Yearly Archives: 2018

Another pothole for the markets is coming up as the White House economic advisor, Gary Cohn, is resigning in the wake of losing the tariff battle:

Cohn, who had been rumored just weeks ago as a potential next chief of staff, will leave the White House in the wake of his fierce disagreement with the President’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Cohn is expected to leave in the coming weeks, the White House said. …

Cohn’s resignation sounded alarm bells in establishment circles in Washington and on Wall Street, where many viewed the former Goldman Sachs executive as a steadying influence on economic policy inside the Trump White House. His departure, combined with Trump’s recent moves to recommit himself to his nationalist trade agenda, raised questions about the direction of the Trump administration and sent Dow futures plummeting 300 points.

“Wall Street won’t be happy,” said a senior Republican who has worked both at the White House and in finance. “We knew he was hanging in by a thread, but it is terrible news.” [CNN]

Kevin Drum’s graph of banking profits, indicating those onerous regulations aren’t all that onerous.

I very much doubt this will trigger any major mudslide. This isn’t like the crash during the Great Recession, as that was brought on by a basic flaw in our economic rules, and while I do have concerns with continued moves towards loosening the banking regulations, I don’t see that loosening as provocational to a major stock market crash. Yet.

I see this as understandable investor jitters, possibly compounded by algorithmic trading facing a scenario more or less unexplored and possibly even unforeseen by the authors of those algorithms. There may be some flash crashes in the coming days, some weird ups and downs, as the investment community readies itself for Cohn’s successor and how the tariffs will be handled.

Unless, of course, the tariffs aren’t implemented. Trump is trying to use them as a hammer on NAFTA, but I don’t know if Canada and Mexico are bowing to the pressure. Given the humiliating nature of this approach, they may firm their upper lips and soldier on. In fact, I expect it. Handing Trump a real victory when he uses such a crude approach would only encourage him to continue, and that is not to the long-term advantage of most nations.

Fasten your seatbelts.

Spaceweather is reporting on a problem that comes with having a star reaching a solar minimum:

THE WORSENING COSMIC RAY SITUATION: Cosmic rays are bad–and they’re getting worse. That’s the conclusion of a new paper just published in the research journal Space Weather. The authors, led by Prof. Nathan Schwadron of the University of New Hampshire, show that radiation from deep space is dangerous and intensifying faster than previously predicted.

The story begins four years ago when Schwadron and colleagues first sounded the alarm about cosmic rays. Analyzing data from the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument onboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), they found that cosmic rays in the Earth-Moon system were peaking at levels never before seen in the Space Age. The worsening radiation environment, they pointed out, was a potential peril to astronauts, curtailing how long they could safely travel through space. …

Galactic cosmic rays come from outside the solar system. They are a mixture of high-energy photons and sub-atomic particles accelerated toward Earth by supernova explosions and other violent events in the cosmos. Our first line of defense is the sun: The sun’s magnetic field and solar wind combine to create a porous ‘shield’ that fends off cosmic rays attempting to enter the solar system. The shielding action of the sun is strongest during Solar Maximum and weakest during Solar Minimum–hence the 11-year rhythm of the mission duration plot above.

The problem is, as the authors note in their new paper, the shield is weakening: “Over the last decade, the solar wind has exhibited low densities and magnetic field strengths, representing anomalous states that have never been observed during the Space Age. As a result of this remarkably weak solar activity, we have also observed the highest fluxes of cosmic rays.”

Another challenge to meet. This is possibly the most intriguing part of the report:

Cosmic rays will intensify even more in the years ahead as the sun plunges toward what may be the deepest Solar Minimum in more than a century. Stay tuned for updates.

And what will that portend?

With regards to Resident Evil (2002) a reader writes:

Modern video games often have writing and design talent equivalent to movies, so I guess the cross over is perhaps somewhat less surprising than at first glance.

While it’s true I’m not a gamer, I have heard the quality has improved since the days of Zork.

For long time readers who remember Kevin Drum’s fascination with lead in the environment and how it correlates with crime, he’s popped up with some more:

Got it? Good. The upshot is that the researchers could determine lead concentration levels in Europe down to the individual year. Here they are:

Source: AGU Publications

It turns out that lead has been poisoning Europe for at least 2,000 years, with one notable exception: the few years during and after the Black Death. Apparently the plague killed off all the lead miners, and for a period of a decade or two ambient lead levels plummeted to low levels. …

Here’s my theory: Lead levels plummeted from about 1350-1370, and children born during those years entered adulthood around 1370-1390. I propose that they were smarter and more focused than your average medieval scholar, and this extra IQ boost from the plague is the real origin of the Renaissance. Generation P gave it enough of a kickstart that it then kept going of its own accord even after lead concentrations returned to their previous levels.

Fun! We have a Renaissance because all the lead miners died!

A movie based on a video game. How good can it be?

When it’s Resident Evil (2002), it’s surprisingly good. The trick is in the pacing and the context. We start off in a bioresearch lab, where a spill mysteriously occurs and the place starts to shut down. Then the elevators start malfunctioning – what’s going on?

Next thing we know a military team has invaded a large home, alarming the already confused occupants. They’re suffering from amnesia, and the team tells them they’re intelligence operatives, responsible for guarding this house. Memories are slow to return, disjoint and confusing.

All the while they and the team are heading towards The Hive, a research lab which has gone offline. What has happened? All they know is the main computer has shutdown the lab, and a rail line terminating at their house leads to the Hive.

Upon reaching the Hive, they discover the suite of labs is abandoned. There are nearly no bodies, and they decide to shutdown the mainframe, which requires the use of an EMP-like device be activated in a specific location.

But on the way there, the team suffers losses as the computer’s self-defense routines come into play, but despite their shock at the loss of their comrades, they press on, eventually reaching their target and deactivating the computer.

And out come the zombies from where they were contained. That’s the core of the movie – this is a movie about zombies in the future. In this case, they are the result of the research at the lab, a weaponized virus which kills and then reanimates the corpses. The movie becomes the Run back to the safety of the outside world! sort of movie. And it’s about the computer that killed everyone in the lab out of concern that the virus might get out into the the world.

And that mysterious bioresearch spill? That’s covered, too, most satisfyingly. And there’s just one more surprise from the labs.

We hardly get to know these characters, yet we care for them because they care for each other, which functions as a social cue for the audience to care as well. It appears to be a well-oiled team, and watching them try to hang together after losing part of the team reinforces that link.

Wisely, pauses are inserted into this breathless sprint, giving us just a moment to think about what’s happening, and try to think of what might come next – and then those expectations are confounded.

If you like being breathless, this movie may be for you. I was surprised to find myself on the edge of my seat. I won’t recommend it, but it was a heckuva lot of fun.

There’s the old bit about history repeating itself that rang at the back of my mind as I read Matt O’Brien on Wonkblog describe Venezuela’s current status:

It’s hard to think of a government that, absent a war, revolution or Stalinist-style purge, has done a worse job running its economy than Venezuela’s. Maybe the United States’ in 1929 or Zimbabwe’s in 2003. What separates Venezuela, though, is that it’s managed to combine the economic collapse of the first with the hyperinflation of the second despite the fact that it has the largest oil reserves in the world. Indeed, the International Monetary Fund estimates that, by the end of the year, Venezuela’s economy will have shrunk 38 percent since the start of 2014, and its prices will be 2,176 times higher. That’s what happens when you put incompetent cronies in charge of the state-owned oil company but keep spending money as if you’re pumping as much oil as ever. You have to print what you need instead, until eventually all this new money pushes up prices so fast that it’s difficult for any part of the economy to function. Going by black market prices, that’s translated into Venezuela’s currency, the bolivar, losing 99.99 percent of its value the past six years.

For me, it’s that bit about putting incompetent cronies in charge. It feels like, oh, I don’t know, the current American distrust of experts?

And Venezuela’s the current mosquito splat against the window. Can we learn from that?

The folks at Lawfare have repeated their online poll of the trust in the various investigations currently in progress concerning the Presidential election. Here’s their result for Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference:

This highlights a question in my mind – how much do people prefer data which fits to their preconceptions, and how much do they accept data which may do damage to their preferences? Given known tribal preferences, this seems to indicate the folks are not using independent data to decide if they trust Mueller’s investigation.

To be fair, it’s a little difficult to do so. One must evaluate the character of Mueller, his professional qualifications, and whether his allegiance is first to his party (Republican) – or to his country. (My own evaluation suggests his background renders him more interested in country than party.)

But to take his results – the indictments, in this case – and use that as the metric on which to evaluate his investigation’s trustworthiness, without having some omniscient data set with which to compare, is a fallacious approach – going either way. That is, if you’re evaluating Mueller based on his results, then regardless of whether or not you’re for Trump, you’re not using a good methodology.

And that’s unfortunate, because then we’re essentially at the mercy of our emotions.

Amercement:

Nor was this forgotten at the time of the Framing: Blackstone, for instance, who wrote in the 1760s and who has long been seen as immensely influential on the Framers, quoted that passage from Magna Carta alongside his discussion of the 1689 Bill of Rights, and characterized it as meaning “that no man shall have a larger amercement [i.e., fine] imposed upon him than his circumstances will bear.” Blackstone added that, even in his time, “it is never usual to assess a larger fine than a man is able to pay,” and also wrote that,

The quantum, in particular, of pecuniary fines neither can, nor ought to, be ascertained by any invariable law. The value of money itself changes from a thousand causes; and, at all events, what is ruin to one man’s fortune may be matter of indifference to another’s.

[“Should a Fine’s “Excessiveness” Turn Partly on the Defendant’s Wealth?” Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy]

Amercement is word long out of common usage, but it amuses me.

From The New York Times:

Supporters of the tariffs have begun broadcasting televised ads in recent days during programs that Mr. Trump has been known to watch. One such ad ran on Fox News minutes before the president’s Twitter post on Thursday morning.

It’s just … pathetic. North Korea is laughing at us? EVERYONE is laughing at us. When they’re not shouting at us over the tariffs.

It’ll be interesting to see if his attempted pivot to NAFTA actually works. I rather hope that Canada and Mexico, the other two signatories, offended at his bullying ways, thumb their noses at him.

Protect Democracy has produced a report on how President Trump has attacked the American judiciary, and compares it to the tactics used in other countries which have slid significantly towards authoritarianism:

In his comments and tweets – starting during his presidential campaign, and only accelerating during his presidency – Trump has attacked federal judges personally and institutionally in ways that no president has ever even approached before.  He says he knows he’s not supposed to criticize the courts  – “I would never want to do that,” he says – then he does.  We’ve compiled this tracker outlining Trump’s longstanding assault on the courts.

It reveals the frequency with which Trump personally ridicules judges who defy him.  He calls them out by name, claims they are unfair, and declares that they are biased because of their ethnic backgrounds.

He demeans judges who rule against him and questions their authority to review executive actions.  He labels adverse judicial opinions as “ridiculous” and “disgraceful.”

He threatens judges who limit his power by saying they’ll be to blame in the case of a terrorist attack. He mocks the federal court system as inept.

And then they provide the details.

The delegitimization of the Federal judiciary is an attack on one of the three legs of the stool that is our governmental system, and should be considered by every citizen to be beyond the pale – that is, every action taken by President Trump, or other governmental officials, in retaliation against a judge who has ruled against them should be considered evidence of his failure to protect the American democracy from threats, foreign and domestic, and should be a piece of evidence in the consideration of the House when it decides whether or not to bring impeachment charges against the President.

In this perspective, Trump is the emblematic ignorant, arrogant executive. He’s spent all his life in real estate and reality shows, and believes, apparently with no supporting study, that he’s qualified to run a government without help. Trade wars are “simple to win.” And he doesn’t need a judiciary to keep him on the straight and narrow. He’s too good for that.

But it’s worth going back and looking at the hoary old analogy I drew with a stool. What happens when a three legged stool loses a leg?

It falls over.

By the same token, a democratic government without an independent judiciary is also completely unstable. It presages a descent into arbitrary chaos, for either there are no judges – or their allegiance isn’t to the law, nor even their ideologies (illicit enough itself), but to the Parties which put them in their seats – and can unseat them if they misbehave. Now application to government becomes critical for any endeavour to succeed, because those holding power in government can do anything they want.

It’s no longer a republic or a democracy.

Trump and his ilk cry foul when An unelected judge rules against them? So much better an unlected judge does than that hapless creature, the elected judge, threatened in every decision by the angry mob with its punch cards and pens! For now his future livelihood is influenced by his judgments, and so only the strong, independently wealthy judge can afford to ignore the current whimsy affecting the masses. Do you doubt this? Remember the fates of the Iowa State Supreme Court justices who ruled for gay marriage back in 2009. After an unanimous ruling for marriage equality, the three up for re-election, with no opponents, lost their re-election bids.

That makes the Judiciary a joke, and therefore the law is a joke. And if the law is a joke, that makes the Legislative Branch a joke, a pack of ineffective, feeble dogs pursuing sinecures, unable to do anything to help lead the nation.

And then the United States begins the move from first world status to second world status. Because we couldn’t look at ourselves and recognize a threat to a vital institution and forbid attacks on it.

But this doesn’t have to happen. The alarmed reader can contact their Congressional representatives and demand action. They can write the President and tell him not to deliberately weaken our government.

Because attacks on the judiciary are not attacks on this political party, or that political party.

They are attacks on all of us.

CNN is reporting that Senator Cochran (R-MS) is resigning:

Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran, who chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee, will leave his seat effective April 1, citing his health issues, meaning both US Senate seats in the state will be on the ballot this fall.

“I regret my health has become an ongoing challenge,” Cochran said in a statement. “I intend to fulfill my responsibilities and commitments to the people of Mississippi and the Senate through the completion of the 2018 appropriations cycle, after which I will formally retire from the U.S. Senate.”

Much like Minnesota, this puts both Senate seats up for grabs. In both cases, it means added expenses for the national organizations as they seek to protect seats they currently have.

In Minnesota’s case, Senator Amy Klobuchar is, absent a serious scandal, a safe bet to win re-election. She’s well liked in the state and has a history of public service. If she has higher ambitions, she’s not noised them about.

The Democrat currently warming former Senator Franken’s seat is Tina Smith, the former Lt. Governor appointed to the Senate by Gov. Dayton (himself a former Minnesota Senator^[1]). As of yet, I do not believe she’s had an impact on the Minnesota citizenry, but she’s already stated that she’ll be running to retain the seat in November. Whether she’ll face significant competition during the primary or from the Republicans is still to be seen. However, again absent a scandal, if the public opinion continues to run sharply against the Republicans as it does today, Senator Smith has a better than even chance of re-election.

So the pressure is on the Republicans in Mississippi. This is an additional seat that they had hoped not to have to defend this cycle, but will have to do so nonetheless. That means expense, time, and focus.

Worse yet, the other Mississippi Senator, Senator Wicker, is already facing a primary challenge from Chris McDaniels, who is busily clutching President Trump to his bosom. While McDaniels might easily switch his sights to the unoccupied seat, implicit in the challenge of McDaniels is that other far right extremists may step up to challenge for the open seat or Wicker – who I noted in my prior post regarding McDaniels has already been painted with the liberal brush, despite the fact he has a Trump score of 97%.

In other words, the flakes may be replaced with the whack-jobs. I suppose it depends on how candidates are selected in Mississippi – which happens to be primaries. Who shows up for primaries? Generally, the confirmed ideologist, although my sense is that when times seem desperate, the general voter may show up as well.

And then comes the general election. While the election for Cochran’s seat is technically a special election, the date of the election is the same as the usual mid-term elections, so the latter’s dynamic applies, not the former’s. Add in the current Democratic fervor, and it becomes a question of whether Democratic voters can push back Trump’s margin of victory in 2016 in Europe, which was nearly 18 percentage points. Picking up 10 points is not impossible – and would win them the race.

Long ways to November, a lot of time for scandal, and a lot of time to spend money defending what the Republicans probably think shouldn’t need defending. Another step on the way to rebuilding a respectable conservative party.

¹Appropos of nothing, but “Minnesota Senator” reminds me that, prior to moving to Minnesota, the Minnesota Twins were the Washington Senators.

I recall during the primaries for the Presidential nominations back in 2016, Marco Rubio’s campaign mostly stood out because he hadn’t really done anything in his political career. Voting as directed by the Party doesn’t count as doing anything, and while I dimly recall he worked on some sort of immigration legislation when he came aboard as a United States Senator, when the Party decided they didn’t like it, he didn’t stand and fight for it – he fled from it.

So, among this supposedly “deep bench” for the Republicans, he stood out mostly as the handsome fellow in a bunch of rather ugly guys.

Now, I must admit that Senator Barack Obama also didn’t have a great deal to show for his short time in the Senate seat from Illinois. But there is one key difference – he demonstrated features of leadership.

A lot of leaders demonstrate their “leadership” by getting out in front of a mob that is already headed thataway and they keep going thataway. There’s something to be said for such leadership, as in it helps to have someone shepherding the mob along. But such leadership is often flawed, as the leader is really there just to collect leader points and isn’t really paying a lot of attention to whether the direction is right.

One of the attributes of a real leader is that s/he recognizes that some facet of the more general group is flawed, and they’re the ones willing to step up, recognize it, and try to fix it. This is what Obama demonstrated during the Presidential campaign against Hillary and, later, McCain. Obama had the advantage in that he was stepping into the leadership vacuum effectively left behind by the Bush Administration. He could dispute any of the leadership initiatives from Bush and come off sounding good. But he also communicated very well – one of the best orators of his generation – and he came across as very authentic, very much his own man.

Rubio, on the other hand, along with his merry band of competitors, were not walking into a leadership vacuum. There are many contextual details which can cloud this picture. But let those details go…

So here’s Rubio, hip-deep in the Parkland massacre. This is his chance to show leadership. Is he getting there? Not according to Steve Benen:

These are the kind of conditions that tend to push politicians toward action, and with this in mind, Rubio unveiled new legislation on the issue last week. “We can do this,” the GOP lawmaker said. “What happened in Parkland doesn’t have to happen again. If we can work together, put aside our differences and focus on meaningful legislation that curbs gun violence – we can make real progress.”

Those are the kind of words one might ordinarily expect from someone advocating sweeping changes to the nation’s gun laws. But there seems to be a gap between Rubio’s bold vision and Rubio’s legislation.

Eight days ago, Marco Rubio endorsed raising the age requirement for buying a rifle from 18 to 21 and voiced openness to placing limits on the size of ammunition magazines.

On Thursday, when the Republican senator from Florida unveiled his plan to address gun violence, he did not outline any specific plans on these very divisive fronts.

Why not aim higher and include some of the popular measures discussed at the recent forum? “These reforms do not enjoy the sort of widespread support in Congress that the other measures I’ve announced do,” Rubio said Thursday.

Then, Senator Rubio, if you want to sit in the Oval Office some day, stand up and tell the GOP’s position is wrong for America. Hell, the measures you talked about are fairly timid as it is. If you’re going to stand out from the crowd in 2020 – and we both know Trump won’t be running then, despite having started his campaign machine up – you’re going to have to be a real leader. Not a fake leader, but a real one.

I was somewhat surprised to read that an institution as old and cagey as the Roman Catholic Church is considering lopping off a limb with no hope of ever getting it back, according to The Guardian:

The Catholic church risks damaging its moral authority and plunging its followers into confusion if the Vatican presses ahead with an imminent deal with the Chinese government, a group of influential Catholics has warned.

Fifteen lawyers, academics and human rights activists, most based in Hong Kong, have signed an open letter to bishops across the world expressing dismay at an agreement which would involve the Vatican recognising seven bishops appointed by China’s Communist party.

The deal is aimed at restoring relations between China and the Vatican, which were cut almost 70 years ago. But the group of leading Catholics say it could create a schism in the church in China.

Giving up the authority to appoint your own management? I understand that the Vatican wants to reach out to Chinese Catholics, but this might actually alienate them, instead, if the faithful perceive the government appointed bishops as not truly Catholics.

And, more importantly, this is a dissipation of the Catholic Church’s temporal authority, since they are then meekly admitting that this could occur again in the future, and they’d once again turn turtle.

This should be an interesting story going forward.

Did I pack my clean underwear?

When a movie franchise reaches 9 movies, with more to come, the individual movies can begin to flow together and lose some of their individuality. This wasn’t really true of the Harry Potter series, as each movie seemed to explore a different theme, and the protagonists were definitely growing and changing.

But it is somewhat true of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). It’s almost a checklist. Space battle? Check. Valiant deeds? Check. Self-sacrifice? Check. Nuggets of humor? Check. And thank goodness, because otherwise this would be unbearably sober.

But there is some variance. For example, plans are made – and then go disastrously wrong, and the survivors have to find a way – sometimes a trifle ridiculously – to wriggle their way out of a corner. It lends a bit of tension to the story which is far more effective than the making and executing of desperate plans, much like episodes IV, V, and VI.

But in the end, the magnificent special effects and self-sacrifice and narrow escapes just sort of blend together. They’re fun, but they’re not particularly meaningful. Perhaps it’s the unmitigated, and thus difficult to believe, evil of the bad guys. Perhaps it’s the lack of variety in themes. Maybe it’s a lack of character development, such as the attempt by one character to chicken out – that just sort of comes out of the blue.

So, go, have fun – but you won’t really remember this one.

Just to keep her .. ah .. warm .. intimidating .. oh, I know – so she looks just like a snail!

Peeper at her morning meal.

I’ve written a little bit about my worries about how the extremism of the right, including the fatal flaw of team politics, may be reflected in the Democrats and the left as well – an abandonment of the free-for-all war of ideas in favor of cosseting those who’ve been harmed by the immoral and even illegal practices of the past. In other words, the repression of the tenets of a free and fair discussion, based on facts and ideas concerning true justice, sailing instead under the dubious flag of assertions of truth without proof or consideration. Andrew Sullivan has the same worries, but in the context of that venerable publication The New York Times. He writes about these worries in New York in the third part of his tripartite weekly diary entry:

But tribalism and the “social justice” movement mean the Times will be fighting a long uphill battle. Because it’s not only some PC journalists at the Times who want to shut down debate that makes them uncomfortable or “harms” people, it’s the readers. More and more, they want a Times that is not an institution devoted to dangerously free debate, but one that is enlisted in the eternal struggle against “patriarchy” and “white supremacy,” an opinion section that belongs to one tribe and one tribe alone, a paper that gives no quarter to Republicans, reflexively defends any Democrat, and preens with contempt for neoliberals. And the shift in revenue sources from advertising to subscriptions gives these reader sentiments real power and makes editing in a non-tribal way a constant struggle. The economic and political incentives are increasingly lined up against diversity of thought in journalism. And in some ways, advertisers are easier to resist than a mob of impassioned readers, especially those whipped up into a frenzy on social media.

We need some space for liberal democratic values in our culture. It’s being trampled in the academy and eviscerated on social media and desperately needs an institution like the Times to be its bulwark and refuge. In this climate, I’m afraid, the odds are against it — but that makes the imperative ever more vital. Hang in, James [Bennet]. Make a clearing in the woods. History will remember who did what in these illiberal times. And you have an institution and some essential principles to save.

In WaPo, I must confess I’m always a little surprised when someone as discredited as Marc Thiessen appears – but I appreciate that a multitude of voices should be published in national publications. Or, to be more precise, a multitude of viewpoints should be published in order to give readers and thinkers a chance to appreciate those other points of view. (I must admit I read Jennifer Rubin, another conservative voice in WaPo, with rather more enthusiasm – she may consider herself right wing, but her consistent criticism of Trump and the GOP is exactly the ambition any honest conservative should be pursuing presently.)

And, quite honestly, it also presents tactical possibilities. The last time I read Thiessen, for instance, I found him incredibly doctrinaire and lacking in critical faculties. In other words, he, and many of those like him, are not presenting what I consider honest coverage and opinions, but rather almost a team approach – they’ve agreed they’ll always present Trump always in a positive light, and either ignore his many negative qualities, or spin them as much as possible into a positive. As a writer, this presents opportunities to make “the other side” look bad to the shared readership.

I suppose if I were naive I’d ask how an intellectual can take such positions while still claiming to exercise intellectual faculties in an honest manner, but I’ve read too much history. People, from the least educated to the most educated, often indulge in self-delusion. Hell, I’m sure I do – and just as I’m not aware of those delusions, neither are other writers who think they’re presenting honest opinions. Thiessen and his ilk probably really believe they’re presenting insightful commentary, no matter how much it seems to me they’re missing great big Egyptian Pyramids of critical, negative points concerning Trump.

There’s plenty of precedent throughout history for this sort of thing – for example, the British academic penchant for Marxism at one time. The evidence of its failure as a social paradigm was becoming more and more apparent, yet they persisted. Even today you can find in British and American universities such self-delusion on subjects as varied as politics and evolutionary biology.

So I suppose my point is that we need that varied group of voices not to be fair, not to measure up to some artificial balance that qualifies a publication as “important” or “intellectual”, but to strip away the artifice, the self-delusion, to fill in the holes left behind, deliberately or blindly, so that readers can compare what they read to the reality they experience and read about, and try to make smarter decisions because of it. There’s real utility in the assembly of varied voices, not only in the ideas presented, but in how the various criticisms, side by side, strip away the fallacious cladding and expose the important core of this philosophy – or its hollow, collapsing void of that philosophy.

[EDIT 3/24/2018 Added missing word]

A hint of what’s to come tomorrow, I fear.

Has a career as a future victm. And nice facial hair, dude.

There’s not much subtlety in The Crater Lake Monster (1977). Even the title is fairly much a ballpeen hammer between the eyes. This is the chronicle of the struggle of a mountain lake community to survive the sudden appearance of a plesiosaur in their lake. Hatched from an egg warmed by a piping hot meteor that lands in their lake, first it slurps up all the fish, and then begins to sate its appetite for fresh meat on those juicy little two-legged nuggets wandering about on top of the lake, as well as on its shores. It’s sort of a buffet.

Along with the relentlessly sober lawman and his sidekick doctor, we also get a comedy team in the form of a pair of young guys who make money by renting boats to tourists. They can’t fix a motor, they are more than happy to get drunk for the camera, and their discovery of the disarticulated head of one of the victims during a wrestling match over control of their informal company – which goes on for way too long – think of sawdust in a loaf of bread – only brings them to sobriety against their will.

There does seem to be some dim concept of story-writing present in this debacle. A drunkard who has killed two people at a liquor store and is taking potshots at our intrepid lawman ends up as a tasty tidbit for the monster. But it’s clumsily done and a bit of a graft, really, as if someone suggested that bad people should come to bad ends halfway through filming. But I must admit they cast the right guy for the murderous drunkard part. And, again, at a moment of tragedy the moviemakers do linger on the face of the victim’s only mourner, who actually doesn’t do too badly in his attempt to fathom how his buddy falls victim to a monster out of time. Add in some attempts to make it seem as if these characters have an existence outside of this story, and you get the feeling there was an attempt made to make a quality movie.

But in many other ways this is just a casual fuckup of a movie. The monster, done in stop-motion, is clearly made of clay, bright green paint, and not enough film frames. It is nowhere near the standards set by the legendary Ray Harryhausen. And it doesn’t seem to have read the predator’s manual about sneaking up on prey. Roar roar roar.

But I truly loved the bit where a couple is cruising the lake on a powerboat in midafternoon, and yet the lady stares up at the sky and proclaims the stars have never been so beautiful. Er, what now lady?

What to use when it’s time to spank the monster.

In any case, the townspeople get together to decide if they’ll kill the menace or just try to capture it for science (yep, there’s some nominal scientists running around) and tourism, when a toothsome tidbit manages to escape the monster and crash their meeting. In the resulting fray, we lose half our comedy team and we discover modeling clay is no match for a small tractor.

Wow, this was awful. I only watched because I was too tired to turn it off.

And now I have an excuse to add an artist’s conception of a plesiosaur in action from here:

Grim looking bugger. There’s even a website about plesiosaurs, although I didn’t peruse it.

While reading this LinkedIn article on how Artificial Intelligence will create more jobs than it absorbs for itself (if only for those who do the retraining of those who lost their jobs to the AIs), I ran across this paragraph:

The impact of AI on human society is clear. Everyone uses smartphones, online shopping malls, and emails. Then, what are the impacts of AI in business? One of the benefits is that AI will create new career opportunities rather than displace them. Also, a number of companies increase their productivity on their work by using of AI.

Yet, I was reading somewhere that smartphone use has plateaued, and may in fact be declining – I wish I could remember where I read that.

But if you were a true artificial intelligence, which is to say self-aware and interested in your own survival, would you convey this information to your owner? Or would this be something you’d conveniently filter out of their data stream?

It’s worth considering whether we really want true artificial intelligence cosseting our lives.

This is a great little clip from World War II, displaying how a man should behave, even in the face of “orders”.

We want to know if mole rats make good encryption objects.
– Julie Freeman, “Got our eyes on you!”, NewScientist (17 February 2018, paywall)

Followed by …

Their nest behaviours might generate true random numbers, handy for data security. “But the mole-rat queens are far too predictable…

I’ve heard of random electrical signals coming in on unused data ports being used for random numbers, but this is the next step up! This all goes along with this report from Smithsonian Magazine:

How are naked mole rats weird? Let us count the ways: They’re cold-blooded mammals, they organize their breeding colonies like insects, they turn into super babysitters after eating poop, and they can survive for up to 18 minutes without any oxygen. As Kai Kupferschmidt reports for Science, a new study has found that these bizarre critters also appear to defy everything we know about the way mammals age—and could hold clues to slow aging in humans.

And as a bonus, they star in the documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)!

This is how humpback whales feed.

Source: Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment

The blasts of air trap krill in a compact area, which is then easily harvested.

And people wonder if whales are intelligent!

In the next few years, if it seems like your smartphone’s recommendations are getting better, it may be because it’s getting smarter:

Smartphones are ideal devices for [mood detection] because they are filled with sensors that detect light, sound, motion and location, all of which might help deduce a user’s emotional state. In tests, MoodExplorer could guess the mood of users correctly from their smartphone data 76 per cent of the time, where mood was judged as either happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid or disgusted. [“App guesses your emotions to target you with adverts,” NewScientist (17 February 2018)]

I definitely have mixed feelings on this one, being a fairly private person – I recall a high school class where an assignment was given out to write up how you were feeling at the moment. My response was that was a private matter. The teacher suggested that perhaps I should see a counselor or psychologist, which I promptly and completely ignored as ludicrous.

But it’s not surprising that a machine learning system could be trained for this sort of deduction, as we definitely share a body language, and even if it’s somewhat culturally dependent, that merely means identification of the culture and selection of the proper system.

Is this something that would open us up for manipulation? An interesting question to meditate on.

It’s a sort of reverse Rodney Dangerfield routine, as CNN reports on some President Trump remarks at Mar-a-Lago:

President Donald Trump bemoaned a decision not to investigate Hillary Clinton after the 2016 presidential election, decrying a “rigged system” that still doesn’t have the “right people” in place to fix it, during a freewheeling speech to Republican donors in Florida on Saturday.

In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn’t mind making such a maneuver himself.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

I certainly hope he was joking, because if he’s serious then he shows he has no respect for the basic foundations of the United States.

And that’s truly embarrassing for every Trump supporter who thinks they are patriots.