Monthly Archives: February 2018

Otherwise, it’s God Sneeze on me, and that’s disturbing.

And one without the flash, just for fun.

And not from tonight, either, but the previous storm.

According to Lizzie Wade in “How To Survive Climate Change,” an unfortunately offline article in Archaeology (March/April 2018), the Moche were a South American empire in which the leadership depended on their communications and propitiation of the gods

Then climate change came in the form of droughts.

The Moche began to falter. Cities turned away from traditional Moche rituals and architecture, and new ceramic styles sprang up, [archaeologist Michele Koons at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science] says. By the time El Purgatorio [a city located in what is now Peru] was built, around A.D. 700, after about 150 years of climate chaos, the Moche had definitively lost their grip within the southern part of their territory, which had once extended to just north of the Casma Valley. “If you have a government that is built on claiming to have control over what seem to be supernatural events, climate change can lead to real political instability, [Clemson University archaeologist Melissa] Vogel says. People start to say, ‘You’re  not doing your job. You told us you could take care of us.

Vogel thinks the people living in the Casma Valley saw the need to do things differently. “They’re taking their lives back,” she says.^[1]

They were succeeded by the Casma in Peru, who were less interested in the gods.

That really rings a bell for me. A substantial chunk of the United States, in denying that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, has effectively withdrawn from science. Where will they go? Religion, of course.

I wonder how long before a major American city is substantially affected by climate change. Will the deniers apologize? No. I foresee your big ol’ religious revival, instead, where they’ll try to pray away the problem.

And that’ll be a heckuva mess.

¹Typos almost certainly mine.

From WaPo:

The moment he saw the brilliant light captured by his camera, “it all clicked” for Victor Buso: All the times his parents woke him before sunrise to gaze at the stars, all the energy he had poured into constructing an observatory atop his home, all the hours he had spent trying to parse meaning from the dim glow of distant suns.

“In many moments you search and ask yourself, why do I do this?” Buso said via email. This was why: Buso, a self-taught astronomer, had just witnessed the surge of light at the birth of a supernova — something no other human, not even a professional scientist, had seen.

Alone on his rooftop, the star-strewn sky arced above him, the rest of the world sleeping below, Buso began to jump for joy.

His discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, is a landmark for astronomy. Buso’s images are the first to capture the brief “shock breakout” phase of a supernova, when a wave of energy rolls from a star’s core to its exterior just before the star explodes. Computer models had suggested the existence of this phase, but no one had witnessed it.

Great story, worth reading in full. And it serves as a reminder that science is not an occult occupation, only open to those who skilled in divine prognostications, but is a vocation open to all who study and work hard – and get a little bit lucky. Our protagonist here is not a scientist – he’s a locksmith who built himself an observatory! A devoted amateur, his name goes down in the history books.

I was fascinated to read that some folks who suffer from epilepsy can be trained to think themselves out of the seizures, as NewScientist (10 February 2018, paywall) reports:

SOME people with epilepsy can be trained to boost their mental alertness to avoid having a seizure. The technique may work by strengthening nerve pathways that can damp down overactive parts of the brain.

Epileptic seizures happen when brain cells become too excitable and start firing out of control. This sometimes starts in just a small region – most often one of the temporal lobes, at the side of the head – and then spreads.

Medicines can keep epilepsy under control, but they don’t work in around a third of cases. This has prompted interest in psychological approaches such as yoga or mindfulness training to control or alleviate the condition – not least because it can be exacerbated by stress.

Several studies have suggested that seizures can be reduced by a form of biofeedback training: techniques that give people information about their body, such as their blood pressure, to help them try to control it. But the use of such training in medicine is controversial, with some suspecting it works mainly through a placebo effect.

It’s fascinating, both from a functional perspective and from the placebo-effect perspective – and, for that matter, it deals another blow to the mind-brain dualism theory (is that dead yet?).

Because scans of the brain indicate it changes in response to the training, it suggests that the physical matter of the brain is influenced by how it is used, much as our muscles grow or become flabby depending on whether or not we exercise, and do it properly. This, in turn, suggests such an undeniable link between mind and body to render the entire theory that the two are distinct as so much rubbish.

And the ever mysterious placebo effect, how does it play into this? I’m not sure. One must assume the placebo effect is some change rendered by the brain to the rest of the body, whether palliative or curative, but I don’t think I, or anyone else, has ever really understood just how it works. And now we’re essentially discussing a treatment of the brain, which in turn may be using the attention it is receiving to modify the body, of which the brain is a part. It sounds like a feedback loop in some ways, but just how that might play into this entire scenario, physically and ethically, is not in the least clear to me.

And the right wing extremists are suddenly getting a vivid example of what happens when the arguments of the leaders become ludicrous:

Two major airlines. A cybersecurity firm. Six car rental brands. A home security company. An Omaha bank. Companies have scrambled to cut ties with the National Rifle Association over the past couple of days, and the list continued to grow into the weekend.

Delta Air Lines (DAL) announced Saturday morning that it’s ending discounted rates for NRA members. “We will be requesting that the NRA remove our information from their website,” the company said in a tweet.

United Airlines (UAL) followed a short time later, saying the company will no longer offer discounts on flights to the NRA annual meeting. [CNN]

I think we can predict the communications at the NRA‘s annual meeting – UAL has been taken over by the liberals. Or far, far worse from the NRA leadership. I mean, it’s a bit of an awkward mouthful to say that about a major corporation, but they’ll try.

And this will become a test for the membership of the NRA. It’s helpful to remember that, once upon a time, the NRA was not an extremist organization. It was instrumental in organizing gun classes. This Steven Rosenfeld article on AlterNet is congruent with my memories over my lifetime:

For nearly a century after, its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association was among America’s foremost pro-gun control organizations. It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against government—if not armed insurrection—emerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.

In the years since, an NRA that once encouraged better markmanship and reasonable gun control laws gave way to an advocacy organization and political force that saw more guns as the answer to society’s worst violence, whether arming commercial airline pilots after 9/11 or teachers after the Newtown [massacre], while opposing new restrictions on gun usage.

No doubt the NRA leadership will be gnashing its teeth at the NRA annual meeting. UAL has been taken over by the liberals! This from an NRA leadership that has been scrabbling for traction as its now-traditional bugaboos of a liberal take-away of firearms has gone by the wayside, and they’ve become even more unhinged as they try to … what?

Keep their membership from escaping the far-right echo chamber.

This is the problem for LaPierre, the NRA CEO, and his gang: they have no influence without the NRA membership and its money. Membership figures are not released, last I checked, so it’s unknown whether the membership continues, as a whole, to be shrinking or growing. But from here on the outside, it’s become clear that the NRA has been a speedboat running madly to the right wing, spewing out fear of the liberals and their gun-grabbing ways, as well as criminals.

And this is the test of the membership – are they still willing to stick with 2nd Amendment absolutists who really think their gun rights come from God? You don’t have to be an atheist to realize that LaPierre is desperately trying to remove the entire topic of gun rights and reasonable gun control from the venue of public discourse and into the venue of the Word Of God – and thus set them in stone.

In other words, he hasn’t a leg to stand on, but he doesn’t want to admit to it.

In the echo chamber, all communications with the outside world is carefully labeled as unreliable, and because only the word of the leaders of the echo chamber are to be trusted and funded, the wealth of the flock may be skimmed off from time to time with a predictability quite useful to the NRA leadership. But if the flock starts to leave the echo chamber?

If the flock begins to question the wisdom of absolutism? I’ve discussed this recently, but it bears repeating: The United States is the Land of Limited Rights. You can’t yell Fire! in a theater unless there’s really a fire. Similarly, rights that can impair other rights must also be limited. Go read it.

Since the NRA leadership has demonstrated a fanatical belief in the centrality of the 2nd Amendment to American life, the membership needs to start thinking about just how far they’re willing to stray from the American mainstream for a flawed ideology.

And the corporations cutting ties with the NRA? They’re not organizations tainted by the liberals. They are hard-headed pillars of the community who have come to realize that the NRA has gone off the rails, and they’re making financially-based decisions. Not just to preserve their customers’ loyalty, but to preserve the stability of the very society on which they depend for their very existence. If society becomes a warzone, these companies won’t see profits like they do today – they might not even exist.

The NRA membership shouldn’t be worrying about the Hand of God appearing in the sky, clutching a Glock. They should be looking at all those airliners up there, a reminder that a sane society is thataway.

Time to change the leadership. It’s a bit like changing a diaper. Has to happen or the baby dies in extremely bad ways.

Did your favorite mouse just suffer a stroke and now you think you have to put him down? Maybe not, reports NewScientist (10 February 2018, paywall) – maybe you can repair him with a pair of scissors:

RECOVERY from a stroke is unpredictable and can take months. But blocking off some functions of the brain can help it rewire itself to work around the damage, according to research in mice.

Jin-Moo Lee of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his team have found that when they trim the whiskers of mice, these animals can recover from strokes more quickly, and show a greater improvement.

“It’s the first study to demonstrate that we can make certain parts of the brain more receptive to rewiring,” says Lee. “We have the ability to actually accelerate and improve recovery.”

In their experiment, Lee and his team triggered strokes in the mice in part of their brains responsible for processing sensations felt in their right forepaws. The team then cut the whiskers of half the mice, and kept them short for eight weeks.

They found that mice with trimmed whiskers recovered within five weeks: by this time, the animals were fully using their right forepaw again. The mice with untrimmed whiskers took seven weeks to reach their peak recovery level, and never regained full use of their forepaws.

Wow!

I had not realized that anti-NRA sentiment was rising so fast, as this mail from Color of Change demonstrates:

Chubb, the world’s largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company has cut ties with the NRA! 

This decision comes one month after Color Of Change partnered with Sybrina Fulton, Mother of Trayvon Martin, and Guns Down to launch our #MurderInsurance campaign demanding Chubb and Lockton Inc. to stop doing business as usual with the NRA’s Carry Guard insurance program. Chubb executives announced their divorce from the NRA in the wake of the tragic high school shooting in Parkland, Florida where 17 children were killed and hundreds more were traumatized.

I suspect it was more than moral outrage, as turning the United States into a virtual war zone would have negative consequences for most insurance companies. Still, kudos to Chubb for sending a message to the NRA – and its own clients.

Michael Veltri discusses the physical fighting skills of President Vladimir Putin in the context of an offer of combat from Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare:

Wittes’s premise is that Putin’s martial arts prowess is largely a matter of propaganda and public relations imaging. As he writes,

Martial arts videos of Putin litter the Internet. So do shirtless images. He tangles with endangered species and supposedly wrestles bears. But for all his displays of the crudest forms of masculinity, Putin only fights people who are in his power, whom he can have arrested, whose lives he can ruin. And I think they’re all taking falls for him. In fact, they’re not really fighting him at all.

Though his Lawfare post is limited in its claims about Putin, Wittes has not always been careful in his descriptions. In at least one social medial post, he called Putin a “fraud”—an idea that then got picked up in the Washington Post in a story about the challenge.

I’ll leave to others the task of evaluating Wittes’s political point about Putin’s use of martial arts for propaganda purposes. For present purposes, let’s focus on gaming out the fight. How would Wittes fair in a fight with Vlad?

Some interesting videos are interspersed, making the point that Putin was once a full-blown KGB agent. Veltri finishes with this:

If I thought Wittes were actually serious, I would urge him—as I do anyone contemplating a fight—to avoid it. I would urge Wittes instead to continue wrestling bears at the National Zoo shirtless from time to time instead.

Does shirtless imply a certain extra dose of manliness?

I thought this was an innovative approach, if a trifle chancy, to identifying ancient animal populations. NewScientist (10 February 2018, paywall) reports:

Art carved into rock by prehistoric people can tell us a lot about the places they lived. Now rock engravings in north-west Saudi Arabia suggest that the region was once home to a host of unexpected animals. …

To find out, Maria Guagnin at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues studied rock art at Jubbah and Shuwaymis, a joint UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The team examined more than 1400 rock engraving panels, some dating back to 8000 BC. The pictures contain around 6600 depictions of wildlife. The team could identify the exact species shown.

Some of the art showed animals that have never been seen in the local archaeological record. For example, antelope called lesser kudu appeared in the engravings, given away by their distinctive spiral horns. Before now, there was little evidence that they ever left Africa.

Of course, this is, in a way, a secondary source – to be viewed with some skepticism by the wise scholar. But I like it! And it suggests that another current-desert was once quite a different landscape.

In case you’re wondering what you can do about the NRA, CNBC has a report that might interest you:

Car rental company Enterprise and First National Bank of Omaha have severed their relationship with the National Rifle Association.

First National Bank of Omaha said Thursdsay it will not renew a contract to issue its NRA-branded Visa credit card.

“Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA,” a bank spokesperson told CNBC. “As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card.”

If you’re aware of an NRA promotional scheme with one of organizations you do business with, complaining about it can bring results. Pick up the phone and call!

Angie Schmitt on StreetsBlog USA laments the mistakes of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority:

Nobody gets thrown in jail for not paying a highway toll or a parking meter. But for some reason people who break transit fare rules are subject to criminal penalties.

In Washington, DC, jumping a turnstile is punishable by a fine of up to $300 and up to 10 days in jail. A bill in the City Council would make these penalties much less severe, treating fare evasion as a civil violation instead of a crime. It has majority support in the council, but WMATA is resisting.

Now the push for decriminalization in DC is gaining momentum, reports Eve Zhurbinskiy at Greater Greater Washington. The Save Our System Coalition — composed of transit unions, the local Black Lives Matter chapter, and other activists — is drawing attention to the use of excessive force and racial profiling by police enforcing transit fares. …

In the end, WMATA isn’t even helping its own bottom line, because obsessing over strict fare enforcement slows down service and repels would-be riders. Transit experts recommend implementing convenient, proof-of-payment fare collection methods that speed up service, with non-punitive inspection systems. Make the fare system work better for riders, and more people will ride — and pay fares.

Smashing your riders’ teeth when they forget their fare cards, on the other hand, isn’t a good way to encourage people to use your service.

Transit systems don’t exist to directly make money. They exist, at least in part^[1], to reduce traffic congestion throughout their service area by reducing the number of cars traversing those roads. While it makes sense to require some sort of payment in order to bring in some revenue, that revenue (and profits) is not the purpose, and to try to find a way to make people value their system enough to care for it and pay for it, coercion isn’t the answer.

My suggestion would be to decriminalize the anti-social behavior, as Angie suggests, and then post prominent signs that say:

Yeccch!

If you see someone cheating your transit system, don’t report them to us. Point at them and start chanting ‘Cheater, Cheater, Parasite, go stick it where the Lampreys bite!’

OK, so perhaps that’s a bit obscure. Public shaming, though, has a long history of efficacy (and fun!), and this would be the gentle way of doing it.

¹Other goals would include reducing highway construction, which brings with it increased ecological benefits.

In the wake of the Parkland massacre the usual arguments from the left, and the usual arguments from the right, but magnified, have continued, with President Trump leading with the suggestion of adding more guns to the fray. I addressed some of this following the heart-breaking Las Vegas massacre in which a man in a tower began shooting into a crowd attending a concert.

But it’s worth exploring Trump’s assertions, because while they might seem somewhat reasonable on first glance, upon reflection they’re really full of holes. Basically, he wants to give guns to some 20% of teachers in each school, and he’s focused our attention on his strawman, some “sicko” “cowardly”. And then they’ll be scared away.

But what about escalation? I’m actually thinking of two kinds here.

First, there’s our gunman. He’s gone out and bought himself body armor. This is going to be a problem for our heroic teachers, because body armor commonly covers the torso, and in gun training your best target area is the torso. Head and hand shots are discouraged.

So do we expect the teachers to also wear body armor while teaching? Really?

But that’s not even a salient question! (It’s an example of grasping the conversation and turning it where I wanted it to go, if only briefly.) Because the typical pistol a teacher will carry cannot breach the body armor.

They’ll need something heavier (this is my second escalation). And so the clamor begins for heavier weapons. Because that’s all the 2nd Amendment absolutists know. Soon we’ll be talking about personal possession of heavier weapons, no matter how SCOTUS has ruled on such mischief before. Schools could become sights of true warfare, small personal tanks waiting for assaults from troubled people who just happen to have the right to buy their own personal tanks.

Or heavily armed drones, for that matter. Is all this acceptable to American parents?

But let’s go back to that phrase I used, “2nd Amendment absolutists.” The key word is absolutist, someone who thinks they have an absolute and unlimited right to own guns. But we’re not a country of absolute rights, because such a country cannot exist. An absolute right of one person must necessarily impair the rights of another, as I’ve discussed before, and in a country where we’re all equal before the law, this cannot exist.

The argument used by the absolutists is that through the presence of more guns, the violence, otherwise known as impairment of rights, will actually lessen. But their arguments are weak and being disproven by reality. While I think Steve Benen’s argument that some people will freeze in a combat situation is not as convincing as other arguments, it’s still worth a look. As I noted after the Las Vegas shooting, the real problem comes in thinking that a gun balances a gun. Well, no. As any trained military tactician will tell you, the element of surprise is far more important. Catch a defender taking a whiz in the loo with his gun leaning against the wall, and all he’s capable of doing is crapping his pants, while your sicko, cowardly gunman shoots him in the nuts.

That’s why the pro-gunners’ arguments are shallow. They don’t understand the nature of the combat they’re going to engender.

Look, no one needs an AR-15 to protect their home. It endangers anyone in the house, along with the neighbors, when you start plugging away at some home invader. If you feel endangered, get a handgun. Or, better yet, start working to improve conditions for the local kids. Figure out how to create jobs so folks who can’t find jobs can have some. Or improve their education.

We don’t need the Land of the Free to become the Land of Continuous Warfare.

Kevin Drum remarks on President Trump’s big skill:

Hossam Dirar of Egypt is considered to be a significant artist, and I thought it interesting that his latest project seems to be, well, going back in time:

“I took European Orientalist artists’ paintings, which I duplicated as black and white photos, and then I painted over them using acrylic paints and inks,” Dirar told Al-Monitor. “I used collage techniques on some of the works.” [AL Monitor]

On his website he has a page dedicated to Le Cairo 1801. Here’s a sample.

A desire to take ownership over the images of the French? Yearning for the Cairo of yestercentury? Just having fun? Check out his other work at the link above. For an overview, see the AL Monitor article, also above.

Scion:

a young member of a rich and famous family [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Ethics Committee Acknowledges Investigation of John Duncan Jr.”, RollCall:

The House Ethics Committee acknowledged Tuesday an investigation of Rep. John Duncan Jr, a scion of a Tennessee political dynasty who announced his retirement in July.

Duncan, a Republican, came under fire that month after reports that his campaign paid his son, John Duncan III, almost $300,000. In the five years since the younger Duncan pleaded guilty to a felony charge of official misconduct. Those payments were made in monthly installments of $6,000 recorded as salary expenses, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Possibly not young enough to qualify for use of the term if he has a grown child? In fact, the “scion” has been in office since 1965, according to RollCall. He’s more of a patriarch.

You distract the director while I climb out the window!

I hate it when a movie made as a high school project makes it onto the air, and I think that’s the origin of Teenage Zombies (1958). This is the story of a mysterious island off the coast where four kids stop to visit in their homemade speedboat. They find people, strange shambling people, being led about, and they make a run for their boat, but it’s missing! Back to the house, and after some clumsily barbed banter, her personal servant, Ivan, takes them prisoner and they’re locked up behind bars.

Turns out the mysterious woman is heading up a research laboratory in search of a drug which, when released into the atmosphere, will turn everyone into soul-less slaves. Who’s she working for? Well, her bosses show up, and it turns out an unnamed foreign power wants to knock the ol’ United States over.

But a couple of more kids show up in something that probably couldn’t even make the trip to the island, see that something’s going on, and return to the mainland to insist the sheriff take them with when he searches the island. Meanwhile, the two boys have picked the lock and are plotting how to escape, but the girls are still trapped.

In a rock-em-sock-em climax, we discover the sheriff is in cahoots – it explains all of his missing prisoners, we inconveniently learn later – but in a falling out, he gets the short end of the stick. Then the good guys defeat the bad guys and the Army gives them all medals.

Seriously.

Let’s see here. Bad dialogue, echoing sound, blurry cinematography, wooden acting, awful plot, no horror (except in the creation of this bomb), and then there was this ape that appeared at the end to take care of Ivan. I think that was the ape’s only role. Or was it a gorilla? And the fight scene just ground on and on. I think it was all just clumsy dancing.

Don’t waste your time on this third-rate junker.

It occurred to me as I watched the big crowds of high school kids marching in multiple states about the Parkland Massacre that they are … tomorrow’s voters. Has the Republican Party thought about that? I’m sure they have – but for some reason they seem to be beholden to the NRA, an NRA that is led by 2^nd Amendment absolutists.

Do they think those kids are just going to forget that their concerns about their own survival were shrugged off?

This is a moment the Republican Party should seize by putting forth substantive gun legislation. Instead, as many news outlets have noted, the Florida Legislature, controlled by the Republican Party, refused to debate an assault weapon ban, but chose to put forth the assertion that porn is a health hazard. It’s as if they stuck their heads in the sand and declared that The 1950s was a golden age and, by god, we’d better do what they would have – and that’s be worried about porn!

All in front of impressionable folks. I shan’t call them children, at least not the survivors from Parkland, for two reasons. First, they’ve had their childhoods ripped away, and, secondly and more importantly, they have demonstrated the will to change what needs to be changed. This is not a mob milling around mindlessly, these were folks aware that their leaders have let them down, and asking them to do better.

These are people on their way to being adults. They’re aware of the world around them, they’re paying attention to who would help them – and who’ll stand by and counsel them that wiser heads have determined the proper course.

They’ll remember that.

And they’ll remember who taunted them. Who called them “crisis actors.” Who seemed focused on discrediting their efforts, their selves – and the tragedy which has enveloped them.

They’ll remember that, too.

And behind all this is an NRA that is now under investigation by the FBI for possibly illegal financial ties to Russia. Now, I don’t really believe that the NRA has become a mouthpiece for Russian warfare, mostly because the NRA leadership has been around for quite a while now, and I don’t credit Russia’s leadership with the ability to carry out plans that stretch for decades.

But it’s interesting how it’s all coming together. Between stirring up divisions in American society when we should be coming together, putting forth ludicrous arguments that are still taken seriously, and leaving America with only one functioning political party, the Democrats, which much of the populace seems to distrust, the political scene in America is really messed up – and that’s just what Russia would like to see. There’s no proof of their involvement in the public messaging of the NRA, and probably lots of disproof out there.

But I can’t help but notice the congruence.

Just as I can’t help but wonder if the Republicans are in the final act of slow seppuku.

Kevin Drum tidily sums up the effects of partisanship – which I suppose he should keep in mind himself:

This is American conservatism in a nutshell. Goldberg despises Trump, but he despises Obama even more. The end result is pretzel-bending arguments about things like this that ignore every scrap of evidence about Trump and Russia. It’s fair to say that Vladimir Putin hasn’t gotten the breather he hoped for when Trump beat Hillary Clinton, but that’s only because Congress and public opinion have forced Trump to back off. And in any case, surely the fact that Putin was so hellbent on defeating Hillary in the first place is evidence enough of how difficult the Obama administration made his life?

And I do see this in conservative publications. This is the single best reason to read partisan-authored articles and listen to partisans of either side in arguments with substantial skepticism, wondering the whole time how they’re trying to twist your arguments.

As an independent, I have no problem pushing pins into partisans on either side who can’t really see the world around them. Their ideology is more comforting to them than reality, and that’s a recipe for disaster. The pin is a favor to them almost as much as it’s good for me to blow off steam.

Paul Muschick of The Morning Call is, uh, calling for reformation of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court (and other judges) selection process:

I hope Pennsylvania’s politically charged gerrymandering saga has an unintended side effect — encouraging us to reconsider how we select our state Supreme Court and other appellate judges.

Nearly all other states choose their supreme court justices based on their qualifications, through a merit selection process, instead of electing them off a partisan ballot. Forcing candidates to campaign and collect campaign donations can raise questions about political impartiality down the road when they hear cases such as the gerrymandering one.

The fact that four Democratic justices tossed out the state’s Republican-created Congressional district map alone was enough to raise questions about partisanship. The justices’ failure to issue their full opinion in a timely manner, and then to draw a new map themselves when the state Constitution says that’s the Legislature’s job, make it even harder to avoid the appearance of political motivations.

It’s a fair cop, given that judicial candidates are running in partisan races. But I can’t say I like his proposed replacement, which would consist of an initial selection via a complex committee to a list, from which the governor would then select. After an initial four year term, there would be retention election for 10 year terms.

Thus, the pressure of elections is not removed, merely mildly attenuated.

Muschick grants that you’ll never get the politics out of judicial selection, but in order to minimize it, we should give the judges the independence from political and popular interference. While it’s important that judges have sufficient credentials at appointment, I’m even wondering if it’s necessary to mandate those credentials. After all, it’s the Executive’s responsibility to find excellent judges; isn’t it legislative interference to set standards? Isn’t it enough that the legislative branch can impeach and convict a judge for bad behavior or poor legal performance, reducing partisanship through some sort of super-majority requirement?

Still, a call for changing the direct election approach to selecting judges is encouraging.

Law Professor Chesney has a new phrase and an urgent warning about our shared computer future – it’s gonna suck. But didn’t we get this warning before? Here he is on Lawfare:

“We are truly fucked.” That was Motherboard’s spot-on reaction to deep fake sex videos (realistic-looking videos that swap a person’s face into sex scenes actually involving other people). And that sleazy application is just the tip of the iceberg. As Julian Sanchez tweeted, “The prospect of any Internet rando being able to swap anyone’s face into porn is incredibly creepy. But my first thought is that we have not even scratched the surface of how bad ‘fake news’ is going to get.” Indeed.

Recent events amply demonstrate that false claims—even preposterous ones—can be peddled with unprecedented success today thanks to a combination of social media ubiquity and virality, cognitive biases, filter bubbles, and group polarization. The resulting harms are significant for individuals, businesses, and democracy. Belated recognition of the problem has spurred a variety of efforts to address this most recent illustration of truth decay, and at first blush there seems to be reason for optimism. Alas, the problem may soon take a significant turn for the worse thanks to deep fakes.

Get used to hearing that phrase. It refers to digital manipulation of sound, images, or video to impersonate someone or make it appear that a person did something—and to do so in a manner that is increasingly realistic, to the point that the unaided observer cannot detect the fake. Think of it as a destructive variation of the Turing test: imitation designed to mislead and deceive rather than to emulate and iterate.

Deep fakes. An example:

Fueled by artificial intelligence, digital impersonation is on the rise. Machine-learning algorithms (often neural networks) combined with facial-mapping software enable the cheap and easy fabrication of content that hijacks one’s identity—voice, face, body. Deep fake technology inserts individuals’ faces into videos without their permission. The result is “believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did.”

Maybe we’ll soon be seeing film of Ted Cruz father assassinating JFK – like candidate-Trump once claimed. Or, for that matter, Obama assassinating JFK – keeping in mind he was all of 2 years old.

Or maybe it’ll be your face captured by security cameras during that midnight bank robbery. You end up in jail for five years.

Removing the technology seems unlikely – the cat is out of the bag and sufficient computing power and necessary algorithms are already available. Unless we’re willing to give up computers, or at least this kind of processing, which I think unlikely in the extreme, we’re facing a new sort of society, one in which constant tracking and recording may be necessary simply to protect one’s privacy – one of those apparent contradictions fraught with peril.

Chesney seems to indicate there are no technologies available for detecting this sort of fraudulent behavior:

Unfortunately, it is not clear that the defense is keeping pace for now. An arms race to fortify the technology is on, but Dartmouth professor Hany Farid, the pioneer of PhotoDNA (a technology that identifies and blocks child pornography), warns: “We’re decades away from having forensic technology that … [could] conclusively tell a real from a fake. If you really want to fool the system you will start building into the deepfake ways to break the forensic system.” This suggests the need for an increase—perhaps a vast increase—in the resources being devoted to the development of such technologies.

The only thought I’d have on the subject is that we need to detect a change to a recording between its initial creation and the viewing of it. Quantum encrypted communications depends on quantum entanglement to detect when communications has been compromised. I don’t imagine it’s really practical, but if an initial recording could be linked to something such that the disturbance of the recording broke the link, that might make it possible to detect forgeries. Perhaps some clever physicist could push that thought along.

And that previous warning? Wag The Dog (1997), where we actually see how the public could be manipulated using computer-generated images.

From one Democratic organization or another yesterday:

Breaking news from Kentucky: Democrat Linda Belcher just won the reddest district we’ve flipped since Trump was elected!

Kentucky’s 49th House District gave Donald Trump a colossal 72% of the vote in 2016, but Linda just turned it blue, winning the support of more than 68% of voters.

According to Ballotpedia, in 2016 President Trump won Kentucky 62.5% – 32.7%, a 2-1 victory over Clinton. But it’s also worth noting that the same day Trump won Kentucky, the local Republican candidate for the seat just won by Ms Belcher, the late Dan Johnson, only won by roughly a single point.

A swing from 49.5% to 68+% is quite significant. However, the late Mr. Johnson had been accused of a drunken sexual assault just prior to his suicide, and this may have motivated the GOP voters in the district to stay home, especially if the GOP special election candidate was unpopular or unknown. Additionally, yesterday’s winner is a known quantity to the local voters, having held the seat twice before, and lost it twice before. It appears to be a competitive district at the state level.

So it’s hard to judge the significance of this Democratic victory, although the victory gap (68 – 31) does make it tempting to see this not boding well for the Republicans. That’s a much larger gap than this district usually would have. I’d draw a graph but I’m out of time.

I’m a little worried by this report concerning former close allies Egypt and Turkey from Ahmed Aleem in AL Monitor:

Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid warned in an official statement Feb. 7 against contesting the agreement on the demarcation of the maritime border between Egypt and Cyprus. He also warned against infringing on Egypt’s sovereign rights in the delimited area, asserting that any attempt to do so was unacceptable and would be rejected.

The Egyptian position came in response to statements by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in an interview Feb. 4 with the Greek daily Kathimerini. Cavusoglu described as “null and void” the agreement signed between Egypt and Cyprus in December 2013 on the joint exploitation of hydrocarbon reserves on the median line between the two countries’ respective exclusive economic zones (EEZ) in the eastern Mediterranean. “We have clearly stated that the agreement violates Turkey’s continental shelf,” he noted.

Turkey’s President Erdogan has transformed from a democratically elected leader into a strongman following the failed coup of a few years ago in Turkey. Strongmen take power because a large enough percentage of the populace initially wants a strongman, although this may not be true after power has been achieved. And what keeps a strongman going?

Being strong.

Egypt has clearly told him to take his marbles elsewhere, as he regards the removal of former Egyptian President Morsi to be illicit, to Egypt’s current government’s irritation. What will Erdogan do when Egypt disregards his protest? He can’t really afford to look weak to his supporters.

I hope there’s no war over this.

I’ve been fascinated by the story of the Pennsylvania gerrymandering case because it has the potential for major consequences in the next election, and the State Supreme Court appears to have little patience for putting this off too long. The GOP initially threatened to impeach the judges, but the State Supreme Court just keeps rolling along. The Philadelphia Inquirer has the latest information on it – namely, that the court issued a map of the district boundaries, and the Republicans are furious:

National Republicans say state and federal GOP officials plan to challenge Pennsylvania’s new congressional map in federal court as early as Wednesday.

“The suit will highlight the state Supreme Court’s rushed decision that created chaos, confusion, and unnecessary expense in the 2018 election cycle,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Matt Gorman said in a statement Tuesday morning. He said state and federal Republicans will sue in federal court “as soon as tomorrow to prevent the new partisan map from taking effect.”

You can find the map at the above link. And while the Republicans may be waving their stick about, history suggests it’s a little stick:

[Senate President Pro Tempore] Scarnati and [House Speaker] Turzai have tried unsuccessfully before to convince federal courts to intervene in the gerrymandering case, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and stay the order just days after the state Supreme Court overturned the congressional district map. That request was denied by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who did not refer the matter to the full court, as is often done, noted Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

“If you’re a Republican defending a map and you can’t even get Justice Alito to refer the thing to the whole court, that’s a pretty weak challenge,” he said Monday, saying he could not think of a challenge that would be successful.

While SCOTUS is looking at the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, this may be a signal that it doesn’t want to see more of these cases – or that it expects the Wisconsin decision to be decisive.

It must be particularly discouraging that Alito turned them down earlier without even requesting the rest of the court to look at the appeal. Perhaps five Justices have made it particularly clear that gerrymandering won’t be tolerated with a big decision in the Wisconsin case. Will this second appeal be more successful? Or are the Republicans just wasting money frantically defending the indefensible?

I’m looking forward to the response to their second appeal. It’ll tell us a lot about the future of gerrymandering by either party – and maybe we’ll also find out how SCOTUS hopes to measure the injustice of gerrymandering as well as remedy it, a topic I touched briefly on earlier.

On Lawfare Timothy Edgar compares and contrasts the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency with a previous indictment of Chinese PLA (Army) officers for hacking into U.S. companies for purposes of stealing intellectual property, an indictment of which Edgar approved in both theory and handling by the Obama Administration:

The Chinese ultimately decided to forgo issuing retaliatory indictments in favor of diplomacy.  No one went to jail, but the U.S. indictments worked: China and the United States eventually agreed that neither side would “conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property.”

But there are two big differences that will make such a happy outcome much more difficult in the case of the Russian hackers.  First, the issue of interference in the U.S. presidential election of 2016 is more significant than theft of intellectual property by Chinese hackers.  Russia’s interference implicates both U.S. sovereignty and ideals that are at the core of American identity.  The fact that the Russian campaign was directed against such vital national security interests weighs in favor of a very tough response by the United States.

Second—and more problematic, from the U.S. point of view—is that the United States is on weaker ground when it comes to international norms in this case than it was in the case of the Chinese hackers. In the latter instance, the Obama administration argued that the theft of intellectual property is distinct from the work of the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.  Articulating this principle put the U.S. on a firm footing in discussions with the Chinese.  It helped that President Obama had issued Presidential Policy Directive 28 just months before the indictment of the Chinese hackers, which explicitly banned corporate espionage by the U.S. intelligence community.

Much like my evaluation of the recent indictments, Edgar doesn’t see it as a threat so much as a discussion starting point:

But the indictment does serve a useful purpose.  It sends a warning—not to Putin, but to Americans.  The U.S. government can’t control what Putin does by issuing indictments. But Americans can—and must—do a whole lot more to defend ourselves against foreign interference in our elections.  We can start by 1) encrypting our communications and data; 2) securing our election infrastructure; and 3) working with social media companies to combat “fake news” by exposing state-sponsored trolls. This threat is not going away any time soon.

And yet, here’s how I think this should really work out.

1. The President sends a diplomatic note to the Russians requesting immediate extradition.
2. The Russians reply with a suitably snarky No.
3. The sunny reply to that is, We’re pleased you have agreed to our request, and the entire United States 5th Fleet will be coming to the port of Vladivostok in order to place them under arrest. Your cooperation will be appreciated. We’ll send in an LST for the actual pickup.

Sure, it’s lurid and ridiculous. It also amuses me greatly. And you just know Theodore Roosevelt would have done it.