Monthly Archives: February 2018

Representative Devin Nunes (CA-R), chairman of the House Intel Committee and purveyor of various vacuous spectacles, appears to be indulging in another such, according to CBS News:

In a sign of increasing partisan hostilities, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee plan to construct a wall – a physical partition – separating Republican and Democratic staff members in the committee’s secure spaces, according to multiple committee sources. It’s expected to happen this spring.

For now, some Republican committee members deny knowing anything about it, while strongly suggesting the division is the brainchild of the committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes, R-California.

“I’m not part of that decision,” said Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas. “You’ve got to talk to Devin. I don’t know what they’re trying to do one way or the other.”

“I swear to God I didn’t know that,” said Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Florida, when asked about the plan. While acknowledging a wall might not be constructive for the committee’s work, he said, “The level of trust and the level of everything down there is – it’s poison. It’s absolute poison down there.”

Rooney said one reason for the tension is an erosion of trust, exacerbated by an ongoing ethics investigation into the “entire Republican staff,” including “the woman up front that answers the phone” for alleged leaks. He later added that the matter was being handled by the Office of Congressional Ethics.

After some thought, though, I suspect this could dovetail quite neatly with the supposedly small kerfuffle in which Trump ended up accusing the Democrats of being traitors for not clapping at his State of the Union address. Many pundits wrote it off as being light-hearted banter with the crowd – accusations of treason? – but that’s a bit hard to swallow.

So this might be the next step. Remember back when America agreed that we always show a united front to foreign adversaries? The House Intel Committee was considered to be part of that united front, and members of the committee made a special effort to drop partisanship when appointed to this prestigious, if somewhat secretive, committee. Partisanship should stop at the borders, or so the feeling went.

That went by the boards after the infamous letter to Iran by the GOP Senators.

But the reputation of the Committee still exists. Nunes’ move, assuming it’s a good report and it comes to fruition, is a signal useful to the GOP propaganda arm to say that the Democrats are not to be trusted, that they are traitors.

Given the recent clownish behavior of Nunes, this might catch the Democrats by surprise.

¹With apologies to Sondheim and Lapine, this is a misquote from Into The Woods. The actual quote:

When first I appear I seem mysterious, but when explained I’m nothing serious.

And now Steve Wynn , former RNC Finance Chairman, has stepped down as CEO of Wynn Resorts:

Billionaire casino magnate Steve Wynn stepped down as CEO of Wynn Resorts, the company said Tuesday.

Wynn, who has donated millions to the Republican Party, was accused of sexual misconduct by several people who have worked at his Las Vegas casinos, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal in late January. The article detailed a pattern of behavior that spans decades and included accusations by employees that they were coerced by him to perform sex acts.

“It is with a collective heavy heart that the board of directors of Wynn Resorts today accepted the resignation of our founder, CEO and friend Steve Wynn,” Boone Wayson, non-executive director of the board of directors, said in a statement. [NBC News]

Steve Benen asks:

This would ordinarily be the point at which the RNC announces that it’s giving up the money it received from Wynn, but that’s apparently not the case.

A Wall Street Journal reporter noted yesterday that an RNC spokesperson said Wynn stepping down as his company’s CEO “doesn’t change” the party’s position on keeping his contributions.

RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel recently said she’s willing to return the money – if an investigation launched by Wynn’s company finds compelling evidence of wrongdoing.

And, ya know, technically I can see McDaniel’s point. Wynn’s announcement simply noted that he felt he could no longer be effective, given the negative publicity.

But, as Benen points out, the Republican Governors Association (RGA) did return the money. That complicates matters.

This is looking more and more like the idolatry of money has taken deeply hold in some Republicans. Which, I suppose, is no surprise. But it takes money to run national campaigns, and that’s the RNC‘s business, not the RGA‘s. Given the low standing in which the current GOP Congressional members are held, it’s no surprise they’d prefer not to give up this billionaire’s money, because it’s going to take an avalanche of slick advertising to hold back this particular tide.

Perhaps the GOP should think about what they’re doing before putting their foot into it. I’m talking about such foolishness as trying to replace the ACA, the silly Nunes memo shit, and in fact all of the amateurism and incompetence on current exhibit in Congress.

Including their amateur President.

The wily plans of the oil companies – also known as survival plans – will have to contend with similar instincts from everyone else, and the latter are more aligned with the survival of current civilization rather than corporate survival. FTN News has a report on EuroStar, the company that runs the rail line between Paris and London via the Channel Tunnel:

Targeting a 50% reduction in plastics by 2020
Reducing waste is central to Eurostar’s Tread Lightly programme which is focused on minimising waste on board and identifying innovative alternatives to traditional packaging.  Over the next three years, Eurostar has committed to halving its consumption of plastics and usage of paper tickets.

This drive to remove plastics has been launched with the elimination of plastic straws onboard Eurostar trains and in its business lounges which is the first in a series of planned initiatives.

Sami Grover on Treehugger notes the short time allocated to this goal of 2020 being important, and this:

It’s also worth noting that achieving such goals is no longer pie-in-the-sky ambitious. The falling cost of renewables, electric vehicles and other such technologies means that companies that really set their minds to it can move very quickly towards sizable carbon savings. I’m willing to bet, also, that they’ll do pretty well out of it in terms of cost savings too.

And, I’d add, along with adding to the cessation of demand for plastics, adding to the demand for renewables and greener technologies will motivate the markets to provide them, and at cheaper costs. This should help sooth those who are outraged at the thought of Big Oil going away – most likely the elected government representatives Big Oil has bought, rather than the libertarian free marketers, who are a little more pure in their devotion to markets and capitalism.

I’ve talked in the past about how the RINO phenomenon in combination with the team politics concept would seem to lead to the inevitable transmutation of the GOP from a center-right political party to a far-right party embracing positions that can only hope to be described as eccentric – and are more likely to be most accurately described as fallacious and ridiculous. CNN has the story:

Rep. Lou Barletta, an immigration hardliner running in a crowded US Senate primary in Pennsylvania, came in contact over the years with fringe organizations and individuals with views far outside the mainstream of American politics, a CNN KFile review of his public appearances over the past decade reveals.

Prior to serving in Congress for the last seven years, Barletta was the mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where he enacted tough measures to crack down on illegal immigration, including an act that allowed the city to impose fines on landlords who rented to undocumented immigrants and deny permits to businesses who employed them (the ordinance was struck down in federal court).

So he’s solid right-winger? Not so fast.

As mayor, Barletta did an interview with a fringe publication that promotes Holocaust denial and headlined a rally where a political activist and musician who has questioned the Holocaust and promoted conspiracies about the September 11, 2001 attacks also spoke and performed. As a congressman, Barletta appeared on a panel put on by the controversial Youth for Western Civilization and spoke at an event hosted by a journal that pushes extreme anti-immigrant views.

Now he’s a Representative, and wants to be a Senator:

Barletta’s positions on immigration and his associations with some of the more extreme elements of the anti-illegal immigration movement will face intense scrutiny in the coming months, particularly if he wins the six-candidate GOP primary to face incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey. A race between the two would in part be a referendum on Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric in a state Trump won by a narrow margin.

Of course:

“Of course Lou was not aware of these individuals’ background,” a spokesperson for Barletta’s campaign said.

Wny not?

Food for thought. Under color of a political party that still pretends to be part of the American mainstream, some guy who talks to Holocaust-denial publications and either exhibits xenophobic tendencies or plays to those of his constituents is reaching for the stars. Makes me wonder how many current GOP Senators have the same tendencies.

Since I mentioned The Los Angeles Times just a short while ago, this news item caught my eye:

The owner of the Los Angeles Times has reached a deal to sell the paper to biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, bringing the paper back under local control for the first time in nearly two decades.

Tronc, the Chicago-based company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, will sell the Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the rest of its California News Group to Soon-Shiong for $500 million in cash, plus the assumption of $90 million in pension liabilities, the company announced Wednesday morning.

The $500 million price tag is twice what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post when he bought that paper in 2013, and more than seven times what Red Sox owner John Henry paid for the Boston Globe that same year. [CNN]

What this might bring for the Times remains to be seen. CNN adds a biographical note on the new owner:

The major question now is what the Soon-Shiong era will mean for the beleaguered paper. Known as “the world’s richest doctor,” Soon-Shiong is a controversial figure in the healthcare industry and on Wall Street. Shares of his biotech companies, NantHealth and NantKwest, have both fallen by more than 80% since he took them public. An initiative he launched to eradicate cancer by 2020 was described by STAT News as “an elaborate marketing tool” for his businesses. (Through a spokeswoman, Soon-Shiong responded to that story in two statements, saying the initiative had made “remarkable progress.”)

Well. Could be interesting. Does he have the necessary capital to pump into the business in order to make it profitable enough? I’ve never heard of this guy before.

Kevin Drum assesses a research result:

A new paper with access to Uber’s massive database of driver records concludes that female drivers earn 7 percent less than male drivers. Why? Mostly because women drive more slowly than men.

There are a couple of other factors as well that are tied to experience, and that’s interesting enough by itself. But the authors call their result “surprising,” and I think that’s the wrong conclusion. The proper conclusion is that in a job that pays via algorithm and has no special rewards for working long hours, the gender gap is only 7 percent. That’s what you get when there’s no opportunity for discrimination.

Without knowing anything about Uber’s “algorithm,” I think Kevin is committing an indiscretion when he assumes an algorithm is gender-blind. The press (NewScientist, I’m sure, although I don’t happen to have any links handy and I’m feeling lazy today) has reported several instances of machine learning algorithms returning results which are not gender-blind. This happens because the data on which these algorithms are trained reflect society’s biases, and the machine learning algorithm is incapable of compensating for such biases.

I’d also like to say that it’s possible the authors of the study were surprised because, well, it makes for more publicity if you’re surprised.

I wonder if this judge realizes just what he’s letting his profession in for. From The Oregonian:

A California bakery can continue its refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, a judge in Kern County has decided — the opposite legal result that Oregon bakers faced after declining in 2013 to provide a cake for a lesbian couple.

The Gresham, Oregon bakery, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, became a cause célèbre for the conservative “religious liberty” movement. In December, the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the state labor commissioner’s $135,000 fine against the bakery.

On Monday, California’s Kern County Superior Court Judge David Lampe issued a preliminary injunction. The ruling allows Tastries Bakery owner Cathy Miller, an evangelical Christian, to continue her refusal to bake a wedding cake for Mireya and Eileen Rodriguez-Del Rio.

And the basis for that ruling?  The wedding cake has been classified as ‘art’, and an artist cannot be compelled to create art.  I wonder how many other pursuits are going to be classified as ‘art’ – and how many times judges are going to be asked to confirm or deny that classification.

But the bigger shame, of course, is the refusal to deliver a wedding cake to a same-sex couple. It is a deeply divisive decision in American society because it’s based on a mistaken assumption, that a civil marriage is also a religious marriage, and, worse, it’s aimed at a class of Americans.

It’s one thing for an artist to be unable to come to an equitable fee arrangement with a client, or refuse to execute a particular artistic expression. It’s quite another to refuse to sell to a class of customers. In this instance of intolerance comes the principle of limited rights – where does my right to buy something end, and where does someone else’s right to sell a product of their own making end?

So I may think the judge messed up, but I also think it’s a hard question and can see Judge Lampe finding it a frustrating case.

Applying thoughts about sectors might help, if we stipulate an “art sector”. Certainly most artists will affirm that the need to make money in order to keep body & soul together is a serious burden on their time and energy, and some become grant-writing experts par excellence, as my Arts Editor has noted on several occasions in the past. In fact, the point of art is neither to make money, nor to produce art of any kind. The point is the ill-defined notion of self-expression.

And that is only occasionally conducive to collecting the money we use in this capitalistic system required to buy food, lodging, and artistic facilities.

This is only to give some context to the problems of the artist.

One final thought: If the decision had gone the other way, and a Satanist had requested a wedding cake of the baker in question, would the bakery be required to bake it?

I recall the name John Lott, PhD. from my twenties or thirties. Reports on his work were published in the libertarian rag REASON Magazine, generally finding research support for NRA positions regarding the practice of generally carrying guns. In one study, he claimed to detect a decrease in the crime rate around those municipalities which had lightened up on gun control laws. I was favorably impressed at the time.

Since then, on rare occasion I run across his name – usually in a poor light. I put it down to the writer in question not liking him or his conclusions. But now I see Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, claims he has caught Lott out in a paper on illegal immigrants:

Economist John R. Lott Jr. of the Crime Prevention Research Center released a working paper in which he purports to find that illegal immigrants in Arizona from 1985 through 2017 have a far higher prison admissions rate than U.S. citizens. Media from Fox News to the Washington Times and the Arizona Republic have reported on Lott’s claims while Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) have echoed them from their positions of authority. However, Lott made a small but fatal error that undermines his finding.

Lott wrote his paper based on a dataset he obtained from the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) that lists all admitted prisoners in the state of Arizona from 1985 to 2017. According to Lott, the data allowed him to identify “whether they [the prisoners] are illegal or legal residents.” This is where Lott made his small error: The dataset does not allow him or anybody else to identify illegal immigrants.[i]

The variable that Lott focused on is “CITIZEN.” That variable is broken down into seven categories. Lott erroneously assumed that the third category, called “non-US citizen and deportable,” only counted illegal immigrants. That is not true, non-US citizen and deportable immigrants are not all illegal immigrants. A significant proportion of non-U.S. citizens who are deported every year are legal immigrants who violate the terms of their visas in one way or the other, frequently by committing crimes. According to the American Immigration Council, about 10 percent of people deported annually are Lawful Permanent Residents or green card holders—and that doesn’t include the non-immigrants on other visas who were lawfully present in the United States and then deported. I will write more about this below.

Too bad for Lott. Kevin Drum’s feelings are on display concerning Lott in a post entitled “John Lott Makes a Mistake. Again. News at 11.”:

Last week, John Lott released a working paper showing that illegal immigrants in Arizona “are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans.” I didn’t bother reading it or reporting on it because Lott is spectacularly dishonest and unreliable in his work and it’s not worth the time to pore through his dreck to find out how he tortured the data.

Source: Alex Nowrasteh

In case you were wondering about proper figures, it appears precision is impossible due to the nature of the dataset (not to mention human error in data entry, etc), but Alex does provide a nice graph of estimates,
which suggests immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than natural born Americans.

What’s the lesson here? Be careful who you admire when you’re young, perhaps. And, to justify the title of this post, I have to say that seeing he’s a gun-rights advocate, and, given his apparent right-ward tilt, probably anti-immigrant, leaves a taste in my mouth. The taste of someone who wants a particular conclusion and will search for it until he gets it.

Real scientists let the evidence tell the story, dictate the conclusion. If, in fact, Lott just tries to prove his preferred conclusion, then despite his Ph.D. and various prestigious academic positions, he’s just a fraud.

HuffPo notes that 314 Action has a horde of scientists running for seats during the mid-terms:

More than 60 researchers and technologists are running for federal office in 2018 as part of a historic wave of candidates with science backgrounds launching campaigns.

At least 200 candidates with previous careers in science, technology, engineering and math announced bids for some of the nation’s roughly 7,000 state legislature seats as of Jan. 31, according to data that 314 Action, a political action committee, shared exclusively with HuffPost.

The group, which launched in 2014 to help scientists run for office, said it is talking with 500 more people and is pressing about half of them to run. An additional 200 such candidates are running for school boards.

“The sheer number is really astonishing,” 314 Action founder Shaughnessy Naughton told HuffPost. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

This is the largest number of scientists to run for public office in modern history. If any of them win, it could dramatically multiply the number of scientists in Congress beyond Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), the lone Ph.D. scientist, a physicist.

A waterfall of rationality? Against a sea of madness? Ah, bad poetry, it is.

But I certainly wish them well. I don’t know if any of them are running in Minnesota.

CNN is reporting that SpaceX‘s Falcon Heavy had a successful liftoff today:

The pioneering rocket firm just pulled off the unexpected, and carried out what appears to be a seamless first-ever launch of its massive new rocket, called Falcon Heavy.

That makes SpaceX the owner of the world’s most powerful operational rocket.

Falcon Heavy took flight Tuesday around 3:45 pm ET from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

About two and a half minutes after launch, the two side boosters on the rocket detached and headed back to Earth.

The rocket is built by SpaceX, the game-changing company helmed by billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Thousands of onlookers could be heard cheering on the company’s livestream.

In the run up to launch, it wasn’t at all clear whether the rocket would work.

“People [came] from all around the world to see what will either be a great rocket launch or the best fireworks display they’ve ever seen,” Elon Musk said in an interview with CNN’s Rachel Crane.

Wow. I was just reading about the complicated plumbing that goes into these monsters, because they’re really multiple rockets strapped together. Two of the boosters made it back down and landed safely; news on the third is not available. And you have to like this:

On board the rocket that’s now headed deeper into space is Musk’s personal Tesla (TSLA) roadster. At the wheel is a dummy dressed in a spacesuit, and the car is blaring David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on an endless loop. Cameras on board the car showed it still headed deeper into outer space. Musk plans to put the car into orbit around the sun.

That’s called testosterone, I do believe.

Benjamin Wittes and Jonathan Rauch have a message for all conservatives in The Atlantic, a message which directly contradicts their usual thoughtful message:

We’re proposing something different. We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans. …

I doubt a groundswell of support will appear for this article, especially among conservatives still caught in the tribal trap, but it’s worth a try.

And one more thing they mention:

… but recently the Democrats have made up for lost time by moving rapidly leftward.

That’s definitely a concern to me. Radical parties are threatening entities, which makes it easier to herd people into voting for other radical positions.

Not that radical positions aren’t eventually adopted by a party – but moving rapidly? That’s not a great sign.

A sunset on Mars back a couple of years.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission’s 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover’s location in Gale Crater. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M Univ.

[h/t WaPo]

WaPo reports on Trump’s first fiscal year of governing, which in all fairness also includes the Republican-controlled Congress when apportioning applause – or blame:

It was another crazy news week, so it’s understandable if you missed a small but important announcement from the Treasury Department: The federal government is on track to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year — Trump’s first full year in charge of the budget.

That’s almost double what the government borrowed in fiscal year 2017.

Here are the exact figures: The U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, according to documents released Wednesday. It’s the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and a big jump from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year.

Many conservatives make the mistake of believing they can draw a meaningful analogy with a typical family unit – draw up a budget, live within your means, etc etc. They ignore the fact that no family has the means at its disposal that does the United States, nor the huge variety of responsibilities. Rare is the family that can raise taxes, borrow money using Treasury bonds against which risk is considered nil, or be responsible for public epidemiology.

We have survived years and years of rolling over our debt, and so far as I can tell it’s only resulted in a new profession, that of the doomsayer of government debt. Some, I doubt not, are fully honest in their profession, but others, particularly of a conservative bent, tend to shout doom while Democrats are in power, but fall silent when their brethren are in power, even as said brethren spend those fabled tax revenues as if they were pennies.

That said, there is no doubt that the deeper in debt we go, the more costly it becomes. But at the moment it appears to be little more than an ideological spear to thrust at your opponents when convenient, to ignore when not. I worry, though, that going in deb too far may lay us open to more economic upsets in the future, although I do not lay the Great Recession at that doorstep.

The 2018 value is a projected value, of course, as WaPo notes:

Treasury mainly attributed the increase to the “fiscal outlook.” The Congressional Budget Office was more blunt. In a report this week, the CBO said tax receipts are going to be lower because of the new tax law.

And that’s the point, I suppose. Governor Brownback of Kansas recently resigned that post, having laid waste to that state government’s revenues through a similar scheme of cutting taxes and waiting for increased revenue to come pouring in. It never did, and Brownback has been shuffled off to one of the most obscure of diplomatic postings, United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. A sad ending for a former Senator once considered a leading Republican light, he ends up being another conservative intellectual lightweight, putting his faith in the Laffer Curve with little thought as to its limits.

And is this what we’ll be seeing from Trump’s tax law? The initial reaction from Fortune 500 CEOs at the infamous meeting with Gary Cohn was vastly unsettling. I guess we’ll just have to settle back and watch the debt jump – particularly if we choose to indulge in a military buildup once again. And will the Republican Congress try to use the deficit they’ve created as an excuse to cut important social welfare programs? It should be interesting.

Readers react to my meditations on piercing closed minds – wherever they’re located:

Interesting.  I’ve never thought about it this way. Guess I’ve never really given it much thought.

Another:

Yes, tribalism is wrong and is destroying our country. I don’t see any way to stop the USA from becoming a has-been nation.

My suspicion is that we’re in for a dip, but once enough of us have been banged on the head with the tangible consequences of bad thinking, our advantage in natural resources and a free(er) society will help us move back towards the front.

Unless the Chinese lead in artificial intelligence gives them a multiplier effect.

Another, from old friend Kevin McLeod:

Good article by Sullivan. Yes, tribalism is hurting us. I wouldn’t say it’s wrong per se – it has value in some situations – but in our current context it’s creating more problems than it solves. It’s good to see growing awareness of the central issue.

I wrote about the same topic in December at Medium: https://medium.com/…/the-bug-in-human-social…

Keep this subject in circulation. It’s a particularly difficult problem to solve because it’s instinctual or nearly so. Shedding outdated social fictions would be a good start.

A good article. I had forgotten about the Emperor’s New Clothes tale, it puts all the arguments about tribalism into one memorable & instructive story, applicable to the entire world of Trump politics.

After the mild collapse of stock prices last Friday, today the markets closed a few minutes ago, with the Dow down 4.6%. What’s driving it? I suspect this has more to do with the long-overdue correction that many analysts have predicted, and less to do with the apparently fangless Nunes memo – but every little bit hurts.

And just to double the fun, Congress must pass some sort of spending bill by Thursday.

And my Arts Editor points out that a new Fed chairman was sworn in today, replacing Yellin. I have no idea if that’s important or not.

Mucilaginous:

1 Having a viscous or gelatinous consistency.
‘a mucilaginous paste’
‘greasy and mucilaginous foods’

1. 1. 1. 1. 1.1 (of a plant, seed, etc.) containing a polysaccharide substance that is extracted as a viscous or gelatinous solution and used in medicines and adhesives.

‘the young leaves are tender and mucilaginous’

Noted in Greg Fallis’ eponymous blog:

You’re probably thinking something like “Yeah, well, Trump’s a dick.” Or “Yeah, well, it’s Monday and this is pretty much what Trump does on Mondays because he’s a dick.” Or “Why doesn’t some adult take the phone away from that mucilaginous motherfucker?”

Donald J. Trump:

This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!

CNN:

The highly controversial memo alleges that then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee that no surveillance warrant would have been sought for a Trump campaign aide without a disputed opposition research dossier on Trump and Russia. The memo is the most explicit Republican effort yet to discredit the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia, alleging that the investigation was infused with an anti-Trump bias under the Obama administration and supported with political opposition research.

The memo tries to connect what Republicans believe was a flawed application to monitor former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page to the overall counterintelligence investigation into potential collusion between Russians and the Republican campaign.

But the memo undermines its own argument about the application being overly reliant on the dossier. It notes that the application also included information regarding Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, suggesting there was intelligence beyond the dossier in the Page application.

National Review‘s Editors:

Finally, the FBI says that the memo has material omissions, and Democrats contest key allegations in it. Resolving this shouldn’t be difficult: The counter-memo produced by the Democrats should be released, as well as underlying material including the transcript of the interview with Andrew McCabe, which has become the subject of a he-said/he-said between committee Republicans and Democrats. Perhaps the surveillance of Page bore some fruit; if so, we should hear about it. The more information the public can get about all of this, the better.

There is speculation that President Trump might, in response to the memo, fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw one of the renewals of FISA warrants on Carter Page. Trump made one of his patented ambiguously threatening remarks about this possibility on Friday. If he were to move against Rosenstein, it might cause a semi-collapse of his Justice Department, give further fodder to Robert Mueller, and undo the political headway Republicans have made in recent weeks. Trump should sit tight and — if the investigation is as unfounded as he says — await his eventual vindication.

Former FBI Director James Comey, fired by President Trump:

That’s it? Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs.

Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC):

“I actually don’t think it has any impact on the Russia probe,” Gowdy, the House Oversight Committee chairman, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“To the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower,” Gowdy said. “The dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’ meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice.” [via RollCall]

It’s worth noting that Gowdy recently announced he will not seek re-election, a decision insulating him from pressure by donors.

Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic, Shannon Togawa Mercer, and Benjamin Wittes:

But you get the point. The bottom line is that there are multiple reasons to expect that Nunes has not given a full and fair account of the FBI’s FISA process and that his memo is as factually deficient as it accuses the Carter Page warrant application of being.

and …

At the end of the day, the most important aspect of the #memo is probably not its contents but the fact that it was written and released at all. Its preparation and public dissemination represent a profound betrayal of the central premise of the intelligence oversight system. That system subjects the intelligence community to detailed congressional oversight, in which the agencies turn over their most sensitive secrets to their overseers in exchange for both a secure environment in which oversight can take place and a promise that overseers will not abuse their access for partisan political purposes. In other words, they receive legitimation when they act in accordance with law and policy. Nunes, the Republican congressional leadership and Trump violated the core of that bargain over the course of the past few weeks. They revealed highly sensitive secrets by way of scoring partisan political points and delegitimizing what appears to have been lawful and appropriate intelligence community activity.

Steve Benen:

It’s genuinely difficult to find an angle to the House Republicans’ “Nunes memo” that helps its intended beneficiary: Donald Trump. Every key argument the president and his allies hoped to advance has fallen apart, and after weeks of over-the-top hype, Republicans are actually worse off than they were before the previously classified materials were released to the public.

In fact, over the weekend, the memo’s credibility actually managed to move backward. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal each reported independently that the FBI did, in fact, notify a FISA judge to the political motivations surrounding Christopher Steele’s dossier. (The underlying allegation from Trump’s allies is wrong — information from politically motivated sources can be used to obtain a warrant — but the underlying charge is now dubious.)

Even if you strip the Republican memo of its context and ridiculous motivations, and consider it solely as a document intended to highlight an alleged FISA court abuse, the document fails miserably.

I was not aware of FISA until I started reading Lawfare; it’s not an everyday subject around American dinner tables. Given this obscurity, this will result on partisans being led around by the noses yet again – or perhaps the weaponization of the respective bases. Beyond specialized experts, I doubt that anyone can have a truly intelligent discussion about it. Ideologues will spout off, of course, prompted by their favorite leader – but will it really lead to anything?

Only if this all goes to court or impeachment perhaps.

I am interested in the fact that some Republicans are rejecting the memo as significant, suggesting that Representative Nunes, who is responsible for the memo, may be out on a limb here. However, given his outrageous behavior as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and yet his continued position, I do not see Speaker Ryan removing him from that prestigious seat.

Even if the prestige-meter is rapidly sinking under his leadership.

But the best analysis is probably Lawfare’s, above, as it seems quite complete and written by specialized professionals – in near-English, at that.

I have no doubt that I inherited my interest – passive though it may be – in archaeology from my mother. Not that dad wasn’t interested, but I think mom had the passion for learning the stories behind all the old artifacts, digs, and everything that went with it, starting with the old National Geographics. So it’s too bad that neither one of them is around to see this report on the Maya civilization in WaPo:

Archaeologists have spent more than a century traipsing through the Guatemalan jungle, Indiana Jones-style, searching through dense vegetation to learn what they could about the Maya civilization that was one of the dominant societies in Mesoamerica for centuries.

But the latest discovery — one archaeologists are calling a “game changer” — didn’t even require a can of bug spray.

Scientists using high-tech, airplane-based lidar mapping tools have discovered tens of thousands of structures constructed by the Maya: defense works, houses, buildings, industrial-size agricultural fields, even new pyramids. The findings, announced Thursday, are already reshaping long-held views about the size and scope of the Maya civilization.

“This world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data,” said Albert Yu-Min Lin, an engineer and National Geographic explorer who worked on a television special about the new find. “And what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilization is all of a sudden brand new again,” he told the New York Times.

An early result?

“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multidisciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With this new data, it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there — including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”

Wow. And what happened to that civilization? It just makes the blood race!

Andrew Sullivan is full of depressing pessimism when it comes to Americans and politics:

The problem with tribalism is that it knows no real limiting principle.

It triggers a deep and visceral response: a defense of the tribe before all other considerations. That means, in its modern manifestation, that the tribe comes before the country as a whole, before any neutral institutions that get in its way, before reason and empiricism, and before the rule of law. It means loyalty to the tribe — and its current chief — is enforced relentlessly. And this, it seems to me, is the underlying reason why the investigation into Russian interference in the last election is now under such attack and in such trouble. In a tribalized society, there can be no legitimacy for an independent inquiry, indifferent to tribal politics. In this fray, no one is allowed to be above it.

On the face of it, of course, no one even faintly patriotic should object to investigating how a foreign power tried to manipulate American democracy, as our intelligence agencies have reported. And yet one party is quite obviously doing all it can to undermine such a project — even when it is led by a Republican of previously unimpeachable integrity, Robert Mueller. Tribalism does not spare the FBI; it cannot tolerate an independent Department of Justice; it sees even a Republican like Mueller as suspect; and it sees members of another tribe as incapable of performing their jobs without bias.

And then he gets worse. Go read it (it’s the first part of his weekly tri-partite column) if you want to be disheartened.

Implicitly it raises the question of how to persuade the members of both tribes – he suggests the Democrats are also moving towards tribalism – that tribalism is wrong.

I’m not suggesting we don’t have a long history of tribalism in this country. Dyed in the wool xyz voter is a familiar chestnut. I’ve always taken it to mean that that the voter had more important things to do than worry about the political scene, between raising children and working, and usually legitimately so. And then remember the mass religious revivals we occasionally indulge in, until the next, and almost inevitable, revelations of the true motivations of the leaders damages those revivals.

But now, as Andrew points out, we’re seeing the wholesale abandonment of the most honorable of vocations, truth-seeking and living by the truth, by the GOP. Let me spell it out.

Once upon a time, in situations such as these, our ancestors, not so far away in time, would, regardless of political inclination, examine the evidence presented, looking both at its trustworthiness and what it said, and if they found the evidence compelling, they’d come to a judgment that put the interests of the country first. It required judgment, fair-mindedness, and a independent frame of mind that disregarded emotional responses in favor of intellectual rigor.

But some of us have lost that common-sense approach. Today, a huge percentage of the GOP has decided, prior to looking at evidence, that their leader is sacrosanct, must be protected, and thus cannot be guilty of any major crime. From this unsupported assertion, they then apply logic and conclude that any news, any evidence, which suggests their leader may be guilty of any sort of crime, must be false evidence. Indeed, using a meme supplied by just that person to which the evidence will allegedly point, they call it fake news, they even take up a belief that numerous news organizations with more than a century of tradition of excellence are simply making up news stories. All in the face of evidence

And it’s all so ass-backwards. They have a conclusion, and for that conclusion to work, they invent wilder and wilder stories. All the news organizations are making up news. That tape of Trump talking about “grabbing pussies”? Fake. The Russians? Oh, they’re our friends, they couldn’t possibly attack us.

And all because they have an allegiance to a group that overrides the good of the country.

That’s why tribalism is wrong. That’s why, in my view, it’s un-American.

How do we answer Andrew’s implicit question, then, of how to remind our fellow Americans about how we used to evaluate evidence, about how we used to put the good of the country ahead of the good of the party, of how pre-determined conclusions are the wrong way to go about evaluating our government?

I don’t really know.

But what I’m going to do is send this off to my friends who seem to in one or the other tribe and ask them to read this, think about it, and then send it onwards to their network of friends, to inject it into the thought-stream. Maybe everyone will snort at it, their minds made up and immovable in what I consider to be error.

But I present these thoughts not as a partisan – long time readers know I’m an independent – but as a fellow American who has grown concerned at this decay in common-sense in the GOP, and worried about similar patterns in the Democrats.

And I invite my readers to take similar steps. There will be no single event which will resolve this problem, just a series of small steps, of tribe members finally sitting down, thinking, and saying, What have I been doing? Recommend this post to friends, share it on FB, or however you want to point out that tribalism is wrong and is hurting America.

On this subject, a conservative reader sends me an article concerning the revived Keystone XL pipeline. From MSN/Money:

Nebraska regulators last November approved Keystone XL, a 1,180-mile-long (1,900-kilometer) extension of the existing Keystone Pipeline operated by TransCanada Corp.

However, the 3-2 vote in favor of expanding the pipeline followed a leak of 210,000 gallons of oil just days prior. That oil gushed from a section of Keystone in South Dakota before TransCanada cut off the flow. …

Proponents of the pipeline say it will lessen dependence on foreign oil while creating jobs. But environmental groups and many Americans — especially American Indians — remain furious about the project. Beyond the risk of spills, the project’s steep environmental costs also include the potential industrialization of 54,000 square miles of Alberta wilderness.

“The scale and severity of what’s happening in Alberta will make your spine tingle,” Robert Johnson, a former Business Insider correspondent, wrote after flying over the Canadian oil sands in May 2012.

What I found interesting is that a conservative reader sent it. It suggests that the future damage attributable to the pipeline through construction, maintenance, leaks, and supply to it bothers conservatives as well as liberals.

[h/t Bill C]

In NewScientist (20 January 2018, paywall) Laura Spinney surveys recent research concerning a potential future collapse of civilization, and these are the kinds of research I like – something simple-minded, application of techniques from other disciplines. And the end of the world:

So is there any evidence that the West is reaching its end game? According to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, there are certainly some worrying signs. Turchin was a population biologist studying boom-and-bust cycles in predator and prey animals when he realised that the equations he was using could also describe the rise and fall of ancient civilisations.

In the late 1990s, he began to apply these equations to historical data, looking for patterns that link social factors such as wealth and health inequality to political instability. Sure enough, in past civilisations in Ancient Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two recurring cycles that are linked to regular era-defining periods of unrest.

One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society, then, as the population grows, the supply of labour begins to outstrip demand and so becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while the living standards of the workers fall. As the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, in which the misery of the lowest strata and infighting between elites contribute to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and made up of two generations – one peaceful and one turbulent.

Looking at US history Turchin spotted peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. Worse, he predicts that the end of the next 50-year cycle, in around 2020, will coincide with the turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a period of political unrest that is at least on a par with what happened around 1970, at the peak of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam war.

Which suggests we do a poor job of teaching our young the lessons of previous years. Hell, we could see that when the American Glass-Steagall legislation was repealed and our economy subsequently, and possibly consequentially, fell into the Great Recession.

Onwards:

This prediction echoes one made in 1997 by two amateur historians called William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book The Fourth Turning: An American prophecy. They claimed that in about 2008 the US would enter a period of crisis that would peak in the 2020s – a claim said to have made a powerful impression on US president Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

Turchin made his predictions in 2010, before the election of Donald Trump and the political infighting that surrounded his election, but he has since pointed out that current levels of inequality and political divisions in the US are clear signs that it is entering the downward phase of the cycle. Brexit and the Catalan crisis hint that the US is not the only part of the West to feel the strain.

When population grows, in the age before WMDs, it helped to perpetuate the society that it makes up, so there’s a social survival value to that population growth; but the cheapness of labor it causes, and the strains which appear to grow out of that cheapness over time, certainly tends to suggest that in the common economic models, the growth of population is not a salutary development to the members of the population outside of the elite. In the end, those religions which encourage^[1] unlimited procreation – which is not uncommon, although not universal – may carry quite a lot of the blame for the misery of their adherents. Another reason to doubt the assertion that life is sacred, no?

But since we’re talking about a social science rather than a hard science, I don’t accept that these need be inevitabilities, and instead I believe this suggests that there’s certainly a role for government in the management of the economy. The trick is to do so without picking specific winners and losers, but instead to shape it in such a way as to benefit those who are not benefiting as they should. It certainly justifies a progressive tax system, since without one the rich ignorantly run the risk of the collapse of society – and the disappearance of their wealth.

The applicability of this article to current circumstances appears to be beyond dispute, as the article notes:

How and why turbulence sometimes turns into collapse is something that concerns Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. He noticed that while, in nature, some prey always survive to keep the cycle going, some societies that collapsed, such as the Maya, the Minoans and the Hittites, never recovered.

To find out why, he first modelled human populations as if they were predators and natural resources were prey. Then he split the “predators” into two unequal groups, wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.

This showed that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each other,” says Motesharrei.

Part of the reason is that the “haves” are buffered by their wealth from the effects of resource depletion for longer than the “have-nots” and so resist calls for a change of strategy until it is too late.

This doesn’t bode well for Western societies, which are dangerously unequal. According to a recent analysis, the world’s richest 1 per cent now owns half the wealth, and the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has been growing since the financial crisis of 2008.

One might say the elite’s allegiance to their family outranks their allegiance to the society which made their wealth possible in the first place.

This whole thing makes the pulse quicken, doesn’t it? After all, we’re talking about an existential crisis. I took a look for this Peter Turchin for any pubications which I might comprehend and discovered he has a number of books out on this sort of thing, well-reviewed, so I put a couple of them on my Amazon wish-list.

As if I have time to read them 🙂

¹And by encourage, I suppose I really mean divinely command.

CNN/Money‘s reasons for Friday’s plunge in the markets?

1. The Fed may raise its core interest rates, in order to fight inflation brought on by the new tax law.
2. This will also cut into corporate profits.
3. They claim worries about the bond market. I don’t do bonds, but it sounds like the price of bonds may drop soon due to a “glut” of them because of increased government borrowing.
4. UGLY POLITICS!
5. The markets have been on a bull run for far longer than normal, and some investors are getting jumpy, waiting for the inevitable 10% drop.

I’m not quite sure what to think of this. The swiftly deteriorating democratic institutions of the leading economic powerhouse should be of concern to every investor world-wide. Their wealth, real and potential, is at risk when the trust we have in those institutions is threatened. If they choose to be worried about the GOP’s attacks on some of the most fundamental institutions of the United States – not only the FBI, but the judiciary as well – then we may see a helluva pullout.

And, in a way, that may be a political stabilization mechanism. If the President takes actions which destabilize the markets and threaten our prosperity, the immediate market signal may be the trigger we need. It’ll be the modern-day equivalent of the villagers with the pitchforks and torches, as the political class ejects the person doingthe damage to the system.

So long as it’s all theoretical, the GOP will sit on its hands. Its members are simply not bright enough to take necessary actions as a group. Sure, some are planning to retire, but that’s because they can’t see themselves doing much beyond that. But once the edge of chaos suddenly appears to them and their donors, it may become an entirely new scenario – with one expendable actor available.

Maybe. All hand waving here, as always.

The GOP, in the persons of President Trump, Representative Nunes, Speaker Ryan, and a number of others, hold the top of a hill in their war with the FBI. Normally, you’d expect those in a commanding position to win such a war, even second-raters like this bunch. But Eugene Robinson makes an important point – this is the FBI:

Presidents don’t win fights with the FBI. Donald Trump apparently wants to learn this lesson the hard way.

Most presidents have had the sense not to bully the FBI by defaming its leaders and — ridiculously — painting its agents as leftist political hacks. Most members of Congress have also understood how unwise it would be to pull such stunts. But Trump and his hapless henchmen on Capitol Hill, led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), have chosen the wrong enemy. History strongly suggests they will be sorry.

The far-right echo chamber resounds with wailing and braying about something called the “deep state” — a purported fifth column of entrenched federal bureaucrats whose only goal in life, apparently, is to deny America the greatness that Dear Leader Trump has come to bestow. It is unclear who is supposed to be directing this vast conspiracy. Could it be Dr. Evil? Supreme Leader Snoke? Hillary Clinton? This whole paranoid fantasy, as any sane person realizes, is utter rubbish.*

The asterisk is for the FBI.

And it’s quite the valid point. Let’s leave aside my constant, and no doubt annoyingly predictable, assertion that the Republicans are a pack of second-raters. Neither the President, an incurious man who doesn’t appear to have learned the primary management lesson that a boss should always employ people smarter than himself, nor his toadies in Congress, have the sheer resources to do the sort of investigating, collating of information, and out and out snooping which is the day-to-day business of the FBI. Nor do they have the professionalism, the discipline, and what appears to be the devotion to truth which should be, ideally and perhaps in reality, the attributes of the FBI. Not that I am deluded into thinking the FBI is run by angels, but it appears the current leaders, past and presence, are strongly bound by honor, and they’re certainly backed by one of the strongest information gathering and analysis organizations on the planet.

I suspect if President Trump and his allies want to play power politics with the FBI, they may lose a few appendages in a long, drawn out war. And while they’re distracted by the maelstrom, former FBI Director and current Special Counsel Mueller will be coming in from another tangent.

We can only hope the institutions of the United States will not be severely damaged while this Faustian drama plays out. And perhaps the FBI can also pull in a few outside players of whom we may not be aware.

Or, to return to the metaphor, President Trump may be beating his chest on top of that hill, but he picked a hill without a water source …. and the FBI will surround it soon enough.

Trying to predict this … Image Credit: NASA

I happened to run across something relating to this long-dormant thread concerning approximate solution computing where the problems are so difficult that they consume significant amounts of energy (the latter attribute of which also applies to Bitcoin, as discussed here), and as it’s from my alma mater (not that I have any sentimental attachment to it, not being the tribal sort), the University of Minnesota‘s Institute of Technology College of Science & Engineering, I thought I’d mention it. It turns out that CS&E has a Ph.D. student who has a paper getting published on the subject. I think. They sure weren’t talking about these fascinating subjects back when I was in school – but then, I barely survived college anyways. From a newsletter from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering:

Hassan [Najafi] is a doctoral student working under the guidance of Prof. David Lilja and his research interests include stochastic and approximate computing, fault-tolerant system design, and computer architecture. He is also the recipient of the University’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship that recognizes outstanding research work, for the 2017-2018 academic year.

A brief description of the paper:

Recent work on stochastic computing (SC) has shown that computation using stochastic logic can be performed deterministically and accurately by properly structuring unary-style bit-streams. The hardware cost and the latency of operations are much lower than those of the conventional random SC when completely accurate results are expected. For applications where slight inaccuracy is acceptable, however, these unary stream-based deterministic approaches must run for a relatively long time to produce acceptable results. This long processing time makes the deterministic approach energy-inefficient. While randomness was a source of inaccuracy in the conventional random stream-based SC, the authors exploited pseudo-randomness in improving the progressive precision property of the deterministic approach to SC. Completely accurate results are still produced if running the operation for the required number of cycles. When slight inaccuracy is acceptable, however, significant improvement in the processing time and energy consumption is observed compared to the prior unary stream-based deterministic approach and also the conventional random-stream based approach.

It sounds fascinating, but I doubt I’d understand the paper. For example, I have no idea what might be a unary-style bit-stream.