Monthly Archives: February 2018

Massif:

In geology, a massif ( /mæˈsiːf/ or /ˈmæsɪf/) is a section of a planet’s crust that is demarcated by faults or flexures. In the movement of the crust, a massif tends to retain its internal structure while being displaced as a whole. The term also refers to a group of mountains formed by such a structure. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Forgotten mountain shrine to a Soviet superstar of astrophysics,” Simon Ings, NewScientists‘s Aperture column (20 January 2018):

A FORGOTTEN jewel in the crown of Soviet astronomy, the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory is located on the picturesque southern slope of Mount Aragats, a four-peaked volcano massif in Armenia.

Much of the mountain (above) once lay in the permanent grip of ice. Glaciers inside its crater weren’t discovered until after the second world war. Since then, the snow line has risen and sheep herders have abandoned the mountain’s waterlogged environs. Photographer Toby Smith, on assignment for Project Pressure, a charity documenting the world’s vanishing glaciers, also recorded the lives of those who remain on the mountain.

Nice pics, too.

As of roughly 2 PM American Central, the big 3 stock market indices are down anywhere from 1.3% to 2%. Perhaps it’s a bit of buyers’ remorse after a long, long run.

Or maybe it’s this:

President Donald Trump — poised to approve the release of a classified memo about the Russia investigation — on Friday ripped the ongoing probe, accusing top law enforcement officials of favoring Democrats.

“The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” Trump tweeted. “Rank & File are great people!” he added. [NBC News]

Openly accusing the very officials he selected^[1] to run the agencies of being in open and illegal revolt against him – with no evidence, to boot. It’s tempting to connect market behavior with this new low in intra-government relations.

But I don’t necessarily give investors that much credit. After all, the markets didn’t come crashing down when Trump won election, did they? They – the investors, collectively – chose to believe there’d be a steady hand at the helm. A fair enough position, too.

But with Trump continually failing to be President in a responsible and positive manner has been rattling the world, and this may be the next group to be rattled. The next week will tell us how investors are really feeling. Can’t come to conclusions on this single data point.

1These would be Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The former is definitely a Republican, and reportedly the latter voted in the latest GOP Presidential primary, while declining to vote in the election.

… that the trees have taken to using parkas.

On Treehugger Lloyd Alter suspects the oil industry won’t be disappearing just yet, despite the claims of some industry watchers on the green side of things:

Peak oil used to be about running out of supply; now some think that we will run out of demand. The oil companies will ensure that we never run out of demand.

Remember Peak Oil? It was all over TreeHugger, the idea that the easy oil was going to start running out and it would get more and more expensive and difficult to find.

We wrote post after post about Hubbert’s Peak and how we were all gonna die, that we are “in the confusion stage now, followed by chaos and collapse and basically the End of the world as we know it as we slide down the slope from the Peak.”

Then along came hydraulic fracturing (fracking), tight oil, deepwater drilling, Trump, Zinke and Pruitt, and the oil and gas are flowing freely and people are piling into pickups. Peak oilman King Hubbert became “a punchline rather than a visionary.” And now, over at the NRDC, Jeff Turrentine asks Could Peak Oil Demand Be Just a Dozen Years Away? But he isn’t talking about oil supply, he is talking demand, suggesting that electric cars are going to cause a different kind of peak.

In this very different type of forecast, oil production doesn’t necessarily begin to decline at a particular point. But our need for it does. And it’s not just a theory: Experts on all sides of the issue say that it’s really coming. At some point over the next 25 years, a number of cultural, political, and technological factors will combine to slake our global thirst for this once most essential of fossil fuels. After decades spent planning for scarcity, oil companies are now busily preparing for something that they never saw coming: their own marginalization.

To be fair, I thought the same thing two years ago, writing Sooner than you think? A prediction that electric cars will cause the next oil crisis. They don’t have to take over the market totally, just enough to tip supply of oil up over demand, like fracking did. But I suspect that the NRDC is being over-optimistic about oil company marginalization.

We wrote earlier about how the oil industry isn’t taking this lying down, and is seriously pivoting to plastic. They are investing US$180 billion to increase plastic production by 40 percent.

And, for Lloyd, this is a problem because we don’t recycle plastics in any substantial way. For the oil industry, that’s glorious news – new product going out the door. It seems to me that this may be a time for government to step in and say This material has to be recyclable and reusable or you can’t sell it. Of course, the screaming will be remarkable, both from industry and from the libertarians who think markets always automatically adjust, but it’s not going to happen without the managing entity – government – waving a hand.

People can be endlessly clever. It’s something worth remembering.

It seems like every time I turn around another Senator or Representative is not going to run for re-election. Most seem to be retiring, while a few are declaring for another seat. So I went looking and found that Ballotpedia has an excellent summary page of these announcements so far.

I don’t know how this compares to previous elections, and I didn’t find anything for previous years on Ballotpedia. Just to summarize, 3 Republican Senators are not running for re-election, and 15 Democratic and 34 Republican Representatives are not running for re-election.

Without the context of previous years, it’s hard to really speculate on what’s going on, but it sure feels like a lot of Republicans are realizing the next mid-terms are going to be very difficult, no matter what VP Pence might be thinking, and sometimes it’s easier to let the next generation carry the fight.

Then there’s the discouragement of realizing that the leadership is basically incompetent (I’ve seen sentiments roughly approximating that in print somewhere), realizing that power isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that sort of thing.

Incumbents are hard to beat. The large number of Republicans heading out the door suggest a lot of opportunities for the Democrats.

On Treehugger Melissa Breyer discusses the Swedish craze of plogging:

If Christopher Guest and crew were to make a mockumentary, a la Spinal Tap, about the warm-and-fuzzy cultural traditions of Scandinavia, they might have very well come up with “plogging.” They would portray wholesome Swedes running like gazelles through pretty Swedish landscapes, bounding with Swedish altruism as they stop, stoop, and pick up a pieces of Swedish litter to carry along with them for proper disposal. And it would be hilarious. But what’s even better than this imagined satire is that it is real! And it is awesome.

Which happens to be how I put things away. See it, grab it. Don’t see it, too bad.

My Arts Editor is not entirely happy with this process, I think.

The current Missouri Attorney General and likely Republican challenger for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Claire McCaskill is Josh Hawley. In keeping with the rightward lurch of the GOP comes this statement from him, via The Kansas City Star:

“We have a human trafficking crisis in our state and in this city and in our country because people are willing to purchase women, young women, and treat them like commodities. There is a market for it. Why is there? Because our culture has completely lost its way. The sexual revolution has led to exploitation of women on a scale that we would never have imagined, never have imagined,” Hawley told the crowd in audio obtained this week by The Star.

“We must … deliver a message to our culture that the false gospel of ‘anything goes’ ends in this road of slavery. It ends in the slavery and the exploitation of the most vulnerable among us. It ends in the slavery and exploitation of young women.”

Poor guy is getting a lot of press, and most of it bad. So let’s see if we can help him out here.

We know that the sex trade is the world’s oldest profession, if we may take chestnuts at their face value, no? So we can immediately eliminate the obvious contention of his statement. But consider this: for the vast majority of that time, the sex trade was merely considered part of the commercial activity of society.

So when the “sexual revolution” came around, freeing women from the compulsion of fidelity from which men had freed themselves long ago, it lent an exclamation point to the work of women over the last couple of centuries to secure their personhood, previously marked by the Suffragette movement.

Which is to say, what had been a simple part of the commercial activity of society suddenly became … repulsive. Enslaving women for sex prior to the sexual revolution had not been terribly abnormal, even when the bonds were matrimonial. Afterwards? Not in the least normal.

And, so, he’s right, if you can read the sentimental tea leaves properly. A fairly normal activity suddenly becomes repulsive – because of freedom. The freedom to indulge, or not to indulge. The freedom to use self-judgment.

Thanks for pointing that out, A.G. Hawley. I’m sure the pastors you were talking with will appreciate this point.

Ben Caspit of AL Monitor reports that it appears that Israel may be preparing for a war brought on by preparations in Lebanon of a manufacturing plant for precision missiles:

Any analysis of recent remarks and moves by Israeli decision-makers and the heads of the country’s security apparatus raises the reasonable possibility that they are preparing the Israeli public for a “war of choice” in Lebanon.

This concept of a “war of choice” is especially sensitive in Israel. Ever since the founding of the state, its leaders have always tried to fight just those wars that were forced on it by its enemies or by circumstances. In contrast, the first Lebanon war (1982) is the best example of a “war of choice,” which evolved into a lengthy catastrophe. The second Lebanon war broke out in 2006, after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers.

The question is when the third Lebanon war will break out and whether it will be started by Israel. What we do know is the third Lebanon war will encompass the entire northern front, meaning Lebanon, Hezbollah and Syria, along with their Iranian backers.

The impression that Israel is preparing public opinion for a “preventive strike” that it would initiate along the northern border has been getting stronger over the last year. On Jan. 29, President Benjamin Netanyahu set off on a quick visit to Moscow, where he had another meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was the seventh meeting between the two men in two and a half years, an unusual meeting frequency for heads of states. In fact, the two men meet more or less every quarter. Putin and Netanyahu have been “going steady” ever since the Russians first appeared in the Syrian sector. So far, this close relationship has succeeded in preventing friction between the Israeli and Russian air forces, which are operating in the same region, sometimes simultaneously.

The United States is also inevitably part of this equation, and given the erratic and weak Administration, it’s hard to say what will come of that effort. But it does appear Israel may be heading into war.

And I found it interesting that Ben, normally a critic of the Netanyahu leadership, did not suggest this might be a useful distraction for the besieged Israeli Prime Minister. I wonder if that is indicative of the seriousness of the Precision Project Missile work.

As speculation builds over the Nunes memo, on Lawfare Professor Orin Kerr of USC casts doubt on one of the central propositions thought to make up the memo – requesting an affidavit under false pretenses:

And some of that depends on identifying just what the narrative is for why the funding source was critical to establishing probable cause. I think that point is really important and too easily ignored.  In #ReleaseTheMemo circles, any possible link between the Steele dossier and the Clinton campaign is like an atomic bomb. It completely annihilates any possible credibility the Steele dossier may have, leaving the exposed words of the dossier behind like the haunting shadows of the Hiroshima blast.

But that’s not how actual law works. In the world of actual law, there needs to be a good reason for the judge to think, once informed of the claim of bias, that the informant was just totally making it up.  As United States v. Strifler shows, that isn’t necessarily the case even if the government paid the informant to talk and guaranteed that they would get out of jail if they did.  Nor is it necessarily the case just because the informant is in personal feud with the suspect. What matters is whether, based on the totality of the circumstances, the information came from a credible source.

That’s a problem for #ReleaseTheMemo, I think. To my knowledge, Steele was not some random person motivated by an ongoing personal feud against Trump or Carter Page. To my knowledge, he was not a drug dealer facing criminal charges who was promised freedom if he could come up with something for the government’s FISA application. Instead, Steele was a former MI6 intelligence officer and Russia expert. He was hired to do opposition research because of his professional reputation, expertise and contacts.  And his work was apparently taken pretty seriously by United States intelligence agencies. Of course, that doesn’t mean that what’s in the dossier is true. Maybe the key allegations are totally wrong. But if you’re trying to argue that Steele’s funding sources ruin the credibility of his research, his professional training and background make that an uphill battle.

That’s just the legal world, though. This is playing out in the court of public opinion, and it’ll be necessary to communicate the legal opinion to the public in order for the public to  understand that the memo is meaningless – if, in fact, the memo contains what it’s thought it contains.

Politico is reporting the Vice President Pence is taking a confident view of the upcoming mid-terms – he thinks the GOP can expand its majority in both chambers of Congress:

“Elections are about choices,” he said in the interview in which he discussed his midterm outlook in detail for the first time. “If we frame that choice, I think we’re going to re-elect majorities in the House and the Senate and I actually think we’re going to, when all the dust settles after 2018, I think we’re going to have more Republicans in Congress in Washington, D.C., than where we started.”

How so?

The vice president’s team has devised a unique ancillary strategy to support his cross-country campaigning: partnering with America First Policies — a Trump-backed public-policy non-profit group designed to boost the president’s agenda — to hold public events designed specifically to discuss legislative achievements like the tax bill.

The goal is to have the group set up events to help voters understand what the White House sees as the upside of the Republicans’ legislative agenda. A senior administration official said Pence’s message at the events will provide a “blueprint for how to be successful in midterms.”

Out in reality, the legislative record of the GOP is dismal. A tax reform package, hastily assembled, which in all probability will do nothing for the economy – and may break it. That’s the only major achievement, written in secret and hurried through by the terrified rats who feared their donors. The rest of it is trivia or just major failures.

BUT Voters are all about perception, no? So I suspect this will be another Big Lie campaign. Their won’t be any mention of the recent AND imminent contretemps regarding the budget ceiling. No mention of how the party is being ripped apart by the Tea Party’s Freedom Caucus. No mention of the mostly supine position of the Senate GOP regarding Trump’s poor choices for the Federal judiciary.

But they will be public events. Will the Democrats setup booths outside the venues and label them as Truth, or Here’s Their Record, or How They Do Things? They’ll need to counter-message, that’s for sure, because marketing is where the GOP really excels.

Synecdoche:

: a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (such as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (such as society for high society), the species for the genus (such as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (such as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (such as boards for stage) [Merriam-Webster]

Noted, with some wonderment, in “Once and for all: Obama didn’t crush US coal, and Trump can’t save it,” David Roberts, Vox:

In his campaign, Trump seized on that resonance with an odd kind of fervor, using miners as props in political rallies and promising, again and again, to put them back to work. He has managed to make the fate of coal miners a synecdoche for the fate of the white working class writ large.