Yearly Archives: 2018

Deborah MacKenzie in NewScientist (28 April 2018, paywall) reports on the latest surprise findings on the life expectancy front:

MORE money, longer life, right? The latest research suggests that education actually plays a bigger role in extending lifespan. The finding could have huge implications for public health spending.

Back in 1975, economists plotted life expectancies against countries’ wealth, and concluded that wealth increases longevity. It seemed self-evident: everything people need to be healthy – from food to medical care – costs money.

But soon it emerged that the data didn’t always fit that theory. Economic upturns didn’t always mean longer lives. In addition, a given gain in GDP caused increasingly higher gains in life expectancy over time, as though it was becoming cheaper to add years of life. Moreover, in the 1980s, research revealed that gains in literacy were associated with greater increases in life expectancy than those related to gains in wealth.

Finally, the more-educated people in any country tend to live longer than their less-educated compatriots. But such people also tend to be wealthier, so it has been difficult to figure out which factor is increasing lifespan.

Hmmmmmm. I always did poorly at academics.

But it does make some sense. While a certain amount of material possessions is necessary in order to ensure continuing existence, at some point, and apparently fairly early, its negatives begin to outweigh its advantages. After all, material wealth enables the consumption of tangibles that have a negative effect on life expectancy. Think of things such as whiskey, or activities such as recreational mountain climbing.

But education, it seems to me, rarely has such attributes.

Onwards to the books and tests, buds!

Erick Erickson on The Resurgent seems resentful that a not unknown tactic was used by the gay community to improve their lot in life:

Hey, buddy, ya wanna cigarette? It’s our best-selling export!

A space explorer returning to Earth begs to be destroyed by Mission Control because the fumes of the planet he and his companions were exploring have penetrated their suits and burned them – and Mission Control grants his request. Exciting start, isn’t it?

Too bad. Rather than investigate these mysterious fumes, we’ll just look for another planet to colonize, stumble into an alien space station or maybe rocket ship, a first in either case, have a rough & tumble with the alien crewman, resulting in his death, blow up the alien ship, and then encounter meteorites while near the Triangulum Galaxy (yeah, that rocket ship evidently goes really really fast) which forces us off course into an unknown planet with an ocean full of giant crabs and hostile fishy humanoids!

Got that?

Such is the plot of Space Probe Taurus (1965). Throw in a distracting romance between the captain and the female scientist, a lot of sexism, meaningless Mission Control scenes, truly wretched special effects, and some utterly preposterous notions of science and the Universe, and this is a total waste of time.

Oh, the acting was OK.

And it’s available online. Oh, lordy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQSRUIucFy4

In reaction to my comment about the EPA and regulating neonicotinoids, a reader writes:

“Will the EPA under Administrator Pruitt abdicate its responsibility?” To every extent that Pruitt and his closest henchman can manage to make that so, yes.

Which brings up the question, Is Scott Pruitt the most corrupt Federal appointee of all time? Just recently Steve Benen counted at least 13 investigations in progress – and then came up with 7 more scandals or incidents that occurred in a 48 hour period. They’re worth a read. And just to cap it off, CNN is reporting this:

A CNN analysis has found that embattled Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt paid himself nearly $65,000 in reimbursements from his two campaigns for Oklahoma attorney general, a move at least one election watchdog has sharply criticized as being recorded so vaguely that there was no way to tell if such payments were lawful.

The reimbursement method, which Pruitt used in his 2010 and 2014 campaigns, effectively scuttled two key pillars of campaign finance: transparency about how campaign funds are spent and ensuring campaign funds are not used for personal purchases, according to a former top elections attorney and a CNN review of the documents.

Some of the reporting may also violate Oklahoma campaign finance rules, according to research done by the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group.

The guy appears to be an icon of how to be so desperate for power that he’ll do anything, anything at all, to gain that power. Long time readers will recognize the sentiment. He’s quite the third-rater – he may even qualify for fourth-rate.

But I can’t really answer my own question. For one thing, the metrics of corruption are a trifle hazy. But I think he’s right up there on the leader board throughout the entire history of the United States – and proof that the GOP is no longer about being fiscally conservative, or morally upright, or even about having a sound military. It’s become all about the money, and the hell with the health of the Republic.

I’m sure missing “no-drama” Obama. He knew how to be an adult.

In The Plum Line Paul Waldman notes a weakness in how the press operates these days:

Yet when he makes false charges about others, as he regularly does, they’re given what is functionally the same respect as any other statement, to be passed on and repeated until concrete evidence emerges to prove they’re false.

Trump understands all this perfectly well. As he once told his then-toady Billy Bush when Bush called him out (privately) for lying about how great the ratings for “The Apprentice” were: “People will just believe you. You just tell them, and they believe you.”

While this is something that should concern us each and every day, we need to be particularly on guard when the 2020 election begins. Trump is going to run a scorched-earth campaign against the Democratic nominee, not just of sneering ridicule but also of innuendo and outright slander. One way we can prepare for it is to stop treating the lies Trump tells — such as putting out false letters about his medical condition — as though they’re anything less than the scandal they ought to be.

There’s a need, I think, to differentiate news stories into three categories: news with assertions verified as true (“facts”), news stories with assertions proven to be false (“lies”), and news stories where the status of the assertions is uncertain. The first should be candidates for being reported, the second should either be discarded or held up as examples of lies, and the third should be held until the status of the assertions are verified.

Too bad that’ll never happen. “Scoops” are far too important in the press culture, and not without good reason. But the fact that a celebrity, or candidate, has opened his or her mouth and flapped their tongue about is not automatically news.

Author James Comey, the former FBI Director infamously fired by President Trump for any of a number of reasons, all of which have seemingly been denied by the President, is perhaps one of the most ambiguous figures in our little bit of national dramatic theatre to which we’re all witness. For the partisan zealot who views the world, and especially high-profile individuals such as Mr. Comey, exclusively through his or her favorite prism, their view of Mr. Comey, if contemplated seriously, brings a certain level of discomfort to their psyche, because his actions as FBI Director have been widely interpreted as favoring both candidates in the most recent Presidential contest, those being Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

The rabid personality, regardless of allegiance, no doubt thinks the worst of Mr. Comey, for that is the nature of such individuals. The world is black and white, and, in their view, Mr. Comey should select one side and ceaselessly work for its goals; any other effort marks Mr. Comey as an enemy, a traitor, or some other denigrative adjective.

In other words, he’s a shithead.

BUT for those of us who see the world in shades of gray, who are aware of our individual limitations, not only of ourselves, but of our fellow Americans, his conduct has certainly led to some questions. Whether we favored Clinton or Trump, the public announcements from Mr. Comey were troubling. Therefore, the publication of A HIGHER LOYALTY is an opportunity to see how he portrays the time in question.

First, this book is NOT a highly technical legal tome, for though Mr. Comey’s training is as a lawyer, spent mostly as a Federal prosecutor, he avoids stepping into the fatal peat-bogs of legal minutiae. Nor is this a catalog of cases in which he’s participated, or leaks in which he’s indulged. Such would be a dull tome.  It is, in fact, an easy read. Mr. Comey’s goal is to present an account of his time with the FBI, the investigations into the Clinton e-mail incidents and the decisions he made, and his interactions with President Trump.

And in order to accomplish this effectively, Mr. Comey feels that he needs to describe what has shaped his attitudes towards public service and life in general, so we get a short, autobiographical sketch. It covers his time as a shy kid, forced to move from a favorite school to a new school, and suffer the slings and arrows of the local group of bullies. From there he describes his mistakes, his own set of lies, and how he handled

This eventually leads him to the lawyer’s guild, because this is where he believes he can make a difference for his fellow citizens. He makes no bones about it, his experience of the bullies leads him to want to expunge the adult bullies which we occasionally run into. He has experience with prosecuting Mob bosses, and during that experience, he spent extensive time with those Mob members who turned state’s evidence. That leads to his observations on the nature of the Mob landscape: “made men” and how they see themselves as honorable men, even as they strangle their rivals.

One of Mr. Comey’s themes is the nature of effective leadership. Does your boss lead through fear and intimidation? Or does he strive to elicit the best efforts of her subordinates through nurturing?

Once Mr. Comey enters Federal service, he slows down and discusses the various decisions he’s made as he’s moved up the ranks. At one time he served under Mr. Guiliani, who would later be Mayor of New York, as an assistant prosecutor, and describes his leadership style, which was basically self-centered; he later occupied the same position, and described how he tried to lead the department. Once again, this is not minutiae, but broad declarations of how to get the best out of your people.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is his focus on protecting the position of the FBI. For most folks, the FBI is an crime investigation unit, and that is by and large very accurate. But there isn’t enough emphasis on a primary attribute of such an agency: its neutral position. This is of critical importance to the proper functioning of the US Government, because crime is not defined in terms of being a Republican or a Democrat; a crime is a crime. If we suspect the FBI of favoring one party or the other, then we’re in danger of losing an important agency which is dedicated to discovering truth.

Truth is one of Comey’s major focuses, and the importance being neutral in pursuit of that truth. For the partisan, this is a critical point, because a partisan, a member of the tribe, finds it hard to ascribe criminality to the tribal chieftain. Their loyalty to the tribe precludes it on an instinctual level; only the person who has considered the matter and has realized that fallacious behavior, whether it be an out and out crime, or simply lying to gain every advantage, will not lead the nation down the path to prosperity, but into the caldera of a volcano.

Once he has been confirmed as the FBI Director, he slows down more in order to give us a sense of what he was trying to accomplish, and how the shit-storm of the Clinton e-mail investigation upended all his efforts. He freely admits to self-doubt, examines alternative decisions, and wonders if he’d repeat certain minor decisions. On the major decisions, though, he sticks with what he did.

Once the election is past, he winnows his experiences down to those relevant to President Trump. This is a more familiar story, of Mr. Trump seeking Mr. Comey’s declaration of personal loyalty, and Mr. Comey realizing, to his horror, that Mr. Trump has little conception of how things should work in the Federal government, and his lack of concern about his ignorance. Indeed, Mr. Comey’s analysis of Mr. Trump’s personality suggests that he’s similar to a Mob boss, a man requiring personal loyalty while failing to return any, all the while gathering up all of value to himself, continually grasping.

One reads in order to gain knowledge and have it change you. How did this affect me? In two ways.

First, his discussion of the Clinton e-mail investigations disturbed me. They make me more hesitant concerning Clinton, particularly when learning that former Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) possessed a laptop containing copies of Clinton’s emails from her Blackberry domain. Mr. Comey cannot explain their presence, and that disturbs me. It makes me wonder about how she conducted herself during her tenure as Secretary of State. Was it really just ignorance of the vulnerabilities of email? We’ll probably never know, but I’d like to think the Democratic Party can present better candidates.

Second, Mr. Comey’s desire to dedicate his life to bettering the lives of his fellow citizens is inspirational. In some odd way, it makes me wish I had been a Federal prosecutor, although temperamentally I’m probably not suited for it. Still, there’s that niggling feeling that I could have done better with my life.

And what about our puzzled partisans who do not understand Mr. Comey? I’d encourage them to read the book, but for those who cannot be bothered, there’s a simple explanation. Mr. Comey, while nominally a Republican for most of his life, is not tribal towards them. Rather, he’s a member of the tribe of truth-seekers. He passionately believes that finding the truth will lead to the best results for this country, and if that shoots the leaders of either party inthe foot, so much the better. Corrupt leaders are a terminal brick tied to the ankles of the Party, and the more quickly they are recognized and ejected, the better.

Recommended.

In news on this long dormant thread, the European Union may have decided to stop using half measures, reports The Guardian:

The European Union will ban the world’s most widely used insecticides from all fields due to the serious danger they pose to bees.

The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on Friday, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses. …

Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013.

But in February, a major report from the European Union’s scientific risk assessors (Efsa) concluded that the high risk to both honeybees and wild bees resulted from any outdoor use, because the pesticides contaminate soil and water. This leads to the pesticides appearing in wildflowers or succeeding crops. A recent study of honey samples revealed global contamination by neonicotinoids.

One of the objections, noted in the same article:

The UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said the ban was regrettable and not justified by the evidence. Guy Smith, NFU deputy president, said: “The pest problems that neonicotinoids helped farmers tackle have not gone away. There is a real risk that these restrictions will do nothing measurable to improve bee health, while compromising the effectiveness of crop protection.”

Careful measurement of bee community health over the next decade or more will now be necessary in order to evaluate the results of the ban, and that means tracking all the other variables involved, such as climate, other widespread human-generated chemicals, and any replacements for the banned substance which may be developed and marketed.

That’s a lot of work and resources.

Melissa Breyer on Treehugger notes a disturbing development in the United States:

Meanwhile, the United States EPA is considering an application by agrochemical giant Syngenta to dramatically escalate the use of the harmful neonicotinoid pesticide, thiamethoxam. If approved, notes The Center for Biological Diversity, the application would allow the highly toxic pesticide to be sprayed directly on 165 million acres of wheat, barley, corn, sorghum, alfalfa, rice and potato.

Will the EPA under Administrator Pruitt abdicate its responsibility?

Remember the shocking referendum in Britain concerning membership in the European Union, which resulted in a vote to exit same, nicknamed Brexit? This report from Bloomberg is fascinating, if true:

The founder of one of the most influential pro-Brexit think tanks was suspected of working for the Kremlin, a member of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party said.

Christopher Chandler, chairman of investment group Legatum Global Holdings Ltd, has been an “object of interest” to French intelligence since 2002, “on suspicion of working for Russian intelligence services,” according to Bob Seely, a Conservative lawmaker who cited 2005 files of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST).

There is little doubt that the net effect of free trade is a positive for all sides, although it’s also generally granted that there will be groups who lose within the national boundaries. Prices drop, efficiencies are found due to higher levels of competition, and all that sort of thing. This economic activity is generally considered to be a positive, resulting in material prosperity and strengthening the stability of the nations involved.

So, if you’re Russian, dislike the West’s most popular political system, and your name happens to be Vladimir, what do you do?

Sow chaos.

Britain is certainly a stalwart in the defense of the West, so destabilizing its economy through the Brexit strategy certainly makes sense. Whether this report constitutes hard evidence, though, is not entirely clear to me.

Conspiracy theoriy? Certainly, for the moment. But it’s worth keeping it in mind as, so far, it’s congruent with all known facts and motivations, not to mention indictments. Neither the Brexit vote nor the result of the Presidential run was anticipated. It would be interesting to know if the Russians have had their hands in the American anti-science movement as well, perhaps even way, way back. After all, you don’t beat your enemies with your piety. You beat them with manpower and / or … technology.

Because the tree just shat upon us.

On Lawfare Benjamin Wittes discusses the possibility that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will issue a subpoena ordering President Trump to sit down in front of a grand jury. When it comes to the decision facing the Trump legal team, it really gets a bit surreal:

Now look at the matter from the perspective of Trump’s legal team—at least if it were acting rationally. (This may be condition contrary to fact, but let’s run with it for now.) It is a simply terrible idea for Trump to sit for an interview. He’s a liar; he speaks both impulsively and compulsively, and he probably has some legal exposure if he tells the truth. So the interview is a lose-lose proposition. This is particularly the case if Trump’s lawyers believe that Mueller has nothing serious on Trump personally without an interview but also that the president may lie if he sits for one—and that his greatest criminal exposure involves not what he has already done but the lies he is likely to tell.

Normally, in such situations, the subject asserts his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself—the right whose whole purpose is to relieve the so-called “cruel trilemma” of self-incrimination, perjury, or contempt. But while the president has a right to assert the Fifth, he can’t easily do so without serious political damage. So the alternative for his legal team is to bet that Mueller won’t actually pull the trigger and issue the subpoena, either out of fear of litigation defeat or out of desire not to delay. Rather than assert the Fifth, the Trump team is playing chicken with Mueller.

That’s really something, isn’t it? We’ve gone a long way down the rabbit hole here.

My suspicion is that if President Trump sees this as a challenge to his acting skills, he may ignore his legal team and insist on doing the interview – or the grand jury testimony. His grip on reality being what it it is, he’ll believe he can make it work and come out looking clean.

Hell, even if he screws up, he’ll tweet that he handled it perfectly and the more credulous of his supporters will believe him.

But at that point, it may be members of Congress on the jury, and it could get messy very quickly.

CNN just reported that Trump’s representative Ty Cobb has resigned. CNN believes …

But, there’s little doubt that the sentiment Cobb expressed to ABC is one he’s expressed to the President and his advisers in private before. That sitting down with Mueller might be the best option for Trump because of how bad, politically speaking, not sitting down with the special counsel would be.

Cobb’s departure comes as Trump himself has seemed to sour on the prospect of an extended interview with Mueller. That souring has coincided with contentious conversations between the special counsel and Trump’s legal team in which the possibility of Mueller subpoenaing Trump to testify was broached. It also comes as the more than 4 dozen questions Mueller wants to query Trump about were leaked to the New York Times.

In an interview with the Washington Post’s Bob Costa, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a recent addition to Trump’s legal team, suggested that a sitdown with Mueller was still a possibility — but with certain conditions.

It’s a little like watching someone fighting to bring in that sailfish for the last 12 hours. The question is whether or not, like the trophy in The Old Man And The Sea, will Mueller end up with a Trump ready to talk and reveal all – or a chewed up carcass of little worth, as Trump takes the 5th on every question put to him?

Or would he? The 5th is, in its way, self-incriminating. Would supporters begin to sour on the master showman then, realizing they were conned?

On AL Monitor, Maziar Motamedi reports that Iran is trying to ban the use of foreign cryptocurrencies:

Last week, Iran joined the growing list of nations to crack down on cryptocurrencies. But why did it choose this approach? Why now? What consequences will it have? As is the case with most things concerning the Iranian economy at present, the ban seems rooted in Iran’s ongoing currency issues.

The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) on April 22 announced through a directive that “all branches and affiliated units of banks, credit institutions and currency exchanges” must refrain from purchasing or selling bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies and do away with any activities leading to their “facilitation or promotion.” The regulator said it has communicated the directive because cryptocurrencies have the potential to “turn into instruments for money laundering and financing terrorism and to be used by criminals for money transfers.”

How many Iranians are using cryptocurrency, and why?

“Naturally, I don’t like to do something illegal, but I will continue buying bitcoins if I’m left with no other viable option,” said Sepehr, a millennial Tehranian who has been purchasing and using the most popular of cryptocurrencies and a few others for micro payments outside — and inside on a few instances — of Iran’s borders since 2013.

[Nima Amirshekari, the head of the electronic banking department at the CBI-affiliated Monetary and Banking Research Institute]
cited unofficial figures as saying that 3-4 million Iranians dabble in cryptocurrencies.

Iranians are bereft of common international methods of payment, including Visa and MasterCard, which can only be bought through websites that purchase them in other countries after taking hefty fees. They also do not have access to direct dollar transactions because of decadeslong US sanctions. As such, they clearly have incentives to turn to virtual currencies.

But the next step, in my opinion, is not likely to work out:

With other cryptocurrencies effectively out of the picture from a legal standpoint, Iran’s own upcoming virtual currency — first officially announced by Jahromi in a tweet — seemingly remains as the sole focus of the envisioned regulatory document.

In his remarks on April 27, Jahromi also briefly referred to many foreign media reports that liken Iran’s virtual currency to that of Venezuela’s and the prospects of circumventing US sanctions. He said, “All cryptocurrencies are capable of circumventing sanctions because they are not under supervision of the US financial regulatory apparatus, and this issue naturally exists concerning national virtual currencies as well.”

According to Amirshekari, the Monetary and Banking Research Institute has already developed a lab model of the national virtual currency and has conducted mining and transaction tests as part of a pilot program. But that is as far as it has gone up to this point, as no concrete decision has yet been made about some of the currency’s fundamental elements, such as what it will be backed by.

The problem with “national cryptocurrencies” is that the supply of “coinage” is controlled by the government, which returns the currency back into the pool with all the paper-based currencies and their risks. The point of decentralized currencies is that the generation of the representation of wealth is not, theoretically, under the control of any single entity – although, in practice, this has not proven as true as one might wish.

This problem renders national cryptocurrencies just as attractive as their paper equivalents, and with the same exchange problems.

WaPo publishes a report on signing bonuses for blue collar workers:

This year, BNSF Railway, one of the country’s largest freight railroads, aims to hire 3,500 workers across the United States — a challenge at a time when employers nationwide say they are struggling to fill vacancies.

So, BNSF is offering something rare in blue-collar America: signing bonuses up to $25,000 for hourly workers, including conductor trainees, electricians and mechanics.

“We want to meet our customers’ needs, and we’re going to do what we need to do to hire for our company,” said Amy Casas, the railroad’s director of corporate communications.

Wow. In some ways, it makes me wish I was a lot younger, so I might investigate one of those jobs – just for fun. But it does speak to how our society has failed to value certain skill sets – not financially, but in terms of prestige – and thus left us with a bit of a shortage.

And, yet, we’re also facing a generation that still lives in their parents’ basements, or so the urban legend goes.

The question then becomes, how do we raise the prestige of those jobs so that people will actually undertake them?

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy has a short essay on denying the vote to felons:

First, note that the Constitution never secures a right to vote, the way it secures a right to free speech or a right to keep and bear arms. It leaves the matter to each state, and provides that, even in federal elections, who may vote shall be determined by whom each state allows to vote in state elections. Of course, various amendments have barred the government from discriminating based on race, sex, payment of poll tax, and age (over 18); but no constitutional text goes beyond that.

The Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause, in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, as generally requiring “strict scrutiny” of laws that discriminate in voting (including when they use criteria that would be allowed in other contexts). But right there in section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment is a provision that expressly contemplates states’ denying people the right to vote based on criminal record.

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. [Emphasis added.]

It hadn’t occurred to me wonder if we really had a Federally secured right to vote, so this is interesting.

Kevin Drum talks about his fellow progressives in the context of the rather rude remarks delivered by Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents dinner:

I’ll skip over whether this was funny. It depends on your taste in comics, I suppose. And Wolf is right: Sanders really does lie a lot. A lot. So I can’t say that I personally care if she was offended. Plenty of people, however, thought Wolf’s bit was really rude, and the liberal response has generally been: Have you heard what Donald Trump says??? That’s a thousand times worse!

This is what gets me about my fellow lefties sometimes. Are we really this clueless about how most human beings react to stuff like this? Namely that normal human beings draw a big distinction between saying mean things generally at a rally and saying mean things aimed at a specific person in that person’s presence.

That’s not so hard, is it? Why do we pretend not to know it? We do this an awful lot, too. Maybe we need to get out more.

I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating for any progressives who happen to be readers of this blog: figure out a better communications style. Scorn is fairly described as kindergarten level. Maybe try a little sympathy once in a while.

It’s what makes The Daily Kos so hard to read.

I admit it, your hat is better than mine.

Reviewing foreign films is always a chancy practice, as I do not have an in-depth appreciation of the culture in which the film was developed. So reviewing Padmaavat (2018), an Indian film, has filled me with some hesitancy.

Padmaavat, set in 1303 and based on an epic allegorical poem, is superficially concerned with the lust burning in the heart of the newly crowed and insane Sultan Allaudin of Delhi for the woman reputed to be the most beautiful in the world, Padmaavati, Queen of Chittor, a kingdom independent of India. Allaudin has seized the seat of the Sultan from his uncle, who he lured to a city Allaudin has captured in the soon-to-be-late Sultan’s name, and there, killed.

His opponents will be the King and second Queen of Chittor, Ratan Singh and Padmaavati, respectively, who meet in the customary manner when he visits her father’s kingdom: she shoots him with a bow and arrow while hunting. His heart thus ensorcelled, they are soon married.

When Allaudin learns of Padmaavati and her famed beauty, he and the recently exiled and embittered guru of Chittor plot how Allaudin may meet and take the queen. For six months, they besiege Chittor Fort to little effect, but as provisions run low for those in the Fort, and the besiegers themselves, encamped in the Indian heat, grow faint, the invader hits upon a new stratagem: to use Indian custom to invite himself into the Fort for a religious festival. Once there, he glimpses the Queen, barely enough to discern her eyes, but that’s enough to inflame his foolhardiness. He invites Ratan to his camp as a return courtesy, and accepts when Ratan requires the besieging army to vacate the area.

In the midst of the dust storm which arises the next day, Ratan is captured by Allaudin, and a message sent to Padmaavati: come to Delhi, or lose Ratan. Padmaavati is no fool, and sets her own conditions: Before Allaudin shall see her, she shall see Ratan and see him free, she will bring 400 handmaidens with her, and she demands the head of the exiled guru, the last of which amuses all in Allaudin’s court – until Allaudin assents to all the demands. Padmaavati’s next communication with Allaudin is the severed head of the guru.

Once in Delhi, Padmaavati engineers a daring escape from Allaudin, freshly injured by an usurpation attempt, but their failure to kill Allaudin results in a new besiegement of Chittor Fort. Ratan falls in one-on-one combat with Allaudin, and Chittor Fort falls to improved technology and superior manpower. But before Allaudin can capture Padmaavati, much less even glimpse her, she, and all the ladies of the royal household, commit self-immolation, thus denying Allaudin his prize.

For me, the most important part of the story is how Allaudin comes to ignore every law and rule and custom of civilization in his insane urge to satisfy his desires. From his wife, a sadly undeveloped role, who he wins from his uncle through rapine, to the seat of his uncle himself, to the use of an entire army to destroy a fort and a people just to slake a lust conceived with little reason, except, perhaps, that having satisfied all his more tangible lusts, now he needs new ones. He is a man dedicated to himself, and only to himself.

But his contrast also suffers a bitter fate, for twice Ratan has the chance to destroy his enemy, and twice does not. Once, as a guest in his own home, it certainly makes sense to follow custom and not kill that guest for little reason, for if one develops a reputation for extinguishing unarmed guests, you’re marked as a barbarian. But his second opportunity, just released from Allaudin’s prison, is refused because Allaudin is badly wounded from an attempted assassination. Ratan believes it’s bad form to take advantage of Allaudin, although I suspect pride and rage have something to do with it as well. In any case, his adherence to custom results in the deaths of himself, his Queen, his army, and his people. It’s an implicit question of just what one should do with the person who believes the rules do not apply to themselves, and attracts a lot of support through his charisma – a question relevant to both India and the United States.

As a movie, it’s a lush, sensual movie, filmed to a high standard: excellent acting, stages (or at least it does not appear to be filmed on location), authentic clothing, a story which kept us in its grip. A few roles could have been fleshed out better, but there is a limit on how far that can go, and the principle roles are very well done indeed, from upright Ratan, enraged Padmaavati, to the outright insane Sultan Allaudin of Delhi.

If you have a taste for long, foreign films, this is a great choice, even if the ending is a downer for Americans.

Recommended.

Erick Erickson, who it turns out did not, as I said earlier, found RedState, but was an early and prominent editor at same, discusses the consequences of being a conservative Trump critic:

We got harassed in church and stopped going for a while. A woman in a Bible study told my wife she wanted to slap me across the face My seminary got calls from people demanding I be expelled. And on and on it went. When I nearly died in 2016, I got notes from people upset I was still alive. When I announced my wife had an incurable form of lung cancer, some cheered. All were directed from supposedly evangelical Trump supporters convinced God was punishing me for not siding with his chosen one. For a while, given the nature of what we were getting in the mail, my kids had to stop checking it.

He must be the evil genius. After all, he has your little white dog.

Black is white in Game Night (2018). If you’re playing charades, then don’t misbelieve. But if the older, far more successful brother in the sweet Stingray Corvette shows up, watch out, because, well,

Denzel isn’t Denzel.

And, no, those two won’t be getting together. So much for that traditional story trope. Part of the charm of this movie is its recognition and playful destruction of certain story tropes which were designed to bring surprise to a plot, but have, through repeated use, become decayed zombies, a form of drearily predictable and, often, non-functional barnacles on a plot.

Which is not to say this is a particularly memorable story. It is more a light bit of enjoyable fluff, the Oreo of movies, a sweet pair of cookies filled with some marshmallow fluff. It delights for the moment, but in the next moment it’s gone, forgotten in the hurly burly of the day. Did I have any Oreos today? Why, I can’t remember, for it did nothing of real note.

Except make me laugh out loud.

Looks like even the NRA isn’t extreme enough for some people. In a letter from Senator Tina Smith (D-MN), she mentions NAGR:

I received an interesting thing in the mail recently — a survey from the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR). They bill themselves as a “conservative alternative” to the NRA.

From the NAGR web-site:

With our rapidly expanding membership of 4.5 million grassroots activists, the National Association for Gun Rights has led the charge to halt the radical anti-gun agenda across the nation. Accepting NO COMPROMISE on the issue of gun control, NAGR works tirelessly to hold politicians accountable for their anti-gun views, and has made great strides in protecting and preserving the Second Amendment. But our effectiveness in the battle against the gun grabbers depends entirely on the support of gun rights supporters like you.

Hard to say if they’re more conservative than the NRA. Actually, it’s a little difficult to cite this as a conservative position – gun control has long been a traditional position in the United States, only having changed in the last twenty years or so. At one time, the NRA supported sensible positions. The transformation to an absolutist position on gun rights is a recent phenomenon, not particularly of a conservative stripe.

Still, it looks like another ideological purity race, doesn’t it? Which organization can embrace a more absolutist position on gun rights, all in a land of limited rights. All I can think is the folks running NAGR are just a bunch of power-hungry boys, given the extreme positions of the NRA. Perhaps NAGR is why the NRA has taken such ridiculous positions. Another lesson in the foolishness of absolute rights begins to come into focus.

The results of our recent warmth interacting with our heavy snows results in a nice pic:

The craters are almost certainly drips from the unguttered room above.

Or blast zones from very small rockets that only land under eaves.

In response to the review of The Young Tiger, a reader writes:

I think you should watch the movie Cherry 2000 and review it for our reading pleasure.

I’ve actually seen the first 15 or 20 minutes of that, maybe two months ago. Couldn’t hack it. Terrible stuff.

But I must admit to a growing irritation with imputations of requirements to the wrong entity. For instance, this White House press release on the recent meeting between President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Abe:

They also reaffirmed that North Korea needs to abandon all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.

I realize it’s possible to suggest there’s an unwritten addition to the sentence, in order to gain our approval and buy-in to the agreement. But I remain irritated, as such assumptions are at least open, if not prone, to error. I’d much rather see a direct declarative:

The President and the Prime Minister require North Korea abandon all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs before we can be signatories to any agreement concerning the Korean Peninsula.

It properly denotes who’s driving this requirement and, stylistically, is simply superior.

But maybe I’m just crabby.

It’s been my observation over the years that the Kung-Fu genre of movies has at least three sub-genres. First, there are the old faux-historical stories, dating anywhere from some unstated ancient time to the end of the last Chinese emperor’s reign, or perhaps a few years into the warlords’ era. Second, there are those movies that are “contemporary,” by which I mean they are set in the same period as they were made, and treat the issues of the day in Taiwan or perhaps Hong Kong (this is before Hong Kong was absorbed by China at the end of the British treaty). And, finally, there is the modern era of movies, which take advantage of modern cinema technology to introduce new generations to the stories, and have taken advantage of this opportunity to, mostly, rework the stories into something more appealing than those stories populating the first two genres. While all genres can have a certain sense of magical realism, it’s stronger in this third sub-genre, as evidenced by, say, Kung Fu Hustle (2004).

The Young Tiger (1973) falls firmly into the second category. Set in 1970s Taipei, I think, Chien Chien, a promising kung-fu student, accepts a challenge from a stranger on the behalf of his teacher, and bests the young man. The next time he sees the challenger, he is being beaten up by a gang, and before Chien can save him, the stranger dies. Chien is knocked unconscious, and the gang frames him for the murder.

The balance of the movie involves his avoidance of the police while weathering the disapproval of his mother, with some romancing of the girlfriend. In his spare moments, he works on tracking down the gang, and each time the gang assaults him, he picks off a few more. The scene in which the gang, in two cars, tries to run  him down as he wheels along in his scooter/ice cream cart is particularly memorable, both for its odd tableau and for how painfully long they stretched it out.

Eventually, the big boss (we know he’s the boss because he keeps shouting at his diminishing minion force You fools!) decides to direct the assault himself, but Chien, who appears to be a close relation to the Energizer Bunny, proves to be too much for the mob boss, and boots him into the pool of shame just as the police show up.

It suffers from many of the shortcomings typical of movies of the second category: awful dialogue, dubious stories, bad cinematography. I’m less certain if the mannerisms of these movies – the short-tempers, forced laughs, and a few others – are part of Chinese stagecraft, a product of Chinese culture, or just bad bad acting.

In any case, I found it difficult to keep my attention on this one. Don’t waste your time on it.

Long-time readers know that I occasionally have speculated that the GOP will slowly shrink, not only as a matter of demographics (it’s base being composed mostly of older white males), but due to the mechanics of “purity.” Those who are insufficiently loyal to the current set of principles, or in more primitive circumstances The Leader, are eventually tossed out of the Party. Then the cycle repeats, because that’s how you ensure power – when you’re a paranoid power-monger. Hell, it happened to a friend of mine twenty or thirty years ago, tossed out of the Minnesota Independent-Republicans for being insufficiently conservative.

What I did not foresee, even though it was bloody obvious, is that this would also happen with the associated organizations. RedState is a long-time, almost legendary conservative collective blog founded long edited by Erick Erickson, who is now with The Resurgent. Today, CNN is reporting a drastic cut in its staff by current owner Salem Media. Who took it in the neck?

Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal.

“Insufficiently partisan” was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat.

“They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump,” one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, “how do you define being ‘sufficiently supportive’ of Trump?”

But if it was about politics, it was also about money.

I include the last paragraph to be thorough, although money may not have been a reason so much as an excuse. I expect there will excuses given about removing the deadweight, budgets, and that sort of thing. For me, a couple of thoughts come to mind.

First, if they do use those excuses, they may be sincere, but they’re also signs of failure and doom for RedState, because it’s a signal of the application of a business model to a profoundly non-business entity. Politics is not a business, it’s about winning the right to govern, and then governing effectively. I’ve been through this before and shan’t bore my readers by repeating myself; new readers should find at least some enlightenment here, where I discuss the problems of moving societal sectors’ processes to foreign sectors, and why this generally doesn’t work. This may be the beginning of the end for RedState, if it doesn’t gain a leader (an editor or whatever they call it) who understands what it means to publish, rather than run a business.

Second, this is a signal of how the intellectual political environment of the GOP is slowly sterilizing itself. Intellectual subjects nearly always grow through conflict. In science, for instance, it’s competing hypotheses concerning reality that are measured for congruence with that reality. The reason that sounds nice and easy and clean is because science, ideally, takes an objective approach to these things.

Politics, governance, and that whole lot are not nearly that clean.

But to get on with my argument, a political environment without conflict is a limping movement, a beast that is fighting off a deadly poison^[1]. Those who fight the tide are, sometimes, those who are in the business of saving the organization from a major mistake. That is what the Never-Trumpers have been doing, for example. When the people who present reasoned arguments against the current momentum are removed from the arena, it becomes poorer because the other side then doesn’t have to work as hard to justify their side. Their arguments become weak, they are distracted by deadly self-interest, and soon they find themselves to be in a cesspool from which they daren’t leave, because, well, all the usual reasons – wealth, near-wealth, fear of poverty, and their friends – who they really don’t like – are part of the group.

The politics of purity simply means the group becomes smaller, the umbrella less effective. Ask every religious cult that has been afflicted with terms such as blasphemer, and then ask those who did the afflicting. Those who survive the perpetrators or the victims will agree that it was a terrible error which drove them apart – and made them weaker.

The United States has been strong precisely because it’s impure, even though its citizens sometimes hate that. The GOP is, in essence, engaging in anti-American activities, in spirit only, everytime they engage in purifying the movement.

¹Oddly enough, in software they say if you’re not fixing bugs in your product, it’s a dead product. Perhaps that’s irrelevant.

Steve Benen notes that Defense Secretary Mattis likes the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the JCPOA, and Israeli defense chief says the JCPOA is working. Then Steve recounts Trump’s reaction when he was told that the Iran nuclear deal is working:

As president, Trump went into “meltdown” mode when his own team has told him that the policy is actually working as intended, because the facts were simply inconceivable to him. He knows the policy is a disaster, so when reality pointed in a different direction, Trump found it necessary to reject reality.

I’m not sure Steve has Trump’s psychology down pat. I think that Trump’s greatest success was as a reality TV star. In such a setting, the most important thing to accomplish in order to be successful is to satisfy the audience’s expectations. Firing XYZ would accord with the audience’s expectations? Fine, “the Donald” fires him. The show was a hit and undoubtedly fed into his ego. This is important because anything that inflates the ego also acts as a training process. That is, if if it makes you feel good, then you repeat it and learn how to make it bigger and better. You become addicted to it. Holds true for mice in labs, holds true for humans. Especially tremendously insecure humans like Trump.

Now he’s in a new reality TV role, and the audience, trained by a conservative media that puts politics over national security, expects him to say that the Iran nuclear deal is bad, won’t work, and needs to be dismantled.

It’s not that he “knows the policy is a disaster,” as Steve says, it’s that his audience, the GOP base, wants it to be wrong. It’s another Obama project, and because the GOP base, nevermind its conservative media handlers, can no longer be mature enough to admit that the political opposition can occasionally be right on anything, it must be a disaster. They were inflamed by the Republican leadership when the infamous letter from the Senate was written, they’ve been trained into thinking the deal is a bad thing, and Trump has simply ridden that wave.

But now the reality TV star is running into, ummm, reality. The Israelis are starting to admit that the JCPOA works. His own Defense Secretary says it’s well structured. Any ordinary politician might have the balls to admit that they were wrong and that it is successful. But Trump has sold himself as the politician who’s never wrong. Worse yet, his instincts are telling him that his survival depends on his keeping his audience satisfied. It’s a narrative that speaks to their need to believe they’re still on top of the world, that those damn experts and those allied with them with their damn patronizing liberal attitudes are wrong, and the man without a plan has it all right.

Trump cannot jeopardize that. Not even because he’ll lose his base – but because he fears he’ll lose all that positive reinforcement.

And so we’ll see the self-destructive behaviors of the addict.