Monthly Archives: January 2018

I am not familiar with McClatchy, but they have an interesting report on a new FBI investigation:

The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy.

FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said.

It is illegal to use foreign money to influence federal elections.

It’s unclear how long the Torshin inquiry has been ongoing, but the news comes as Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sweeping investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including whether the Kremlin colluded with Trump’s campaign, has been heating up.

Interesting, did I say? More like fascinating. This has the potential, at least at its extremes, to explain some of the most ridiculous behavior to have recently graced the American landscape. After all, sowing the fertile American fields with, well frankly, batshit crazy nutcase opinions that cause disruptions in an otherwise strong American society would certainly work to the Russian oligarchs’ advantage, now wouldn’t it? Is the leadership of the NRA just a bunch of sock-puppets for the Russians? That would be an extreme example of the subversion of the NRA, but it’s not completely outside of the realm of possibility.

Reticulate:

1. in the form of a network or having a network of parts
   a reticulate leaf
2. resembling, covered with, or having the form of a net
   verb (rɪˈtɪkjʊˌleɪt)
3. to form or be formed into a net [Collins English Dictionary]

Noted in “The Merits of Supporting 702 Reauthorization (Despite Worries About Trump and the Rule of Law),” Jack Goldsmith and Susan Hennessey, Lawfare:

They know that 702 is deeply embedded in a reticulate legal system run mostly by career public servants and supervised by all three branches of government, including numerous agencies in the executive branch, the congressional intelligence committees and the life-tenured members of the FISA court. In short, the answer to Greenwald’s puzzle about Trump critics voting for 702 reauthorization is that the NSA and FBI are remarkably immune from inappropriate presidential meddling.

An interesting, enlightening usage.

From martin hislop of designboom:

toyota’s ‘GR super sports’ concept is based on the world endurance championship (WEC) ‘TS050’ hybrid race car, and the presentation signals that the 986-hp twin-turbo, direct injection, 2.4-liter V6 hybrid road car will soon become a reality, ensuring that the mclaren ‘senna’, aston martin ‘valkyrie’ and mercedes-AMG ‘project one’ hypercar, will each have some serious competition. the japanese-automaker has released minimal details at this point, but has specified the power of the hybrid drivetrain has as 986 hp (735 kW).

Really? 986 HP and it’s a hybrid? Still, I wouldn’t mind taking one for a spin in the summer:

Via designboom

Jack Goldsmith and Susan Hennessey on Lawfare have a response to the concerns some privacy and civil rights advocates have about the update to FISA‘s section 702:

No member of Congress has been more critical of President Trump’s rule-of-law difficulties than [Rep. Adam Schiff]. He is the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee and one of the most knowledgeable and informed members of Congress on intelligence matters. Schiff has not hesitated to be critical of intelligence community practices when he sees fit. He has watched the 702 program up close over many years in classified settings in his oversight role. He knows well its virtues and its warts. We suppose it is possible that Schiff would vote to give the president, whose integrity he so obviously worries about, vast powers to spy on Americans in an abusive way. Given everything Schiff has publicly said and done over the last year, however, a much more plausible inference is that he knows not only how valuable the 702 program is but also how law-constrained and carefully controlled and monitored it is. He and the other Democrats who support reauthorization, and the many Republicans who worry a lot about President Trump yet support reauthorization, have a high degree of confidence that the National Security Agency and the U.S. intelligence community more broadly cannot and will not abuse the 702 tool even if they harbor concerns that Trump might desire to do so. They know that 702 is deeply embedded in a reticulate legal system run mostly by career public servants and supervised by all three branches of government, including numerous agencies in the executive branch, the congressional intelligence committees and the life-tenured members of the FISA court. In short, the answer to Greenwald’s puzzle about Trump critics voting for 702 reauthorization is that the NSA and FBI are remarkably immune from inappropriate presidential meddling.

Which is interesting, if not organic, by which I mean they’re relying on another authority to prove their point, rather than proving it from the substance of section 702. Given that it would undoubtedly be in unintelligible (for me) legalese, I’m not precisely dismissive of Jack and Susan, simply a trifle uncomfortable – which is the inevitable role of the interested, but uninitiated, audience. They go on:

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren points to the surveillance abuses directed at Martin Luther King Jr. to argue against 702, she actually highlights the opposite point: the massive transparency, both voluntary and involuntary, over the past few years about how Section 702 operates shows that it has not been abused for domestic political spying and implies that the 40 years of post-Hoover legal reforms are largely a success (though not without hiccups). The fact that President Trump has not focused his abusive energies on intelligence collection is a testament to the efficacy of the legal and cultural constraints on electronic surveillance. Instead, Trump has, as our colleague Benjamin Wittes predicted long ago, focused those energies on trying to manipulate Justice Department law enforcement practices, where the fabric of regulation guaranteeing independence from political manipulation is much less dense.

It’s always fun to use someone’s words against them. The following paragraph, though, sort of highlights one of the more uncomfortably extreme possibilities of Trump’s occupancy of the Oval Office:

Another testament to the value and integrity of Section 702 is that the democratic process worked well despite irresponsible interference from the top of the executive branch. Ordinarily, the president is a crucial champion of surveillance authorities. President Trump, however, offered gift after gift to Section 702 opponents. In promulgating falsehoods about how the program worked and about how his predecessors used surveillance tools more generally, and in continually insulting and undermining the intelligence community, Trump harmed his national security team’s reauthorization efforts. His unpresidential behavior culminated in a rogue tweet last week the morning the House was set to take up the bill, setting his aides and members of Congress scrambling to do damage control and to explain to the commander in chief that he was tweeting against his own administration’s position. In the past, passing major surveillance legislation has required an all-executive push. The fact that it managed to succeed this time, despite the president effectively pushing in the other direction, says something about the intensity and unity of the belief across the executive branch about the program’s value and legitimacy.

The image of a thoughtful, serious President.

And leaves me wondering if that rogue tweet really was a rogue tweet, or a subtle attempt to disassemble the national security apparatus which is just one part of the national defense strategy assembled by conventional Republicans and Democrats over the last few decades. I’d prefer to think it was simply a paranoid, amateur President shooting his damn-fool mouth off once again.

Still, not being conversant with legalese nor the entire FISA landscape – that’s why we have Congresscritters, but need them to be responsible compromisers, not ideological assholes – I have no real opinion on the matter. Jack and Susan’s point concerning the sunset clause (not quoted), however, strikes me as being exceedingly wise and sensitive to the illegal surveillance debacles undertaken by the state security apparatus controlled by Hoover. If the rest of the bill – or at least section 702 – is as carefully considered as is the sunset clause, then we may be on the right track.

The United States has a long tradition of current Presidents not criticizing their predecessor(s). This is an important tradition both within and without the country, as it promotes harmony between otherwise antagonistic political parties and intra-party factions, as well as presenting a seemingly coherent and smooth transition from one Administration to the next.

But when we return to sanity, how will the next President handle the inferior position in which Trump will leave the United States? I stumbled across this article in the Los Angeles Times:

China has now assumed the mantle of fighting climate change, a global crusade that the United States once led. Russia has taken over Syrian peace talks, also once the purview of the American administration, whose officials Moscow recently deigned to invite to negotiations only as observers.

France and Germany are often now the countries that fellow members of NATO look to, after President Trump wavered on how supportive his administration would be toward the North Atlantic alliance.

And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S., once the only mediator all sides would accept, has found itself isolated after Trump’s decision to declare that the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

In his wide-ranging speech on national security last week, Trump highlighted what he called the broadening of U.S. influence throughout the world.

But one year into his presidency, many international leaders, diplomats and foreign policy experts argue that he has reduced U.S. influence or altered it in ways that are less constructive. On a range of policy issues, Trump has taken positions that disqualified the United States from the debate or rendered it irrelevant, these critics say.

Many of the maneuvers and stumbles of the Trump Administration will need to be repudiated, inside and outside the country. I hope the Democratic Party is having a quiet discussion of the topic, because it’ll be important to present a united front as well as  a coherent explanation of the strategy, whatever it might be.

The GOP, on the other hand, is too much in the grip of Trump to actually consider having such a discussion on a formal basis, although possibly more moderate members talk about it over dinner. The rest of the Party, however, is still convinced they’ll be holding on to power over the long term with the Party in its current extremist form.

I think the proper strategy is simply to admit the error of electing Trump by blaming him. Within the United States, it sends a firm message that these many stumbles are directly connected to Trump, and it’ll be important to attribute many of those mistakes to his deceit and even self-delusion, as well as his lack of curiosity. Trying to attribute his mistakes to being an amateur or someone from the private sector would send a message incompatible with the basic mythos of the United States, that being any kid can grow up to President of the United States. One cannot rule anyone out, but it’s acceptable to say You’d better be ready to study your fanny off! to anyone thinking of running for the position – making ludicrous promises and lying like it’s an art form are not acceptable approaches to campaigning and governing, and that message needs to be emphasized.

Outside the United States, it’ll be an implicit acknowledgment of the mistake our Democracy has made with the election of Trump to the Presidency, an apology to friends – and a warning to those countries’ leaders who considered Trump a role model.

Steve Benen’s annoyed with GOP cynicism about children:

With time running out before a government shutdown, House GOP leaders added a six-year extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program to their stopgap spending bill, along with a series of tax breaks intended to undermine the Affordable Care Act. The House Republican leadership published this stunning tweet yesterday:

“Children’s lives are at stake. It’s time for our friends across the aisle to stop playing games with CHIP funding.”

It followed House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) telling reporters that it’s “unconscionable” for Democrats to oppose CHIP funding. Several GOP lawmakers held a press conference accusing congressional Dems of failing to support “American children.”

I’ve been following politics for quite a while. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen political tactics this cynical.

The appropriate response? Here’s my take on turning my opponent’s Check! into my Checkmate! of them.

Mr. Speaker, your attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act, replacing it with nothing, would harm far more children than a short delay in continued funding of the CHIP program. We will not condemn the poor children of America to inferior health care simply to satisfy your ideological posturing.

And then mail that response to every single household in the Speaker’s district. If he protests, invite him to return the favor – while noting that the Democrat’s are proud of their policies and tactics. Why isn’t he?

Today we happened to notice the word ‘catfishing‘ in a TV listing description, and, being unaware of the term, I looked it up. Cool definition, so I figure I’ll make it Word of the Day.

Except I’m suspicious.

Yep, turns out I’ve already used it as a Word Of The Day entry.

TWICE.

Sheesh.

V&A dundee , designed by kengo kuma, will be opening in September 2018, and designboom has the pics:

via designboom

For the next pic:

the façade comprises 2,500 cast stone panels

via designboom

Nice facade. Follow the link above for more, mostly exterior shots.

From WaPo‘s The Fix:

Had [Senator McConnell] said only once that he needed the White House to provide more guidance, it could perhaps be dismissed as a helpful hint. But in back-to-back sentences, McConnell makes crystal-clear that he doesn’t think Trump has enunciated this very basic piece of information, even as we’re weeks into negotiations. And he seems to sympathize with the idea that lawmakers reached a compromise that they thought would meet with Trump’s approval, only to have Trump renege. Trump, after all, said the following last week: “I think my positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with” and, “I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, gee, I want this,’ or ‘I want that.’ I will be signing it.”

Senator McConnell, President Trump’s confusion and tendency to blow with the wind should be all you need to know that this is a man not competent for the office. If he was stubborn as a mountain, even in defense of a bad policy position, we could at least see him as just being wrong.

But this is bad for the United States.

Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) continues to be an enigma. The retiring Senator delivered a speech on the floor of the Senate which, I’m happy to say, echoes two of the themes of this blog, and in language eloquent to its purpose. From the CNN transcript:

Mr. President [I believe this is a traditional reference to the President of the Senate, not President Trump – Hue], near the beginning of the document that made us free, our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” So, from our very beginnings, our freedom has been predicated on truth. The founders were visionary in this regard, understanding well that good faith and shared facts between the governed and the government would be the very basis of this ongoing idea of America.

… our freedom has been predicated on truth. A dive right to the heart of the matter, isn’t it, the recognition that the farther we permit ourselves to stray from truth in search of egotistical fantasies, the harder we’re going to crash to the ground – eventually. And if we crash hard enough, we may lose everything.

And he follows up with another pointed observation:

As the distinguished former member of this body, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, famously said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” During the past year, I am alarmed to say that Senator Moynihan’s proposition has likely been tested more severely than at any time in our history.

It is for that reason that I rise today, to talk about the truth, and its relationship to democracy. For without truth, and a principled fidelity to truth and to shared facts, Mr. President, our democracy will not last.

And so he connects the importance of an adherence – a slavish adherence, to borrow a phrase – to truth and reality, to sustaining the democracy so important to our lives.

Connected, but separate, he then connects the fake news epithet, vile and self-centered as it is, with danger to our democracy:

Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase “enemy of the people,” that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of “annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader.

This alone should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the president’s party. For they are shameful, repulsive statements. And, of course, the president has it precisely backward — despotism is the enemy of the people. The free press is the despot’s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy. When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn’t suit him “fake news,” it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.

I dare say that anyone who has the privilege and awesome responsibility to serve in this chamber knows that these reflexive slurs of “fake news” are dubious, at best. Those of us who travel overseas, especially to war zones and other troubled areas around the globe, encounter members of US based media who risk their lives, and sometimes lose their lives, reporting on the truth. To dismiss their work as fake news is an affront to their commitment and their sacrifice.

And for those who would still mutter about the mainstream media, he makes a key observation:

Of course, a major difference between politicians and the free press is that the press usually corrects itself when it gets something wrong. Politicians don’t.

A phenomenon about which I blogged just today here.

So why is Senator Flake an enigma? His Trump score, supplied by FiveThirtyEight as of this writing, remains 90.7%. He has not, as far as I know, rejected a single judicial nominee sent to the Senate by the Trump Administration. So while I cannot help but applaud his words, his actions speak of a continued allegiance to the very Party which sent a man, whom he obviously despises, to the White House. He would not betray his conservative principles by voting against poorly written legislation such as the AHCA, which failed, or the Tax change bill, which passed, and certainly not by rejecting those judicial nominees who are obviously unqualified for the judiciary.

But he didn’t.

His may be a call to an important bulwark of our nation, currently under attack by a defective, self-interested Executive, but his failure to bolster his concerns with actions is deeply disappointing.

And go read his speech. It’s worth a read if you don’t understand why not everyone doesn’t condemn the mainstream media. And it’s not, as our ancestors might have called it, a stemwinder.

Pernicious:

Having a harmful effect, especially in a gradual or subtle way.
‘the pernicious influences of the mass media’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in GOP Senator Jeff Flake’s speech to the Senate today, of which a transcript may be found here. The relevant passage:

But many untruths are not at all trivial — such as the seminal untruth of the president’s political career – the oft-repeated conspiracy about the birthplace of President Obama. Also not trivial are the equally pernicious fantasies about rigged elections and massive voter fraud, which are as destructive as they are inaccurate — to the effort to undermine confidence in the federal courts, federal law enforcement, the intelligence community and the free press, to perhaps the most vexing untruth of all — the supposed “hoax” at the heart of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Boko Haram is a jihadist organization located in Nigeria, Chad, and nearby nations. One of the most violent terrorist organizations, it’s suppression has proven difficult. On Lawfare, Professor Alex Thurston has 5 myths concerning Boko Haram that he’d like to dispel, the most discouraging of which is this one:

Myth #5: Americans Know How to Defeat Boko Haram

Americans, especially the U.S. government, have been full of suggestions for how Nigeria can and should defeat Boko Haram: Increase socio-economic development programming in northeastern Nigeria. End human rights abuses by security forces. Conduct counterinsurgency, rather than counterterrorism. Involve neighboring militaries in the conflict. Deradicalize prisoners. Talk to Boko Haram. Don’t talk to Boko Haram. …

If Nigerian politicians and military officers, absorbing lectures from their American counterparts about counterinsurgency, socioeconomic development, and human rights, quietly raise an eyebrow, they could be forgiven their skepticism. Sixteen years into the war in Afghanistan, can the United States claim undisputed expertise in counterinsurgency? With the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights recently expressing shock at the conditions he saw in rural Alabama, can America claim perfection at socioeconomic development? With recurring allegations about U.S. military abuses of human rights from Somalia to Yemen to Afghanistan, can America claim that its hands are always clean? Nigerians are not stupid or ill-informed: They watch the news, too.

As I wrote above, the Nigerian state has failed, so far, to defeat Boko Haram—but there are no guarantees that American experts, confidently offering prescriptions from afar (or near, from an increasing variety of coordination cells, special operations deployments, and NGOs), would do any better, even if their prescriptions were followed to the letter. Obviously it’s good for Americans, Europeans, Nigerians, and others to keep thinking about potential solutions. But the solutions are just that: potential. Nigeria is not an equation to be solved like some math problem in a workbook, where the answer is evident if you know how to find it—rather, Nigeria is one of the most complicated countries in the world. Any resolution to the Boko Haram conflict will require a good deal of experimentation, trial and error, and even luck. It may also take quite a long time.

I’ve been hearing about Boko Haram for years, between violent raids and the mass kidnapping of young women and girls. Their defeat is not likely to come from battlefield advice from Americans, but from within their own culture – understanding what and why those of Boko Haram are motivated to engage in these actions.

And to look into how resource scarcity may be playing into this situation.

Or they just are fairly dumb. Philip Bump of WaPo helpfully points out the errors of Fox & Friends of Fox News when evaluating some poll data from Survey Monkey:

Over the course of 2017, SurveyMonkey conducted 605,172 interviews of Americans. A quirk of statistical analysis is that the precision of poll results from a survey of 605,000 people vs. only 1,000 people is small; the former has essentially no margin of error, but the latter has a margin of error of only three points. This is why most pollsters don’t bother polling hundreds of thousands of people. Why spend the money when your estimate is good with far fewer people?

Those 605,172 interviews, though, were conducted over the course of the year …

On Tuesday morning’s “Fox and Friends,” the hosts were discussing a survey showing that most 2017 coverage of Trump’s presidency was negative. Kilmeade interjected with some good news.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “through all this negative coverage, they did a survey of 600,000 people about how black America views this president. His numbers have actually doubled in approval. It’s still low, it’s around 25 percent, but it’s doubled since the election.”

Okay. So. First of all, they didn’t do a survey of 600,000 black Americans. Second of all, Kilmeade clearly thinks that saying “600,000” adds heft to the results, which, as we noted above, it doesn’t. Third, Trump’s approval numbers haven’t doubled, for the reasons above — and then some.

Approval numbers necessarily start only when a president takes office; after all, how are you going to evaluate the job performance of someone who doesn’t yet hold a job? Gallup has asked Americans their views of Trump’s job as president since his first week in office, allowing us to compare approval ratings among black Americans from the earliest point to the most recently available ratings (through the end of 2017).

Trump’s approval among black Americans fell nine points from January to December. Rather than doubling, his approval rating among those Americans was actually more than cut in half, dropping from 15 percent to 6 percent.

Philip continues onward, disassembling Kilmeade as well as Neil Munro of Breitbart. And, you know, this isn’t opinion, or he says she says. This is statistics, cold hard math. Anyone can do it. But it appears Fox News and Breitbart think their readers are too lazy or ignorant to actually check up on the reasoning skills of these news outlets.

Which is right in line with their history.

Saccades:

When you move your head and eyes to scan a scene, your eyes are incapable of moving smoothly across it and seeing everything. Instead, you see in the image in a series of very quick jumps (called saccades) with very short pauses (called fixations) and it is only during the pauses that an image is processed.

Your brain fills in the gaps with a combination of peripheral vision and an assumption that what is in the gaps must be the same as what you see during the pauses. [“What an RAF pilot can teach us about being safe on the road,” LondonCyclist]

[h/t Chris Johnson]

Did you hear about the study that supposedly shows that almost all terrorists are foreign born? It appears that this might be a controversial conclusion. Simon Maloy noted a small-print caveat, but since he put his finding on Twitter, which is virtually unreadable, I’ll quote Steve Benen on Maddowblog instead:

Simon Maloy, for example, took note of the Trump administration’s methodology. From the second full page of the newly released report: “This information includes both individuals who committed offenses while located in the United States and those who committed offenses while located abroad, including defendants who were transported to the United States for prosecution. It does not include individuals convicted of offenses relating to domestic terrorism, nor does it include information related to terrorism-related convictions in state courts.”

Oh. So the point of the report appears to be bolster Trump World’s argument that those concerned about terrorism on American soil should necessarily be concerned with immigrants and foreigners. After all, as the document put it, approximately 73 percent of those convicted of international terrorism-related charges in U.S. federal courts “were foreign-born.”

But that includes convicted terrorists who weren’t in the United States until we brought them here for trial and it excludes instances of domestic terrorism – which, as we know, is often at least as dangerous to the American public as international terrorism.

From the Department of Justice:

“This report reveals an indisputable sobering reality—our immigration system has undermined our national security and public safety,” said Attorney General Sessions.

It’s hard to decide if Sessions is trying to bolster the xenophobic position which resonates with President Trump’s base, or if he’s attempting to gloss over any and all Christian terrorist actions on American soil – of which there’ve been a few, mostly resulting in the assassination of doctors who perform abortions.

But the motivation, as base as it is, and as poorly as it reflects on AG Sessions’ intellectual and moral qualities, is irrelevant to a consequence not mentioned by Benen or Maloy, and that’s this: If this report is not withdrawn and/or repudiated, in particular by the AG himself, then it’ll become part of the intellectual record of the United States, meaning that its apparent flaws will be ignored, and its conclusions to be congruent with the reality.

And then? Policies will be implemented on it. And the taint of the study will transfer to those policies, as is ever the case. Soon we’ll have a tanks all over the southern and northern borders and hordes of police checking every incoming plane and ship, while scant dollars will be dedicated to the problems of domestic terrorism. And then we’ll wonder why we don’t seem to be as safe as we should be, and no one will think to look at the critical flaws of the report that started it all.

Unless we protest this now.

If you can’t afford a story, you can always borrow some cleavage.

Some people work to the tune of checklists: as each task of a project is completed, a big ol’ checkmark is applied to the list, and when all the boxes are checked, hey, you’re done.

So let’s make a checklist!

Bad title? Check.

Bad audio? Tinny. Check.

Toothmarks on the scenery? Check.

Exploitation? Check.

Bad effects? They’re doing that out-of-focus thing. Check!

Bad plot? Wandering from point to point, yep. Oh, and plot holes. Check check check!

Dubious dialog? Check and a half.

Bizarre death scenes? MEEEEE-OW!

And such is the reality of The Corpse Grinders (1972). Yep, they’re putting corpses through a meat grinder. Nothing interesting in that title. OK, maybe why – it’s because a cat food company is about to go under, and, in search of cheaper raw materials, the pair running the joint have resorted to using a new raw material.

Speaking of pairs, the characters do tend to come in pairs. Let’s meet a few.

There’s the grave-robbers, a husband and wife team. He’s big and blustery, she clings to a doll, even while helping carry the corpses. He wants what’s coming to him, I’m not sure what she’s doing in this relationship. I’m not even sure what she was saying. Helluva accent.

There’s the business owners. They’ve already offed their primary investor – and made him part of their product line, so to speak. The younger, dominant one has to keep the older one in check, as he’s a little interested in the help but nervous as a Yorkie.

Oh, the help? One’s a little slow, the other’s a deaf mute on crutches. They’re intriguing but ultimately only one ends up as product.

All the victims have a cat. MEEOW. Nibbling at the victims’ carotids, mostly.

Then there’s the pair of geese. Food for the grave-robbers? Security geese? (There really is such a thing as a security-llama.) Their role is obscure, perhaps they’re just local color.

And the heroes? This pair is a Doctor and Nurse team who like to smooch. Their cat makes a quick cameo, mainly to sink claws into his chest. They think nothing of it until a corpse is brought in, all messed up in the chest and throat. Reports of other attacks start popping up. And what brand of cat food do they use?

There are a couple of guys who are not in a pair, a hit-man who is helping the cat food company transition to a new mix of products, and a mystery fellow who seems to be taking a lot of notes while people walk by him.

The plot holes? Maybe it was the result of the TV cutting process, but at one point the husband grave-robber is garroted by the hit-man, yet five minutes later he’s being shot. Sadly, the security geese seemed confused and uncertain of the action to take after the wife grave robber went galloping by, hotly pursued by, well, that would be giving away the plot.

And then the dialogue, oh my. It ranged from dully predictable to laughable. Maybe the latter was on purpose. For example, the Doctor calls the Food Adulteration Agency for information on some cat food they submitted for analysis, and the answer? “Nothing adulterous here.” And then when the Doctor and Nurse encounter the deaf-mute and try to speak to her, she taps her ear, and the Doctor says “Oh, she’s a mute, she can’t understand a thing we say.”

Well.

Eventually, Nurse ends up on the conveyor belt leading to the grinding machinery, half-naked, and is heroically rescued by the guy with the notebook (ol’ Doc is nursing his wounds). There, wrecked the ending for you.

Sadly, there are not enough laughs to justify watching this clunker.

Pamela Wible has written an important and fascinating article for WaPo on the phenomenon of doctor suicide. Not doctor-assisted suicide, but doctors committing suicide:

The response was huge: So many distressed doctors (and medical students) wrote and phoned me. Soon I was running a de facto international suicide hotline from my home. To date, I’ve spoken to thousands of suicidal doctors; published a book of their suicide letters; attended more funerals; interviewed hundreds of surviving physicians, families and friends. I’ve spent nearly every waking moment over the past five years on a personal quest for the truth of “why.” Guilt, bullying, exhaustion are big factors. Here are some of the things I’ve discovered while compiling my list and talking to so many people: …

Lots of doctors kill themselves in hospitals. They jump from hospital windows or rooftops. They shoot or stab themselves in hospital parking lots. They’re found hanging in hospital chapels. Physicians often choose to die in a place where they’ve been emotionally invested and wounded.

If our society is going to continue to depend on medicine, then we need to take a closer look at how we conduct the medical business because we currently have a shortfall in many specialties. Do we train doctors properly? What stops people from becoming doctors? I know those in charge of training claim the harsh training produces doctors to be depended on – but what about the wastage of those who wash out? Is this really the best way?

Having read the article, at least some of it suggests that the normal human emotional operating procedures – a phrase I use with specificity – may be the cause of many of these suicides. With that in mind, I wonder how  hard it would be to use people without those standard emotional responses as doctors.

Not being a psychologist, I don’t know if sociopath would be the right word for what I am thinking. But not caring that deeply for your patients might be a survival lifeline for doctors.

Or maybe Artificial Intelligence is the way to go here.

I was reading about the collapse of British firm Carillion on CNN/Money, a firm that started out in construction, but now …

The company also builds infrastructure for high speed rail and power distribution projects, and provides government services such as road maintenance and hospital management.

Merely interested transformed to fascinated by this bit:

“It has been more than surprising, possibly even negligent, that the U.K. government continued to dish out contracts to Carillion even though their future has looked uncertain for some time,” said Fiona Cincotta, a senior market analyst at City Index. “[This] is a costly mistake that the U.K. government can ill afford.”

As if the government turning a profit is top of her mind, perhaps. But here’s the thing: a wise government should not be limited to a single source of supply. As an example, in the past the United States War Department (later DoD) carefully spread its spending between many suppliers when it possibly could, for a couple of reasons, including the importance of not having a single source go under, and because competition is a good thing: It improves services and reduces costs, assuming it’s well-managed (not an easy thing in itself sometimes).

So when a government awards a contract to a struggling firm that has done good work in the past, they are extending a lifeline to a firm that, if it recovers, will provide the government with a necessary buffer against the problems that come with single sources. Companies that supply government needs are often specialized, such as battleship makers, (military and science/technology suppliers, oh my, the whole institutional knowledge thing can be far more important than in private sector land.), so finding new sources is a problematic venture.

Compare that to a company signing a contract with another company to be supplied with something. If the supplier goes under, then the first company may have a claim on the remnants of the second – but possibly only after a costly, time-consuming court battle. So it makes sense for them to evaluate suppliers’ financial conditions, along with the usual, and cross a supplier off if its financial condtion, if knowable, renders it questionable. They may still want the comforts of competition among suppliers, but the resources of most companies do not compare to that of a major Western government.

So what took my attention was what may, and I emphasize may because the analyst’s quote is extremely limited, be a misapplication of sector wisdom. It’s always worth asking that question when someone, an analyst, comments on something that may be quite out of their expertise.

Of course, one day after not ruing using Twitter comes a story, told on Twitter, that tells how President Obama said goodbye to an assistant staff secretary leaving for a new job. Here’s the link to the tweets. I didn’t quite tear up, but I do like it. And it exemplifies how President Obama treats people. I’ll skip the compare and contrast.

Source: NY Daily News

It’s a reminder that there are stories and there are mediums for the stories. Some mediums are better for certain stories than for others. This was a quick, sentimental hit that happens to reveal how President Obama cares for people, from a quick goodbye and good luck to someone moving on. The medium needn’t be words, as the pic on the left demonstrates. We know he’s paying homage to another service member making the long, last trip to their hometown.

I still won’t use Twitter. It’s a ridiculous format, too many badly told stories, it’ll induce ADD. But the occasional dip on the advice of someone braver than I? Fine. In this case, WaPo provided some backstory, and here’s the link to that. But the Tweets are really enough.

Returning to progress on the hypothesis that increased prevalence of CO₂ in the atmosphere leads to the reduction of useful nutrients in food, Harvest Public Media (via NPR)  has a report on the possible impact it’s having on one of our favorite American foods – beef:

“Somewhere on the order of 50,000 cow pies got shipped to Texas for this study,” says [researcher Joe] Craine, who co-owns Boulder, Colorado-based Jonah Ventures.

What he’s found is a trend in the nutritional quality of grasses that grass-fed cattle (and young cattle destined for grain-heavy feedlots) are eating. Since the mid-90s, levels of crude protein in the plants, which cattle need to grow, have dropped by nearly 20 percent.

“If we were still back at the forage quality that we would’ve had 25 years ago, no less 100 years ago, our animals would be gaining a lot more weight,” Craine says.

Craine thinks part of the problem may be related to moving cattle to feedlots. When cattle are taken from the prairie, their manure, which delivers nutrients into the soil, is removed.

But he has a sneaking suspicion that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are contributing as well. Increased CO2 levels have been linked to fewer nutrients in plants like rice, wheat and potatoes.

And this may break public support for spewers of CO₂:

“Pretty soon you’re at the point where the protein concentrations are too low for too long a period for the animals to gain any weight,” Craine says.

Seeing as this is focused on grass-fed beef, which is only a small part of the total beef market, perhaps I hyperbolize when it comes to the impact on public attitudes towards CO₂ production. Still, it’s another chip from the boulder of public opinion – and beef is important to the American psyche.

And that’s not nearly as important as the question of the overall impact of increased CO₂ on our food system. If it’s causing us to pack on the pounds, increase diabetes, stress our overloaded health system – well, I suppose the deniers can encompass those topics as well. But the basic fact that CO₂ levels are rising is undeniable – it’s just a matter of measurement – and then the argument is whether the plants are actually changing their nutritional content due to the change in gas composition of our atmosphere.

I wonder which institution is out front with a set of greenhouses, each with an unique gas composition in which CO₂ is varied, and getting ready to measure the nutritional value of each crop grown? Probably no one, but I predict that as more of these results come in, someone’s going to sit down and do it. And then we’ll see more studies on how just such changes to the food supply affect our health.

And then the frantic denials and stony-faced pursuit of profits will be just like the nightmarish tobacco industry dishonorable debacle.

BTW, just how IS that CO₂ measurement from Mauna Loa doing? Hmmmmm. Looks like it’s still tooling right along – upwards trend.

We’ve talked about team politics before, wherein loyalty to Party suppresses your own good sense; it’s part of the larger phenomenon of tribalism. This has at least a couple of results, such as the ascension of the incompetents up the ladder to high office, and the attempted removal of those who might actually try to exercise their good sense in service to party and/or nation. The latter is happening now in Alabama, as Politico is reporting:

Alabama GOP Sen. Richard Shelby is confronting a fierce backlash from conservatives over his refusal to support Roy Moore in last month’s special election — with Moore backers pushing a censure resolution and robocall campaign targeting the powerful lawmaker.

Moore’s supporters are furious with Shelby over his remark days before the Dec. 12 election that he “couldn’t vote for Roy Moore,” a controversial former state judge who was facing allegations of child molestation. Instead, Shelby said he would write in the name of another unnamed Republican.

Moore’s backers say the comments from the 83-year-old dean of Alabama’s congressional delegation effectively delivered the election to Democrat Doug Jones, and now they’re fighting back.

This week, three Moore supporters submitted a resolution to the Alabama Republican Party executive committee calling for Shelby to be censured. It argues that Shelby “publicly encouraged Republicans and all voters to write in a candidate instead of voting for the Republican Candidate Judge Roy Moore,” and that his “public speech was then used by the Democrat Candidate in robocalls to sway voters to not vote for Judge Roy Moore.”

The move came after a pro-Moore outside group, Courageous Conservatives PAC, ran robocalls last month describing Shelby as a turncoat and calling on him to resign.

“Sen. Richard Shelby stabbed President Trump and conservatives in the back,” said one of the calls, which urged listeners to call his office and complain. “Tell Shelby you’ll never forget his disloyalty to President Trump and the Republican Party for his treasonous actions. Tell Shelby he’s betrayed his trust to Alabamians and he should resign his office. Call now.”

While one might immediately suspect the GOP tribal motives of the attackers, those last two paragraphs really puts their nasty little motives into focus, doesn’t it? A senior GOP, no, THE senior Alabama GOP member, a man who should, and did, express a leadership opinion in unequivocal terms, and rather than respect his opinion and, perhaps, offer a rebuttal, the Moore supporters choose the tribal option – off with his head!

Because they – and their deeply flawed candidate, who’d wreck the United States if he could have his druthers – think they’re smarter than a man whose spent years in politics.

I think we’re going to be seeing shit like this for years to come from the GOP, as it perceives its problems being insufficient loyalty, rather than inferior candidates. Quite literally, in point of fact, the Party really has little chance to generate superior candidates, because that requires admitting that the candidates who’ve the charisma, or the boot-licking abilities, to climb the ladder are, in fact, inferior – and when it’s always team politics, that’s a hard thing to do. No one will vote against someone on “your” team.

And it may be one of those self-reinforcing trends, because as more and more members decide they can’t stomach a candidate, say so publicly, and get run out of the Party, it will face more and more failures – and will blame it on the failure to be loyal to the Party, and thus respond with more and more loyalty requirements, which will result in more inferior candidates, blah blah blah.

But this may take a while – a few years, at least. And they’ll never really figure it out, because for a while team politics was quite successful, even if the resultant GOP-controlled Congresses have been unimpressive – or even disgraceful. But as candidates get worse and worse, the process will go, and in the person of Moore and Trump is already beginning to go, from positive to negative.

Ever been curious about the procedure for choosing the occupant of seat of the Supreme Leader of Iran? AL Monitor has a leaked video for which they’ve provided some description and translation:

A newly released video has shown the process in which a body of 74 clerics elected then-President Ali Khamenei to the highest position in the decade-old Islamic Republic, a position he has held for nearly three decades. While parts of the video from the June 4, 1989, Assembly of Experts meeting have been seen before by Iranian viewers, the entire, complete version not only shows the intricacies of the election process but offers new information that was not public knowledge.

The video begins with a discussion about whether or not the assembly should elect a single individual to replace Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic who had died the day before at age 86, or whether the assembly should elect a governing council of three to five individuals. Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who chaired the meeting, calls for a vote on whether there will be an individual election or council.

This is where one of the lesser-known facts comes out of this meeting. The election, according to Rafsanjani, was to be a temporary one until the necessary constitutional changes could be made. Someone from the floor asks that the temporary nature of the election not be made known to the public and Rafsanjani agrees. By standing, 45 members of the assembly vote in favor of holding an election for an individual.

And were those Constitutional changes ever made? Khamenei remains the soul occupant of the top level of the Iranian political hierarchy.

Ordure:

1. : excrement
2. : something that is morally degrading [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in this 9 Chickweed Lane comic strip.

I’ve never had an account on Twitter, and only read a few tweets over the years, so I missed out on this little bit of political maneuvering:

And this week, rumors spread of the impending publication of an essay by Katie Roiphe in Harper’s magazine that might take a similarly skeptical tack. Some believed that Roiphe might even hold the instigator of the legendary Shitty Media Men list accountable, and that this person might thereby be subjected to online abuse. And so a Twitter campaign was launched, in a backlash-backlash, to preemptively stop the publication of an essay no one had actually read. One Twitter activist, Nicole Cliffe, went further: “If you have a piece in the hopper over at @Harpers, ask your editor if the Roiphe piece is happening. If it is, I will pay you cash for what you’d lose by yanking it.” This strikes me as a new development for the social-justice left: They now believe in suppressing free speech — even before they know its content! It also strikes me as ominous for journalism as a whole. When journalists themselves wage campaigns to suppress the writing of other journalists, and intend to destroy a magazine for not toeing their ideological line, you can see how free speech truly is on the line. Why not simplify this and publish a blacklist of writers whose work, based on previous ideological transgressions, cannot and should not be published?

Pretty quickly, others on Left Twitter offered money for other authors to pull their pieces from the issue — and a few writers said they had agreed to do so. Cliffe was admirably blunt about her intent: “If I have my druthers, the March issue of Harper’s will consist of a now-toothless 200-word piece on the list that doesn’t name anyone and a long meditation from the editor on raw water.” Then this Twitter threat: “If Katie Roiphe actually publishes that article she can consider her career over.” Meanwhile the very people who were up in arms about possible online harassment of the list organizers, went online to call Roiphe “pro-rape,” “human scum,” “a ghoul,” a “bitch,” “the definition of basura,” a “bag of garbage,” and “a misogynistic bottom-feeder.” That’s another thing with ideological fanatics: Irony tends to elude them.

And then the final twist Wednesday night: One Moira Donegan outed herself as the creator of the list, and wrote a long essay defending herself.

The essay is, to my mind, eloquent, beautifully written, even moving at times, but baffling. I read it waiting for the moment when she took responsibility for what she did, or apologized to the innocent people she concedes may have been slandered. But it never came. It’s worth recalling here exactly what she and others did. They created an online forum in which anonymous people could make accusations about men whose careers and reputations would potentially be destroyed as a consequence. There was absolutely no attempt to separate out what was true or untrue, what was substantiated and what was not. “Please never name an accuser” she advised upfront in the document. And then: “[P]lease don’t remove highlights or names.” No second thoughts allowed. The doc openly concedes its grave claims should be “taken with a grain of salt.” In her essay, Donegan actually cites this as exonerating evidence, as if reckless disregard for the truth were a positive virtue for a journalist, and not actually a definition of libel.

Just trying to write about it is like hugging a porcupine at this point, really, because if you write something that offends someone else, pop!, they plunk you on a list that requires no proof, just simple allegations, and your career is over – if only temporarily. Why temporarily? Right now we’re caught up in righteous ideological zeal, fed on justified outrage, but short on references to open society norms. But as that wave of zeal builds greater and greater, those who are holding it up will start to get gobbled up themselves, much like Leon Trotsky taking an ax in the head on the orders of a fellow Communist. Imagine yourself filled with excitement over this lovely list – until your husband, or your father, or your brother, or even a mother, sister, lover appears on the list.

A list to be taken with a grain of salt.

And you think it’s unjustified. Sure, brother John flirted, but why is he on the list?

So someday – hopefully soon – this list will fall into disrepute. Donegan will probably find a tough professional life ahead of her, but hopefully the rest will be more or less forgiven. Because that’s one of the things we do.

Andrew goes on to call it all McCarthyism, which is no doubt accurate, but makes me sad for all the folks with the surname McCarthy; we need a word, shorn of personal epithet, that conveys the horror of the error of trampling the norms and rules of an open society that have been developed through such toil, something perhaps a little short of the religious term blasphemy.

And it should denote someone who has temporarily forgotten the injustice that can spring from trampling those norms, even if you do so in the name of remedying an injustice. Because it’s not the hallmark of a stable system. No reference to truth, to reality? Sounds like superstition to me. Rancid, deadly superstition.