly flogging Peter Strzok, know that all that flogging cannot change the fact that key evidence in Mueller’s possession, evidence which I suspect implicates the President directly, has absolutely no tie to Peter Strzok at all. None. Tomorrow will be just one big giant show that in no way can alter the provenance of key, damning evidence in Mueller’s possession.

Someday in the future we may discover if Marcy is correct or not. If she is, this may just be another circus put on by the second- and third- rate GOP House members who believe Party victories are more important than getting things right.

And if she’s not? I’ve been getting antsy about the Mueller investigation because there hasn’t been any public activity in the last couple of months. Is he wrapping things up? Avoiding negative publicity during the run-up to the mid-terms?

Preparing to lower the boom on someone who’s pivotal in this mess?

Or were the criminal indictments and pleadings all we’re going to get?

If you believe Marcy, there’s more to come. And that’s what my gut tells me as well.

Equerry:

an officer who works for a particular member of a royal family to help in their official duties:
an equerry to the Queen [Cambridge Dictionary]

Heard on Dr. Who last night: Trial of a Time Lord.

I know I grew up drinking fruit juice by the gallon, and I suppose in view of this report, it’s miraculous that I was skinny as a rail as a kid – and still have my original teeth. From Katherine Martinko on Treehugger:

Juice, on the other hand, has somehow escaped the unhealthy label. Despite having a sugar content equivalent to that of soda (10 teaspoons per 12-ounce serving), it still enjoys a healthy halo, and thus continues to feature prominently on breakfast tables, in kids’ lunches, and on daycare menus. Particularly for kids, juice is seen as an easy way of getting important vitamins and minerals into their bodies, which may be why the average kid in the U.S. drinks 10 ounces of juice per day — double the amount recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

A trio of paediatricians wants this to change. In an article for the New York Times titled “Seriously, Juice Is Not Healthy“, the three doctors argue that it’s time we stopped pretending that juice is different from other sugary beverages.

One of the biggest concerns is the sugar content, which nobody needs these days, in light of the obesity crisis currently afflicting the United States. Studies have shown that drinking juice prior to a meal actually makes a person hungrier, leading them to overeat.

Juice is not the same as whole fruit because it lacks the fibre that fills a person up. That is why “children who drink juice instead of eating fruit may similarly feel less full and may be more likely to snack throughout the day.” The doctors also expressed concern over juice being a “gateway drink” to other sugary beverages.

I don’t drink much juice these days, fortunately. But I can’t count the number of kids I see running around with juice boxes.

And that’s the indicator of the next fight on the way: the war to be waged by the juice manufacturers on information like the above. Get out the marshmallows as corporate profits become more important than the health of the kids. Sort of like the recent contretemps at the World Health Organization and baby “formula”. The United States came out of that looking like idiots, didn’t they?

Lawfare‘s Benjamin Wittes tries to correct the misapprehensions of many, including myself, and possibly even President Trump, concerning Judge Kavanaugh’s attitudes towards the Office of the President and the law by delving into the musty old articles of 1998. Here’s one of the three points he claims Kavanaugh is making in an article Kavanaugh published shortly after the impeachment of President Clinton:

Second, the article also makes a strong prudential case for independent investigations of the President and other high officials, given the inherent conflicts facing the attorney general in situations in which senior administration officials are investigative subjects. Kavanaugh made this argument at a time when, as noted above, the whole political culture was moving the other way. “Even the most severe critics of the current independent counsel statute concede that a prosecutor appointed from outside the Justice Department is necessary in some cases,” Kavanaugh writes. “Outside federal prosecutors are here to stay.” Critically, Kavanaugh’s proposed structural reforms to the independent counsel law were aimed not at weakening it but at shoring up the credibility and independence of the investigators against political attacks. Does this sound like someone who’s gunning for Mueller?

Wittes transitions, then, to this:

Kavanaugh and I talked at some length about these ideas at the time he gave that speech and wrote that article. I had written a book about the Starr investigation, a number of years earlier, in which Kavanaugh is quoted. So we had a shared interest in the subject of how investigations of the president should and should not take place. His point was in no sense to create an imperial presidency that was above the law. His concern, rather, was that his experience with Bush had taught him that Starr’s disabling of the Clinton administration was not worth it. This was about humility. “Looking back to the late 1990s,” he writes, “the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal-investigation offshoots.” He gave the speech when it looked like Barack Obama would win the presidency. He published the article with Obama in office. This was a policy proposal, in other words, to protect the institution of the presidency at time when his party didn’t control it. And nowhere in those pages does he indicate that his view of the law had changed.

I am not convinced that Kavanaugh would not get in the way of any SCOTUS case involving the President on the grounds that the President is too busy or too important to be imposed upon. Wittes and Kavanaugh notes the country might have been better off if Clinton hadn’t been bothered by those suits of long ago. The problem with this statement is that impeaching President Clinton over a blowjob wasn’t an act of responsible governance, it was the act of a political party that was entering into its first phase of insanity.

Also, arguments on posteriori grounds based on one or a few cases, without a theoretical framework with which to justify those arguments, are really little more than ad hoc emotional arguments. In my previous post on this subject, I laid out the theoretical, plausible outcomes of adhering to just such reasoning, which comes down to leaving the Nation vulnerable to a malignant or incompetent President, and that Justice delayed is quite frequently Justice denied.

Suggesting the President shouldn’t be subject to such cases just because Clinton may have been unfairly victimized isn’t good reasoning. If the result is to protect a truly malignant President from investigation and removal, it’s better to put the blame for that sordid incident on the responsible entity – the Republican Party for pursuing a triviality which could have been better handled through some misdemeanor in court, or even a traditional whisper campaign – rather than subjecting the nation to a truly sanctimonious, yet completely hypocritical trial.

The impeachment of Clinton may have been one of the early signs that our political system was beginning to suffer from a cancerous growth called hypocrisy.

And I don’t think Wittes’ judgment on this matter is accurate, so much as I should like to.

This report from Katherine Martinko at Treehugger caught me off-guard:

Did you know that one-third of all fish caught never makes it to a dinner plate? According to the latest report on the state of the world’s fisheries, released yesterday by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a shocking 35 percent of global catches gets thrown overboard or rots before eating. This is a sobering number, considering the detrimental environmental impact of much of the world’s fisheries, as well as the many people suffering from lack of food. The Guardian reports:

“About a quarter of these losses are bycatch or discards, mostly from trawlers, where unwanted fish are thrown back dead because they are too small or an unwanted species. But most of the losses are due to a lack of knowledge or equipment, such as refrigeration or ice-makers, needed to keep fish fresh.”

An example of the tragedy of the commons, as they say, and the importance of responsible regulation by governmental entities, at least so long as the world remains overpopulated by humans. When it’s just a few small fishing villages, that kind of waste would be unimportant to the prey species, but in today’s world of trawlers and too many mouths, this kind of waste does terrible damage to those species.

Research at the University of California-Riverside has yielded a surprise:

A diet high in soybean oil causes more obesity and diabetes than a diet high in fructose, a sugar commonly found in soda and processed foods, according to a just published paper by scientists at the University of California, Riverside.

The scientists fed male mice a series of four diets that contained 40 percent fat, similar to what Americans currently consume. In one diet the researchers used coconut oil, which consists primarily of saturated fat. In the second diet about half of the coconut oil was replaced with soybean oil, which contains primarily polyunsaturated fats and is a main ingredient in vegetable oil. That diet corresponded with roughly the amount of soybean oil Americans currently consume.

The other two diets had added fructose, comparable to the amount consumed by many Americans. All four diets contained the same number of calories and there was no significant difference in the amount of food eaten by the mice on the diets. Thus, the researchers were able to study the effects of the different oils and fructose in the context of a constant caloric intake.

Compared to mice on the high coconut oil diet, mice on the high soybean oil diet showed increased weight gain, larger fat deposits, a fatty liver with signs of injury, diabetes and insulin resistance, all of which are part of the Metabolic Syndrome. Fructose in the diet had less severe metabolic effects than soybean oil although it did cause more negative effects in the kidney and a marked increase in prolapsed rectums, a symptom of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which like obesity is on the rise.

So, if you’re a mouse, don’t ingest soybean oil. Mouse models are not necessarily good proxies for humans, but it’s something worth worrying about. Where does soybean oil show up in food products?

… is found in processed foods, margarines, salad dressings and snack foods. Soybean oil now accounts for 60 percent of edible oil consumed in the United States. That increase in soybean oil consumption mirrors the rise in obesity rates in the United States in recent decades.

And …

The researchers cautioned that they didn’t study the impacts of the diets on cardiovascular diseases and note in the paper that the consumption of vegetable oils could be beneficial for cardiac health, even if it also induces obesity and diabetes.

I’m still considering avoiding soybean oil, and it’s definitely an issue to keep on the radar for the future.

President Trump begins the NATO summit:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused fellow NATO ally Germany of being beholden to Russia because it buys energy from Moscow, in pointed remarks ahead of a summit of the military alliance in Brussels.

“Germany is a captive of Russia,” Trump said at a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, his first since arriving in the Belgian capital. “It’s very inappropriate.”

Trump went on to complain that the United States is expected to “defend them against Russia,” despite Germany making “billions of dollars” in energy payments to Moscow.

“I think it’s something that NATO has to look at,” Trump said. “Germany is totally controlled by Russia.” [CNN]

We’ve seen this time after time, haven’t we? Trump is suspected of A, and then he accuses his opponent du jour of A. From sexual misconduct (“grab a pussy” vs PizzaGate), it’s been a distinctive pattern. A long running concern has been Trump being compromised by Russia, and so now he’s managed to use that particular trope against German Prime Minister Merkel, who had the wherewithal to criticize him.

While it may work as a distracting tactic, I wonder if it really betrays a complete lack of imagination on the part of the man. I shouldn’t be surprised.

David French of National Review expresses his disappointment in Trump’s nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to SCOTUS rather than Judge Barrett in WaPo:

Trump had — right in front of him — the judge who could be populist and principled; the person who could galvanize the base and be an originalist judicial bedrock for the next 30 years.

The president blinked. In the coming days and weeks, you’ll see conservatives rally around Kavanaugh. The judicial nomination wars will settle into their post-filibuster norm. It will be easy for Democrats to largely vote in lockstep. Kavanaugh’s credentials will make it easy for Republicans to do the same. In the coming years, he will make the court more originalist. He’ll certainly write at least some opinions that make conservatives stand up and cheer, but at roughly 9 p.m. on July 9, for a critical part of Trump’s base, the cheers for Kavanaugh were a tad forced.

There was, for the first time in Trump’s judicial wars, a palpable sense of an opportunity lost.

French seems to think that Trump is operating on a basis of conservative Christian principles. French should know better; Trump operates to benefit Trump. Kavanaugh has expressed respect for a broad power view of the Presidency, that the President shouldn’t be bothered with lawsuits, etc. This benefits Trump more than the empty glory that comes with nominating a conservative woman to the bench who, frankly, hasn’t Kavanaugh’s experience, whether or not my reader likes that record.

Needless to say, the cultural warriors have leapt to their artillery now that Judge Kavanaugh has been nominated to SCOTUS by President Trump. My previous thoughts and knowledge on the judge, slim as they may be, were written up here. Steve Benen didn’t much care for his acceptance speech:

There’s simply no way Kavanaugh can speak to this with any authority. For him to state such a claim as fact is hard to take seriously.

I imagine the White House’s allies will say the judge was simply being polite, saying nice things about the president who, moments earlier, announced plans to reward him with one of the nine most important jobs in American jurisprudence, and there’s no need to take it too seriously.

Perhaps. Alternatively, when a Supreme Court nominee uses pro-Trump hyperbole better left to the president’s press secretary, he’s signaling a deference that should give us pause.

Rather than agree – or disagree – with Steve, I’d rather speak to Judge Kavanaugh’s potential future on the Court. Given his previous comments that a sitting President should not be bothered by such minutiae as lawsuits, it’s reasonable to assume, as many commentators have been quick to point out, that he was selected for his inclination to protect Trump’s backside in case Special Counsel Mueller comes out with legal action against the President – or, for that matter, if Congress impeaches the President.

So my thought is this – will Judge (perhaps soon to be Justice) Kavanaugh have the balls to recuse himself if such a lawsuit ends up before SCOTUS? Having substantively discussed how he’d decide such a lawsuit, he’s effectively compromised himself.

Yesterday I mentioned California’s Republican embarrassment, but now it’s back to the other coast, specifically New Jersey, as WaPo’s Dave Weigel reports:

The National Republican Congressional Committee has withdrawn its endorsement of a congressional candidate in New Jersey after reporters dug up offensive comments he’d made about black and Hispanic people.

“Bigotry has no place in society — let alone the U.S. House of Representatives,” NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers said in a statement Monday night. “The NRCC withdraws our support of Seth Grossman and calls on him to reconsider his candidacy.”

Grossman, a former elected official in Atlantic County, was not the party’s first choice to run in New Jersey’s 2nd District. Rep. Frank A. LoBiondo (R-N.J.) announced his retirement late last year, and the local party scrambled to find a contender in a district that backed President Trump in 2016 but was high on Democrats’ target list.

No strong candidate emerged, and Grossman won the four-way June 5 primary with 39 percent of the vote. Almost immediately, Democratic and liberal groups began digging through his social media and through videos from candidate forums.

And what did he say?

In one video, Grossman answered a question about how Republicans could reach more diverse groups of voters by saying “the whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap, and un-American,” having “become an excuse by Democrats, communists, and socialists, to say that we’re not all created equal.” In a Facebook post, first uncovered by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, Grossman linked approvingly to an article at a white nationalist website that argued African Americans “are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike.”

“Oy vay!” wrote Grossman. “What so many people, black, white and Hispanic, whisper to me privately but never dare say out loud publicly.”

And he managed to win a plurality in the primary. This speaks either to the relative ignorance of the current Republican voter, their tolerance for extremism, or their mental state, which appears to find anything outside of their social circle to be frightening.

In any case, it’s not conducive to a productive American society.

I have yet to see similar cases for the Democrats, although they’ve tried to chase away a few candidates on various tactical grounds.

Our newest phlox. I’m hoping it’s not as predacious as the current phlox:

A look down Herb Lane:

And our new Guardians of the Garden. They’re a bit shy, but I’m assured quite rambunctious:

I suppose we could liken them to a bad case of acne. The owner doesn’t want them, but there they are, ugly little red explosions in Illinois, Virginia, and now California, according to The New York Times:

A Republican congressional candidate in a reliably blue California district managed to capture nearly a quarter of votes cast in the state’s open primary last month — just after the state Republican Party caught wind of his anti-Semitic comments and rescinded its automatic endorsement.

The candidate, John Fitzgerald, urged people on his campaign website to pay attention to “Jewish supremacism,” among other anti-Semitic views, which led party leaders to rescind their support in May, about two months after the official endorsement.

The Republicans have removed the endorsement, but it’s still egg on the face – and another clue that the extremists are riding on the skirts of a Party that is already in the shallows of the Extremist Sea. How soon before they climb the rope ladders and take control of the ship from the slightly less extreme extremists?

On Lawfare Kimberley Marten outlines how Russia is asserting influence throughout the world:

Russian aggression is a central concern of the foreign and security policy community, with debate focusing on what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions are and how best to deter him. But missing from much of the discussion is the fact that a variety of semi-state security groups, with a hazy relationship to Moscow’s central authorities, are playing an increasing role in Russian actions both at home and abroad. The United States and other Western states must develop a better understanding of the complex motives and economic interests held by these opaque and informally commanded security forces to ensure the best possible attribution of and response to any hostile acts they commit. This will require recognizing that they are likely not always following Putin’s direct orders.

While many scholars and analysts now have a sophisticated understanding of the roles played by private military and security firms around the world, the array of semi-state security actors mobilized by Russia is unique—and noteworthy. Putin’s Russia is replacing the traditional notion, held by most Western countries as well as the Soviet Union, that states should have ultimate command and control over how armed force is used on their territories or in their name abroad. Instead, the new Russian model is centered on ambiguity, and the Kremlin even seems comfortable with the fact that these semi-state actors often have distinct commercial interests, separate from the Russian state. When a well-armed state with a growing international presence chooses to redefine the relationship between sovereignty and force, the magnitude and variety of threats that it might produce is being redefined as well.

The semi-official methods they’re moving to also impacts the Russians who make up these private military forces, as the loss of central regulation may also mean less chance of rescue or exchange of prisoners.

It also increases the chances of rogue actors.

Poker night was always a problem with this crew.

Destroy All Monsters (1968) is a rare outlier in the Japanese Godzilla / kaiju genre of movies. Most of these stories feature a monster or two laying waste to the countryside, often acting as the deus ex machina that brings punishment down upon the evil-doers of the moment, while the citizenry cowers in its shelters. But in this one, despite the destruction of a number of cities world-wide, the monsters are actually the mechanism of a more comprehensive and comprehensible plot. Earth has been invaded by the Kilaak, a race of creatures which can take over humans through technological means. They’re Their goal? The usurpation of Earth for their own, unclear purposes.

As a means to that end, they surreptitiously take control of the several monsters penned up on an island named Monsterland, and send them out to destroy various foreign cities. Eventually, several meet at Tokyo, leaving it a wasteland. But the real action is taking place behind the scenes, as a various government agencies frantically try to discover what has happened to those who were in charge of Monsterland, and how to respond. In the climactic scene, humanity’s monsters are freed from alien control, stomp a space monster into the ground, and win the day.

To say this is a step up is true. To say the cheap special effects, obvious models, bad acting, and dubious story makes it worthwhile is a claim I shan’t be making. This is positively awful.

Only watch while drunk. Or working on it.

I’ve often thought that charitable motivations were one, or more, of the following:

1. Religious motivations. We give because God (or, more precisely, some guy who claims to have a special relationship with God) tells us to give.
2. Indirect gain motivations. We perceive a shortcoming in society, and by donating we believe we’ll help shore up the hole in the dike.
3. Reputational motivations. We give because it makes us look good to society at large, and then we reap the direct gains of looking charitable.

This article in Nautilus then attempts to explain the phenomenon of anonymous giving in the context of the third motivation, the reputational motivations category. Here’s a small bit from it, in the context of an episode from a TV series with which I’m not familiar, so I apologize for not expanding the context:

What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’s “hard to reconcile with standard evolutionary accounts of pro-social behavior,” the researchers write. Donations fall under a form of cooperation called “indirect reciprocity.” “Direct reciprocity is like a barter economy based on the immediate exchange of goods, while indirect reciprocity resembles the invention of money,” Nowak wrote in his highly cited 2006 paper “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” “The money that fuels the engines of indirect reciprocity is reputation.” Donation evolved, in other words, because it granted a good reputation, which helped humans in securing mates and cementing alliances. But if that’s true, how did the practice of anonymous giving arise? The title of the new paper suggests a solution: “The signal-burying game can explain why we obscure positive traits and good deeds.”

The signal-burying game is one of the latest examples of scientists gaining insight into human behavior from game theoretic models and signalling theory. These games, the authors write, make sense of “seemingly counterintuitive behaviors by carefully analyzing which information these behaviors convey in a given context.” Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, said recently on Sam Harris’ podcast, “Waking Up,” “Signalling theory is probably the part of game theory I use most often. The idea there is: How do you credibly demonstrate what kind of organism you are through the signals you give out? And what makes those signals honest, and hard to fake, rather than easily faked, like cheap talk?”

The article is, of course, pop-science, which means they aren’t being properly general in their discussion. The impression I gain from the article is that the authors have accepted that everything is done for selfish reasons (libertarians would love that), and they’re attempting to rationalize anonymous giving, one of the potholes in their road to the compleat explanation of human behavior, by saying it doesn’t exist.

But of course it exists. While some might argue this is a self-negating statement, when I give I would give just as much anonymously as I do with my name attached – the latter is what happens because I mainly give by credit card, and since the government currently lets me take them against my taxes, I do that, too.

But while the latter is a well-known example of social-engineering, it doesn’t qualify to negate anonymous giving.

While I don’t doubt that some folks do engage in the behavior of interest in the article, which is “anonymous giving which is then leaked,” this is unsurprising in a culture where we also find rare, but documented, cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The intellectual error in this article may be to fail to recognize there are non-biological as well as biological evolutionary reasons for behaviors. Rather than attempt to deny that anonymous giving occurs, it makes more sense to ask how it fits into the various categorizations of motivations for giving; we can use the categories I gave, above, or come up with your own.

In the first category, religious motivations, we have the most arbitrary and capricious reasons for immediate motivations, but they all boil down to God said be anonymous. This is the introduction of social evolutionary pressure which I mentioned, because it measures conformance, or lack thereto, of social strictures. The signaling mechanism indicating conformance might be the swelling of the coffers of the charity, singular or plural, in question, or the lack of apparently wealth of the donors. Just a trifle ironically, the various forms and reasons of anonymous giving are subject to the forces of social evolution; that is, those forms which lead to negative consequences for the members of the religion in question will become dead ends, while those leading to positive results will be propagated. This is an elementary observation. It’s simple to realize that there must be a congruency between positive for members of the religion and for the greater society in which it is partially or totally embedded, otherwise society will extinguish the particular phenomenon – or be extinguished.

In the second category, indirect gain motivations, anonymity may or may not serve the ultimate goal the betterment of society. However, I will point out that there are reasons for not advertising that one has the resources to contribute large amounts of wealth to a particular cause, such as importuning from other causes, worthy or, more often, not worthy. Then there’s outright criminal behaviors with negative impacts on the giver. This may be the strongest case for anonymous giving that I can think of – improving society, with it consequent positive results for the giver and their family relations, without signaling that one has wealth which may be gained by malefactors through negative acts. It makes anonymous giving seems like a more rational course of behavior than reputational giving, at least in relation to the perception of potential criminality in the society at large.

This, too, is a matter of social evolutionary pressure, especially if those who do not anonymous give are then eliminated from the idea pool. The idea pool is analogous to the gene pool, and consists of those ideas which are used to improve society. If we admit that those with more wealth are often those who most control the direction in which society will travel, then those victimized by criminals will lose that influence – and society will lose those ideas, for better or for worse.

And then there’s folks, like myself, who have no taste for gaudy & pretentious gestures. Not usually. I’m not as shy as when I was young, but I’m still not much for the limelight.

In any case, I’d take this article with more than a grain of salt.

I don’t watch a lot of television, but when my sister gave my Arts Editor a gift of a Amazon Prime membership, we started taking advantage of it.

One of the shows we tripped across is Endgame, the principal character of which is fictional chess Grandmaster Arkady Balagan. Having witnessed the assassination of his fiancee, he is now trapped by the psychological damage from the incident in the hotel in which they were staying prior to her death. In order to finance his stay in this high-end hotel, he turns to crime-solving using his analytical skills and his Russian temperament, but in the background is conducting his own investigation of his fiancee’s death, in association with his fiancee’s young, determined, yet naive sister.

If you enjoy modern crime solving dramas, this is not a bad little series to try out. The acting is more than competent, the staging and character chemistry is well done, and the stories are enjoyably intricate.

The wonder, of course, is why this intriguing effort didn’t make it more than the single season. It certainly had a lovely cliff-hanger season ending, as Balagon is warned not to further pursue his investigations of his fiancee’s death. Perhaps even better, characters are not necessarily permanent, as one dies in the final episode.

We’d have happily watched more episodes, and I don’t know why they didn’t continue this show. Put it in the file labeled One season wonders.

From Retraction Watch:

35,000 papers may need to be retracted for image doctoring, says new paper

Yes, you read that headline right.

In a new preprint posted to bioRxiv, image sleuths scanned hundreds of papers published over a seven-year period in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB), published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The researchers — Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University, Elisabeth Bik of uBiome, Ferric Fang of the University of Washington (also on the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization), Roger Davis of the University of Massachusetts (and former MCB editor), and Amy Kullas, ASM’s publication ethics manager — found 59 potentially problematic papers, of which five were retracted. Extrapolating from these findings and those of another paper that scanned duplication rates, the researchers propose that tens of thousands of papers might need to be purged from the literature. That 35,000 figure is double the amount of retractions we’ve tallied so far in our database, which goes back to the 1970s.

Wow. I’d like some more explicit information. Ah, here we go:

RW: You extrapolate that if 10% of the MCB papers needed to be retracted for image duplication, then 35,000 papers throughout the literature may need the same. How did you perform that calculation, and what assumptions is it based on?

EB: We extrapolated the results from previous studies to the rest of the literature. In our previous study, in which we analyzed 20,000 papers, we found that 3.8% contained duplicated images. We know that the percentage of duplicated images varies per journal, because of a wide variety of reasons (different editorial processes, variable levels of peer review, different demographics of the authors). Since this percentage was calculated on papers from 40 different journals with different impact factors, this percentage serves as a reasonable representation of the whole body of biomedical literature. The 10.1 % is the percentage of papers that were retracted in the MCB dataset. Granted, this was a much smaller dataset than the one from the mBio paper, but it was a set that was seriously looked at.

If there are 8,778,928 biomedical publications indexed in PubMed from 2009-2016, and 3.8% contain a problematic image, and 10.6% (CI 1.5- 19.8%) of that group contain images of sufficient concern to warrant retraction, then we can estimate that approximately 35,000 (CI 6,584-86,911) papers are candidates for retraction due to image duplication.

And one of the researchers on this subject, Elizabeth Bik, commented:

Errors can be found anywhere, not just in scientific papers. It is reassuring to know that most are the result of errors, not science misconduct. Studies like ours are also meant to raise awareness among editors and peer reviewers. Catching these errors before publication is a much better strategy than after publication. In this current study we show that investing some additional time during the editorial process to screen for image problems is worth the effort, and can save time down the road, in case duplications are discovered after publication. I hope that our study will result in more journals following in the footsteps of ASM by starting to pay attention to these duplications and other image problems, before they publish their papers.

So this really is a matter of carelessness OR working on a very difficult enterprise with either inadequate tools or methodologies.

It’s still a big number.

This is the Creeping Bellflower. The pic is from our garden of last year, but it’s back again this year:

And how has it attained the exalted title of this post? From iNaturalist:

This plant is native to Europe and western Siberia and it has been introduced to North America, where it has become an extremely invasive weed. It chokes out other plants, and eliminating it is nearly impossible due to its multiple propagation mechanisms.

Sound familiar? I might point out it’s actually fairly attractive on the surface and has wormed its way to the heart of our political system garden, and is going to be damned pernicious.

Adumbrate:

1. : to foreshadow vaguely : intimate • the social unrest that adumbrated the French Revolution
2. : to suggest, disclose, or outline partially • adumbrate a plan
3. : overshadow, obscure • bubbling optimism, not at all adumbrated by difficulties [Merriam-Webster]

Heard on Dr. Who today, Trial of a Time Lord.

Such camera hogs. I daren’t bring the camera anywhere near them or they’ll snatch it away.

Then, no more spam phone calls.

Hmmmm.

Dicta:

The part of a judicial opinion which is merely a judge’s editorializing and does not directly address the specifics of the case at bar; extraneous material which is merely informative or explanatory.

Dicta are judicial opinions expressed by the judges on points that do not necessarily arise in the case.

Dicta are regarded as of little authority, on account of the manner in which they are delivered; it frequently happening that they are given without much reflection, at the bar, without previous examination. [The ‘Lectric Law Library]

Noted in “Fellow conservatives, stop the baseless attacks on a potential Supreme Court pick,” Alberto R. Gonzalez, WaPo:

The same reporting included another case where the District of Columbia Circuit ruled to allow an undocumented pregnant teen to get an abortion. Again, Kavanaugh dissented, and once again nameless conservatives argued that the dissent should have gone further, no doubt frustrated that Kavanaugh did not take on abortion rights even though he is bound as a circuit judge to follow Supreme Court precedent. I remember a time when true judicial conservatives did not act to advance a social agenda through dicta — words that have no legal bearing in the case at hand nor serve as precedent for future cases.