Monthly Archives: January 2018

Psammophorous:

SOME plants have an odd defensive tactic against insects. It seems they use sand grains as abrasive armour that damages the insects’ teeth.

These “psammophorous” plants have sticky surfaces to which sand adheres. This sand was suspected to be involved in protecting against herbivorous insects, but this was only tested in 2016. Eric LoPresti of the University of California, Davis, showed that plants with sand coats are eaten less. LoPresti and his colleagues have now examined why. [“Plants use sand armour to break teeth of attacking caterpillars,” NewScientist (6 January 2018)]

I didn’t actually find psammophorous defined anywhere.

I don’t want to do a sequel, either.

Disney is a major motion picture studio, which means they bring major talent, skills, and technology to every movie they make. This makes their release of the movie John Carter (2012) all the more puzzling. We can see the skills and technology in every scene, whether it’s a natural scene on Earth, or a 90% CGI scene on Mars, because they look authentic, they look consistent, and quite often they look magnificent.

But, as so often is true, the problem appears to be the story. Now, it’s true that the original Martian series does not contain fascinating plots. The series survived on exotic locales and species, but it was not hard to spot the hero of the story, and we always knew the hero would not only survive, but be practically unscathed.

But John Carter is only very loosely based on A Princess Of Mars, the first novel of the series, as it claims in the credits. It’s true that Carter is a Confederate calvaryman, looking for gold in the antebellum Southwest, and stumbles across a way to jump between planets, if more violently than in the novel. Once across, he’s captured by the Tharks, four-armed creatures with rifles and swords. But then the tale swerves, featuring the ambulatory, predatory city Zodanga that has wiped out nearly all the opposition on Mars, with the exception of city of Helium. Zodanga’s leader is aided by therns, mysterious humanoids of magical technology.

And this is part of the problem: they’re not well enough defined that we can understand their limits. They have transporter technology, personal appearance shields, frightening weapons, and a mythology on Mars that makes them into the unbeatable. In order to appreciate Carter’s strategies, we need to know what they can and cannot do. And why are the therns fairly stupid? The therns are on Earth as well as Mars – why didn’t they realize that an Earthman would physically stronger than a Martian? Yet we see Carter breaking iron chains with his bare hands – going to Mars makes you stronger? Really??

The story moves along at a sprightly clip, which has the unfortunate effect of skipping over important character development. For example, there’s this creature I’ll call a super-dog that is fanatically attached to Carter. Why? Well, it was kicked a couple of times at a party, and Carter stops it by starting a fight. But the fight actually makes the audience overlook that entire motivation, and thus the super-dog’s loyalty, which is an important plot mechanism, seems unexplained. By comparison, in the novel the dog is badly hurt protecting some Tharks from the local wildlife, but the Tharks are about to savagely kill it when Carter intervenes and saves its life, forcing the Tharks to heal it. (It’s also too much of a super-dog, even though it may be my favorite character in the movie.) Doesn’t that seem a bit stronger of a motivation, even for a dog?

And why is it wrong for a Thark to know which other Thark is your biological parent, or a child of your’s?

It’s a pity. The CGI is beautiful, the airships of the Martians alien yet attractive, there are several strong female characters, the dialog is not awful, and occasionally becomes clever. But some characters are wasted, such as the leader of Helium, who comes across strongly in his one big scene, not to mention his Admiral, Kantos Kan, who engineers the rescue of Carter from the Zodangans by pretending to be kidnapped, a maneuver pulled off with true panache. I must admit I wished the movie was about Kan rather than Carter.

And I don’t usually mention casting in my reviews, but the lead is played by Taylor Kitsch, and I must admit I didn’t like him. Part of it is the awful hair, part of it is that he always seems confused and a little behind everyone else – which is understandable in an alien environment, but I increasingly found it frustrating.

In the end, despite a big investment the movie was a flop. It can be fun to watch, but don’t come out of it with that feeling that your life has been changed. There are just too many questions and plot holes.

Most of us remember this part of a poem from our school days:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!^[1]

Commonly associated with the Statue of Liberty, she who welcomed many a desperate family from abroad over the years, it’s quite a contrast to the scrapingly (right along my nerves) worldly view of Pastor Robert Jeffress of megachurch First Baptist Dallas, justifying the views of President Donald “shithole” Trump, as reported by WaPo:

Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, a prominent Southern Baptist church, said that while he would not have used the same language Trump did, he agrees with the president’s perspective.

“What a lot of people miss is, America is not a church where everyone should be welcomed regardless of race and background,” Jeffress said. “I’m glad Trump understands the difference between a church and country. I support his views 100 percent, even though as a pastor I can’t use that language.”

The United States, Jeffress said, has every right to restrict immigration according to whatever criteria it establishes, including race or other qualifications. “The country has the right to establish what would benefit our nation the most,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything racist about it at all.”

America is not obligated to accept people based on need, such as the case with refugees, he said. “I wouldn’t let the language obscure the point he’s making: Why would we allow people who will not benefit our country?” Jeffress said. “We have the right to screen [refugees] based on the economic benefit they might bring, and we can establish the criteria we want to use.”

For a country that was founded on a notion of freedom, fought a ruinous Civil War on that notion of freedom, received and celebrated the Statue of Liberty on that notion of freedom, and invited in refugees on that notion of liberty – all implemented in various flawed manners, of course – it seems the height of hypocrisy to deny that notion of freedom in immigration now. And, worse, from a pastor of religious tradition which, at least in its most basic traditions^[2], has been the champion of those least powerful in the world, the leper, the poor, the downtrodden, the refugee, to hear his tongue wrap around that most antithetical to his tradition is shocking and appalling.

I guess his addiction to power has led him down different paths.

For the interested, Steve Benen notes how the White House evangelical advisory council has, for the most part, clung to their positions of influence. That it exists in the first place seems inappropriate to me; that they cling despite the shitstorm through which they’re flying is appalling and speaks to their addiction to prestige and influence.

¹Today I learned something new: the poem we hear about in school is part of a larger poem by Emma Lazarus. From How Tall Is The Statue Of Liberty:

New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

²In the interests of full disclosure, I am an agnostic, and have been my entire life. Nevertheless, it doesn’t require an initiate to discern the basic principles of the sect.

Which doesn’t sound all that great, but here’s an analogous approach involving a cancer afflicting the Tasmanian Devil, who have been miserably decimated (or, my Arts Editor would point out, far worse than decimated, since decimated merely means losing a tenth) by this cancer. In the following, MHC refers to a set of proteins on a cell’s surface which identifies it as “being from here,” but neurological cells often hide these, at least in the Devils, and these fatal cancers are thought to be from the neurological system. From NewScientist (6 January 2018, paywall):

[Gregory Woods at the University of Tasmania] was recently tinkering with the vaccine when he discovered something quite remarkable. He grew tumour cells in a liquid spiked with cytokines, which are molecules that turn on a cell’s MHC labels. Then he injected the cells into afflicted devils. Over time, their tumours began to shrink and, in some cases, disappeared completely. “It’s a bit odd, treating cancer with cancer,” says Woods. Still, he can’t argue with the striking results.

It’s fascinating. It suggests that the injected cells are telling the cancerous cells to turn on their MHCs, and then the immune system exterminates them. There may not be much application of this particular bit of knowledge, but it’s still fascinating.

Unless a new MHC could be forcibly attached to cancer cells.

Perhaps NewScientist’s Feedback column (6 January 2018) has foreseen the capstone of the energy problem of Bitcoin:

If this trend continues, it won’t be long before someone tries to build a Dyson sphere, enveloping the entire sun, to power the trade in cryptocurrencies. Which perhaps explains why we haven’t heard from any Kardashev type 2 civilisations yet – they are all busy mining bitcoin.

The dedication of the entire civilization to the discovery – or validation – of a currency. I’m sort of boggling at this right now.

Farrago:

A confused mixture.
‘a farrago of fact and myth about Abraham Lincoln’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in a cartoon for NewScientist (23 December 2017), which does not appear to be available online.

Steve Benen’s mention of a report that President Trump may have slept with a porn star leaves me flat:

… the Wall Street Journal  reports this afternoon on a curious alleged payment during the 2016 campaign season.

A lawyer for President Donald Trump arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult-film star a month before the 2016 election as part of an agreement that precluded her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

Michael Cohen, who spent nearly a decade as a top attorney at the Trump Organization, arranged payment to the woman, Stephanie Clifford, in October 2016 after her lawyer negotiated the nondisclosure agreement with Mr. Cohen, these people said.

Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, has privately alleged the encounter with Mr. Trump took place after they met at a July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, these people said. Mr. Trump married Melania Trump in 2005.

The reporting has been met with several specific kinds of denials.

And … so what? We know his base doesn’t care if he sleeps around. They’re so deeply in his thrall that they’ll excuse most anything he does that isn’t obvious betrayal of the United States. Sexual hijinks? That may even be seen as a positive, because, for them, leadership means breaking the rules.

So don’t expect anything out of this story.

In a different fantasy, Trump apologist Marc Thiessen has published a column in WaPo that describes Trump’s public meeting concerning immigration as a complete success that has destroyed Trump’s critics and let’s him get on his way to success. No, I’m not kidding:

This week, two incredible events unfolded before our eyes: American television viewers were invited into the White House Cabinet Room, where for nearly an hour they watched as President Trump effectively led a bipartisan meeting in which he and congressional Democrats made real progress on immigration reform.

And it snowed in the Sahara Desert.

The reason for the Saharan snow was a rare blast of arctic air sweeping across Algeria. The reason for the rare public display of presidential leadership was the release of a new book by New York media gossip columnist Michael Wolff that portrays Trump as mentally unfit to be president. Wolff describes Trump as being like a child who “could not really converse . . . not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.” In just 55 minutes, Trump completely discredited Wolff’s thesis.

This would be the same meeting where other observers noted that Trump managed to get so far afield that his GOP minions had to drag him back to their position. I saw a part of that meeting, and Trump sounded excited, confused, passive-aggressive, and made promises that I wouldn’t trust in the least.

I don’t know what Thiessen thinks he saw, but then I recall when Sarah Palin burst on the national scene and how most of the conservative punditry committed a coordinated swoon at her feet. They should have been ashamed. She came across as a lunatic. After the election, she abruptly quit her job as Governor of Alaska, so discrediting herself – and the swooners.

And I’m quite sure she still has supporters, completely confused as to how to evaluate politicians in a sane manner. Just like Marc.

Any ideas what this might be?

Incredible, isn’t it? It’s recent picture from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter. Here’s another shot:

Both are color-enhanced, of course.

In The New York Times, David Brooks thinks the Trump Administration is improving:

Third, the White House is getting more professional. Imagine if Trump didn’t tweet. The craziness of the past weeks would be out of the way, and we’d see a White House that is briskly pursuing its goals: the shift in our Pakistan policy, the shift in our offshore drilling policy, the fruition of our ISIS policy, the nomination for judgeships and the formation of policies on infrastructure, DACA, North Korea and trade.

It’s almost as if there are two White Houses. There’s the Potemkin White House, which we tend to focus on: Trump berserk in front of the TV, the lawyers working the Russian investigation and the press operation. Then there is the Invisible White House that you never hear about, which is getting more effective at managing around the distracted boss.

To my eye, that first sentence is completely disconnected from the rest of those two paragraphs. Imagine if Trump didn’t tweet. Why? Trump’s Tweets are now an officially sanctioned line of communication, and so a suggestion that we just ignore them is to only look at the part of the Administration that does what you desire, without acknowledging everything else. This is not high journalism, it’s low-brow selective vision.

And Joe Scarborough in WaPo is not in the least happy with Brooks’ comments:

Brooks’s column was met with effusive praise across the Never Trump community, even as the moderate Republican suggested a sort of detente in return for the favorable conservative policies being produced by the Trump White House. The columnist approvingly cited reports that behind the scenes Trump is a well-informed and affable leader who knows how to run a good meeting. Brooks even makes the breathtaking claim that “the White House is getting more professional.”

I find myself at a rare loss for words. Let’s simply review Trump’s actions over the three days since Brooks’s column was published.

The president once again advocated making it easier for politicians like him to sue columnists such as Brooks. Such a move would do immeasurable harm to our First Amendment free-speech guarantees.

Trump also pressured Republicans to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation and politicize the rule of law. This autocratic partisan plea to subvert Robert S. Mueller III’s work comes after the former FBI director has already secured convictions of Trump’s national security adviser and a top foreign policy expert, along with indictments of his former campaign manager and another key campaign operative.

If you only look at the good trees, you’re not going to see the diseased trees that signal ongoing disaster. But let me use language that any good conservative should recognize:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. [Benjamin Franklin]

Or, for those of Brooks’ ilk, the aphorism might go:

Those who would give up a little honor for a few goals will have, nor deserve, either.

Of all the subjects that interest me, and thus I write about, water is undoubtedly the most basic. Today I note a report on MSN.com concerning Cape Town, South Africa:

t’s the height of summer in Cape Town, and the southwesternmost region of South Africa is gripped by a catastrophic water shortage. Unless the city adopts widespread rationing, the government says, the taps “will be turned off” on April 22, 2018, because there will be no more water to deliver.

This would make Cape Town the first major city in the world to run out of water, according to Anthony Turton, a professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in South Africa, who spoke to the New York Times. “It’s not an impending crisis—we’re deep, deep, deep in crisis.” The shortage is the result of a multi-year drought.

The city is asking residents to restrict their water use to 87 liters per person per day. That’s roughly the equivalent of a four-minute shower using a regular shower head, or an eight-minute shower using a low-flow shower head.

Cape Town’s water system isn’t built to withstand a multi-year drought (nor are any city’s water system), which are expected to occur “perhaps as rarely as once in a millennium,” according to a group of professors from the University of Cape Town.

This particular drought won’t last forever. But according to climate models, it is likely part of a trend for the Western Cape of South Africa, where climate change is expected to bring lower chances of wet years and higher chances of dry years as the century progresses, according to Piotr Wolski, a hydrologist with the Climate Systems Analysis Group. Water rationing may soon become the norm for the city of 4 million.

I expect, if we haven’t already, we’ll soon see migrations out of Cape Town until it reaches a sustainable level of inhabitants. The rest? I don’t know, but if there’s not enough water, they either have to fight over it – or move.

The climate change debate has so far been a lot of denial, followed by a lot of finger pointing. But the result is all about the human carrying capacity of planet Earth. Will it go up, effectively making us less overpopulated? A few folks point out that the higher CO₂ concentration must surely be better for plant growth. However, if those plants merely have more carbohydrates, then the argument fails from the human perspective.

But for most of us, I think without preventative action, current anchors of human existence – Miami, Tokyo, New York City – may start to shake in ways we’ve only seen when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were subjected to the atom bomb. Predictability, a key factor in human prosperity, will begin to disappear.

And that will surely lower the human carrying capacity of the planet.

For political observers, the special election for the Pennsylvania 12th district is March 13th has become important in that it’s a traditionally Republican district, considered safe,, and pits State Representative Rick Saccone (R), a Ph.D. (PoliSci) characterized as an ally of President Trump, against youthful former Marine and attorney Conor Lamb. Politico notes that Trump’s White House, no doubt stung by the Alabama debacle, wants to reverse the momentum in this typically conservative-leaning district:

After a humiliating loss in the Alabama Senate race last month, the administration is drawing up ambitious plans that will kick off next Thursday when Trump travels to the conservative district to appear with Republican candidate Rick Saccone. Vice President Mike Pence and an assortment of Cabinet officials are also expected to make trips; Pence may go twice ahead of the March 13 special election, two administration officials said.

The White House has taken an especially keen interest in the race: Members of Trump’s political affairs office met with Saccone this week. And during a Tuesday conference call between the Republican national party committees and the Saccone campaign, White House political director Bill Stepien expressed displeasure with the progress the candidate was making on fundraising. Stepien said Saccone wasn’t raising enough money and asked for an update on the campaign’s progress in the days to come.

That strikes me as some top-down directives. Does the local GOP machine not have it all under control? And what does the White House know about the local fight?

And what are these two candidates saying? Politico is admirably concise:

Saccone has presented himself as a staunch ally of the president, praising Trump for the job he’s done and vowing to help enact his policies. Lamb, meanwhile, has struck a delicate balance. While saying that he didn’t vote for Trump and pointing to his failure to pass an infrastructure bill, he has also praised the president for declaring the opioid epidemic, which has severely affected the district, a public health emergency.

In other words, Saccone is presenting as a right-wing extremist, while Lamb is reaching out to disaffected moderate conservatives, while hoping that the general liberal loathing for Lyin’ Trump will keep them on his side.

So how have things looked in the past? There’s no point in a chart because the former occupant of the seat, Tim Murphy (R), has not faced opposition since 2012, when he won with 64% of the vote. Mr. Murphy resigned in 2017 due to a sex scandal.

That said, it’s good to see the Democrats once again active in the district, because truth be told, the more a party dominates a district, the less likely the Representative is going to really be a quality leader. While driven people can improve in a vacuum, improvement is much more likely in the presence of competition, because it can become improve or die. Evaluating political performance is a very tricky thing to do, unfortunately, so this general observation does have its flaws. I happen to live in Representative Betty McCollum’s district, which is considered quite safe, and while I like her and think she probably does a good job, I do wish that McCollum faced some competition each cycle. But how well does McCollum perform? The metric? Votes on issues are a very popular measure, partly because it’s easy. How about leadership metrics?

Returning to my district, sure, there was a Republican’s name on the ballot the last couple of times – but I couldn’t tell you the name(s). Indeed, to be fair, I even talked briefly with one of them once. His language was strictly boilerplate, and if he thought that was up to snuff, he was deeply wrong.

An inactive party does not encourage the citizens to become active in the political world, and that is wrong. That the 18th district of Pennsylvania lacked a full slate of candidates was a sad mistake, I think. I hope their correction works out for them. The last thing the nation needs is another Republican YesMan.

If you’re wondering about that Fusion GPS Congressional testimony, but don’t have time to round it up and try to evaluate something outside of your experience? Greg Fallis is happy to help you out:

First, and most important, is this fact: the folks at Fusion GPS are professionals. I need to go off on a short tangent here. I spent seven years as private investigator specializing in criminal defense. From the title, people reasonably assume my job was to help accused criminals who are being prosecuted. In fact, my job was to gather facts and information and report my findings to the defense attorney. If that information supported the defendant, the attorney needed to know that; if it didn’t, the attorney needed to know that as well. I didn’t go out looking for information that would benefit the defendant or that would hurt the prosecution; I just looked for information that was accurate and credible. It didn’t matter to me if it helped or hurt the lawyer’s case. …

… Fusion hired Steele to do the sort of work Fusion doesn’t do. Most of what Fusion does is document-based. Following paper trails. Discovering relationships by delving into deep, obscure bureaucratic files and public records. That gives them solid, objective, unbiased information — a document says what it says. But the public record only takes you so far. It was also necessary to actually talk to people who dealt with Trump’s business dealings in Russia.

This is an entirely different sort of investigation. It’s less about accuracy of information than it is about the credibility of the informant. A document says what it says; people say all sorts of ridiculous shit for all sorts of ridiculous reasons. Documents can give you accurate information; people are capable of giving you very accurate misinformation, maybe by accident, maybe on purpose. This gets even more complicated when dealing with Russia and Russian agents, who are trained in actively providing disinformation.

This was Christopher Steele’s area of expertise — human intelligence. Determining who is credible and who isn’t, the degree to which the information is reliable, how much it can be trusted, what motives do people have to provide misleading information. Steele began talking to people, and what he learned alarmed him. The fact that Steele was alarmed was, in itself, alarming to Simpson.

Fallis comes at it from a liberal perspective, but, given his cited experience, he seems to be well-grounded for evaluating the information-gathering portion of the testimony. Take a peek and be enlightened.

In the realm of the trudge towards the deadly Bolo, I don’t know how often these armed drone encounters are happening, but this particular one, from WaPo, is interesting for a facet that had not occurred to me (being naturally a little slow):

A series of mysterious attacks against the main Russian military base in Syria, including one conducted by a swarm of armed miniature drones, has exposed Russia’s continued vulnerability in the country despite recent claims of victory by President Vladimir Putin.

The attacks have also spurred a flurry of questions over who may be responsible for what amounts to the biggest military challenge yet to Russia’s role in Syria, just when Moscow is seeking to wind its presence down.

In the most recent and unusual of the attacks, more than a dozen armed drones descended from an unknown location onto Russia’s vast Hmeimim air base in northwestern Latakia province, the headquarters of Russia’s military operations in Syria, and on the nearby Russian naval base at Tartus.

Russia said that it shot down seven of the 13 drones and used electronic countermeasures to safely bring down the other six. It said no serious damage was caused.

Anonymous attacks should have been obvious to me, but I’m not a military guy. So now Russia is under attack, but doesn’t know who to strike. Pick the wrong group and your prestige jogs down a point – and maybe you’ve just alienated a potential ally. If you don’t lash out, you look weak and passive. Interesting conundrum.

Compounding it is this:

The Russian Defense Ministry statement said the drones used in the Hmeimim attack came from between 50 and 100 kilometers away …

A rather sophisticated drone. Russia is pointing fingers at the United States as the supplier of the weaponry.

BTW, if you’re intrigued by Keith Laumer’s Bolo series but haven’t pursued it on the Web, here’s a Fandom site. Have at it.

Ever since Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) announced his retirement at the end of his current term, I’ve been slightly bugged by it. It wasn’t the implied hypocrisy, which comes from calling for a return to norms while still voting with Trump on hastily constructed legislation and judicial nominees; and I certainly won’t miss him because of that hypocrisy, although his opposition to the candidacy of Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate seat a few months ago, as well as criticizing Trump during his retirement speech, was memorable.

I knew the source of the irritation, but I hadn’t really felt like addressing it, although I had very briefly mentioned it in the previous post on this thread.

Then this announcement of someone running to replace him popped out:

On Tuesday, Arpaio announced he would seek the Arizona Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Jeff Flake. Arpaio enters a crowded Republican field and is likely to face a barrage of attacks from Democrats and civil rights groups, who are sure to note in campaign advertisements how the policing practices he championed have led to dozens of lawsuits. [Los Angeles Times]

A convicted felon, pardoned by President Trump, an arrogant scoundrel or bigot (whichever he prefers), thinks he can take that seat? And, yet, I’m not sure he’s the worst of the bunch. Ever heard of former Arizona State Senator Kelli Ward (R)? The moment Arizona Senator McCain announced his brain cancer diagnosis, she suggested that the Arizona governor should appoint herself to fill the term. Then, from her previous campaign against Senator McCain:

Yesterday on “The John Fredericks Show,” Arizona Republican state Sen. Kelli Ward, who is challenging Sen. John McCain in the state’s GOP primary, claimed that the American government has “armed ISIS” and used over $1 billion to train and provide resources to the extremist group. [Right Wing Watch]

So a right-wing extremist OR a power-hungry “I’ll say anything to get elected” type. Her choice.

But from Flake’s announcement of his retirement:

It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, and who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican party — the party that for so long has defined itself by belief in those things. It is also clear to me for the moment we have given in or given up on those core principles in favor of the more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment. To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess we have created are justified. But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy. [CNN]

And is it only the prospect of victory which justifies the fight, Senator Flake? Your party, your seat in Congress, is threatened with far-right extremists who espouse philosophies inimical to a healthy society. Extremists whose demonstrable wish is to bring down those non-partisan institutions of society, because their findings do not support the extremists’ positions. Extremists whose philosophies are based on theories of humanity long-rejected, with little to no theoretical support – except in the eyes of those whose view of humanity is tainted and not shared by the mainstream.

By stepping out of this fight, you give the reasonable, moderate conservative one less choice, and discourage them from your party. By leaving the high ground to the extremist, you cede any voice of moral authority. And by permitting yourself to be chased away by a President who is not, and never has been, moved by principle or common moral justification, but merely by personal pique and avarice, you tell those who might otherwise follow you that the best principle is to bow down to the bully, to crawl on your belly in response to a President who, frankly, deserves not the office he occupies.

Certainly, you might lose that fight in the primary. But by fighting in the best way possible, rather than the worst, you remind your Party in Arizona of how an honorable politician stands forth for his principles – by putting forth principles you think are good and just, and not descending to the ad hominem that currently is worn as a proud cloak by your extremist brethren.

And, hey, if Ms Ward chooses to accuse you of being an ISIS benefactor, it’s your chance to strike, and strike hard: laugh her out of the room, ridicule her out of the race. Tell her you wouldn’t dream of accusing her of the same, nor any opponent, because you’re better than her. Tell her she’s nothing more than a swamp-dwelling crocodile.

And let Arpaio sag his jaw to the ground, and creep away.

I generally try to find something interesting in every movie I watch, whether it’s a great movie or an awful movie. But the best I can say about Dr. Cyclops (1940) is that I really liked the radiation suit. It has a savory, in your face, Steampunk art flavor going for it. Its lack of expression is itself an implied menace. Delicious.

The rest of it? It’s formulaic. A mad doctor in a jungle somewhere sends for a couple of other scientists to help him identify something under a microscope, because his eyes have gone bad. They come, they identify, he thanks them and tries to send them away. Wounded professional pride makes them refuse his orders, and he traps them in his secret radiation chamber, fueled by radium he’s been mining. They wake up and find they’re about a foot tall (shades of Attack of The Puppet People!), but they courageously fight back against cats, dogs, caimans, and the crazed doctor himself, winning the day in the end.

The acting’s bad, the casting’s poor (it appears the mineralogist was just a tall 15 year old doing a bit of acting for bucks), the title is weak weak weak, the plot is fairly bad, even if there was a little morbid tension in trying to guess just how they were going to do in the evil scientist, and at one point they had the Latin American porter wearing what could only be described as a diaper. In fact, one time it’s a white diaper, another time it’s red. We saw a colorized version via the Svengoolie television show, and that wasn’t particularly good, except for the green flashes during the radiation scenes.

Avoid avoid avoid, this is just really dull. When it’s not grating, see said mineralogist. But the radiation suit could be on a poster.

President Trump campaigned, in part, by playing on the instinctual fears of the conservative base. You’d think that, regardless of how he plans to campaign in the future, he’d take steps to safeguard the nation in the future in honor of that campaign tactic. In this, though, you’d be committing the sin of thinking he’s an intellectually curious man who compulsively learns as much as he can about each issue that comes up.

Instead, he sits around and watches Fox News.

Why do I bring this up? Because Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey are utterly outraged on Lawfare concerning the FISA vote. If you’ve never heard of FISA, it authorizes the surveillance of foreign nationals on foreign turf, and must be periodically reauthorized. It’s somewhat controversial for privacy advocates, but virtually everyone agrees it’s a critical tool for preventing national security catastrophes. So what happened when it came up for a reauthorization vote today?

When the history of President Donald Trump’s use of Twitter is written, there will be a stiff competition for his most destructive, most irresponsible tweet. A strong contender for that less-than-august honor came Thursday morning, when the president of the United States tweeted this:

“House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?

[I just copied the text of the tweet, because actual tweets don’t migrate easily into WordPress.]

For present purposes, the much more urgent matter is that the president here seemed to be at least implicitly opposing reauthorization of 702—and doing so on the day the House of Representatives is to vote on the matter and when the outcome of that vote is uncertain.

Let’s not mince words here: The lapse of Section 702 surveillance capabilities, even for a short time, would constitute a full-fledged national security emergency. The National Security Agency is on record as saying that “collection under FAA Section 702 is the most significant tool in the NSA collection arsenal for the detection, identification, and disruption of terrorist threats to the U.S. and around the world.”

And then even more interestingly:

Perhaps following an early-morning staff intervention, Trump seemed to recognize his error and tried to undo some of the damage, tweeting:

With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!

And then came this:

This is a sufficiently high legislative priority that the White House rushed out a Statement of Administration Policy late Wednesday night:

The Administration supports House passage of the House Amendment to S. 139, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 provides authorities to collect critical intelligence on terrorist organizations, weapons proliferators, and other foreign adversaries that is vital to keeping the Nation safe. Reauthorizing these authorities before they expire on January 19, 2018, in a manner that preserves their effectiveness, is a top priority of the Administration.

I’ve omitted the balance of the White House statement, as it’s not germane to the point I’ll be making. So why my remark about television? I’ve seen quite a few posts recently concerning Trump’s TV habits, and Benjamin and Susan also point at a specific correlation:

But the president’s tweet followed this clip that aired on “Fox & Friends”—which Trump is known to watch. This clip also ran this morning [clip omitted, I could not view it – Hue] …

In other words, President Trump tweeted lies against his own intelligence community in the course of signaling opposition to a legislative priority of his own administration on a crucial national security priority at an especially delicate moment in time. Then he tried to take it back.

Regardless of your opinion on FISA, the larger picture has to deeply concern every citizen, Trump supporter or not, because it’s increasingly clear that President Trump simply blows with the wind. This point is being made by many commentators, but it’s worth repeating over and over. He doesn’t get his information from the best intel operation in the world, or from academics who’ve studied these subjects for decades, or from anyone at all who might have some qualifications.

Instead, he consults one of the objectively worst news sources on the planet, Fox News, and pretends that it represents some sort of deep analysis.

This time it appears total disaster has been averted, if we’re to believe Benjamin and Susan. But what happens next time the President decides to pervert an important piece of legislation, or an Executive Order, or anything under his control – say, the reputation of the FBI – in order to further one of his personal paranoid fantasies – or in response to something he’s seen on Fox News?

I ask my conservative readers, how does this make any sense at all?

It’s depressing to realize that any of our representatives in Congress do not have a deep and nuanced understanding of how our government works. I mean, you’d expect them to sit down and study it – but, apparently they don’t. Here’s an example, from TPM a few days ago:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said Friday that President Donald Trump “has a legitimate right to say that he was betrayed” by Attorney General Jeff Sessions due to Sessions’ recusal from matters relating to Russia, which in turn led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.

“The American people, now, are getting a taste of what people in Washington have known over this last year, and that is Jeff Sessions betrays the people who have had faith in him,” Rohrabacher told CNN’s Ana Cabrera in an interview.

But AG Sessions’ loyalty is not to the President. His loyalty is explicitly to the country, and it is his duty to prosecute anyone who may break the law – including the President.

Rohrabacher should know this. It should be tattooed on his eyelids. The response shouldn’t have been, well, maybe this will doom Sessions. It should have been, Hey, that’s immaterial. Has he betrayed the country?

Because the country and the President are NOT indivisible.

If you’re wondering how expensive last year has been in terms of weather disasters, NOAA is on the case with a useful table:

Below is a historical table of U.S. Billion-dollar disaster events, summaries, report links and statistics for the 1980–2017 period of record. In 2017, there were 16 weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States. These events included 1 drought event, 2 flooding events, 1 freeze event, 8 severe storm events, 3 tropical cyclone events, and 1 wildfire event. Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 362 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted.

Thankfully, the death toll was relatively small, which can be attributed to scientific advances in weather forecasting, as well as responses to same. Melissa Breyer provides some context on Treehugger.com:

Last year, the US suffered an astounding $306 billion in damage, shattering all records to date.

2017 was definitely one for the books. If you felt like natural disasters in the United States were descending with unusual fury, you were correct. In fact, according to a new report by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, 2017 was the most expensive year on record for natural disasters in the country. From the parade of hurricanes and hailstorms to freezes and fires, the succession of calamities came with a price tag of $306 billion in damage.

While they adjust for inflation, the fact is that there’s more people, which makes the United States a bit more of a target rich environment for natural disasters.

Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog notes the latest in the North Carolina redistricting saga has been rejected 

In a case sure to be appealed to the United States Supreme Court,  three-judge federal court has has struck North Carolina’s congressional districting as a unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. One judge partially dissented on some grounds, but agreed with the other two judges that the redistricting plan violated the Equal Protection Clause. The Curt also fast tracked a remedy in the case, giving the state a deadline to pass the plan and appointing a special master in case, as expected, the NC General Assembly resists. …

The majority opinion by Judge Wynn is an unqualified victory for the plaintiffs, finding multiple grounds (including equal protection, the First Amendment, and the Elections Clause) for ruling that North Carolina’s plan is unconstitutional.

The result is not a big surprise given what North Carolina did here. After its earlier redistricting was declared a racial gerrymander, it came up with a new plan using only political data that it described as a partisan gerrymander on its own terms. It did this as a defense against a future racial gerrymandering claim. As the court explained at page 16, NC “Representative Lewis said that he “propose[d] that [the Committee] draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats because [he] d[id] not believe it[ would be] possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.”  If there’s any case that could be a partisan gerrymander, it’s this one.

The desperation would seem to be a clear signal that the North Carolina GOP realizes that its ideology has led to a popularity that is not where they’d like it to be. At this point, though, is there enough time for SCOTUS to come to a decision on the similar cases from Wisconsin and Maryland? Or has the North Carolina GOP managed to drag this out far enough that they’ll be able to keep their cozy jobs at the next election cycle?

An age-old tradition continues, as reported on HuffPo:

Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher with close ties to President Donald Trump, is calling on followers to send her donations of up to one month’s salary. Those who don’t pay up could face “consequences” from God as he demands the dough as a “first fruits” offering.

“The reason is God lays claim to all firsts,” White wrote on her website. “So when you keep for yourself something that belongs to God you are desecrating what is to be consecrated to God.”

In this case, the “firsts” are money, which “supernaturally unlocks amazing opportunity, blessing, favor and divine order for your life.”

Or, in other words, God can be bought. Nothing new here, folks, keep moving right along. You’ll find charlatans like her in every century, all the way back.

Matt O’Brien for WaPo‘s Wonkblog doesn’t seem to have much use for Bitcoin and, possibly, libertarians. Besides noting the energy consumption problem I noted here, he also sees another limitation:

The first thing they don’t understand is that money isn’t just a store of value. It’s also a medium of exchange, or what we use to buy things with. And if it’s going to be much of one, then it not only has to avoid losing too much value, but also gaining too much. Otherwise, why would you ever spend it? You wouldn’t. You’d just hold on to it as long as you could in case, like bitcoin, it went from being able to buy $900 worth of stuff one year to $19,000 the next. Which, if it ever did replace the dollar, would bring the economy to a halt while everyone stopped buying anything other than the essentials and waited to become bitcoin millionaires.

To stop that from happening, you’d need to be able to increase the supply of bitcoins as the demand for them did. This is more or less what is known as “printing money,” and, as is often the case, it can be either good or bad depending on whether it’s done appropriately or not. Do it too much and you can get the type of persistent inflation the U.S. had in the 1970s; way too much and the kind of currency-killing hyperinflation Germany had in the 1920s; but too little and the economy might fall into a doom loop like the whole world did in the 1930s. Bitcoin, though, is set up under the assumption that people — or, more accurately, governments — can never be trusted to do this, and that pretty much anything that reduces the value of a currency is by definition bad. That’s why its pseudonymous creator decided there would only ever be 21 million coins, even though that hard limit has meant prices have zoomed up and down and back up again as interest in bitcoin has itself. That’s made it the best penny stock and the worst currency in the world.

I wasn’t aware of the 21 million coin limitation. Yeah, as long as humanity predicates economies on expansion, a limited currency is doomed. Once that last coin is dispensed, the relative worth of each coin will inevitably increase as the economies expand (because each coin must represent some part of the economy), and once a substantial portion of the population realizes this, hoarding will start, depending on the external context. What does that mean? That means are there alternative currencies, such as … the American dollar? If so, then we’re going to see a boom and bust cycle as value slides back and forth between the two currencies, where value means transactions taking place. Does a bitcoin represent a pound of flour – or 10000 pounds? Well, it depends on whether someone wishes to use a bitcoin or a dollar.

And if there’s not an alternative, then people will hoard, but that’ll put the brakes on the economy, so then they’ll lose value. I think. Sounds like a roller-coaster.

Hey, I’m not an economist, but Matt’s article, which is worth perusing, makes me think I made the right decision not getting into Bitcoin for the long term. Right now it appears to be a short-term game of last one holding the coin loses.

AL Monitor covers the official reason for the recent protests in Iran. It’s … us!

In his first extensive comments on the recent protests in Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Jan. 9 pointed the finger at the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, saying they planned the unrest. …

On Jan. 2, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani stated in an interview that Saudi Arabia, Israel and a number of Western countries had plotted the unrest. The protests reportedly led to the arrest of thousands of people and the deaths of almost two dozen people, who, according to officials, were killed by “rioters.” Law enforcement officials have said that a large number of those who were arrested have been freed.

Keep in mind that the Supreme Leader represents the religious interests of Islam, which is to say they guarantee the rightness of the government as a whole.

Which logically brings us to “Our Islamic government can do no wrong, so these protests must be originate with evil outsiders!”

Notice how this absolute certainty of being right is echoed in our own GOP. They have engaged in the rudest of political maneuvers, and have written the most important bills in a slap-dash manner that would have embarrassed and infuriated leading members of both parties fifty years ago, but they’re so certain they’re right, because God is on their side.

The insanity they express is gob-smacking, just as is Khamenei’s. He can’t even consider blaming himself and his supporters, because that would fly in the face of God, and they can’t do that.

So, in each case, they ride the rollercoaster into the coastal shoals below, either to dash their brains out or drown in the surf. It’ll be McConnell, Ryan, Khamenei, and Trump, all in a pile.

And yet more religious fanatics will pile in. Because that’s how you get power. First, God. Then, charge! Avoid blame, take the credit, and relentlessly climb the mountain!

In China they’ve recently introduced the concept of social credit, which is an amalgamation of some of the things you think of as credit as well as other activities, such as giving to charity or failing to pay court fines – or having friends with low social credit scores. Mara Hvistendahl of Wired has a wide-ranging and fascinating report on it:

Ant Financial wasn’t the only entity keen on using data to measure people’s worth. Coincidentally or not, in 2014 the Chinese government announced it was developing what it called a system of “social credit.” In 2014, the State Council, China’s governing cabinet, publicly called for the establishment of a nationwide tracking system to rate the reputations of individuals, businesses, and even government officials. The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be trailed by a file compiling data from public and private sources by 2020, and for those files to be searchable by fingerprints and other biometric characteristics. The State Council calls it a “credit system that covers the whole society.”

For the Chinese Communist Party, social credit is an attempt at a softer, more invisible authoritarianism. The goal is to nudge people toward behaviors ranging from energy conservation to obedience to the Party. Samantha Hoffman, a consultant with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who is researching social credit, says that the government wants to preempt instability that might threaten the Party. “That’s why social credit ideally requires both coercive aspects and nicer aspects, like providing social services and solving real problems. It’s all under the same Orwellian umbrella.”

Thinking about this, it occurred to me that this is sort of an illustration of one key difference in the moral systems of China and the West. In the West, our moral system is religiously based and beyond the domain and abilities of the most governments to seriously affect it. In those cases where the moral system does change, at least in the United States, it has less to do with the government and more to do with popular debate and opinion. (In the past, monarchies sought the imprimatur of God, but that didn’t necessarily give them influence – only a good Army making the trip to Rome could do that. I suppose ol’ King Henry’s construction of the Anglican Church might apply, although the claim goes that he just wanted to marry someone else – which is an element of morality, now isn’t it?)

But China lacks any 3rd party moral system, if you will: it’s the domain of the Chinese government, and since the only legal occupant of the Chinese government is the Chinese Communist Party, they get to choose the moral system. I’m sure the great bulk of the moral system is akin to Western moral systems, but it’s around the edges that they can play.

And why is this? I am not aware of any religious group with a dominant position in Chinese society; Marx preached against any form of religion, and I do believe the Chinese followed right along in his footsteps. I found this bit interesting:

In China, anxiety about pianzi, or swindlers, runs deep. How do I know you’re not a pianzi? is a question people often ask when salespeople call on the phone or repairmen show up at the door. While my score likely didn’t put me in the ranks of pianzi, one promise of Zhima Credit was identifying those who were. Companies can buy risk assessments for users that detail whether they have paid their rent or utilities or appear on the court blacklist. For businesses, such products are billed as time-savers. On the site Tencent Video, I stumbled across an ad for Zhima Credit in which a businessman scrutinizes strangers as he rides the subway. “Everybody looks like a pianzi,” he despairs. His employees, trying to guard against shady customers, cover the office conference room walls with photos of lowlifes and criminals. But then—tada!—the boss discovers Zhima Credit, and all of their problems are solved. The staff celebrate by tearing the photos off the wall.

We don’t see this much anxiety, I hope.

And I feel no great enthusiasm for such a service in the United States. It feels like a hammer.

David Post of The Volokh Conspiracy has found the reply to Trump’s cease-and-desist letter to Henry Wolff, author of Fire and Fury, and his publisher, and has nicely edited it to bring out the parts which makes Trump’s lawyers look like idiots, which I will now shamelessly borrow:

Henry Holt & Co., through its lawyer (Eliz. McNamara at Davis Wright in NYC), has sent a response [available here] to Trump’s cease-and-desist letter. It’s a nicely-crafted letter, worth reading as a small reminder that excellent legal prose does not have to be incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo. Some highlights:

“[Y]ou demand that my clients cease publication of the book and issue a full and complete retraction and apology. My clients do not intend to cease publication, no such retraction will occur, and no apology is warranted.” [Note the Oxford comma after ‘occur’ – nice! It’s part of what makes the sentence sound downright Churchillian.]

“Though your letter provides a basic summary of New York libel law, tellingly, it stops short of identifying a single statement in the book that is factually false or defamatory.”

“[W]e note that you understandably cite to New York as the governing law, yet we were surprised to see that President Trump plans on asserting a claim for ‘false light invasion of privacy.’ As you are no doubt aware” – Ouch! – “New York does not recognize such a cause of action. Not only is tis [sic] claim meritless; it is non-existent. In any event, it is patentily [sic] ridiculous to claim that the privacy of the President of the United States has been violated by a book reporting on his campaign and his actions in office.” (emphasis in original)

Regarding Trump’s claim that Holt could be liable for “inducing” a breach of contract by Steve Bannon: “The law treats sources like Mr. Bannon as adults, and it is Mr. Bannon’s responsibility – not Henry Holt’s or Mr. Wolff’s – to honor any contractual obligations. Indeed, your attempt to use private contracts to act as a blanket restriction on members of the government speaking to the press is a perversion of contract law and a gross violation of the First Amendment.”

And finally, in regard to the seven pages of document -preservation instructions in Trump’s letter: “[My clients] will comply with any and all document preservation obligations the law imposes upon them. At the same time, we must remind you that President Trump, in his personal and governmental capacity, must comply with the same legal obligations regading himself, his family members, their businesses, the Trump campaign, and his administration, … including any and all documents pertaining to any of the matters about which the book reports.” That’s a nice turnabout.

Thank you, David. One of my best reads of the day. OK, so a lot of the rest was computer code…. it still made me laugh.