Yearly Archives: 2018

Andrew Sullivan, in the second part of his weekly tri-partite column, laments the infiltration of a flawed philosophy into college and corporate HR office that is threatening liberal democracy:

The full text and documents of James Damore’s class-action lawsuit against Google make for fascinating reading. Throughout, the company’s policies are close to indistinguishable from those of many elite colleges, and indeed of more and more of corporate America (including many media companies). It is, of course, a great idea for Google to include as many people as possible from as many diverse experiences and backgrounds as possible — in order to recruit the very best employees.

But the “social justice” movement is about much more than that. It’s about replacing and subverting what it regards as “white male dominant” culture. And how does Google define “white male dominant culture”? According to a Google HR department handout, cited by Damore, some of the nefarious qualities “[v]alued by U.S. white/male dominant culture” include: perfectionism, individual achievement, objectivity, meritocracy, and a “colorblind racial frame.” And it is important to push back against all of them. …

Where on earth will this lead us? When you can identify the enemy by sight because of the color of their skin or their gender, fighting against a system quickly becomes a fight against individuals, whether that is the intent or not. That’s why it is going to be very interesting to see the gory details of Harvard’s admissions process in the current lawsuits — both private and from the Justice Department — in defense of individual Asian-American applicants, allegedly rejected because they are of the wrong race.

Well, in the corporate arena, those corporations controlled by a flawed philosophy, in HR or or corporation wide, will be unwilling participants in a social experiment called Survival of the Fittest. No doubt my reader has heard this one before, but as Janet Factor once noted,

Evolution is a substrate-neutral algorithm. It works its magic just as well on computer programs or political soundbites as it does on DNA.

Or corporate competition. If this new philosophy is indeed more flawed than that currently underlying liberal democracy – and, given its apparent internal contradictions and general incoherency, I tend to agree with Andrew that it is flawed and inferior – then those corporations will lose the talent that makes their collective efforts successful.

I recall, many many years ago, a financially painful lesson. I was invested, if memory serves, in Lucent Technologies, a telecommunications company. One day, I read about some bizarre requirement from their HR department, of which the exact nature now escapes me, but in general it fell into the category of disrepute as engendered by my generally skeptical nature – that is, it sounded like dumb bullshit. All employees were required to cooperate with this requirement.

And, a short while later, the stock price fell sharply on news of under-performance. I eventually lost money on the investment. And I recall, even now, not realizing that the news had been a pivotal signal to me. Lucent went on to shrink from 165,000 employees to 35,000 and then merge with Alcatel, which was generally considered a failure.

Andrew wonders where this will lead us? The corporate world is not monolithic, so we can assume there will be winners and losers. I am not invested in Alphabet, the parent to Google, and given this news, I would not consider an investment in Alphabet until that philosophy is either given a better defense, a revision, or is ousted from Alphabet.

Can you imagine a world without Google? Better get started on oiling up the imagination machine, because that world may be coming faster than you think. All it would take is Google faltering in their technical expertise, and technical expertise is what leaves a company the fastest when unbelievable bullshit starts flying around the corporation. I know engineers. They’ll put up with bizarre religious beliefs, but when something labeled “progressive” but obviously idiotic comes along and is embraced by corporate, they’re gone.

Or I should say allegedly odious profession, actually. It’s Fareed Zakaria in WaPo:

One of the oft-repeated criticisms of America is that it has too many lawyers. Maybe, but one of the country’s great strengths is its legal culture. As I’ve written before, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that without a class of patriotic and selfless aristocrats, the United States could fall prey to demagogues and populists. But he took comfort in the fact that, as he put it, American aristocracy can be found “at the bar or on the bench.” Tocqueville saw that lawyers, with their sense of civic duty, created a “form of public accountability that would help preserve the blessings of democracy without allowing its untrammeled vices.”

I’ve known many lawyers, and actually I consider just about every one of them admirable people. The American Experiment is not founded on religion or military might, it’s founded on respect for the law, and the lawyers are those who implement it in all its messy details.

American contempt for lawyers is ill-founded and motivated by a few bad actors.

A reader comments on U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley recent contretemps with the White House:

I don’t agree with her very often because she’s mostly parroting the official GOP mantra, if there is such a thing nowadays. But I do like her style, directness, and efficient use of the English language.

So do I. I don’t feel like she’s pulling a fast one on me. It’s too bad she seems to be in the extremist’s camp, otherwise it’d be a bit of a kick in the teeth to the white supremacist wing of the GOP to have a Republican Presidential candidate who happens to be female and Indian. I wonder how much harassment she receives from the bigots of the party, and how much they grind their teeth in frustration at her success and influence.

While reading Greg Sargent in WaPo’s The Plum Line, I began to wonder. But first, Sargent’s summation:

To be clear, the fact that Republicans strong-armed the release of the Comey memos in the first place, and the fact that they promptly leaked, both set bad precedents when it comes to political interference in ongoing investigations. But now that it did happen, there’s no way to argue that this outcome is vindicating for Trump. The opposite is true.

And this echos other publication asserting the leaked memos absolve Trump of nothing, despite his protestations.

But will the Trump supporters ever even see analyses such as Sargent’s? I’d bet, at most, a plugged nickel Fox News will be publishing along these lines, so we can be fairly sure that your typical Trump supporter, who reads Trump’s tweets and consumes right wing media devoted to Trump, will never see this sort of analysis. Like much of the American public, they depend on their news organizations and associated opinion pieces for their world view, perhaps even moreso than your average American.

So these analyses are rather like preaching to the choir. For the punditry, it’s a shocking and stunning blow TO the Trump Administration, and in fact to the conservative movement as a whole, as it repeatedly demonstrates incompetency and third rate amateurism, or, alternatively but doubtfully, an amazing level of deception against the Trump movement.

But for Trump supporters? The only impact will be confusion for those who engage with non-Trump supporters or media, as their mother’s milk will clash with the outside world. And they’ll just shake their heads and keep on sucking.

And it continues no matter what the weather gods may decree.

Stay in tune, boys!

It’s America’s disreputable side of society, stylized and set to music. Guys And Dolls (1955) follows the machinations of two men, Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson, as they pursue their vocations and their distractions – their ladies – in New York, New York. All around them, the city’s inhabitants gyrate to the tunes and the tension as Nathan bets high rolling Sky that he cannot take a doll of Nathan’s choosing to Havana for a night of dinner and … whatever takes their fancy. $1000 is the bet, and Nathan plans to use these ill-gotten funds to run a crap-game, his vocation and income, because those who fancy themselves well are in town, ready to chuck the bones in search of unearned wealth.

Who’s Nathan’s choice? To Masterson’s dismay, it’s Sgt Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army, a woman upright and devoted to the straight and narrow, but despairing of taking the first step up the Army ladder, of dragging a soul out of the filth of the gutter and into Heaven with her. But Masterson is not the sort to collapse at the first hurdle, and soon he finds the hook that will persuade her to his cause: 12 sinners’ souls will make their appearance at the Mission Hall two nights hence, in return for her company. Reluctant, but at the end of the creek, she agrees.

Meanwhile, Nathan has his own set of troubles, as his woman of 14 years is demanding he put up in the chapel, or shut up, and does so in that most elegant of New York accents – loud and grating. His protestations of love, so elegantly voiced, still her demands – for a time. But when he proves to be a more willing singer than groom, she vows this is the last time, much to his dismay. But he must make the dough, doncha know, and with a crap game or his end imminent, and the Mission Hall fortuitously empty, the dice are in play. Sadly, at least for them, the return of the rightful occupants precipitates the scattering of the gamers like chickens before the fox, but they’re gone fast enough that the notorious Lieutenant of the police department must depart with merely a  rage in hand.

But Sarah accuses Masterson of duplicity, both specific and general, and Sky finds there’s a limit to his detachment towards her. Recalling his marker to Sarah, he finds a native guide to the floating crap game, now, appropriately, in the sewers, and on a single roll, persuades a dozen or more of the gamblers to visit the Mission Hall at the appointed hour. A room full of confessionaries, reluctant though they may be, mark success … both immediate and in the future.

Full of famous names such as Harry the Horse and Nicely-Nicely, costumed as if no one in New York is poor, and danced with abandon, this is a luxuriant, leisurely stroll as we consider the question of how to salvage the souls of those who chase lady luck for far too long and way too much audacity, and if the answers are less than convincing, who cares? This is about style and daring, not argument and counter-argument. For today they wed, and if tomorrow brings disagreement, what of it? Live for wedded bliss today, living life to the fullest.

I haven’t mentioned the circus going on down in Missouri, as I figured it’d fade away – but, instead, it’s become more of a train accident. The Governor, Eric Greitens (R-MO), was initially accused of taking a photo of a woman who was nude against her wishes. She was having an affair with him. Then he was accused of forcing her into oral sex. Now Politico notes that he’s accused of mismanaging a charity he ran in the past:

St. Louis prosecutors filed criminal charges against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on Friday over his handling of a donors list for his veterans charity, the newest controversy for the governor, who is facing separate allegations of blackmail and sexual assault and a felony charge alleging invasion of privacy.

Missouri’s attorney general, Josh Hawley, announced on Friday that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner had found probable cause to file criminal charges against the governor in the case. Prosecutors allege that Greitens improperly used the donor list for his charity organization, The Mission Continues, during his 2016 political campaign.

Adding a bit of spiciness to this stew is the news that the Attorney General bringing the charges, Josh Hawley, is not only a Republican himself, but is gunning for the Senate seat currently held by Claire McCaskill (D-MO), which is currently considered the seat most likely to be flipped from Democratic to Republican control.

Hawley is engaged in a delicate dance here. Will voters consider this the actions of an honorable prosecutor, simply doing his duty? Or, sensing that Greitens is critically injured, he’s decided to push some dubious charges in hopes of getting more publicity, but it comes off wrong and it buries him instead?

Greitens, for what it’s worth, is loudly protesting this treatment. He admits to the affair, but after that it’s all just fantasy:

In a lengthy statement issued Friday, Greitens was defiant and claimed prosecutors were unfairly targeting him:

“Two months ago, a prosecutor brought a case against me. She claimed she had evidence of a crime — but she’s produced none. She said her investigator would find the truth. Instead, her investigator lied under oath and created false evidence. And she is using thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars to do all of this. Her case is falling apart — so today, she’s brought a new one.”

It continued: “By now, everyone knows what this is: this prosecutor will use any charge she can to smear me. Thank goodness for the Constitution and our court system. In the United States of America, you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

I understand the first couple of charges were brought by someone other than Hawley. In any case, it’s a spectacle: a sitting governor under not one, but multiple serious indictments. Will this reflect poorly on the Republican brand – or just Greitens? Or even Hawley?

Turkey appears to be backing away from so-called fiat money and pushing gold as the currency of choice in international commerce – and preparing for it, of course. Mehmet Cetingulec of AL Monitor has the story:

Turkey’s central bank, in a fundamental shift in its reserve policy, is stocking gold and scaling back on foreign exchange after many years of keeping gold reserves at a fixed level and trying to boost foreign exchange. In the first week of April alone, the central bank’s gross foreign exchange reserves declined to $83 billion from $84.7 billion the previous week, while gold reserves stood at about $25.3 billion.

The unprecedented increase in gold reserves propelled Turkey to 10th place in terms of gold reserves in February. According to the World Gold Council, Turkey had 546.8 tons of gold that month, compared to 116 tons in September 2011.

The goal?

In a sign that Turkey will continue to stock up on gold, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on April 17 argued that international loans should be based on gold rather than dollars. Speaking at an economic gathering in Istanbul, he remarked, “Why do you have to make the loans in dollars? Let’s base the loans on gold. We need to rid states and nations of exchange rate pressure. Throughout history, gold has never been a means of pressure.” Erdogan also said that he had made the suggestion to International Monetary Fund officials at a G-20 meeting.

Ankara’s desire to boost the use of gold pertains not only to borrowing, but also to trade. This meshes with its efforts to promote interest-free banking, where lending systems are based on gold. Some, however, see more covert motives behind Turkey’s stocking on gold.

Interest free banking is a result of the Islamic prohibition on interest. And there’s more:

In an April 17 article, Hurriyet’s economy pundit Ugur Gurses reported that last year the central bank withdrew all 28.6 tons of gold it was keeping at the US Federal Reserve, moving it to the Switzerland-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Bank of England. According to the report, at the end of 2017, Turkey’s gold reserves totaled 564.7 tons, including 375.4 tons at the Bank of England, 18.7 tons at BIS, 33.7 tons at the Turkish central bank and 136.8 tons in the central bank’s account at the Istanbul stock exchange.

Some interesting moves by Turkey. I’ve never quite understood the fascination with gold myself, but it sure seems to becloud some people.

The quest for saving money ran into a blockade:

A group of cancer doctors focused on bringing down the cost of treatments by testing whether lower — and cheaper — doses are effective thought they had found a prime candidate in a blood cancer drug called Imbruvica that typically costs $148,000 a year.

The science behind Imbruvica suggested that it could work at lower doses, and early clinical evidence indicated that patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia might do just as well on one or two pills a day after completing an initial round of treatment at three pills per day.

The researchers at the Value in Cancer Care Consortium, a nonprofit focused on cutting treatment costs for some of the most expensive drugs, set out to test whether the lower dose was just as effective — and could save patients money.

Then they learned of a new pricing strategy by Janssen and Pharmacyclics, the companies that sell Imbruvica through a partnership. Within the next three months, the companies will stop making the original 140-milligram capsule, a spokeswoman confirmed. They will instead offer tablets in four strengths — each of which has the same flat price of about $400, or triple the original cost of the pill. [WaPo]

Naturally, the researchers were outraged. Kevin Drum thinks it’s unwarranted:

I can’t believe I’m defending a pharmaceutical company, but what did these oncologists expect? Everyone knows that the price of drugs like Imbruvica doesn’t depend on the cost of actually manufacturing the stuff. Whether it costs a penny a pill or $100 a pill is irrelevant. These drugs are priced to recover their R&D costs based on the number of patients who are likely to use them. If the number of pills required was any kind of factor at all, they’d manufacture them in 10-milligram sizes and make people buy 14 or 28 of them.

First, let’s note that Kevin is mis-characterizing the purpose of general pharma pricing. The purpose is to recover the R&D costs on both successful and unsuccessful drugs, and to make a profit – generally a big profit. (They also hope for lucrative “off-label” applications as well, but that’s another story.)

It’s a fascinating question, though. We’re accustomed to considering the physical properties of a tangible product to define the price of that product, but in this case it’s nearly all about the intellectual effort that went into the R&D process. And, if the pharma company was being completely honest and not just jerking these scientists around, it wouldn’t be using the price-per-pill model at all. That pricing scheme is an example of the rapidly-becoming-discredited medical services for a fee model in which medical supplies, procedures, professionals, and, most importantly, corporate entities are disconnected from the primary purpose of medicine: to correct defects in the human body^[1].

I would like to see the pharma companies cease dispensing their illness solutions in separate pills, priced-per, and instead put a price on the entire treatment, regardless of the actual number of pills involved. I recognize that this doesn’t fit perfectly, since many severe illnesses, by definition, are not yet resolvable, so you’d have to label the ‘solution’ as something else reflecting the true purpose of the treatment, whether it’s pain alleviation or life lengthening. But you get the point.

And there should be some sort of consequence if the treatment doesn’t work. Boy, the devil would live in those details, wouldn’t it?

¹Yeah, we could have a marvelous argument over that as well. Just think of the controversy within the deaf community over restoration of hearing. Or the requests from high functioning autistic folks that they be labeled neuro-atypical, vs the rest of us neurotypical sorts. It’s not a cut and dried topic.

Architect Massimiliano Locatelli wants to move into the future, which he thinks means your next house will be 3D printed. From Wallpaper*:

W*: What was your vision when designing this house?
ML: My vision was to integrate new, more organic shapes in the surrounding landscapes or urban architecture. My intention was to do the first house for a square in the centre of Milan. I wanted to show a different way of using a printing machine and explore how a concrete house could create a dialogue with our memories of interior design, made of references to archetypes of the past.

W*: What challenges and what opportunities does 3D printing present for the architect?
ML: The challenges are the project’s five key values: creativity, sustainability, flexibility, affordability and rapidity. The opportunity is to be a protagonist of a new revolution in architecture.

Pity about the concrete. How one might extrude wood from a printer is not entirely clear to me, though. I also wonder about impact on the construction trades.

Christopher Buskirk opines in WaPo that the great conservative experiment is doing just fine, but the problem is he’s a very shallow observer:

Against this butcher’s bill of failures and broken promises, look at Trump’s first year in office: Unemployment is low, the stock market is high and wages are rising. Ordinary Americans have more money in their pockets as a result of lower taxes. Illegal immigration has declined, regulations are being rolled back, Obamacare’s individual mandate is dead, and a slate of constitutionalist judges has been approved, with more on the way. Thanks to a too-timid congressional leadership, deficits remain a problem, but we’ve at least gotten major pro-growth policies. And with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s impending departure, we have a chance at a more energetic effective leadership team.

He’s railing against the Republicans of the early 2000s and those who served during Obama’s Administration, which isn’t a bad idea, but the problem is that he, like the man himself, wants to give Trump far too much credit. Let’s go through a few:

1. Unemployment and the stock market may be low and the stock market high, but they are practically unchanged since the end of the Obama Administration.
2. Wages may or may not be rising, but Trump has little control over that – that comes down to profitability and scarcity of talent. On a larger scale, Trump has done remarkably little on the economic front.
3. Lower taxes for the wealthy. But this is an assertion shorn of context. What will the effect be on the nation, particularly in the area of corporate taxes? So far, informed critics have pointed out that the lower taxes are only resulting in more money for those who have it through stock buybacks and the like. Investment in new production? Isn’t happening. Buskirk sounds dangerously like former Governor Brownback of Kansas, whose guesses on how economics work did not pan out.
4. Immigration has been declining for nearly a decade, mostly under the center-left leadership of Obama, although I’d argue there’s more to it than Obama – there’s a xenophobic nation which no longer welcomes immigrants. Taking credit for a long-term trend is a pothole waiting to break your ankle.
5. The individual mandate may be dead, but why take that as a positive? The healthier the citizenry, the more productive it’ll be. The individual mandate was a plug for the individual, for industry, and for the nation. Without it, growth will suffer.
6. The “constitutionalist judges” appear, by and large, to be fairly inferior. Some have even been rejected by a GOP that has been largely compliant to Trump’s judiciary selections, indicating these aren’t so much Constitutionalists as just big mouths that caught Trump’s attention.

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to his argument. He seems to be caught up in the standard right wing fantasy of how things work – even when they don’t.

He doesn’t pass the smell test.

It’s funny how you can ignore the resources around you. Here I am, a University of Minnesota graduate (and the ‘M’ is a big, national-calibre school), I’m living barely a mile from their St. Paul campus, and only a few from the Minneapolis campus, which is where I actually went to classes, and yet have I taken advantage of that proximity?

Not that I can remember. I have resolutely ignored ‘M’ for years, especially its Alumnae Society or whatever it’s called. I should probably look back with some regret, if I were smart about such things, but I’m not a joiner and I was never academically competent. I balled up more tests than I can count. Shit, I failed a take-home final once. (Still got a B in the course. It was a CSci course, Numerical Analysis, taught by a first year professor. I think enough students complained that the school ‘adjusted’ some grades.)

The Parkes Observatory, where a number of FRBs have been observed.

But when an alumnae notice came around that mentioned a guest lecture on FRBs, it finally shook me out of my hole and made me look up at the stars, the appropriate thing to do, because FRB stands for Fast Radio Burst, an astronomical phenomenon in which radio bursts which last a few milliseconds suddenly pop up in the data of radio telescopes. The lecture was given Wednesday, April 18^th, by Professor Victoria Kaspi of McGill University, Montreal, and she pitched it at an educated but non-specialist audience, and though it was clear she’s not an expert presenter, she was spirited, has a sense of humor, and really made it a fun and educational hour and a half.

She explained not only that their origination points, which are hard to determine, are quite far out, but how they know this. We know that in a perfect vacuum, radiation, whether it be visible light, x-rays, or radio waves, travel at the same speed. But even open space is not a perfect vacuum, it has free electrons floating around. Why is this important? Because they will diffract the radiation, and what happens is that the lower frequencies will move slower. I tried to find one of her beautiful graphs of a signal coming in, but no luck, so you’ll have to imagine a graph of frequencies on the Y-axis and time on the X-Axis. An FRB will start in the high frequencies, but as a few milliseconds pass, the signal falls in a slight curve into the lower frequencies. Through independent means they have rough estimates of the densities of the free electrons in most directions, so combining the graph with the free electron densities gives them an estimate of the distance from the source to Earth.

She also explained how a microwave oven was spooking them at noon some days. That was a hoot.

The CHIME radio telescope

Finally, she mentioned the CHIME radio telescope, currently nearing completion, up in British Columbia. Originally designed and built by cosmologists, the astronomers are hitching a ride on it in the hopes that FRBs show up in the radiation band it’ll be monitoring, which I believe is in the 400 – 800 MHz. The FRBs so far measured have been around 1200 MHz – 1600 MHz, if memory serves, but they have their hopes.

And the origin of FRBs? Professor Kaspi said she was agnostic on that point. Many theories have come and gone, and I think at this juncture they’re just too short on information to have a strong guess.

But great fun!

James Hohmann notes on WaPo‘s PowerPost that the Democrats are looking to improve their messaging:

Many Democratic talking heads make weak arguments on television that fail to move voters. To address this, several groups and top pollsters on the left are teaming up to launch a new project that will conduct surveys and convene focus groups to produce monthly guidance with the most politically potent lines of attack against President Trump and congressional Republicans.

This new initiative, which has not been previously reported, will be called Navigator Research. The debut report, shared first with The Daily 202, offers original polling and talking points related to the economy, political corruption and disruption.

It flows from fears among progressive thought leaders that their side focuses too much on the ups and downs of public polls related to the generic ballot and Trump’s approval rating, rather than messaging and framing.

“There is a dearth of direction as it relates to how to talk about things,” said Jefrey Pollock, the president of Global Strategy Group. “When the news cycle is the length of the tweet, that challenge is more acute than ever. … For years, Republican politicians have been better at paying attention to language cues. We’re trying to do a progressive version of that.”

My concern is how they play to make sure they do that ethically – or does the subject even come up? Things to avoid include only telling part of the story, using keywords to get the emotions of the voter all het up, making shit up … that sort of thing.

On The Fix, Aaron Blake talks about U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and her argument with her boss:

Nikki Haley might as well have called the White House a bunch of liars.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on Tuesday rebuffed White House aides’ claims that she bungled an announcement of new sanctions against Russia. After Haley said Sunday that the sanctions were on the way by Monday, the White House appeared to change course and said a decision had not been made. But rather than an admission that President Trump had had a change of heart, word ventured out that Haley had gotten out over her skis. …

Not so, says Haley. And in fact, she said that even the more charitable explanation is wrong.

“With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” Haley said in a statement.

When I read that a couple of days ago, I wondered if Haley was on her way out. After all, Governor Haley was initially hired so her Lieutenant Governor, Henry McMaster, would be rewarded with the South Carolina governorship. Reports at the time suggested Haley didn’t much care for Trump. But she’s proven to be one of Trump’s best hires, a straight-ahead diplomat in the United Nations who represents traditional American interests – which is more than can be said for Trump.

I think, with this little tempest, that she’s showing backbone that will be appreciated in the future. She may, in fact, have higher ambitions, and this incident will play in her favor. The question may become whether there’s a party she can call home the next time an election rolls around – or if she’ll be part of the moderate Republican segment who chooses to breakaway from the GOP and form their own party.

Louche:

questionable; shady; odd [America]
shifty or disreputable [English]
[Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “The cast goes ape in a stage adaptation of a Will Self novel,” Stewart Pringle, NewScientist (7 April 2018):

Self’s work has always been a freewheeling mishmash of whimsy, bar-room philosophy and bum jokes, giving his work great energy and exuberance. There is also a less appealing note: a queasy “appreciation” of the louche excesses of London’s arts scene. Marmion has nailed that perfectly.

It’s a review of a play, of course. What it’s doing in NewScientist is less obvious. But I’d never seen the word louche before.

Jeff Singer of The Daily Kos publishes a lengthy analysis of the new North Carolina legislative district map, lately redrawn after the courts found the 2011 map discriminated against black voters:

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that had struck down 28 of North Carolina’s 170 state legislative districts on the grounds that Republicans had violated the Constitution by diminishing the power of black voters when they drew these maps in 2011. However, the GOP legislature still got first crack at drawing remedial maps, and they took the opportunity to shore up a number of Republican districts—something they otherwise were not permitted to do, since the state constitution prohibits mid-decade redistricting.

A Democratic challenge to this backdoor gerrymander ran aground in the courts, leaving Republicans with maps they can still be quite happy with. As a result, breaking the GOP’s veto-proof three-fifths supermajorities in either chamber is still going to be a major challenge for Democrats, much less actually gaining control of the legislature.

So it appears the North Carolina GOP plans grasp and claw for every shred of power it can gain. No surprise.

Renminbi:

The Treasury Department, in its biannual currency exchange report, scolded China for its lack of progress in reducing the bilateral trade deficit with the United States, but did not find that it was improperly devaluing its currency, known as the renminbi.  [“Trump Declines to Label China a Currency Manipulator as Trade War Brews,”  Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson, The New York Times]

I’ve been listening to these reports concerning Trump personal attorney / “fixer” Michael Cohen and his three clients, Trump, Mr. Broidy, an RNC deputy finance chair who’s just stepped down, and, most interestingly, Sean Hannity of Fox News with some puzzlement, and while most of the media world is off on a gallop over possible conflicts of interest, because Hannity was broadcasting on the subject of Cohen as he ‘s found himself in a pot of hot legal water, I’ve been wondering about the details of Hannity’s denials.

These denials boil down to Hannity discussing minor matters with Cohen in passing. No payments, no formal relationship, no nuthin’. But but but … doesn’t the definition of a client include some sort of payment? The trading of one thing of value for another?

Why is Hannity going to such great lengths to disavow a business connection, when Cohen appears to have acknowledged just such a relation?

If Cohen is naming Hannity as a client in open court, why would he lie about it?

Someone’s got their ass hanging out, but I can’t tell who. If the Feds (not Mueller, who’s not involved, despite Hannity screaming the Cohen raids means Mueller’s out of control and “off the rails”) have Cohen’s files, I suspect they know, or soon will know – unless that information is considered non-germane. The “taint team” apparently will take care of that.

And if there is a formal business relationship, what then? I suppose it’ll depend on the nature of the business contracted.

But I must say that it seems quite odd that Trump, Broidy, and Hannity, all big names, are all using the same “fixer,” someone who deals with unsavory details of the lives of the rich and powerful. Broidy has already admitted to using Cohen to pay off a Playboy model he impregnated. Trump allegedly used Cohen to payoff Daniels. Hannity can see where this train is heading and wants to head it off.

Could his career be on the line here? I’m not familiar with him, but I’ve noticed both journalists and comedians are licking their lips. Although, given the depths to which the Fox News audience appears to have sank, what could he have done that would turn them off?

Voted for Hillary?

Ever wonder just what Kim Jong Un might mean by the term denuclearization? Georgy Toloraya on 38 North elucidates:

Among these presumptions, the one concerning denuclearization is the most dubious, simply because the meaning of the word is understood differently by North Korea and the United States and other parties who at some point would be involved in negotiations.

The North Koreans have a much more comprehensive understanding of “denuclearization.”Kim Jong Un reportedly told South Korean envoys last month that he’s for denuclearization of Korean peninsula (including the South), and reaffirmed during his recent trip to China that: “It is our consistent stand to be committed to denuclearization on the peninsula, in accordance with the will of late President Kim Il Sung and late General Secretary Kim Jong Il.” This formula was again repeated by Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho during his recent visit to Russia.

But this is hardly anything new. North Korea has repeatedly stated that denuclearization is a global concept and Pyongyang will relinquish its nuclear weapons in the context of complete and general nuclear disarmament. They have told Russian experts that for years, the DPRK was the only country in Northeast Asia without a “nuclear umbrella,” but now the situation is one of “equality” and they are ready to solve the problem amicably within a regional framework.

So does this mean they expect world-wide nuclear disarmament? Or just the peninsula?

Georgy’s remark about what might happen if Trump is unprepared makes me positively ill – because we know he won’t be prepared.

My recent meetings with North Korean government representatives indicate they are seriously preparing for the dialogue and probably have developed a plan that would involve concessions and compromises based on the principle of action-for-action. However, the Trump administration does not yet appear to have a clear roadmap in mind, apart from the blunt demand of “denuclearize or else.” There is danger that without a proposal of its own to put on the table, the US might get caught flatfooted against at more prepared Pyongyang. If the summit ends up as a failure, then the United States and North Korea may go back to where they were before the North launched its peace offensive in early January.

Trump wouldn’t admit to it, of course. We’d have to await evaluation by 3rd party experts.

Timorous:

1. full of fear; fearful:
   The noise made them timorous.
2. subject to fear; timid.
3. characterized by or indicating fear:
   a timorous whisper. [Dictionary.com]

Heard on Dr. Who a night or two ago, in reference to a timorous beast.

Whatever you may think of Roman Catholicism, it’s worth keeping an eye on the Pope as he influences one helluva lot of people. So I thought this observation by E. J. Dionne, Jr. in WaPo was of interest:

It’s not often that public figures hold themselves to the standards they apply to others. There was thus an instructive symmetry between what Francis said in his Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad”) and his own moment of necessary penance.

In the document, the pope declared that “the lack of a heartfelt and prayerful acknowledgment of our limitations prevents grace from working more effectively within us.” Humans — every single one of us — fail, falter and fall. We do far better when we admit it.

And this is what the pope did Wednesday when he apologized for his terribly misguided defense of a Chilean bishop accused of covering up abuse by an infamous pedophile priest.

Many of us who admire Francis feared that his apparent standing up for the indefensible was a sign that the 81-year-old pontiff was incapable of recognizing the Church’s profound breach of trust when it placed institutional self-preservation above a concern for the suffering of those abused by priests.

How often do you see a world leader admit to a rather serious error in judgment? Not very often. Most of them are too wrapped up in their egos, often disguised as matters of national pride or even national security. Certainly, religious world leaders, as a subset of world leaders, have a somewhat different set of priorities, but how often do you see even them confess to screwing up badly?

He sets an example that others should pay attention to – and, of course, will not.

The latest on the special election for AZ-8? Or maybe it’s just propaganda. Anyways, the Democrats sent a fund-raising letter that says,

But a funny thing is happening with this race — Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, the Democratic candidate, has been campaigning hard under the radar for the past couple months. She’s sneaking up on the Republican candidate, and a poll out today has them locked in a dead heat.

Would have been nice if they’d provided a link to the poll, no? In today’s era, not providing that link is malpractice, to my mind. In fact, The Hill has a poll from 4 days ago:

A survey from Phoenix-based polling firm OH Predictive Insights and ABC15 Arizona found former state Sen. Debbie Lesko (R) garnering 53 percent of the vote, compared to physician and first-time candidate Hiral Tipirneni (D) with 43 percent.

But let’s stipulate that the poll mentioned in the Democrat’s fund-raising mail exists and has reasonable error bars. Arizona is a conservative state, and since redistricting in 2011, the former Republican occupant of the seat never won by less than 63% of the vote. If Dr. Tipirneni has, in fact, closed the gap to close to even in a district which went for Trump by 21 points (according to the same Hill article), that’s a tremendous achievement as well as a commentary on the poor reputation of the GOP. It’d be another lesson for a GOP that seems to have forgotten how to govern – or how to be a responsible political party.

Architects don’t have to just design buildings. Consider the goals of pioneering architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, now 96, profiled in Wallpaper*, who continues to work on healing the sick of Vancouver – which appears to be basically everyone in the city, and, by extension, all city dwellers:

But Vancouver today has come a long way from the heady days of the 1970s, when the building blocks for Vancouverism – the forward-thinking green city model that became the darling buzzword for international urbanists in the 1990s – were formed. Vancouver in 2018 is in the grips of a housing crisis, and increasingly an ecological one. Oberlander has used the $50,000 she won from the 2015 Margolese National Design for Living Prize to fund a study on how overdevelopment, lack of affordable housing and dwindling green spaces affect people’s mental and physical health. In spite of several public lectures on the topic, City Hall, she says, has yet to respond. But Oberlander remains a true believer in the power of landscape architecture to save the world, and sees an innate connection between social justice and good design. ‘Beauty is important,’ she affirms. ‘It unites people and makes something meaningful to the user.’

She ultimately sees her calling as a kind of healing art, and like the concept of ‘invisible mending’ expressed in her Inuvik school in the Northwest Territories, which reintroduced native plantings after nurturing them in nurseries, she also helps to heal cities. ‘My design is therapeutic for busy people in the city who use only electronic devices,’ she pronounces. ‘Just look out at my garden. You can’t even see the street. Isn’t it peaceful?’ And with that, Oberlander is off to preach her gospel of enlightened urban design to City Hall, where the mayor’s office would do well to pay heed to the wise landscape architect who helped build a city that still dreams of being truly green.

I think her type of landscape architecture appeals to our evolutionary brains, which did not evolve in stone and glass buildings, but rather in natural surroundings. I might presume the brain must endure extra processing as it encounters the smells and sights of rectangular bricks and that sort of thing.

Or maybe I’m just all wet.