Yearly Archives: 2018

A friend in chat, talking about a peregrine falcon sitting on a fence in his yard:

I’m sure it kept an eye on me while drinking some coffee.

And do falcons take cream in their coffee?

Out in the local fast food joint’s parking lot:

Amir Ali on Take Care is taking care to remind Chief Justice Roberts of how one bad decision can define a court:

In the short, five-year period that Harlan Fiske Stone presided as Chief Justice, the Supreme Court contributed several decisions that continue to shape the judiciary and American life. For instance, Stone himself authored International Shoe Co. v. Washington, a seminal decision known to every first-year law student and which judges still apply every day to determine which people or corporations they have jurisdiction over. Yet, today, no one could feel secure discussing the Stone Court without acknowledging its deepest mistake, Korematsu v. United States, in which it acquiesced to President Roosevelt’s internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans.

And thus, concerning the travel ban argued yesterday at the Court:

We also know this is a similar evil because the President told us so. When Trump was asked how he could justify banning Muslims from the U.S., he repeatedly and openly cited the internment of Japanese Americans with approval. “What I’m doing is no different than F.D.R.’s solution for Germans, Italians, Japanese, many years ago,” he said.

All of this should make clear that it’s not President Trump’s legacy at stake. Regardless of what the Supreme Court says, everyone knows what President Trump stands for—if he has been one thing, it’s transparent.

It’s the legacy of the Robert’s Court on the line. The Stone, Fuller, and Taney Courts all should have known they were in the wrong at the time they decided their respective failures. But the Roberts Court has perhaps the clearest warning of any—the President’s own invocation of decisions that are already viewed as the Supreme Court’s darkest.

If the Roberts Court acquiesces, history will remember it—perhaps over all else.

Amir may be stretching a point, but nevertheless I think his focus on Chief Justice Roberts’ concern for legacy may turn out to be the key if the Court rules against the travel ban.

After another frenetic day, perhaps this will be calming.

Gastral drumming:

We have known since the 1960s that several species of wasp perform “gastral drumming” from time to time – banging their abdomens against their nest walls in a series of short bursts.

The scientists who first reported this behaviour thought it may be a signal that the wasps were hungry. Meanwhile, other researchers suggested the wasps might be telling nestmates about food sources. Such “recruitment” behaviour is common in social animals, from house sparrows to naked mole rats. [“Wasps drum with their stomachs to tell each other about food,” Richard Kemeny, NewScientist (14 April 2018)]

As Jonathan Chait in New York reports:

While many reporters have described President Trump’s aggrieved psychology, his phone call this morning on Fox & Friends gave outsiders unfiltered access to the sorts of rants he routinely imposes upon his staff. In the interview, Trump’s sense of persecution was so acute he was barely able to concentrate on an open invitation to tout his own success, the thing he does best. Asked to grade his presidency to date, Trump began by denouncing the “phony cloud” placed over his head by the deep state, briefly regained his balance to give himself an A+, and then returned to the calumnies inflicted upon him by his enemies in the media and the justice system. “A horrible group of deep-seated people,” he insisted, “are coming up with all sorts of phony charges against me and they’re not bringing up real charges against the other side.” Trump’s belief that his enemies, not he himself, should be the subject of legal investigation overwhelmed even his ability to boast about his great success.

Sorry, dumb Leader, those of your opponents who needed investigation have been investigated and either cleared or dealt with, except for McCabe, who’s still in process. Now it’s your turn, and you keep giving off clues like other people give off halitosis.

I really wish I could write with conviction that this is the beginning of the end of the amateur movement, but I think there’ll be too many excuses made, too many conspiracy theories constructed, for Trump supporters to come face to face with their own failing – their failure to properly vet Trump, and accept that he is not suited for the Presidency. From literally hundreds of lies (“crime has never been so high!”), to empty boasting (saving jobs), invocations of xenophobia (Mexican rapists), his willingness to say anything that would make the current audience happy (“clean coal”), to promises that he could not keep, or if he could keep them would ruin the Nation (ludicrous military boosts in spending), it was clear, starting in the primaries, that he was completely unsuitable and, worse, unwilling to do the work necessary to become suitable.

But I fear the Trump supporters will mostly go to their graves convinced that the President was railroaded, because that’s how this will be presented to them and, because it fits with their preconceptions, they’ll not further investigate, as they should.

He’ll probably turn into some damn martyr, and we’ll run into “believers” from time to time.

And, in the meantime, another test faces the American loyalists in the Federal government, denying Trump what he childishly wants – direct control of the Department of Justice. I wish everyone from Sessions on down the good judgment to tell the asshole No.

And maybe Ryan will get off his fat government ass and start impeachment. While I sympathize with Comey’s view that the voters should just boost Trump, and by implication all of his adherents, out of government, I worry that it’ll take too long.

A few nights ago – maybe last week – Colbert on The Late Show said something along the lines of  “Trump choking Sessions in a hot air balloon wearing a bridal dress,” and all I could think was … well, courtesy of my Arts Editor:

It seems weirdly apropos.

For those who worry about SCOTUS becoming more and more conservative as Neil Gorsuch, IJ, joins the court, the news from Empirical SCOTUS is not what you may expect to hear:

Gorsuch joined the Court at a unique time. While there is much discussion about how this Court could be the moving towards the right, especially if Justice Kennedy (or any of the more liberal justices) retires with a Republican President at the helm, other statistics show the Court at the present is actually more ideologically liberal than it has been in years.  According to the Martin-Quinn (MQ) Scores, the ideological metric commonly used to measure the relative positions of Supreme Court justices, at the end of last term the Court was the only one in recent memory with five primarily liberal justices and four predominately conservative justices (scores greater than zero denote conservatives while less than zero denote liberals).  The justices scores at the end of the 2016 term, Gorsuch’s first partial term on the Court, look as follows:

Source: Empirical SCOTUS

It’s interesting that Kennedy is inclining towards the liberal side of the spectrum, although of course the entire political spectrum analogy sometimes is a poor measurement of any single person, and in his case a poor predictor of future performance.

But for pure surprise, my money is on Roberts. He’s the guy with the biggest sense of legacy, and thus most likely to ignore expectations.

Dioecious:

FOUR palm trees have been spotted changing from male to female for the first time.

While many plants have male and female sex organs, palm trees were thought to be either male or female, or “dioecious”. [“Palm trees have been spotted changing sex for the first time,” NewScientist (14 April 2018)]

I was reading about the latest jaw-dropping admission of corruption from a government official, as detailed here in The New York Times:

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

At the top of the hierarchy, he added, were his constituents. “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions,” said Mr. Mulvaney, who received nearly $63,000 from payday lenders for his congressional campaigns.

It’s not even clear he gets it.

I shan’t guess his name, as he – or she – might have a lawyer.

And it finally came to me. “Draining” was used merely in a newspeak sense. It’s been redefined as “getting as much as I can.” So the draining the swamp rhetoric which Trump used over and over and over to presumably attract moral, fiscally conservative voters was actually a siren song to all the, well, alligators are actually not what comes to mind. Think lamprey. Yep, that thing off to the right. Yep, every time Trump cried Drain the swamp! he was actually calling all those lamprey-like creatures to come to him, where he could give suckle.

Ugh, this analogy got downright ugly in a hurry. The sad part is that it’s not even in jest. If you think Mulvaney is an exception, you need to read up on EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who appears to be even worse than Mulvaney.

Returning to this dormant thread, the concern was that the latest in a series of technological revolutions might not follow the general pattern, which is that each eats up a certain category of jobs, by automating them, but more are created than are lost, making for a net gain – and a lucrative one at that. Well, the early returns are in, as NewScientist (14 April 2018) reports:

People’s fears have been stoked by headlines warning of the robot takeover. A 2013 study by the University of Oxford, for example, suggested robots are set to replace as much as 47 per cent of the US workforce and 35 per cent of the UK’s.

But far from this apocalyptic scenario, automation resulted in an overall increase in jobs of between 1.5 and 1.8 per cent in Germany between 2011 and 2016. While robots claimed 5 per cent of jobs, more new ones were created. What’s more, most of these tended to pay better than those that had been lost.

Like I said, early returns. As AI continues to improve, as sager heads predict, perhaps the trend will fade and we will soon be praising our robot overlords.

But, so far, not so much.

The AZ-8 special election was last night, and naive Republicans are indulging in a sigh of relief as the Republican, Debbie Lesko, defeated Democrat Hiral Tipirneni by about 5 points.

The smart ones are appalled, even panicky. As Steve Benen notes,

Arizona’s 8th congressional district is a heavily Republican area. Donald Trump won here by 21 points in his presidential race, and GOP voters enjoy a 17-point registration advantage. In yesterday’s special election. Republicans ran an experienced state lawmaker, while Democrats ran a first-time candidate. Common sense suggested the race wouldn’t be close.

No doubt the Democrats were energized and the Republicans … lethargic? Or repulsed by their own party? Hard to say.

Meanwhile, The Texas Tribune reports the Republican Governor of Texas is scheduling a special election to replace Brent Farenthold (R), who resigned from his TX-27 amidst sexual harassment and financial scandals:

Gov. Greg Abbott got the go-ahead Monday from Attorney General Ken Paxton to suspend state law so the governor can call a special election to replace former U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi, as soon as possible.

Responding to a request from Abbott submitted Thursday, Paxton issued a nonbinding opinion saying a court would agree Abbott could set aside the election rules under a part of Texas law that lets the governor suspend certain statutes if they interfere with disaster recovery. Abbott said last week he wanted Farenthold’s former constituents to have new representation “as quickly as possible” because the Coastal Bend-area’s Congressional District 27 is still reeling from Hurricane Harvey.

As noted in an earlier post, Farenthold was the Texas representative who benefited the most from the most recent redistricting in Texas, and in fact the same Tribune article notes that SCOTUS will be hearing an appeal from the State against a lower court ruling that the redistricting amounted to illegal gerrymandering.

In any case, this election, if it does occur, is another opportunity for the Democrats to frighten the Republicans. While an excellent showing by the Democratic nominee in a TX-27 contest would be inspirational for Democratic challengers nationwide, it would also serve as a warning to the Republicans. In normal circumstances, a warning could be used to correct problems. However, these are not normal days, what with the Republicans are weighed down by the President’s exceptionally poor record, as well as the party’s many failures in Congress, and the party’s transition from a center-right governing party to a fringe-right party of extremists who just happen to have the world’s finest political marketing machine.

Quite honestly, that seems to be about all they have going for them now, and it’s nothing to scoff at. See my review of The Persuaders.

Jessica Hamzelou explains in NewScientist (14 April 2018) that scientists have discovered experiences change gene expression – in your brain:

The brain seems to store memories in new connections between neurons. To do this, the neurons need to make new proteins – a process that is thought to be controlled by hundreds of genes.

While investigating how this works, Ami Citri at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his colleagues discovered that particular experiences – be it an electric shock or a hit of cocaine – elicit different changes in gene activity in the brains of mice.

These mice were given a variety of positive or negative experiences, such as electric shocks to their feet, a sugar treat, a dose of a chemical that makes them feel ill or cocaine. An hour later, they were euthanised and the team looked at which genes were being expressed in seven areas of the brain that are involved in memory, including the hippocampus and amygdala.

Citri was surprised to find that all of the mice given cocaine, for example, showed the same general pattern of gene activity. The patterns were so clear that the team could guess what experience a mouse had been through with over 90 per cent accuracy just by analysing the levels of activity of different genes in their brains (eLife, doi.org/cm6w).

The whole euthanization thing is a bit of a spoiler, of course, for would-be scientific mind-readers. It’s a fascinating first glimpse into the mechanics of storing memories. The next – BIG – step is to predict how a specific experience will modify the brain, right? At the moment, it’s a matter of noting correlations a posteriori. If you can predict, without that specific correlation being available, how some arbitrary experience will affect the brains of a normal person, then you’re really cooking.

That should take, oh, several centuries to accomplish.

And then that atypical persons brain should also be fascinating. Oooops, subject’s dead. Damn, we should have developed the tricorder, first…

Here’s the Chandra X-Ray telescope view of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster from 2003:

Credit: NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al.

The Chandra image shows the supermassive black hole at the center of Perseus A, seen as a white point. This image is 350 thousand light years across at the distance of the Perseus cluster. The hot cluster gas is seen as diffuse emission, and two cavities in the cluster gas are visible on either side of the black hole. Low-energy X-rays (0.3-1.5 keV) are shown in red, medium-energy X-rays are shown in green (1.5-3.5 keV), and high-energy X-rays are shown in blue (3.5-7.0 keV).

It may not be so cool as others, but it has a certain faux-retro feel to it in the graininess, as well as a slightly 3-D impression. Cool stuff.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the report that Admiral Jackson, the US VA nominee, is now being orphaned by President Trump, is the ongoing theme of this Administration – the selection of unqualified or otherwise unacceptable nominees for positions in the government, who end up stepping aside when they fail – or, in a few cases, winning confirmation to their posts, only to leave in disgrace. Think Price, or Tillerson.

These are avoidable. These are unforced and embarrassing errors. You’d think the Administration would learn.

Repeat that. You’d think the Administration would learn.

In the natural world, one of the marks of a successful creature or entity is its capability to learn, whether how to communicate better with those it hopes to win to its causes, or where to best find prey that can be slaughtered and eaten.

And the unsuccessful? Those who never learned this simple lesson. We should have perhaps realized that this Administration is doomed to failure when we first heard about this incident, which James Hohmann helpfully reminds us of on PowerPost:

When Trump fired Chris Christie as the head of his transition team on Nov. 11, after the then-New Jersey governor expressed opposition to hiring Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Flynn and Steve Bannon, who would be White House chief strategist, celebrated by tossing binders full of potential personnel picks into the trash, according to a Politico report last year.

A disdain for careful planning and investigation marks those doomed to failure. I’m as much an off-the-cuff as the next guy – maybe more than I should be – but when we’re talking about important government matters involving the safety of the nation, throwing away material of this sort marks, for the careful observer, the people who have little more going for them than an unreasoning rage at the political opposition – hardly the mark of mature political types.

Mitt Romney’s run for the Senate in Utah has run into a snag. From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger notes how parenting styles really aren’t styles so much as judgments on other parents:

Maclean’s reported in its most recent issue that only about 100 kids are kidnapped each year in the U.S. in the stereotypical ‘scary stranger’ scenario, which is “a small fraction of one percent of missing kids each year.” Meanwhile, vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for U.S. kids between 1 and 18, killing around 1,600 kids annually. So, when parents drive a kid from point A to point B to avoid the risk of kidnapping, they’re actually putting their child in greater danger.

While everyone is entitled to their own personal phobias and has the right to choose how to act on those fears, what is entirely unacceptable is requiring other parents to raise their kids according to those beliefs.

As ]Professor Barbara] Sarnecka puts it, “I shouldn’t be legally required to act irrationally just because a lot of other people have a particular phobia.”

This, however, is the frightening direction in which our society is headed and it needs to be counterbalanced by more public discussion about the benefits of promoting independence in kids. Sarnecka recommends that parents talk positively about their own childhood memories and avoid fear-mongering conversations. Most of all, walk the talk! Fight the busybodies by setting your kids free. The more kids are out and about unsupervised (within reason), the more normal it will become.

No kids here, but given how little my parents kept an eye on me once I reached a certain age, I think, as a parent, I would have ended up having more than one conversation with police department personnel about how I was raising any kids I had.

And I would have been quite irritated about it.

There is a certain amount of short-sightedness to the worry about your kids being kidnapped. The goal of raising children should be to raise good citizens; raising people who end up terrified of their own shadows does not for a good citizen make. Fortunately, there appears to be a counter-movement over the last year or two against the wrapping children in bubble-wrap movement, so perhaps these worries about kids will pass.

Or perhaps not. In decades past, it just wasn’t possible to keep an eye on the kids like you can today. Add in the smaller size of families, and kids are viewed with more sentimentality than, perhaps, they were in yesterday. I’m just speculating, of course, since actual measurements of sentimentality seems a dubious effort, but it does make some sense.

A reader identifies what I thought was some sort of antenna cable:

It’s heat tape to keep the downspout from clogging with ice.

Oh! I would never have guessed!

I’ve finally finished The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants To Change Your Mind (2016), delayed by life and illness. If  you are the sort that likes to look behind the curtain and see how things are done, especially those processes that most people don’t even suspect, and if they did they’d disapprove, then I can heartily recommend this book.

First, the author is James Garvey, PhD, listed as employed by the Royal Institute of Philosophy (his Wikipedia page says he’s the Secretary of that institution). In this book, he reveals how our urge, natural or not, for persuasion has been gradually circumvented by entities, usually corporate or political, seeking specific behaviors from the generic “us”, the citizens who have something of value they want, whether it be money, votes, or general inclinations.

His Preface gives his motivation for the book, a lecture he attended by an Oxford theologian in which, during Q&A, he lodged what he consider a “killer objection”. Did this bring the theologian to his knees? No. Garvey was simply ignored.

I began to suspect [argument and logical reasoning are] not even remotely how things actually go at all. I don’t want to overcook the point and suggest that arguments are entirely unpersuasive – but we might well over-estimate their hold on us. … I believe there is something newsworthy here, something worrying over and above all the obvious stuff, something just out of focus, on the corner of our collective vision. [p. xii]

Chapter 1 kicks things off with a little known story out of history: The Robin Hood Society of Butcher Lane, London. Created in the early 1700s, it consisted on members who argued, in a structured manner, the issues of the day. Some participated, others remained silent, enjoying the glory of the debate. Judging was strict and more or less objective In 1780, its activity abruptly became a fad, as the number of such societies escalated. Their endpoint, however, was detestable and worthy of loathing:

In the end, London’s flirtation with rationality did not last long. Largely in fearful reaction to the brewing French Revolution, the debating societies were violently repressed by the government — thugs were hired to break up debates, police constables blocked the doors, landlords were threatened with fines or worse, popular speakers were roughed up, and finally Parliament voted in the Seditious Meetings Act, effectively making public debate a treasonous offence. [p. 6]

An ominous comment on the nature of those on top.

From there it’s on to the current state of disputation: the goal, to win by any means necessary. Furthermore, he meditates upon the loss of the practice of reflection, referencing Bertrand Russell’s observation:

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. [GoodReads]

His final observation?

So I think we have an obligation, maybe a moral one, to understand what contemporary persuasion does to us. It bothers me, and I hope that now it bothers you, too.

Chapter 2 covers public relations, including the infamous testimony to Congress prior to the American entry into the Gulf War, from an anonymous Kuwaiti girl, that Iraqi soldiers invading a hospital, taking the incubators, and leaving the preemies to die on the floor – a lie, as it turns out, formulated by a PR firm, and delivered by a member of the Kuwaiti royal family operating under cover. An unwary Congress bit on it, backing the war. He covers the history, which he begins at World War I, hitting the turning points, end with …

While I’m all in favour of education and democratic renewal … I worry that education and legislation might never actually manage to thwart an industry worth so many billions of dollars, an industry that’s better at ‘education’ than any university system, and an industry that specializes in ensuring that laws that might harm its clients’ interests never see the light of day.

Chapter 3 concerns tweaks and nudges, something many of us are familiar with in regards to our 401Ks, where the trend has been to make contributions to our 401Ks the “default setting,” rather than forcing us to actually go through the administrative work of setting up and contributing at firms which support 401Ks. Why? Research indicates people often go with default settings, as the recent Facebook debacle has highlighted.

Garvey also introduces us to the idea that we have two thinking systems. The first is the fast one, and is the one that is employed when, on a camping trip, the bushes rustle and you take off running. There’s no active, rational thinking, but rather the instinctive consideration that a mountain lion is about to leap upon you. What should one do? Run for your life. The second is the much slower, rational system, where we try to apply logic and reasoning to a situation. The goal of the Persuaders? To activate and manipulate the first system, leaving the second quiescent, through the use of keywords.

We also think we are much less vulnerable to manipulation than we actually are. Levine found that 70 per cent of those questioned said they were more aware than average of how manipulation works. 61 per cent said they knew more about manipulation than their peers.

Reminds one of those driving statistics, doesn’t? 70% of drivers think they’re better than average. These are usually the tailgaters and people who cut you off, aren’t they? So if you think you’re good at detecting manipulation, think again.

Chapter 4 works on the concept of social proof. Coins left in buskers’ cups, long lines at nightclubs, the people standing behind a candidate at a rally, and other faux clues function to manipulate you into thinking or doing something that you might not otherwise decide. He recounts the research that has gone into focusing social proof on all of us, some representative experiments, and that sort of thing. That free food that shows up at the supermarket? It’s not to introduce you to the product. It’s to induce feelings of reciprocity, so that you’ll buy something in return for their gift. And more. And more.

Chapter 5 explores the superior use of communications by various political parties, as compared to their opponents. Following Bush’s 2004 victory,

Democratic strategists found themselves consumed by insights from cognitive science and linguistics. … Not arguments, but the careful use of resonating turns of phrase was the key – words that evoked or fit into established worldviews were better heard and more strongly believed.

Framing the debate became key, and thus the presence of Frank Luntz, Republican strategist, researcher, and resource for many Republican candidates. Luntz says 80% of life is emotion, and that’s where he works. Thus the subtle appeals not to reason, but to emotion in Republican speeches – xenophobia, racism, and that sort of thing.

Garvey comments,

But even with this limited grip on political language, I now find myself turned off by political speeches. I don’t want to hear and be affected by them. Sometimes I look away and hum to myself when a politician appears on TV to respond to the news of the day.

This chapter also includes an appalling example of buzzword usage in England, which I will desist from quoting. It was quite enlightening, though, and I suggest that media refuse to broadcast messages in which the politician ignores the question in favor of answering their preferred question, or, worse, just employs buzzwords designed to elicit emotional responses. We saw the former just last week on The Late Show, when Cynthia Nixon completely ignored host Stephen Colbert’s question concerning her lack of experience in her run for Governor of New York. I was appalled, but the audience applauded, rather than booing her as they should have.

Chapter 6 gives the history and usage of persuasion in the retail world, from the days of Pompey and Herculaneum to today, including pivotal names, research, and processes. People who view shopping as a leisure or entertainment activity should read this and then hide in their bedrooms for at least a month.

Chapter 7 concerns data collection and analysis, which has been much in the news of late due to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and includes the amusing anecdote concerning the father of a teenage daughter who receives a coupon for diapers, is outraged, and then a week or two later discovers his daughter is, indeed, pregnant. The big retailer Target knew before the prospective grandfather. The subject of retail use of data for planning the layout of a store is explored in almost tiresome detail.

The final chapter returns to the honest subject of simple argumentation. Garvey gives a history, beginning with the poet Parmenides, who he labels the first to explore formal, reasoned debate, but,”… an awful poet.” From there, he covers the big Greek three of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, knocking down the relativists in the process, but his real purpose here is to remind us that we can be rational creatures making rational choices, so long as understand that manipulation occurs all around us.

He includes a fascinating view of his day as he tries to avoid being manipulated, identifying the various tricks used to separate him from his valuables, from money to inclinations to votes. It’s an illuminating trip, and he admits sometimes it exhausts him, as the brain needs to rest after so much effort – it is an organ like any other, after all.

So there you go.

Recommended.

How about you?

While reading a WaPo analysis of the North Korean goals and motivations for the upcoming Kim-Trump meeting, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any real thought given to the other side – that is, an analysis of the United States’ negotiator, Donald J. Trump.

Consider: North Korea had a veritable cavalcade of nuclear and ICBM tests in 2017, to the point that the Western media was awash in reports and analysis, and Hawaii screwed up a drill enough to credibly frighten the state’s citizens that a missile was incoming.

Who do they face? The weakest American leader since at least Jimmy Carter, and more likely we’d have to go back to Presidents prior to World War II to identify a leader weaker than Trump. Why does this matter? Because Trump is well known to be an overconfident, insecure, foolish, bombastic, ignorant, and incurious man – and I choose each of those adjectives with care, not simply because I like those adjectives, but because each is applicable to Donald J. Trump.

The result is a leader who can be manipulated, not only by Americans and, possibly, Russians, but, I think, North Koreans.

Why did the North Koreans ask for this meeting, and schedule it for May? Why did they agree to meet with current CIA Directory Pompeo? Because they can read the tea leaves. Even if our form of government is foreign to them, even if our politics are currently more difficult to read than normal, it seems a safe bet that the next Congress, coming up in less than a year, will be far less compliant with President Trump than the current Congress.

Indeed, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that impeachment proceedings may begin soon after the next Congress convenes.

And that means that whatever North Korea wants out of the Americans has to be won soon, and that means Congressional debate before consent will be won, and that should take time.

So they hurry their twin weapons programs along and achieve a modicum of success, they successfully use that as propaganda to rattle the American President (which we can see from his frenzied Tweet-storms), and then they appeal to his vanity by giving him a chance to achieve something his predecessors did not: an accord with North Korea.

So how good is Kim Jong un? Will he be able to manipulate an elderly ignoramus who probably won’t even read the final accords?

Stay tuned.

On Lawfare Keith Whittington discusses the insignificance of an Article of the United States Constitution:

Nonetheless, faithful and conscientious constitutional actors should do more than pay mere lip service to the text. Congress is abdicating its constitutional responsibilities to determine whether the United States should make war on other nations when it makes no effort to take advantage of the ample time available to it to deliberate on how the United States should respond to the use of chemical weapons by a rogue regime and when it makes no effort to develop a collective response to presidential threats to use military force against foreign governments with which the United States is not already at war. The executive branch is indicating the irrelevance of Congress to the warmaking process when it announces that the president’s Article II authority should be understood to include the power to initiate military force against foreign nations whenever he deems American national interests to be at stake. …

At the local strip mall, as water poured down the downspouts, I noticed this:

In fact, it appeared all of the downspouts had been invaded by cabling. Sure hope this never causes any problems.

A reader comments on the pharma business  model:

I’m glad you said he mischaracterized their pricing model, because the line “These drugs are priced to recover their R&D costs based on the number of patients who are likely to use them” is just a fantasy story sold to the public and politicians to enable huge amounts of profits. How many times have corporations told us their prices for X were so high because they were forced to do expensive thing Y to make X available, and then we’ve been able to prove that true, versus the number of times we’ve been able to prove it false? I’d wager those statements have rarely been confirmed as truth, and frequently confirmed as deception. Big Pharma is big, and filthy rich. The very, very rare case where some company spends a gazillion dollars on R&D by itself and is not profitable does not prove the “rule” they sell us into believing. Recall also that we the people through our taxes paid for and continue to pay for scads of basic research to creates these drugs. No drug company invents completely novel things; it and its employees stand on the shoulders of many others, most of whom are not getting paid by those excessive profits. That a majority of modern drugs are vastly cheaper in other countries is one clear indication that it’s poppycock.

Although to some extent our over pricing permits the other countries to have lower prices, in general I agree with the reader. I wonder what would happen if the United States government simply stopped all basic research – would, as the libertarians would assert, the corporate world pick up the load?

Or would we simply not see any more true innovation, just us being locked into medicines which treat, but do not cure, life-threatening diseases?

A reader comments on the printed concrete house:

What’s wrong with concrete, as compared to extruded wood?

I suppose “extruded wood” could be sawdust mixed with some sort of binder, which would require energy to create. I have no way to estimate its impact on the environment. Concrete, on the other hand, has a measured substantial impact, as remarked upon here.

Another reader:

I could see concrete being 3D printed for load-bearing columns; then a different kind of concrete with more insulative value, being used for the walls. Print a notch in the wall so you can surface mount the utilities — wiring chases and HVAC — then cover it with a panel of some kind. Make it earthquake resistant and I’d live in it.

To which another replies:

There’s a type of concrete used for making blocks which have good insulation value, are much lighter and easier to work with, but which retains much of concrete’s strength. It’s called Aerated Autoclaved Concrete (AAC). The downside of AAC is mostly that it takes a lot of energy to produce, but maybe if that’s averaged out over its long lifespan, it wouldn’t be as bad as other materials. I haven’t seen numbers on that yet.

Given it’s software used to control the printers, it should make for easily customizable houses.