Monthly Archives: March 2018

She’s a scene-stealer, Sheriff – quick, put her in cuffs!

Sharing a theme with The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Gunfighter (1950) is a sober exploration of the dingy reality behind the glamour of being a famous person, and, as such, it’s a Western film noir. Jimmy Ringo is reputed to kill men far and wide, so when he trots into Cayenne, he causes an uproar. The fame is a little overwhelming, as he’s really visiting Cayenne to see his estranged wife and son, but he finds one of his former partners is now the sheriff, while another partner and gunslinger who had retired was murdered one night, shot in the back of the head. Then there’s the bartender who knew him back in the day and practically idolizes him now, and when word hits the street that Ringo is in town, the school empties of its rambunctious scholars, eager to see a gunfight and someone die. Even the local group of upright ladies, eager to see him out of town, make an appearance to make their bold observations – fifty murdered men, why he should be hung! – known to the sheriff and, inadvertently, to Ringo, who protests that the number is scarcely more than fifteen.

But Jimmy is fading, no longer the cocky young man eager for a reputation, but now in his thirties and reflecting on the lives he’s been forced to take, and how that has affected his life. What he doesn’t know is that he’s surrounded by the forces he himself has caused to come into being. In front of him is a younger version of himself, gunning for him just for the reputation of having killed Jimmy Ringo. Behind him are the three brothers of the man he last had to kill, all in the name of reputation. Off to the side is a grieving father, angry over the loss of his son, reputedly by the hand of Ringo. And filling in the gaps are the townspeople, eager for blood in their morally upright way, eager to see the Wages of Evil served on the evil-doer, or they’re just eager if they’re the children.

Through the storm beckons his one hope: his estranged wife, who could not stand his wild ways years before, but now he hopes for another chance, because he’s changed and wants to settle down, far, far away. But the forces of evil are too strong, and when she gives him a period of a year to prove that he’s changed, they don’t realize he won’t even see the next sunset.

You see, Reputation wins out.

But Jimmy and the sheriff know the terrible reality behind the dangerously easy grasp for quick fame, and as Jimmy slips from this world to the next, he and the sheriff, in unforgiving vengeance, shift the curse which has afflicted Jimmy onto his killer. No, he won’t die for the murder of Jimmy Ringo, that would be too easy. With his dying breath, Jimmy declares to the sheriff that he drew first but the kid got him. And now the kid, even as the sheriff boots him out of the town, is the next to realize his life is little more than glitter and the next gunslinger; between bouts with death, his life will be as desolate and bleak as a desert.

A quick and easy fame benefits no one.

This is not a major masterpiece, as the lead looks more like a Hollywood 25 year old than a Western 35 year old, but it’s otherwise well done, with a particularly interesting plot. I think this is a minor classic, well worth a look if it pops up as available. I know I enjoyed it quite a lot, not for the action, but for the rich moments in between gun shots.

Recommended.

Amish-inabe:

Collaboration [archaeology] can even bring separate groups together, [Sonya Atalay of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst] added. During her work at an Anishimaabe rock art site in Michigan, she watched as the Native Americans got to know the local Amish community, which provided stones for a sweat lodge ceremony and looked after the site. The evolving partnership inspired a Native artist to coin the term “Amish-inabe.” [“A Case for Collaboration,” Julian Smith, American Archaeology (spring • 2018, print only)]

Professor Randall Eliason of George Washington University Law School discusses an angle on the whole Presidential pardon idea that hadn’t occurred to me – if dangled in front of someone as a possibility, it might actually be a bribe. Eliason explains in WaPo:

Federal bribery requires that a public official agree to receive and accept something of value in exchange for being influenced in the performance of an official act. In this scenario, the official act would be granting a pardon. While the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in the case of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell dramatically narrowed the definition of “official act,” there’s no question that a president granting a pardon would be an exercise of government power under the McDonnell v. United States standard.

“Thing of value” is also fairly easily met: It would be the agreement not to cooperate against the president. The thing of value in bribery law is not limited to envelopes stuffed with cash. It can include anything of subjective value to the public official, whether tangible or intangible. Such intangibles as offers of future employment and personal companionship have been found to be things of value for purposes of bribery. A promise not to cooperate in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe could readily serve as the quid in this quid pro quo.

The public official, of course, is the president. Dowd is not a public official and cannot be bribed himself, but he could conspire with a public official to arrange bribes on the official’s behalf. The theory would be that Dowd and the president engaged in a conspiracy to accept bribes by agreeing that Dowd would make the offer. This, of course, would require proof that Dowd was acting with the president’s approval and not merely freelancing.

My oh my, the footing is getting slippery for the President, isn’t it? I think the informal English rendering would be If you refuse to cooperate with the law and are therefore convicted and jailed, I will pardon you, and my public pronouncements are my signal to you of this deal.

I wonder if Fox News has considered reading Eliason’s article on the air when they know the President is watching, just so he’s informed about how that could end badly for him. Not sure what I’m talking about? Here’s Steve Benen to explain:

It’s an amazing dynamic without precedent. When White House officials wanted Trump to understand his own agenda, they’d brief television pundits in the hopes that they’d convey the lessons to the president through his preferred medium.

After all, Trump is more likely to buy into an idea if he sees it repeated by pundits he likes on television. The alternative, I suppose, would be presidential aides handing Trump a “document,” but everyone involved seems to understand that doesn’t work. …

In case you think the severe winter storms in the Northeast militate against a warming globe, think again. D-brief’s Eric Betz reports on the latest research:

In late February, an invasion of warm, southern air sent temperatures surging above freezing across the Arctic and toward the North Pole. In the two weeks since then, three nor’easters have smacked New England and the surrounding areas.

As the Arctic warms, this trend has become common in recent winters, and it’s drawn new attention to links between the polar vortex — a constant mass of cold, dense air rotating over the north pole — and weather patterns farther south.

When the polar vortex weakens like it has several times this winter, it can cause the jet stream to buckle and smash cold Arctic air into warm and wet air to the south. The result: severe winter storms.

“This year is a great example — a textbook case,” says Judah Cohen, a climatologist with the private prediction center called Atmospheric and Environmental Research. He says that Arctic heat “set up this parade of nor’easters the past two weeks.”

Weather is a non-linear system, so as we add (or more precisely retain) more heat to the system, strange things will happen. In this case, the winds forming a wall around the North Pole breakdown and the cold mass descends south.

For the unofficial record, Minnesota had a more traditional winter season than we have had over the last decade or so. Or so was my impression when I wasn’t huddled in a sickly pile of pajamas.

Conservative Max Boot has a complaint about the U.S. military under Secretary Mattis:

After the Vietnam War, the U.S. military deliberately set out to forget everything it had learned about the brutal and unpleasant business of fighting guerrillas. The generals were operating under the assumption that if they didn’t prepare for that kind of war, they wouldn’t be asked to fight it. The emphasis in the 1980s and 1990s, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was on fighting conventional, uniformed adversaries. That worked out well in the 1991 Gulf War but left the U.S. armed forces tragically ill prepared for the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I thought the military did reasonably well in the initial attacks on the two countries, but were asked to then rebuild nations, not something the military should be doing. But anyways, the following interested me more:

Countries such as Sweden and Italy are working to combat Russian election interference by educating citizens about “fake news” and closing loopholes that hackers can exploit. (Even so, pro-Russian populists won the recent Italian election.) But Adm. Michael S. Rogers, outgoing head of U.S. Cyber Command, told Congress that he hasn’t been granted enough authorities to fight back against the Kremlin’s meddling and that the Russians “haven’t paid a price . . . that’s sufficient to get them to change their behavior.”

Generals are often accused of fighting the last war. Actually, they are more likely to prepare for a future war that never arrives while neglecting a current conflict. The Pentagon will be repeating that mistake if it focuses its energy on conventional wars rather than the hybrid threat. In fairness, that’s not all Mattis’s fault. Combating hybrid warfare requires extensive civilian-military cooperation. But it’s hard to fight a war when the foremost beneficiary of the enemy’s attack is the commander in chief.

I wonder if Max has considered the possibility that, by preparing for the war that never arrived, the US Military was actually successful. I’ve mentioned the fleet in being concept before, so I’ll just quote myself:

… where the very existence of a force, even if not deployed, modifies the behavior of the adversary.

Adversaries thinking to engage in conflict with us come to the realization that the United States is prepared for conflict in one mode, and therefore, and quite logically, abandon that mode themselves, seeing as we can generally out-resource just about anyone not named China. I’m no United States defense expert, so I can only guess that Mattis felt that we’d been neglecting our conventional capabilities and didn’t want to tempt someone into taking a shot at us, so he at least says that aspect of defense needs beefing up. It’s a signal: Don’t fuck with us, our conventional forces will be ready.

The question then becomes whether or not Max’s hybrid war preparations are being abandoned, or simply advanced without fanfare.

In a WaPo article on the labor tensions around the company that makes Peeps, they mention pensions:

The pension, which is administered by a group of labor officials and corporate executives from the 200 participating companies, has sued the company, alleging it improperly tried to stop enrolling new employees in the pension without paying the withdrawal fee. The company has sued the union, demanding “monetary damages” and alleging the strike was illegal.

Companies, labor leaders and retirees are watching closely, because the multi-employer pension that Peeps workers depend on is one of close to 1,300 around the country.

In total, 10 million current and retired workers participate in multi-employer pensions, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. These pensions allow employees to move from one job to another within the same pension and carry their retirement benefits with them.

Many of these multi-employer pensions are on track to run out of money. If the pension runs out of money, retired workers might only get a small percent of the money they thought they had earned through decades of work.

I know that pensions are one of the pet projects of unions and the left, one of those things you automatically get behind if you’re on the political left. Corporate America doesn’t like them, on the other hand, and has been getting rid of them as they can.

In my mind, I wonder about the stability and advisability of a financial institution where the income is known and limited, while the outgo is effectively neither. In the middle is, of course, the investments the pension fund can make – but investments can go belly up, too, so depending on them to make up the difference seems a mugs’ game.

And I wonder if UBI (Unconditional Basic Income) would ease the pressure on pension funds – or if the possible increase in taxes to pay a meaningful UBI would increase the pressure. Not an economist, am I.

When the media speaks of decoding genomes, I think there’s an assumption that the decoding is perfect. I know I did. Turns out that this is wrong, and that the mistakes and missed DNA is remarkably consistent – and has been dubbed Dark DNA. Biologist Adam Hargreaves describes the realization and subsequent hunt for the missing matter in NewScientist (10 March 2018, paywall):

[From the sidebar] These days, sequencing is largely automated, so the process is much faster. Multiple copies of a DNA strand are first chopped up at random into small fragments – usually between 100 and 150 bases long – which are then sequenced individually before being pieced back together by computer programs that match overlapping sections. But there’s a problem. This “next-generation” sequencing is not very good at deciphering stretches of DNA dominated by just two bases, such as G and C, because this makes it hard to reassemble overlapping fragments. As a result, we may have overlooked substantial chunks of DNA in the genomes sequenced to date. My colleagues and I have dubbed this “dark DNA”.

And so?

[From the main story] But we realised it might explain why the corresponding DNA appeared to be missing – standard sequencing technology is not very good at picking up sections of DNA with high levels of G and C. So we set out to reveal the elusive DNA in a different way: using caesium chloride ultracentrifugation. This involves spinning chopped-up DNA in a highly concentrated salt solution very fast – at least 40,000 revolutions per minute – for three days so that denser fragments, like those rich in GC bases, sink to the bottom. Having separated this out, we attempted to sequence it alone.

It worked. What we found was a mutation hotspot – a region of DNA with an extraordinarily large number of mutations, many of them changes from A or T to G or C bases. Sand rat Pdx1, for example, contains more mutations than any other version of the gene we know of in the animal kingdom – resulting in a Pdx1 protein that, in just one key region that binds to DNA, has at least 15 amino acids differing from the normal version.

Ah! Not only are the “missing” DNA not easily detected by traditional methods, but they’re undergoing very fast mutations! A major piece of evolution occurring, and we couldn’t see it.

A great bit of detective work, if it holds up.

Continuing the proactive thoughts on deep fakes that are coming our way, Jesse Lempel publishes a post on Lawfare concerning a possible approach using current law on how to attack those who would generate deep fakes, at least domestically:

But there’s another form of intellectual property that doesn’t turn on ownership of a particular image or work: the “right of publicity,” which, as one court explained, “is an intellectual property right of recent origin which has been defined as the inherent right of every human being to control the commercial use of his or her identity.” The right of publicity is a state law claim recognized in most states, whether by statute or common law (with slight variation among states), and is frequently invoked by celebrities seeking to prevent a business from unauthorized use of their images or identity in an advertisement. (For greater detail, see Jennifer Rothman’s Roadmap to the Right of Publicity.)

Could a victim of a deep fake posted on Facebook or Twitter bring a successful right-of-publicity claim against the platform for misappropriating “the commercial use of his or her identity”? This is a tough question that has not yet been tested in the courts. Such a claim would need to get over three basic hurdles: (1) fitting the right of publicity into the Section 230 intellectual property exception; (2) counting deep fakes as “commercial use” of identity for right-of-publicity claims; and (3) First Amendment protections on free speech.

I’d  never heard of the Right of Publicity before. Jesse goes on to analyze this approach, pointing out possible pitfalls and adverse previous rulings. It’s an interesting position to take on what is, quite frankly, a frightening future development for those who value a stable society.

Courtesy Steve Benen, today’s scandal is EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s living arrangements in Washington, as explained by Bloomberg Politics:

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s lease at a Washington apartment owned by a lobbyist friend allowed him to pay $50 a night for a single bedroom — but only on the nights when he actually slept there.

Not so bad?

The owner is a health care lobbyist, Vicki Hart. Her husband J. Steven Hart, is also a lobbyist and his firm represents clients in industries regulated by the EPA.

Ooops. But there’s more, as Steve helpfully notes:

ABC News reported yesterday on a first-class trip Pruitt took to Morocco late last year – it cost $40,000 and you paid for it – in order to have the EPA chief pitch “the potential benefit of liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports on Morocco’s economy.”  …

But what makes this story so much worse is the second half of the controversy. As ABC News added, “Cheniere Energy Inc. owned the only active Liquid Natural Gas export plant in the United States at the time.”

Why is that important? Because for much of 2017, Pruitt “occupied prime real estate in a townhouse near the U.S. Capitol that is co-owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist, property records from 2017 show.”

The lobbyist’s firm specifically lobbies on liquid natural gas exports.

Pruitt’s a real Swamp Monster, apparently. But it was Steve’s last comment that caught my attention:

Postscript: Twelve years ago, with Republicans controlling the White House, the Senate, and the House, Democrats had a fair amount of success running against the GOP’s “culture of corruption.”

The party may want to consider dusting off that playbook.

I actually have to kinda wonder about that. After all, when it’ll actually take three or four minutes just to list all the scandals in the White House as well as Congress, before getting to the full scale ineptitude and rank incompetence, well, no one will sit still for a political ad of that magnitude.

But it’s like Fogo de Chão for wolves and lions.

On Lawfare, law professor Alan Rozenshtein thinks the problem of 3rd party access to cryptographic systems may be resolvable, progress is being made, and that at least some of the problem is cultural, rather than technological or mathematical:

Again, we still don’t know whether secure third-party access is possible. None of these researchers (nor anyone else) have publicly put forward proposals at the level of detail that would be required for a full evaluation. And if they did, it’s almost certain that the research community would find serious, perhaps even fatal, flaws. But that’s how cryptographic research moves forward, and we ought to put our energy into such research rather than spend it on what Herb Lin described in 2015 as a “theological clash of absolutes”: that is, the abstract “it can’t be done/it can be done” debate that has dominated the encryption conversation. (Benjamin Wittes made a similar point around that time.)

At least for scholars and policy analysts, the question should be how to encourage this incipient line of research. It’s understandable that the government would prefer that technology companies come up with the solutions, but Washington now has an important opportunity to drive a pragmatic, research-based process. Perhaps the National Institute for Standards and Technology should lead the way, just as it successfully ran a multi-year, global, and public competition to select what became the widely used AES cryptographic protocol. But that’s just one option out of many. The larger point is that after years of bitter stalemate, the debate over law-enforcement access to encrypted systems may finally be making real progress. And to track this progress, we should focus less on the war of words between the government and certain parts of the information-security community and instead focus on those security researchers—whether in academia or industry—who are working to discover whether secure third-party access really is a contradiction in terms.

He focuses on the questions of secure vs secure enough, and wonders if we have explored the latter option thoroughly. The success of these systems will not come from amazing mathematical insights, but from hard work and security protocols – and that will then lead to the question of what to do with systems that do not have 3^rd party access built into them. Do they then become illegal?

WaPo reports on a difference of opinion in Toronto:

The vegans planned their protest for the middle of the restaurant’s busy dinnertime shift.

The group of animal rights activists were incensed that Antler Kitchen & Bar, a locavore restaurant in Toronto that says it highlights regional ingredients, served foie gras and farmed meat “meant to run in the wild.” So a group of them stood in front last week chanting “you’ve got blood on your hands,” and holding a banner that read MURDER in hot pink lettering.

Then came the counterprotest.

Michael Hunter, a chef and co-owner of the restaurant appeared in its window with a raw deer leg and a sharp knife, when he began to carve up the meat in full view of the protesters, some of whom later said they were disturbed for days, according to news reports.

There’s more nuance, presented later in the story, but the point is fairly clear:

“He wanted to get us back, which I guess is easy to do. We’re only there because we love animals,” [protest organizer Marni Ugar] said.

“We were in shock,” she said.

Ugar has offered to reduce the frequency of protests to once a month if the restaurant displays a sign in its window saying “Attention, animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust no matter how it’s done.”

The ideal: Life is sacred, and, by extension, it should not be taken.

Reality: Life feeds on death. Whether it’s an herbivore eating vegetation, or a carnivore hoping to dine on the herbivore, this is how life gets on. Even plants depend on nutrients in the soil, often deposited there as the remains of formerly live things.

But let’s take this a little further. First, humans may disturb the environment to the extent that we now have serious debates about defining a new Era named the Anthropocene, but that doesn’t set us apart from Nature, it makes us an integral, if disruptive, part of it.

Why is this relevant? Let’s take a very concrete example from Minnesota. Being humans (or Europeans, to be precise), we set about exterminating the wolves when we came here, because of the threats they posed, real or imagined, to our livestock and ourselves. While the wolves aren’t completely gone, their decrease has changed the ecological makeup of the region to the extent that the deer population is periodically described as a plague of locusts.

In other words, the deer, no longer restrained by the wolves, have overpopulated their ecological niche. It’s a nice, clean word, isn’t it? Overpopulation. You don’t think much about it. After all, we’re not the ones who are overpopulated, are we? (Yes, we are, but the impact is slowly growing and spread across many issues, such as wolf populations, or climate change.)

Ever see a starving deer?

Count the ribs, watch it stagger about, desperate for food. It’s unpleasant.

That, folks, is a potential result of the principle All life is sacred. When the available resources are inadequate to the needs of the population, they don’t go to sleep until the resources increase, nor do they go magically to heaven. They die in horrible pain from starvation or disease.

So when we become the top predator in an area by reducing the population of previous dominant predators, and we also possess a conscience to care for those creatures in that area that haven’t offended us by trying to kill and eat ourselves or our personal critters, we have to assume a responsibility to keep their populations in sensible check. If that means hunting and eating, then so be it; we’re fortunate that, as omnivores, we can eat those that are killed. It’s that or a far more ghastly death.

In a more abstract sense, we adopt principles not, ahem, out of principle, but because we believe that by adopting those principles, those rules for how we live our life, that we’ll improve ourselves or the society around us. We change them when we’re obviously wrong, reluctantly, and we fight about them, say, over whether preservation of wetlands trumps economic development.

But the Life is sacred principle is putting the wagon before the horse. It implicitly asserts that it’s miraculous that life occurs, and, since we value our lives, we should value all other lives on the same absolute scale – every individual life. Thus we get impassioned arguments about whether fetuses identified to have Down Syndrome should be permitted to be aborted at the mother’s option, immense efforts at saving preemies – and ridiculous amounts of money spent on our pets. Hey, I’m not sneering at pet owners, because I’m one of them. I spent a lot of money trying to save our last three cats, when maybe we should have put them to sleep and saved them a lot of suffering.

But they were family, and I believed in giving them a chance. I give myself a pass on family, as we all will do.

Back to my point, the Life is sacred principle is drowned by its own logical, real results – dying by starvation and disease being the most vivid. It should be enough, once realized, to cause that principle to be abandoned, and something more reasonable formulated and debated. I present, as an opposite example, the extermination of the American bison, a truly irresponsible action, taken, I suppose, to feed settlers, and make way for them. A closer examination of the bison situation would yield more nuance, I’m sure.

Given all that, I suppose it’s no surprise that I support the restauranteur to some degree. I do limit that support, though, in view of the report that he serves foie gras, which seems like torture for the geese, as I understand the production of foie gras, but that’s a matter for another post.

I think that’s the strategy from Judicial Watch: trying to salt the earth that Mueller may be planting with the results of his investigations. David Post of The Volokh Conspiracy is quite annoyed with Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations Chris Farrell, who was recently interviewed on Fox News:

There is a great deal in this that is malignant nonsense, starting at the very beginning, with Farrell’s statement of the doctrine: that “evidence obtained unlawfully … can’t be used, and anything derived from that can’t be used” in a criminal proceeding. …

Notice, please: evidence that was obtained in violation of specific constitutional guarantees – the 4th Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and (as established in other cases) the 5th Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, and the 6th Amendment’s right to counsel – is inadmissable, as is evidence derived from that unconstitutionally-obtained evidence.

It is thus simply incorrect – incorrect as in “I’d flunk a 1st year Criminal Procedure student for suggesting it on an exam” incorrect – to suggest that all evidence “obtained unlawfully,” and all evidence derived from such unlawfully obtained evidence, isn’t admissable in criminal proceedings. Unlawfully obtained evidence can be and is used in criminal proceedings all the time. …

My guess is that Mr. Farrell knows all that; indeed, my guess is that virtually every lawyer in the country who knows anything about criminal procedure knows all that. So what is going on, I wonder?

It is ironic and surely coincidental that this attack on the utility of the evidence that Mueller is collecting comes just as particularly interesting piece of evidence has come to light: that in September and October 2016, Rick Gates, while working for the Trump campaign (as liaison to the RNC), spoke by phone on numerous occasions to an individual the FBI had linked to Russian intelligence services (and whom Gates himself described a “former Russian Intelligence Officer with the G.R.U. (Russian military intelligence).” We don’t know what subjects came up in those conversations, but Gates, having pled guilty to the charges Mueller has brought against him, is co-operating with the investigation, so presumably we’ll find out soon enough.

So if you saw that interview and were suitably impressed, think again. If you like World War II Pacific Theatre analogies, Farrell was a tiny destroyer, desperately making smoke, as the enemy’s big ships came barreling along. And it appears Mr. Post was not taken in, not in the very least.

I would take Mr. Farrell’s pronouncements in the future with a very large grain of salt. So large, in fact, that I might choke on it.

There’s been some hubbub over retired SCOTUS Associate Justice John Paul Stevens calling for the abolition of the 2nd Amendment:

In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.

That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence. [The New York Times]

Elizabeth Wydra on Slate:

On the complicated issue of guns, I have a profound disagreement with the former justice. In the wake of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida—and the triumphant day of marches across the country that surviving students and their allies organized last weekend—Stevens’ call for young activists to work for repeal of the Second Amendment is staggeringly misplaced.

At the level of public discourse, it is catastrophic. Calling for the amendment’s repeal—a daunting task that could take decades and untold resources but is likely to result in failure—only sets back this burgeoning movement by emboldening and energizing gun extremists. President Trump, oddly silent about Stormy Daniels this week, practically leapt out of bed to disagree with Stevens on Twitter, rallying the far right against this phantom menace. National Rifle Association leaders quickly capitalized on Stevens’ comments as well, claiming “the gun-control lobby is no longer distancing themselves from the radical idea of repealing the Second Amendment and banning all firearms.”

 Constitutional Law Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard via WaPo:

The kids have been savvy enough to know better. They have reminded everyone that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, even as interpreted by a conservative Supreme Court and the right-leaning lower federal courts, is far from absolute: It permits Congress and the states to outlaw what the court in District of Columbia v. Heller called “dangerous and unusual weapons” and those “not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes,” and to comprehensively regulate gun sales and the places guns can be carried. Over the past decade, the court has let stand bans on semiautomatic assault rifles, limits on the sale of large magazines and restrictions on the number of guns a person can stockpile. It has left no doubt that Congress can require universal gun registration, that states can forbid gun sales to anyone under 21, and that government can red-flag potentially dangerous purchasers, ban concealed carry and enact sweeping safety measures. Relying on that legal reality, the young have reassured Americans fearful of confiscation that they do not seek the repeal of the Second Amendment.

Repealing the Second Amendment would eliminate that source of reassurance — without even achieving the Parkland, Fla., students’ aims. It would not take the most lethal, military-grade weapons out of dangerous hands. Indeed, it wouldn’t eliminate a single gun or enact a single gun regulation. It would instead make the passage of each proposed regulation more difficult. Worse, a repeal campaign would infuse the Second Amendment with an absolute anti-regulation meaning that only the gun lobby has given it.

 In other words, the practical consequences are nil – or worse. Robert Charles of Fox News:

Once we begin whittling away at one of our rights in the Bill of Rights, what’s to stop the erosion of the others? Freedom of speech? Freedom of religion? Changes like this wouldn’t be minor tinkering – they would amount to major disfigurement of America’s foundational document, equivalent to amputating a person’s arm or leg.

Hmmmm. And, yet, there’s persistent talk on the right about rewriting the Constitution completely. Keep in mind we did actually rescind the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), and nothing else fell like dominoes. Granted, it doesn’t have the same holiness as the first ten, now did it? Still…

Steve Benen on Maddowblog:

Putting aside some of the core issues at stake in the 2008 ruling, let’s not forget that Scalia’s 5-4 decision may have been celebrated by the right, but it nevertheless endorsed “longstanding prohibitions” on firearm ownership from felons and the mentally ill, bans on guns in government buildings, limits on the commercial sale of guns, and bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons,” including “M-16 rifles and the like.”

In other words, the kinds of proposals reformers are demanding are entirely in line with the kind of constitutional framework Scalia articulated a decade ago – a framework the right claimed to support.

I mention this, not to contradict Stevens, but to reject the idea of a binary choice between repealing the Second Amendment and leaving the status quo in place indefinitely. The same changes sought by leaders of the March for Our Lives could be approved immediately by lawmakers and could withstand a legal challenge from the NRA and its allies.

What stands in the way is not the Second Amendment, but the political will of officials currently in office.

Do the possible rather than the impossible.

Matthew Yglesias in Vox:

That’s a striking claim for a distinguished jurist, but it’s misleading on the law and background of the politics. The Supreme Court’s current Second Amendment jurisprudence allows all the gun regulation ideas that currently have any meaningful support in Congress. And putting another progressive justice or two on the bench would create even more constitutional scope for regulation.

Trying to repeal the amendment simply sets up the gun control movement for failure, since the political barriers to amending the Constitution are so high. And to prioritize an amendment is in fact to cede the constitutional argument to the NRA and falsely imply that the existing text and precedents don’t allow for sensible gun control.

In other words, it’s an inadvertent trap.

Syd Sweitzer in a public post on Facebook:

FYI – Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is a …. REPUBLICAN. Nominated by Ford, who was also a Republican.

But how much longer will he be a Republican? And, were he not a former Associate Justice, would he be a Republican today? My sense is that he was a moderate Republican when he was nominated for SCOTUS, and moderate Republicans of Ford’s Presidency would be regarded as liberals by today’s GOP base.

He’s little more than a prize on the mantelpiece for today’s GOP. And one that might be swept away and put in the closet if he continues to exhibit leftist views like this one.

As far as the debate goes, I’m more or less persuaded by the views of Tribe and Yglesias. So long as we don’t discuss the oddity of the 2^nd Amendment being considered to be an absolute, rather than limited right, we’ll probably not see much traction. I have some mild sympathy for home-protection, but I have very little for “concealed carry” and other aggresive “rights” which subject general citizenry to the accidents of the clumsy, as well as making it far harder to distinguish between the good guys and the (armed) bad guys.

And I have no sympathy at all for those who want to trot about with weapons of war in hand. The general “fear of the government” ignores the fact that it’s our government, changeable at the ballot box.

Oh, yeah! The IRS Scam Call Club!

Of course, the IRS isn’t going to call if you have problems. It’ll be mail or maybe through your tax advisor, if you use one. And then not using a toll-free number? That’s a big giveaway.

But I must say, there was a delightful retro quality to the call. It was neither live nor recorded, but a delightful computer-generated voice, artfully patched together to really pull you back thirty years when such technology was in its infancy. I’m not even sure, thinking about it, if it’s a scam or some compulsive performance art.

But there you go. It’s a PSA for you. If the IRS calls, it isn’t the IRS.

Florida conservatives had been hoping to alter the Florida Constitution to permit funding of religious schools through vouchers via a Constitutional Amendment. Turns out that idea, despite their tipping the initial scales in its favors, isn’t working out, reports the Tampa Bay Times:

Proposal 4 would have struck the Blaine Amendment from the state constitution — which prohibits public money from going to any religious institution, and thus any religiously affiliated private school.

After a short but robust debate on Wednesday, that proposal was “temporarily postponed.”

Donalds said they will not bring it up again.

She also withdrew proposal 45, which would have added language to the constitution saying “nothing herein may be construed to limit the Legislature from making provision for other educational services … that are in addition to the system of free public schools.” …

But any proposals that make it to the ballot in the general election must receive at least 60 percent support to make it into the constitution, and recent polling done by Clearview Research found that Proposal 4 fell far below that threshold. Clearview often does work for Democratic causes but this poll was not done for any particular client, according to president Steven Vancore.

Only 41 percent of respondents said they would vote “yes” on the proposal and 51 percent of respondents declared they would vote “no.” The research firm did not conduct polling on proposal 45.

The Florida Education Association opined that the polling was more likely the reason for the proposals’ removal from consideration by the CRC. A similar amendment was also on the ballot in 2012 and it was defeated.

Far-right ideas are not as popular as one might think if they only get their news from conservative media, although I think 41% is still unsettlingly high.

An angry ghost is at the center of Prison (1987), the ghost of a man executed for a murder he didn’t commit. But I’ll tell you what, this ghost is more than ready to commit murder most foul, now that he’s in the afterlife. Naturally, he’s tied to the prison where he died, the traditional approach to ghosts’ abodes, so that leaves just two classes of people, the imprisoned and the imprisoners.

You’d think he – do ghosts have gender? – would have sympathy for the prisoners, wouldn’t you? After all, they were mostly not responsible for his death, in fact it’s something like twenty years later so, given turnover and the fact this prison has been abandoned for while, he wouldn’t have a grudge against anyone, yes? But, no, the prisoners make for convenient victims. I must say, at this juncture, that a scene in which a prisoner versed in some sort of black magic summons the dark spirits and that sort of rot was actually quite impressive.

Too bad it ended with a ray of light boring a hole through his chest.

This is what happens when you don’t carry your wire cutters while doing your rounds.

A few other prisoners buy the farm in various odd ways, to use the old saying, but in all honesty, the guards are the real victims here. They get shot, thrown off upper story walk-throughs, choked to death with barbed wire, and, in the latter case, a final ignominy of being thrust through the ceiling, wrapped like a present, into the Warden’s office.

The Warden, unsurprisingly, was instrumental in the unjust death of the ghost’s former corporeal body – is there a single word for that uncouth phrase? – all those years ago. Now he’s suffering an emotional breakdown as the prison is slowly coming apart around him.

And don’t forget the lady who seems to represent the board of directors. I think. In any case, her home computer, not located near the prison, manages to explode, for reasons unclear.

Yeah. This is bad.

But let’s skip the traditional grousing about the story, even though it’s fairly awful, because I think what really has my back hairs up here is rather the obverse of what I observed in Ghostbusters (1984). To summarize the review of Ghostbusters, I appreciated the elevation of humanity to something beyond the level of the Divine, as ghosts are caught and confined, and then a savage God is humiliated and destroyed: Man is no longer supine, butt in the air, ready for debasement.

But Prison is a bit of pro-religion propaganda. Not only do ghosts exist, but they exact awful, savage revenge. Dark powers can be summoned, but not controlled. Man is a victim, a plaything, to be savaged and flung aside, and the hell with improving, fighting back, becoming something better. Cower in corners and hope the men of the cloth – prominently absent here – can cover your ass for you when the dark powers rage.

An awful story, unsympathetic characters, dull dialog, and a regressive theme. Put this in the Don’t Bother category. Unless you’re a Viggo Mortensen completist, and even then I wasn’t sure which of characters he might be.

Cenotaph:

1. a sepulchral monument erected in memory of a deceased person whose body is buried elsewhere. [Dictionary.com]

Mentioned in conversation with my Arts Editor last night. It’s also used somewhere in the Nine Princes In Amber series, by Roger Zelazny, but I misremember exactly which book.

Leon Sigal of 38 North worries that Bolton’s grasp of the history of North Korean negotiations is flawed. Here’s his take on North Korean aims:

Throughout the Cold War, Kim Il Sung had played China off against the Soviet Union to maintain his freedom of maneuver. In 1988, anticipating the Soviet Union’s collapse, he reached out to improve relations with the United States, South Korea and Japan fundamentally in order to avoid overdependence on China. That has been the Kims’ aim ever since.

From Pyongyang’s vantage point, that aim was the basis of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which committed Washington to “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations,” or, in plain English, to end enmity. That was also the essence of the September 2005 Six Party Joint Statement which bound Washington and Pyongyang to “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together, and take steps to normalize their relations subject to their respective bilateral policies” as well as to “negotiate a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”

For Washington, the point of these agreements was the suspension of Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. For nearly a decade, the Agreed Framework shuttered the North’s production of fissile material and stopped the test-launches of medium and longer-range missiles and did so again from 2007 to 2009. Both agreements collapsed, however, when Washington did little to implement its commitment to improve relations and Pyongyang reneged on denuclearization.

So-called experts ignore that history at their peril.

In one respect, the aims of the Kim family is something Americans should deeply understand: a desire not to be dominated. Korean history with the Chinese and the Japanese has been unpleasant, sometimes in the extreme, and it’s easy to understand why the Kims have taken North Korea on a highly independent path.

I think we can assume the recently reported trip to China was a carefully planned bit of diplomacy, perhaps an attempt to manipulate the West as much as it was to communicate with the Chinese. Perhaps Kim wanted to assert some prestige, as North Korean is near enough to claiming to be a nuclear power.

Given the reported horrific behavior of the rulers towards the ruled in North Korea, it’s a bit of a question as to whether Americans will ever accept the Kims as the legitimate rulers of North Korea, and the Korean War is also quite a lump in the throat – although the Chinese also participated in that bitter conflict on North Korea’s side, and we seem to have gotten past that. I might add that China’s Mao Zedong’s Culture Revolution resulted in suffering and death for millions of Chinese, and the Communists are still in charge there today.

But Mao was eventually, if unofficially, repudiated; after his death, his wife was put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to death for crimes during the Cultural Revolution, although the sentence was never carried out.

It might help, during negotiations with Korea, to remember the desire of the Kims to be independent of the various powers of the world.

And then we call it a Sarcastic Fringehead:

Source: Pixdaus

And they have a special talent, as NewScientist (10 March 2018) tells us:

SARCASTIC FRINGEHEADS have more of a temper than your average fish, but it isn’t a sharp tongue that their rivals face: it is their gaping, fluorescent mouth.

When threatened by another male, the fish opens its mouth about as wide as its head, displaying an outer and inner row of teeth. This effort is intended to show other fringeheads that “I’m bigger than you and you shouldn’t come into my area”, says Watcharapong Hongjamrassilp at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Which just accentuates the coolness.

Pardoned but guilty of a felony former sheriff Joe Arpaio proclaims his priority if he is elected to the Senate next fall:

Republican Senate candidate and former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio suggested that he would revive the debunked claim that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fraudulent if he’s elected to the Senate.

At a conservative convention last week, Arpaio recalled introducing President Donald Trump at a campaign rally where the former sheriff mentioned illegal immigration and the “birther” theory — that Obama was not born in the US and therefore was ineligible to be president. [CNN]

We could write this guy off as an ex-con in the beginnings of dementia. Or an ex-con trying to run a classic con on us. Much like Trump with Mrs. Clinton, this is a Republican who wants to resurrect an old enemy to run against because, frankly, the Republicans have very little to show for their victories in the last election – unless rank incompetence is an accomplishment.

But I think there’s a bit more danger to think about, and it’s this: he’s continuing to chip away at the respectability of the institutions which hold us together. If a non-partisan institute such as a hospital issues a representation showing that someone was, indeed, born in that hospital, we should not be sitting around doubting the veracity of that document without some kind of proof.

If Sheriff Joe has this proof, then fucking well get it out there so we can examine it, otherwise shut your yap on that subject. That is how we do business in this nation, not this dishonorable waving of a hand in the air, I’ll show you the evidence later after you elect me.

The alternative?

Mr. Arpaio, is it true you were born in Mexico to Latin parents? But, sir, we have proof positive that what you claim is your birth certificate has been faked and your real parents are former drug lords who had syphilis. We have pictures of the birth right here, along with the Mexican birth certificate. Why didn’t you tell voters this during your many runs for Sheriff, sir?

Is that the kind of nation Arpaio and the birthers want to engender?

Did Trump’s lawyer raise prospect of parsons for Flynn, Manafort?

Well, that’s a new perk at the White House.

I’m sure it’s already been fixed.

Slate reports that the GOP wants to make very sure they won’t be embarrassed in Arizona’s 8th district:

Panicked by recent results and fearing another national embarrassment, Republicans are spending big in hopes of holding on to a district Donald Trump won in a landslide. Sound familiar? It should. After high-profile losses in Alabama and Pennsylvania, Republicans are now desperate to win next month’s special election in Arizona.

According to Politico, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC are spending a combined $270,000 in Arizona in support of Debbie Lesko, the former state senator running to fill the House seat that opened up when GOP Rep. Trent Franks resigned from Congress in disgrace late last year. That’s on top of the roughly $280,000 the Republican National Committee has already reported spending on field operations on Lesko’s behalf. Add it all up, and that’s more than a half-million dollars in a district that would be well under the radar in any normal year.

Here’s the thing: at some point, advertising no longer matters. No matter how much you din the voters with your message, if their real world experience disagrees with your message, it’s just money down the toilet.

The GOP should never have lost PA-18. They have a massive voter registration advantage in AZ-8. They shouldn’t lose.

And if they do? They really don’t want to face that conundrum – but do they realize that money is not the solution to every problem?

I haven’t seen the Democrats investing in AZ-8 just yet. Maybe they should do a $10,000 ad buy, just to see how much of a twitch they get out of the Republicans.

Sodality:

In social anthropology, a sodality is a non-kin group organized for a specific purpose (economic, cultural, or other), and frequently spanning villages or towns.

Sodalities are often based on common age or gender, with all-male sodalities more common than all-female. One aspect of a sodality is that of a group “representing a certain level of achievement in the society, much like the stages of an undergraduate’s progress through college [university]”.

In the anthropological literature, the Mafia in Sicily has been described as a sodality. Other examples include Maasai war camps, and Crow and Cheyenne military associations, groups that were not much unlike today’s Veterans of Foreign Wars or American Legion. [Wikipedia]

Noted in”The Mystery Of Hohokam Ballcourts,” Alexandra Witze, American Archaeology (Spring 2018, currently print only):

Researchers have also grappled with questions concerning the locations and timing of these ballcourts. Though there is evidence of trade and other interaction between the peoples of Mesoamerica and the greater Southwest, Mesoamerican-style ballcourts appear only in Arizona and the state of Sonora in northern Mexico. [Desert Archaeology Inc. archaeologist Henry] Wallace thinks that the various Southwestern peoples “picked and chose” the Mesoamerican offerings that most appealed to them. “People and leaders will adopt what works for them and benefits society,” he said, and for the Hohokam ballcourts were useful for creating “social institutions and sodalities.”

The behavior of brown bears in Sweden has been changing in response to changes in rules concerning the hunting. Basically, you can’t take a mother with cubs. The result?

“Generally, the cubs have followed their mother for a year and a half,” says Professor Jon Swenson from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). “Only rarely have we observed them to follow her for two and a half years.”

This has now changed. Today, more cubs stay with their mothers an additional year, as opposed to 15 to 20 years ago. “Man is now an evolutionary force in the lives of the bears,” Swenson says. …

As long as a female has cubs, she is safe. This hunting pressure has resulted in a change in the proportion of females that keep their cubs for 1.5 years in relation to those that keep them for 2.5 years. In the period from 2005 to 2015, the number of females keeping their cubs for an additional year has increased from 7% to 36%. The individuals themselves do not alter their strategies. They portray either one behavior or the other, and this trait seems fixed.

“This basically means that we are shooting more of those females that only keep their cubs for a year.” [Phys.org]

Since the individuals are not altering their behavior, it suggests a genetic change, although it could still be a learned behavior, passed to following generations.

I suppose a genetic study would be necessary to verify it. It’s fascinating to think the genetics could change this fast.