Yearly Archives: 2018

An inspiration as both a scientist and as a disabled man, he serves – present tense, yes – as a model of what you can do. Not everyone can have the support system he had, and he reportedly had his pecadilloes, but still a light in the firmament has gone out tonight.

The folks at the Center for Economic and Policy Research are searching for signs of the coming economic boom:

The National Federation of Independent Businesses released its February survey of its members this morning. The survey showed (page 29) that 29 percent of businesses expect to make a capital expenditure in the next 3 to 6 months, the same percentage as in January. This is somewhat higher than the 26 percent reported for February of 2017, but below the 32 percent reported for August of last year. It’s also the same as the 29 percent reading reported back in August of 2014 when a Kenyan socialist was in the White House.

In other words, there is no evidence here of any uptick in investment whatsoever and certainly not of the explosive increase promised by the Trump administration. Maybe if Trump did some more tweeting on the issue it would help.

To my totally untrained mind, it might be a trifle too soon for the great economic expansion to begin, but it might be time to start getting antsy about it, if you were in any way dependent on it. But keep an eye out for reports on the monthly balance of tax collection vs outlays at the Federal level, such as this one from Reuters:

The U.S. government had a $215 billion budget shortfall in February as revenues into the government’s coffers fell and outlays increased, the Treasury Department said on Monday.

That compared with a budget deficit of $192 billion in the same month last year, according to Treasury’s monthly budget statement.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the Treasury recording a $216 billion deficit last month.

If those continue to grow, then we’ll know that the Kansas “miracle” is now afflicting all of us. Only, the Federal government is allowed to run deficits, unlike the states, and the deficit hawks are muffled. Thus, we’ll need to keep watch ourselves.

With regard to the firing of Secretary Tillerson, Ezra Klein confirms on Vox the firing of the #4 person at State as well, and then lets his jaw go slack:

Let’s count the eye-opening things here:

1. Trump, whose television catchphrase was “You’re fired,” couldn’t bring himself to fire America’s top diplomat in person. This is similar to how he fired FBI Director James Comey, sending his former bodyguard Keith Schiller to deliver the news. The two incidents together confirm frequent press accounts that for all his bravado, Trump actually is loath to fire people himself.
2. Tillerson reportedly only found out about his firing when Trump tweeted about it on Tuesday morning. This statement likely represents shock on the State Department’s part as well.
3. The lead State Department spokesperson is openly insulting the president by leaking details about Tillerson’s dismissal that paint him in a negative light.
4. Tillerson, whose tenure in Foggy Bottom was widely seen among foreign policy experts as one of the worst (if not the worst) in modern history, still believed he was doing a good job at the time of his firing.
5. It’s still unclear why, exactly, the secretary of state was just fired at this particular moment in his spectacularly unimpressive tenure as America’s top diplomat.

In the Trump administration, chaos is something of a norm. But this is shocking even when grading on that curve.

With regard to Ezra’s #5, my previous offhand remark that this is cover for a possible disaster for the Republicans in the PA-18 special election has grown on me. Ezra’s making the classic error of trying to evaluate the event without thinking about the political context. Since Tillerson was out of favor with Trump, it was easy to sacrifice him.

And while Tillerson may have been one of the worst to occupy the post in recent memory, Pompeo may try to best him in that department. Assuming he’s confirmed in the post.

Readers remark on the dismissal of Secretary of State Tillerson:

Typical Trump. He likes to surround himself with a phalanx of Yes Men to advance his position as the “smartest man in the room.” Non-conformity must be avoided at all costs. Another sad day for America.

Trump’s nominee to replace Tillerson is Mike Pompeo, current CIA Director and a former far-right House member. He is considered to be a close ally of President Trump. I wonder if President Trump is feeling like he needs some support from his Cabinet.

Another:

Were basing this story on what we have been told. The relationship didn’t seem right from day one, and it’s not nice to call the boss names .We shall see if it was a good decision in short order. Plus in defense of Tillerson it would be hard for a guy who was big time in the private sector to follow somebody’s agenda. I really think he took the job because you’re not supposed to say no when the President ask’s you to serve.

The reader has a couple of good points. I think it all started with Trump’s preoccupation with appearance, because Rex Tillerson surely has the look of a distinguished diplomat – not my deduction, of course, as many other writers have noted about Trump.

But, as the reader points out, he didn’t have the experience to be Secretary of State, having been a private sector guy all his life.

This is probably illustrative of why Trump has been a failure so far – he doesn’t understand how to pick the people with whom he has to work.

BTW, Tillerson wasn’t the only State employee let go today. Conor Finnegan reports on Twitter:

Vaughn Hillyard relays some information about the PA-18 special election:

If accurate, it continues the narrative that the GOP has become the party of the Christian far-right, which is more than a little morally confusing, given the nature of the leader of the GOP – President Trump.

It does suggest, however, that Saccone may have hurt his chances of winning. This is the rhetoric you use to firm up your base when you are certain they are all of the Christian variety. However, on the flip side are the Independents, who generally remember that this is a secular nation, and may even take offense at the suggestion that those who are not voting Republican are doomed to the Nth circle of hell (I don’t recall just which circle was reserved for Americans who don’t vote Republican). He’s circumscribed his potential voters to those who buy into divisive, hateful rhetoric.

And that’s not a recipe for winning.

From 38 North‘s Adam Meyers is some commentary on North Korea during the run-up to the Trump-Kim meeting. He’s certain that North Korea’s Kim will continue to aggressively defend its interests:

In response to the most recent round of UN sanctions, a spokesman of the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated: “We define this ‘sanctions resolution’ rigged by the U.S. and its followers as a grave infringement upon the sovereignty of our republic and as an act of war violating peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and the region.“ This initial reaction, now that the ebullience of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics has passed, should put the world on notice that the Kim regime may see offensive cyber operations as a proportional response to the increasing chokehold of international sanctions. What might such an attack look like?

North Korean operators have been observed over the past several months targeting a variety of organizations that might be seen as viable targets for a retaliation, including financial organizations and defense contractors. North Korean operators would likely use an existing penetration as a jumping off point looking for a high-profile target to inflict damage upon as a show of force. Attacks that occurred during 2016 demonstrated DPRK actors had the capability to penetrate a financial institution and use their processes against them in a currency generation scheme that netted millions of dollars in currency. Based on several other high- profile attacks that followed this watershed event, it is possible that DPRK actors already possess access to organizations that may meet their needs. If a suitable penetration is not present, a new one would be targeted, likely using spear phishing emails or a “watering hole” attack (compromising a legitimate website likely to attract targets of interest who would then be infected with malware). Both techniques have been leveraged by DPRK cyber operators successfully in the past.

The North Koreans will not be angelic during this period prior to the big meeting. Embedded in his commentary is a description of a strategy new to me:

If a suitable penetration is not present, a new one would be targeted, likely using spear phishing emails or a “watering hole” attack (compromising a legitimate website likely to attract targets of interest who would then be infected with malware). Both techniques have been leveraged by DPRK cyber operators successfully in the past.

I’ve fallen way behind on the dark-side of programming, I fear.

I’ve been meditating of late on how human processes or customs don’t really seem to scale. First, I suppose I should define what I mean by scale. As a software engineer, a process is scalable if its functionality and performance is relatively insensitive to the amount of data it’s processing.

But this isn’t quite what I mean here. In today’s context, a human process or custom is scalable if it continues to display positive survival characteristics regardless of the context in which it is utilized. Now, there should be an equivalent to the word “relatively” in the first paragraph, but I’m not sure what that word might be. When one says insensitive to context, that means context can assume any value and the process continues to be valuable to humans as a survival mechanism, and I do understand that there are truly no behaviors which can be completely insensitive to context in the manner defined.

So let me clarify how I am considering context to change, and that is in terms of population density. Thus, in one fell statement, I’m trying to say that human customs that have good survival characteristics at low population densities begin to reverse that attribute at higher population densities.

One of the best examples of this lies in humanity’s custom of dividing into tribes for, paradoxically enough, survival reasons. At low population densities, when faced with competition from other tribes, whether these are based on geography (nationality) or religious reasons, it was a positive survival characteristic to reproduce quickly. Families of ten or more produced excess children which could work the fields, serve in the military, and secure other purposes critical to the group’s survival.

But this survival mechanism, pursued to the N^th degree, actually exacerbates the problem of scarce resources as population rises. Consider the problem known as the tragedy of the commons. Economists and libertarians will characterize the tragedy of the commons as a problem in which a resource does not, and most usually cannot, have a human owner that will manage it and, if possible, renew it, but as an unmanageable and important resource, all comers have a go at it without thought as to whether its harvesting will extend it beyond its capacity to renew. The most common example with which I’m familiar are fisheries.

But the pressure behind the tragedy of the commons is burgeoning population. Without a large and growing population, we would not be harvesting the fisheries with great abandon, or draining marshes for more living space, or opening mines in wilderness areas such as Minnesota’s own BWCA – or finding the existence of our civilization threatened by anthropogenic climate change.

And this is all pushed along by customs from bygone eras. Have children, keep the bloodline going, out-grow that other sect over there, grow grow grow! I don’t even need to give a name to the sect because it’s always true regardless of the sect; those that do not grow disappear. The Quakers tried not reproducing, as I recall, and disappeared in the dust of history.

Yet the logic of the low population era persists – how do you tell someone not to  have ten children? It’s the problem of They got here first and therefore they win, so you’d better not have more than one kid – there’s no justice in the justification. Their group is threatened by the growth of other, potentially savage, groups, and unless they can convert outsiders to their cause like the Quakers did, they have to reproduce. And, absent a reasonable ladder to the stars, we see pressure continuing to build on our resources, on our environment, and on ourselves.

The resolution? I suspect it’ll be just like deer and wolves, with dramatic drops and climbs as the two revolve around a dynamic balance, which is so bloodless in that abstract way of writing, but implies the bloody deaths of fawns and pups, mothers and fathers. The analogs in the human world will be bloodier because we have bigger weapons and behaviors not strictly motivated by simple survival.

In a way, this is yet another blow to the Creationist argument, because God, if it actually does have an existence, has sure given us an awful set of tools for continuing our existence. Their existence and behaviors are far more congruent when assuming we come from an animal evolutionary tree, than when we think we’ve come from some omniscient being who has plans for everyone.

And what are our chances for finding better survival tools? Beats me. Science provides us a way to recognize the problem, but I doubt any controlled & peaceful manner of population reduction will really work, unless the approach that appears to have evolved in Japan, which seems to be a distaste for sex, spreads across the globe.

Seems unlikely.

Your Dark view of the future for today.

The first in this series goes to Pennsylvania GOP chairman Val DiGiorgio for this statement:

“The other reason it’s so tight is, you have to remember, this is a Democrat district, notwithstanding the fact that the president won this by 20 points.” [Politico]

According to Ballotpedia, the last time this district was represented by a Democrat was 2000. In fact, redistricting happened in 2010, so one might argue that this district has never been represented by a Democrat – but I think the boundaries are similar prior and post, so it might be a specious assertion.

In any case, the Democrats didn’t even run a candidate 2014 and 2016, and defeated his last serious oppont 64% – 36%.

Someone’s in a panic. Is it him or his bosses?

My reaction to the news that Secretary of State Tillerson had been fired? A visceral feeling that another honorable man had been booted out of the Administration. Which is somewhat ridiculous, given how the State Department has reportedly been chronically understaffed by Tillerson, and become fairly irrelevant under his leadership.

And now I see this from NBC News:

Hours before being ousted as secretary of state, Rex Tillerson called the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter with a military-grade nerve agent in the U.K. “a really egregious act” that appears to have “clearly” come from Russia.

On his way back from a trip to Africa, Tillerson said late Monday that it was not yet known whether the poisoning “came from Russia with the Russian government’s knowledge.”

But Press Secretary Sanders refused to confirm the Russian connection asserted by Prime Minister May of the UK. I get the feeling that Tillerson, another amateur, was at least doing the best he could do under the circumstances.

And it sort of brings a tear to my eye, even though he should never have been in that position.

Reportedly, CIA Director and former House Representative Mike Pompeo will be nominated to take over the Secretary of State position. Will he be a stolid guardian of President Trump?

Decedent:

Noted in “Odor Thought To Be Sewage Leads CA Prison Staff To Inmate’s Body,” Hoa Quách, San Diego Patch:

“Examination was limited by decomposition artifact,” the autopsy said. “The only demonstrable natural disease was his hepatitis cirrhosis due to chronic hepatitis C viral infection. Sudden death has been associated with hepatic cirrhosis; however, the decedent was not clinically in liver failure and was not known to be jaundiced. Although it is certainly possible that the decedent died of natural causes related to his liver disease, focal bronchitis, and/or (redacted) due to homicidal violence cannot be completely excluded.”

A reader remarks on my review of The Incredibles:

Huh. I’m usually really critical about plot holes, but I’ve really enjoyed this movie, multiple times. I don’t see the flaws you spead of. Sure, Mirage has been helping Syndrome, but without knowing her motivations for starting that endeavor, we can’t say for certainty that she shouldn’t draw the line at innocent children. Maybe she has a grudge against the other supers. I also didn’t see any glaring editing flaws. It’s mostly a comic farce, so I’m not expecting depth.

I must have watched this movie more than a dozen times, annoyed that for all the excellence and thought that went into this, in the end it just doesn’t quite come together. Or isn’t quite perfect.

On Mirage I suppose we can agree to disagree. I was also bothered by Mr. Incredible’s lack of emotional distress over the murders of the other supers, though. Perhaps the social dynamics of being supers was such that one could laugh at the deaths of other supers (think of the discussion of capes with Edna), but it just rang a trifle false for me. Probably all they would have had to do to fix that, for me, was to have Mr. Incredible gently pat Gazerbeam’s remains on his way out of the cave. In fact, Gazerbeam’s final action, which is to burn the stolen password into the wall of the cave, indicates a certain social bonding, which Mr. Incredible could have reinforced, for the audience, through a simple sentimental action.

In terms of editing, I noticed a lack of flow during some of the escape from the island. It just seemed herky-jerky.

Comic farce, like most (all?) theatrical drama, has the capactiy for real depth and thought. Just think of Charlie Chaplin’s work.

Hey, think you’re fairly nifty? Maybe you can sell your genome:

EncrypGen, one firm in the vanguard of this movement, is launching its first product this week. Essentially, this is an online database where an individual can upload their digitised genome. It can then be left there until they want to show it to their doctor, for example. Or, if they opt in to a service launching later this year, their data can be sold to researchers too.

With this service, scientists scouring the database will see anonymous profiles, along with details such as hair colour or medical conditions. If they find a profile of interest, they can ask for access. Users will then be able to negotiate a price for handing over part or all of this genomic data. As drugs are twice as likely to make it to market when they are based on human genetics, pharmaceutical firms are likely to be willing to pay the most. [NewScientist, 24 February 2018, paywall]

And what coin will they be paying you in? Did you guess …. this?

Payment to the data’s owner will be in the form of EncrypGen’s freshly minted cryptocurrency, DNA coin, which can then be traded or sold. Initially, there will be pricing guidelines, but David Koepsell, the firm’s co-founder, believes market forces will eventually dictate genomic value.

Just how many fads can they ride at once?

Long time readers know that I don’t have a lot of patience with amateurs working on critical problems, but now NewScientist bids to set me on the straight path. In “Work the crowd: How ordinary people can predict the future,” (NewScientist, 24 February 2018, paywall) Aaron Frood reports on experiments involving teams of amateurs working problems:

The answer surprised even the US intelligence officials behind the experiment. It turns out crowds really can make accurate predictions – so accurate, in fact, that they promise to permanently change how states analyse intelligence.

We have known some of the benefits of collective wisdom since Aristotle, but a slightly more recent example features in the 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds by journalist James Surowiecki. The opening pages tell the story of the day Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton went to a country fair. Galton, a formidable scientist himself, asked people to guess the weight of an enormous ox. Most got it absurdly wrong, but the median guess of the 800-strong crowd was just 1 pound off the true weight of the ox, which for the record was 1198 pounds, or 543 kilograms.

The wisdom of crowds is an integral part of life today. We try suspected criminals by jury. We use crowdfunding websites to back new products. We follow the throng to popular restaurants. Now it even seems it may be possible to predict the future using the masses.

The underplayed element? It took me a couple of days to bring this to the fore in my brain. From a sidebar:

Are you a superforecaster?

Crowds of ordinary people can be good at predicting the future. But the most accurate predictions come when you identify the best 2 or 3 per cent of a crowd and team them up. Nearly all these superforecasters have a university degree, a wide range of interests and a curious mind. They also tend to have a few other key characteristics. [Intelligence, Shrewdness, Motivation and commitment, Teamwork are the headers.]

So we’re not talking about average folks making extraordinary forecasts, we’re talking about extraordinary folks working together to come up with extraordinary forecasts. This isn’t crowd-sourcing, despite the advertising, but the employment of top line people who just don’t happen to hold advanced expertise in the subject area. In fact, what did happen to the experts in the competitions?

… in 2005, a book called Expert Political Judgement brought crowd predictions to the fore again. The author Philip Tetlock, a psychologist now at the University of Pennsylvania, had studied expert predictions for two decades. In one experiment, he surveyed about 300 professional political and economic forecasters, asking them a series of questions about the future and getting them to pick answers from a range of options. He also asked them to assign a probability to their stance. He amassed tens of thousands of predictions and compared them with what really happened. The experts performed terribly: worse than if they had assigned equal odds to each outcome every time.

Along with the failure of the experts, notice one other thing: the subject areas. We’re not talking a wide range of subjects, but two of the vaguest and hardest, politics and economics. It’s unfortunate that the nature of the test areas wasn’t played up in the article, as it might have revealed more about the problems of experts in these areas, as well as how the teams of top-flight amateurs solved their problems. A differential comparison of the experts against the teams might have yielded (and perhaps it did) key insights into what goes wrong for the experts, and how they might compensate in the future.

So, in the end, I feel justified in sticking with my judgment that we need experts in government, not a pack of amateurs. Not only this, but the debacle occurring in Congress is enough to leave me content.

How bad has it been negotiating with the North Koreans? Robert Carlin on 38 North, a veteran of these activities, describes it:

The fact is that when they are serious, the North Koreans are good negotiators, but no better than our own. They practice Diplomacy 101. A productive set of negotiations with them follows a pattern found anywhere in the world: Define the problem in terms that both sides can claim benefit from a solution; divide the problem into parts; move from easiest to hardest to solve; fix details and define terms; review again so that both sides understand what is and what isn’t in the agreement; agree on implementation details and timetable.

No agreement is an agreement unless both sides say it is. That’s tautological. “Seizing control” of the agenda is a bad idea. The North Koreans know we won’t negotiate simply on the basis of “their” agenda, and we should know the same about them. It never hurts to be the first one to put a piece of paper on the table, and since the North Koreans are frequently in reaction mode, that’s often what the US is able to do.

On the other hand, now we have two new faces. Based on Trump’s failures to make deals, it’s a bit nerve-wracking, while Kim is more of an unknown quantity. There may be more continuity on the North Korean side than the American side – which may be a good recipe for being snookered. Carlin’s final word on the matter:

High-level meetings with the North, in my experience, have not been a zero-sum game. The last thing we should want is to force them into that mold.

This will be deadly serious business for both sides – not a situation for a fly-by-night rookie. But that’s probably why North Korean made the offer to talk and to throw quite the toothsome cookie out as bait.

Readers react to Trump’s presence in Moon Township, PA:

Instead of endorsing Saccone, he spent 65 minutes of his 70 minute speech praising himself. What a dumbass we have for a president.

He’s a narcissist. Another:

He was there to rally the troops. People love those rallies, that doesn’t mean you have to agree with him, but it works, he is out and about, not on the golf course.

Those who show up seem to get all het up, sure. I wonder if the attendance is all they’d like it to be, though. And, yes, nice to not see Trump on the golf course. Which reminds me, from Culture Cheatsheet:

Politifact reports that since taking office, Donald Trump has made regular visits to his own golf clubs in Florida and Virginia. CNN reported in January 2018 that in his first year in office, Donald Trump spent 95 days at his signature golf clubs. He golfed in Florida, Virginia, and New Jersey.

NBC’s Golf Channel reported early in 2017 that Barack Obama played 333 rounds as president and averaged 41 rounds per year. CNN noted at the end of 2017 that Donald Trump could be on track to triple Obama’s time on the course. But the network did note that “It is unclear, however, whether Trump golfs each day he visits a course or how many rounds he plays when he does.” CNN adds, “Trump’s golf outings are notable only because he repeatedly mocked Obama for the time he spent on the golf course and said he wouldn’t have time if he were elected president.”

While Great Briain’s Prime Minister Theresa May’s government isn’t getting the best of reviews, at least they seem to be willing to call a bear a bear, according to the BBC:

Former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia, Theresa May has told MPs.

The PM said it was “highly likely” Russia was responsible for the Salisbury attack.

The Foreign Office summoned Russia’s ambassador to provide an explanation.

Mrs May said if there is no “credible response” by the end of Tuesday, the UK would conclude there has been an “unlawful use of force” by Moscow. …

Mrs May said: “Either this was a direct action by the Russian state against our country, or the Russian government lost control of its potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”

Meanwhile, President Trump can only express admiration for Putin and other autocrats such as the newly-minted Chinese President-for-life Xi Jinping and Philippine President Rodrigo Roa Duterte.

This weakness in our President will have consequences for decades to come, and it lands squarely on the backs of Congress, specifically Speaker Ryan and the Executive oversight committees, to identify such grave failures and do something about them. To their mild credit, they did pass a sanctions bill to punish Russia, which Trump promptly ignored.

But make no mistake, the consquences are also immediate – for our ally. In normal times, Britain would have had a conference and then the full backing of the United States on this important matter. Today? They can have no confidence in us, because our leadership appears to be compromised.

For Trump, the Russian moves are nothing more than the arabesques of a ballerina. For our erstwhile ally, they are far more sinister.

(h/t Syd Sweitzer)

Bob Bauer’s explication on Lawfare of President Trump’s use of the government lawyers really reinforced, through example, my thoughts concerning the various sectors of society and why processes, as well as leaders, are not interchangeable:

But the crux of the problem seems to be the president’s failure to accept that it is the counsel’s responsibility to advise him of limits—legal constraints—on what he wants. Lawyers are his “staff,” like any other: He wants their personal loyalty, which, as he understands it, can mean that they must ignore or work around legal and ethical limits on the pursuit of his personal and political wishes. A leading example is the president’s refusal to accept that his attorney general was required to follow Justice Department regulations in recusing himself from oversight of the Russia investigation.

In this single paragraph is illustrated the expectations of a businessman vs the realities of a government. President Trump expects the government lawyers will serve his whim and fancy, but they do not – they give legal advice, but they have responsibilities which are dictated by the government, not by Trump, and he cannot order them about as he might wish. This is an exemplification of different expectations of optimizations, the clashing of purposes – but it’s not a beautiful cymbal, but more a thud followed by the scream of the workman who just got his caught between the hammer and the nail.

Bauer then gives some insight into the ways of government lawyers:

Executive branch lawyers can do their work only if certain bedrock conditions are met. One is adherence to dependable process of some sort for building legal advice into the decision-making process. The other is an understanding of the lawyers’ role. Trump has little feel or use for process, a limitation that has become apparent, from the development of the first travel ban, through the tweeted announcement of his intention to bar transgender Americans from military service, to his appearance in the press room on Friday to tout—without preparation or any briefing of relevant foreign policy and national security staff—the invitation to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The president has exhibited a lack of understanding of the lawyers’ role and sees them as serving an enabling function—just making it possible for him to do what he wants. And often when they don’t do as he desires on the issues he most cares about, Trump instinctively resorts to threat and bullying, as he has publicly done in the case of Jeff Sessions.

Government is not a bigger business. It’s an entity with responsibilities far different from that of business – and because President Trump refuses to recognize this basic (but obscured by American anti-intellectualism) fact, our government will continue to fail to meet its basic responsibilities in all executive areas.

The government is 200+ years old, and did not pop into existence fully-formed. These processes were put in place for reasons, usually having to do with the needs of the Executive. Trump’s attempts to twist the government to protect himself will, inevitably, damage the government and our security.

Anything to whip up the voters, it seems. WaPo reports on President Trump’s visit to Moon Township, PA, in support of Rick Saccone’s (R) special election run for the House of Representatives:

Trump said that allowing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for drug dealers — an idea he said he got from Chinese President Xi Jinping — is “a discussion we have to start thinking about. I don’t know if this country’s ready for it.”

“Do you think the drug dealers who kill thousands of people during their lifetime, do you think they care who’s on a blue-ribbon committee?” Trump asked. “The only way to solve the drug problem is through toughness. When you catch a drug dealer, you’ve got to put him away for a long time.”

It was not the first time Trump had suggested executing drug dealers. Earlier this month, he described it as a way to fight the opioid epidemic. And on Friday, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration was considering policy changes to allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty.

But on Saturday his call for executing drug dealers got some of the most enthusiastic cheers of the night. As Trump spoke about policies on the issue in China and Singapore, dozens of people nodded their heads in agreement. “We love Trump,” one man yelled. A woman shouted: “Pass it!”

If it were only that easy.

But, disregarding questions of whether a Christian would endorse this proposal and whether it would pass Constitutional muster, there are two problems with it.

First, treating drug dealers as deliberate murderers ignores the fact that, like President Trump, drug dealers are businessmen. And the first thing a businessman doesn’t want to do is kill off the customers. Thousands? Only by their own hands, in most cases.

Second, it trashes the traditional role of redemption in American society. While there are certain crimes, such as serial killing, which will draw death penalties or life in prison, generally Americans have always believed in punishment followed by a chance for redemption. This proposal trashes this tradition embraced by conservatives and liberals alike.

Third, unlike murder, which is a deliberate act inflicted on an innocent person, and sometimes even planned, drug dealing involves two willing parties (disregarding the addiction the buyer may suffer from). Kill a drug dealer and someone will take his or her place. You want to stop the overdoses? Stop the demand – or satisfy it legitimately.

Executing drug dealers will be ineffectual for the real problem – it’ll only be effective for satisfying the emotional desires of people frustrated with reality.

The blue guy had too much beer.

Watchmen (2009) is a fusion of the superhero and film noir genres, an exploration of the limits of good and evil, how the actions of costumed vigilantes, who see themselves as judge, jury, and executioner, differ so little from those they pursue – whether it be merely the gang member in front of them, or the two greatest countries in the world in a tireless rivalry which, in their stubborn perversity, may explode into Armageddon at any moment.

There’s a big cast of characters here, ranging from President Nixon (in his third term? fifth term?), through the superheros who make up the vigilantes, onwards to the enigmatic Dr. Manhattan, a physicist killed and recreated as a near-god in a physics accident, but my attention was drawn to two of the vigilantes.

Rorschach, whose mask flashes through the cards of the same name, is a cipher and the personification of vigilantism, tracking down criminals and executing them. His allegiance to all that is good may be uncompromising, to use his word, but his methods are evidence of an underlying psychoticism exacerbated by the ceaseless cries of civil rights by those very criminals who have violated the rights of their victims. His thirst to cleanse the world of all that is evil makes him, paradoxically, an ambiguous character, but whose unceasing pursuit of evil – at least as he sees it – drives the story.

So when Rorschach discovers that another superhero, The Comedian, has been killed, he follows up on it. The Comedian is the other character who fascinated me. A vigilante who glories in the violence, he is less a man interested in justice than in satiating his primitive desires, and in that satiation he glimpses the fragile underpinnings of the artificial systems of justice we inevitably live in. Such a glance at the insanity of losing these systems would cause many to lose their minds, but for The Comedian, it makes him laugh, even if his laughter is maniacal and his mood black as tar. For all that the movie begins with his murder, he casts a long shadow over the entire enterprise, because, for all his chaotic and unrestrained desires, he emits some light as well. He is the hidden father of one of the new generation of vigilantes. His sigil will acquire planet-wide significance. And he is the one who discovers the fantastic scheme to force peace on this world, which in turn forces him to realize he has no friends as he turns 60 years old, no one to share this adventure with, an adventure which ends all too soon.

But this scheme, much like the vicious methods use to attain justice in individual encounters, requires equally vicious methods, but scaled up to the deaths of millions, sacrificed on the altar of peace and survival. Will it happen? Rorschach may violently disapprove of the scheme – but its originator believe it’s the only way to save human civilization. And what of Dr. Manhattan’s observation that the Universe is like a giant clock, predictable and relentless – do we have free will or no? Does it mean there is justice – or just someone’s clock?

This is a long and almost luxuriant movie, with characters mostly drawn out with delicacy, but it’s also gratuitously violent, and, at least in the director’s cut that I saw, has a cartoon interspersed throughout, a morbid tale of a man, concerned about the fate of his family after his ship is ravaged by The Black Freighter, attempting to return to his home port, and what occurs when he finally arrives. It appears to be connected to Rorschach, but I’m entirely unsure as to its purpose in the movie.

This movie is magnificently parsimonious in its information, and it asks a lot of implicit questions.

Recommended.

It begs bad jokes, but his purpose is worthy. More information from Melissa Breyer on Treehugger.

Opprobrium:

1. the disgrace or the reproach incurred by conduct considered outrageously shameful; infamy.
2. a cause or object of such disgrace or reproach. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in H. Sidky’s “The War on Science, etc,” Skeptical Inquirer (March / April 2018, print only):

Ironically, given that this enterprise was about epistemological egalitarianism and human dignity, those who did not accept postmodern premises were labeled racists, sexists, right-wing oppressors, colonialists, and the instruments of a defunct materialist worldview (the terms of opprobrium were endless).

Anthropologist H. Sidky, writing in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer (March / April 2018, print only) in “The War on Science, Anti-intellectualism, and ‘Alternative Ways of Knowing’ in 21st-Century America,” points the finger of responsibility for those collectively best thought of as reality-deniers at …                     :

… postmodernists were able to launch an all-encompassing disinformation campaign to delegitimize science and rationality. The distressing effects of this campaign were painfully brought to light for many after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The assault on science centered on the idea of epistemological relativism. This entails the premise that conditions of knowledge are such that the truth and falsity of assertions are context-dependent, situated, and always relative to cultural and social backgrounds, political position, class, gender, ethnicity, race, and religion. Thus, the idea that scientific knowledge depends upon objective empirical evidence is false. Excluding the empirical dimension of the scientific enterprise, these writers misrepresented science as merely a “story” or narrative like any other that relies on rhetorical ornamentation and languages games to persuade people of its legitimacy and authority. Epistemological relativism dictates that no representations of reality or story can be privileged because there are multiple and equally valid realities and truths. Moreover, because all truths are relative, postmodernists asserted, who truth prevails is a coefficient of power and coercion [c.o.^[1]]. The West is dominant and hegemonic, and hence its “truths” (i.e., science) are privileged. [Any typos mine – haw]

Which, suitably translated into everyday English, does sound an awful lot like we see a lot of these days, I’ll grant. However, Sidky attributes much of this to philosophers such as Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Foucalt, among others – and I have to admit that, not having read them myself, why should I think that the chief climate-deniers have read them, either? They’re high-falutin’ stuff, ya know?

Sidky continues,

To expose the exact nature of power relations, post-modern thinkers believed, one had to look at the linguistic context of truth claims because nothing exists apart from the discourse that constitutes them. In other words, apprehension of a reality outside the linguistic webs that entangle us is not possible, which is an assertion that goes against anthropological evidence, science, common sense, and everyday epistemology.

To my mind, it also present a chicken and egg problem. But to continue on to the definitive fingerpoint:

For forty years, the postmodern savants in universities across the country indoctrinated students with their antiscience message [c.o.]. The substitute they offered was epistemological relativism as the avenue to establish a genuinely just and tolerant society open to diverse viewpoints. …

Many of those indoctrinated in postmodern anti-science went on to become conservative political and religious leaders, policymakers, journalists, journal editors, judges, lawyers, and members of city councils and school boards. Sadly, they forgot the lofty ideals of their teachers, except that science is bogus [c.o.]. Thus, vast cadres of people with little interest in the message of multiculturalism and epistemological egalitarianism coopted the central lesson of postmodernism that truth is what one wants it to be to assert the legitimacy of their authoritarian dogma, irrationalism, and bunkum.

Given some of the madness that has come popping out, this makes some startling sense, although I wouldn’t expect the “conservative” right wingers to actually taken Kuhn, Focault, et al, seriously. What little I’ve read of them certainly had me shaking my head in disbelief.

And I’m not really sure how this all helps, either.

¹c.o. – citation omitted. See the original article or email me for the citation, as I have no plans to reproduce Sidky’s citation list here.

From the kudos or recommendations testimonials page (I cannot remember the word I really want to use) for Skeptical Inquirer:

“I know of no greater antidote to pseudoscience than the contents of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. I wait with high anticipation for the arrival of every next issue. And when it arrives, I read every word. And when I am done, my fuel tanks are once again topped off for my next round of encounters with all those who have yet learned how to think.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist and Director Hayden Planetarium, NYC

Dude, I think you meant “… who have not yet learned how to think.”

If you love – I mean really love – your car, then you won’t like this piece by Lloyd Alter on Treehugger:

It seems that most transit decisions in North America are made with the goal of making life easier for people in cars.

In North America, transit planning is a mess. Decisions like building a hyperloop from Cleveland to Chicago or a one-stop subway extension in Toronto in the face of sound transit planning by experts that say these decisions are ridiculous. In New York City, they arrest people for fare-jumping but let them park cars for free for months; in Toronto again (my home is in the news a lot these days) they beat up kids over a two buck ticket.

In Munich, you see what happens with sound planning and good transit. I am staying in the suburbs near a massive new residential and commercial development, with a lovely streetcar right outside the door of my hotel. It stops about six times on the way to the other end of the line at a subway stop.

I have been on this streetcar a number of times, looking out the window at the stores and buildings on either side. You can do that on a streetcar; you are on the surface, a step from grade, so if you want to get off and buy something you can. There are housing, offices and retail on either side; unlike subways with stations far apart, the development isn’t just at nodes but along the entire route.

That’s how you keep the car makers, some of our biggest employers, and alive and kicking, I suppose.