Monthly Archives: March 2018

An update on this interesting investigation into the NRA and a link to Russia, from NPR – a United States Senator has taken an interest:

In the context of ongoing investigations, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to the NRA earlier this month asking, “Can you categorically state that your organizations have never, wittingly or unwittingly, received any contributions from individuals or entities acting as conduits for foreign entities or interests?”

The NRA said it does receive foreign money but not for election purposes.

“While we do receive some contributions from foreign individuals and entities, those contributions are made directly to the NRA for lawful purposes,” NRA’s General Counsel John C. Frazer wrote to Wyden in a letter obtained by NPR. “Our review of our records has found no foreign donations in connection with a United States election, either directly or through a conduit.”

In 2015 to 2016, Frazer continued, the NRA received money from companies based in the U.S. that may be owned or managed by foreign nationals. “However, none of those entities or individuals is connected with Russia, and none of their contributions were made in connection with U.S. elections,” Frazer added.

But, as TPM reports, the NRA‘s explanation has a hole or two:

The gun group insists it has never received foreign money in connection with an election. But campaign finance experts say that, since money is fungible, that assurance doesn’t mean much.

Though it’s a long way from being confirmed and may never be, the NRA’s new admissions offer perhaps the most compelling evidence yet that foreign money could have allowed the group to conduct political activities boosting Trump.

The strange, even bizarre behaviors of the NRA leadership continues to leave me uneasy. I know suggesting some subset of them are Russian moles is waaaaaay out on the extremes – but what few facts we have so far does fit the theory. Just from Occam’s Razor, I do assume that they’re merely home-grown American extremists who haven’t figured out that “the government” is really “our government.”

But I’ll keep the other theory in mind.

HuffPo has more information on the gerrymandering case involving the Democrats in Maryland:

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge from Republican voters in the 6th District who say state officials violated the U.S. Constitution in redefining the district’s borders. The plaintiffs argue that by drawing the boundaries based in part on political data, Democrats essentially punished voters for their past support of GOP candidates, violating their First Amendment rights. …

The Maryland case is different from the Wisconsin one in a few key ways. While the Wisconsin lawsuit challenges an entire map, the Maryland suit seeks to redraw just one district (though obviously that would affect other districts). The Maryland case is being brought by Republicans, who were the main beneficiaries of congressional gerrymandering after the 2010 Census. And the Maryland plaintiffs are advancing the novel legal idea that partisan gerrymandering amounts to an unconstitutional retaliation based on voters’ past choices.

A district is unconstitutional, they contend, when officials take voters’ past support for candidates into account and draw a map in such a way that dilutes their votes with no justification other than partisan gain. Richard Pildes, an election law expert and professor at New York University, wrote in a blog post that the plaintiffs were suggesting a way to evaluate partisan gerrymandering claims that is similar to the way the Supreme Court already looks at claims of race-based gerrymandering ― an area of law the court is active in.

An interesting legal assertion, although since people are changing domiciles from time to time, the idea that they’re being punished for past voting patterns seems a trifle dubious to me.

Stewart Baker on Lawfare recounts a Bolton achievement when it came to secret shipments of arms by North Korea, and how to legally deal with them:

But contrary to his trigger-happy anti-diplomatic reputation, Bolton quickly set about building a nonproliferation framework that avoided the foreign policy establishment’s earlier mistakes. The Proliferation Security Initiative didn’t rely on endless multilateral set piece negotiation leading to a treaty. Instead, Bolton identified a group of like-minded European countries, and in 2003, this coalition of the willing signed on to a coordinated campaign to interdict shipments of missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Without a treaty, each country agreed to do what it felt was authorized under international law,—a pledge that Bolton cleverly expanded by making international law himself, negotiating bilateral ship-boarding agreements with the main countries supplying flags of convenience to merchant vessels.

Many states adopted domestic laws prohibiting trafficking in WMD, and the U.N. Security Council eventually adopted a resolution calling on all members to do so. By avoiding an international treaty negotiating scrum and a multinational centralized bureaucracy, PSI left the United States with the flexibility and initiative to seize on opportunities to expand PSI’s reach as they arose. (Much to China’s frustration, I’m pleased to add; it has spent fifteen years watching PSI tighten the screws on North Korea and railing ineffectually from the sidelines about PSI’s lack of formal treaty authority.)

Having started with like-minded countries, the PSI gradually expanded to include less enthusiastic members who nonetheless could not reasonably oppose interdiction of WMD. Several U.N. Security Council regulations requiring nonproliferation action were hung on the framework of the PSI principles, A hundred countries now belong, and Bolton’s initiative was largely embraced by the Obama administration—mainly because it works. When I was at the Department of Homeland Security, after Bolton had left the administration, we often had reason to rely on PSI’s authorities to investigate suspicious shipments bound for the United States. Thanks to its flexibility, the nonproliferation framework was easily adapted into a homeland defense measure.

Which is somewhat reassuring – he may have a subtle side. Let’s hope so.

This car should have gotten a credit. I think it had more screen time than the daughter.

Panic In The Year Zero! (1962, aka End Of The World) is a remarkably steady and believable look at what might happen if a limited nuclear war had taken place in the 1950s. It features the Baldwin family, driving from Los Angeles into the mountains on a family vacation trip. Midway up the mountains, a series of flashes of light catch their attention, and soon father Harry has guessed the truth, even if the telephone operators are merely saying the lines are down: Los Angeles has been hit in a nuclear attack.

He immediately switches into survival mode, buying and taking supplies at gunpoint, and driving further up into the mountains, looking for a cave his son has mentioned in the past. His goal? Family survival. His obstacles?

Everyone else.

Along with the usual friction one might expect, a gang of no-good young men, taking advantage of the situation, becomes their biggest external obstacle. They know no decency, have no respect except for raw power, and soon enough, after his daughter is assaulted by them, he and his son are forced to hunt those they can find and kill them.

But there are internal obstacles as well. His wife cannot quite believe that mankind will descend into savagery, and his daughter disconnects from what’s happening, as might be expected from a self-centered teenager. But when Harry kills the men who assaulted his daughter, with neither remorse nor pity, and then nearly leaves one of their victims behind, he awakens to the fact that he’s becoming the man he warned his son not to become: killing without thought, living without pity nor generosity.

So, in a sense, when his son is desperately wounded by the last survivor of the gang, it’s his lifeline, a reminder that there’s more to life than vengeance and survival. Word has arrived that civilization is beginning to return in a town not too far away, and the climax is the desperate drive towards civilization and hospitals.

And finding the US Army sitting in the way.

Some of the special effects are substandard, but fortunately they left the nuclear attack as simply flashes in the sky and a couple of mushroom clouds. The close investigation is of the psychology of all the survivors, the authorities dead or distracted by the catastrophes in Los Angeles and other cities, and I think it’s well done.

I can’t say you’ll enjoy this movie if  you run across it – there’s not a lick of humor in it – but it’s a sobering reminder of another era in American history, when we lived under the shadow of the Cold War, and how that affected much of the population’s psychology.

The worst part of this movie may be its title.

Remember Mike Hughes, the guy who was building a rocket as part of a plan to prove the Earth is flat? He finally got his first rocket in the series of rockets – just a test, not the final rocket – to fire and get him off the ground:

 Mike Hughes, a California man who is most known for his belief that the Earth is shaped like a Frisbee, finally blasted off into the sky in a steam-powered rocket he had built himself.

The 61-year-old limo driver and daredevil-turned-rocket-maker soared about 1,875 feet above the Mojave Desert on Saturday afternoon, the Associated Press reported. Hughes’s white-and-green rocket, bearing the words “FLAT EARTH,” propelled vertically about 3 p.m. Pacific time and reached a speed of about 350 mph, Waldo Stakes, who has been helping Hughes, told the AP. Hughes deployed two parachutes while landing, the second one just moments before he plopped down not far from his launching point. [WaPo]

He was mildly injured, but says he’ll be continuing. While I don’t agree with his scientific views, I admire this 61-year old’s gumption. I honestly hope he achieves his goal of getting a rocket up 52 miles – and discovers the Earth really is a sphere. He can bring the news back as independent confirmation, in the great tradition of science.

Rana Strauss of Treehugger went to Morocco and came home with some great pics:

I had to grab that one because camels always look like bad-tempered gossips. More at Treehugger.

A reader remarks on solar lensing:

It looks to me (from brief Google search) that the Oort Cloud starts about 1,000 AU out from the Sun and extends to about 100,000 AU. It also appears that Voyager 1 is only just beyond 100 AU, slightly beyond the Termination Shock and the Heliopause.

So, this gravitational lensing point is way out there. It may take quite a while to get a telescope put in place there, but it definitely sounds worth doing. It’ll also take a couple hours to get radio signals from such a telescope back to earth (1 AU is about 9 light minutes, is it not?).

Lastly, at that distance, I suspect our Sun looks like a speck, maybe just a bright star.

Ah, I see the linked linked article mentions 550 AU as the distance involved.

And another reader issues a correction of the first:

A couple hours? Neptune is 4 light-hours away from Earth and it’s a hell of a lot closer to us than the Oort cloud. This page puts the Oort cloud at about a YEAR away from us at light speed:

http://casswww.ucsd.edu/archive/public/tutorial/Intro.html

Nice to have someone else do the work for me.

Aaaaand today the market goes swooping upwards in my off and on coverage of the market. The Dow Jones was up 2.84%, while the other two were up about as much or even more.

So what’s going on? CNN/Money attributes it to talks aimed at averting tariffs with the largest country in the world:

Stocks soared on Monday after news that American and Chinese officials are holding behind-the-scenes talks aimed at averting a trade disaster.

Only days ago, President Trump’s crackdown on China’s trade tactics and fears of retaliation sent the market to its worst week in two years.

I’m sure that covers a substantial portion of the rally, but I think there’s a bit more to the motivations behind that rally. What might that be?

President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats the US identified as intelligence agents and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, the most forceful action Trump has taken against Russia to date. Of those being expelled, 48 of the alleged intelligence agents work at the Russian embassy in Washington and 12 are posted at the United Nations in New York, senior administration officials said. [CNN]

See, this is actually a reasonable reaction to the outrage of poisoning a former Russian spy on British soil. What’s more, it’s part of a coordinated action with many of our alllies. For once, President Trump, or his advisors, are showing some sense in the foreign policy arena. The market, which craves predictability and sensibility from the government, got the latter, if not the former, today, and appears to have celebrated. Trump moved against a palpably hostile and aggressive Russia. That has to reassure the more politically conservative investors.

Another part of this rally may be the algorithmic trading platforms operating once again in unusual, even unknown territory, and trading up as the internal rules of the algorithm interact with a real world doing, well, odd things. I wonder if the markets have a way to measure that activity and how it impacts the movements of the market – and if those measurements are worth shit. The fact that I can’t imagine how to do that sort of measurement doesn’t mean it isn’t done.

In WaPo, David Weigel discusses the next special election, for Arizona’s 8th district, considered to be at least as ruby-red as PA-18. But this time around, the candidate for the Republicans is Debbie Lesko, a former State Senator who appears to be enthusiastic and committed, unlike the PA-18 Republican candidate. The surprise?

The Republican National Committee has put $281,250 into the special election to replace former congressman Trent Franks, the first financial commitment by either national party in a district that has voted reliably Republican since being drawn in 2011.

The RNC declined to comment on the investment, but Arizona’s 8th District was not necessarily seen as a potential Democratic pickup. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won just 37 percent of the vote in the district — worse than her showing in Pennsylvania’s 18th District, which Democrat Conor Lamb  just won in a squeaker.

The Cook Political Report rates the Arizona 8th as “safe” for Republicans, and Democrats seemed to write off the district after scandal-plagued former state senator Steve Montenegro lost last month’s Republican primary to former state senator Debbie Lesko. The election to replace Franks, who resigned after it was revealed that he had urged an employee to bear his child as surrogate mother, is on April 24.

There’s no mention of any polls showing a close race, although Weigel does mention that Lesko’s opponent, Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, has an effective first attack ad out, so perhaps the RNC is simply feeling a little jumpy. There’s certainly no history to make them jumpy, though – since redistricting in 2011, Representative Franks, who resigned in the wake of a scandal, easily won the two elections for the Republicans. It’s not worth even graphing, since the Democrats failed to run anyone in 2012.

As with PA-18, it’s not the victory which will matter so much as the change in winning margin for the Republican. It was so large in PA-18 that the Democrat won by the skin of his teeth. Once again, it seems unlikely that the Democrat will win, deep in Republican country – but who knows? An inspired campaign, disaster on the other side, unforeseen events can easily tip these campaigns one way or the other.

And what if Trump comes to campaign, and Lesko loses in a shocker? Just a minor dream on my part, but that would be another small step on the rebuilding of the conservative movement into something other than a body of extremists.

One day, President Trump thinks Russia’s President Putin can do no wrong. The next?

President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats the US identified as intelligence agents and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, the most forceful action Trump has taken against Russia to date. Of those being expelled, 48 of the alleged intelligence agents work at the Russian embassy in Washington and 12 are posted at the United Nations in New York, senior administration officials said. [CNN]

Yep, his changing affections make me dizzy. While it’s good to see some positive action from President Trump for a change, and especially as part of a coordinated action with a number of other countries, it’s hard not to see this as a distraction from the Stormy Daniels controversy, which is coming to a peak in the wake of last night’s broadcast of an interview with Daniels by Anderson Cooper.. I do notice that CNN is splitting its web-site welcome page between the two news items, presumably conscious of the possibility that this may simply be a distraction, although I remain skeptical about the importance of this sexual infidelity / campaign contribution infraction.

And the Russian reaction so far?

The Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov called the US decision to expel 60 Russian diplomats a “very bad step” and that the US “will understand what kind of grave mistake they did and I hope that maybe in the future our relations will be restored” in a video tweeted by embassy’s official twitter page on Monday.

“I consider this actions counterproductive. I said that the United States did very bad step, undercutting a little what we still have in Russian-American relations. These decisions are going against to the telephone conversation between our two presidents,” Antonov said.

The ambassador added: “it’s up to United States to decide what kind of relations they want to have with the Russian federation.” [CNN]

Vague and ambiguous. Is this a threat from Russia to the United States, or from Putin to Trump? The latter might be interpreted as “stop fucking around or I’ll release that compromising information I’ve been using to jerk you around.”

The next couple of days could be very interesting.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised concerning the Wisconsin legislature’s reaction to the judge’s order that special elections be held for those two open spots. From Stephen Wolf on The Daily Kos:

On Thursday, a state court judge in Wisconsin ordered Republican Gov. Scott Walker to promptly call special elections for two legislative seats that he’d let lie vacant since December, which would’ve deprived those voters of representation for nearly a year. But those special elections still might not take place: Even though the judge in question, Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds, was a Walker appointee, Republicans in the legislature reacted to her decision with terrifying anti-democratic furor the following day, with state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald saying he’ll advance legislation to overturn Reynolds’s ruling.

Fitzgerald did not stop there. He demanded that the chief justice of the state Supreme Court discipline Reynolds for “politicizing” her ruling and called Reynolds’s judicial district, which is anchored by the state capital of Madison, a “laughingstock.” In a final Orwellian twist, Fitzgerald declared, “Nobody’s trying to slow down or halt anything related to an election,” which is exactly what he’s trying to do.

There are no rules that apply to a Republican Party that believes itself the blessed of God, especially one that dominates the legislature and holds the Governor’s office in Wisconsin.

It’s disappointing. I suppose next we’ll see Judge Reynolds asked to leave the Party, perhaps even RINOed out, and it’ll be too bad because she appears to be one who has a higher allegiance than only to the Party.

And these are the types of actions that bid fair to cause the Democrats to be equally careless of the law when they take power, I fear. I know the North Carolina GOP used the actions of the North Carolina Democrats from 20 or 30 years ago as an excuse for their wretched clutching of power, and I will not be surprised if, in a decade, the Democrats, faced with a challenge from the opposition, whether that be GOP or whatever replaces the GOP when it implodes, decide their lust for power justifies any action.

Rather than justice being the key.

It’s a member of one of the staples of the story-telling business: the Grow Up in a Hurry tale. That’s the central core of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017), the tale of five young people trapped in a deadly video game. It’s predictable, doctrinaire, heavily sprinkled with humor both expected and unexpected, and loaded with stereotyped characters.

And not bad at all.

When I say it’s predictable, I mean it’s predictable for those of us beyond a certain age, who have experienced enough stories to understand where the main current of story-telling generally goes. But I’m not the intended audience of this movie. That audience was in the theater with me, though – kids, ages 5 and up, I’d say from a random sampling of the horde (it was a full house at the Riverview, and a late start). They haven’t seen what I’ve seen – for them, this straight-line adventure is an eye-opener, a virtual class in surviving in the unknown, and what it requires.

The stereotypes, perhaps a little tiresome for the older set, serve as hooks into which the little ones can get a grip, a hitch up the ladder of knowing who these characters might be, of getting their theory of mind rolling. Who are they and what will they do next? For the youngsters, a long setup is not practical, as their attention might wander; the stereotype is an approach to interest the kids and begin the process of predicting the next action to come.

Doctrinaire? Sure. There’s very little questioning of the general aspects of American life. There’s the geek, his semi-friend the athlete, the hot, self-absorbed chick, the metal-head (not so well developed), and the shy lass, and they do not challenge how life is lived in the United States. That gives the young audience a little more traction.

But then there’s the leap into the video game, and four of them land in the skins of folks who are, well, not like themselves. The skinny video game geek, for example, has shoulders two yards wide (played by former professional wrestler Duane Johnson). The hot chick? Think Jack Black. This is the challenge for the kids: to understand how seeing the world from a different vantage point may give you more information about the world, and how others see you based on appearance – and change how you see it, as we see the kids start adapting to their new skins – and the abilities that they bring them, helpfully displayed by a holographic screen listing their strengths and weaknesses.

From here on in, it’s all about the goal set for them by the game, and how they get there, each learning about themselves as the game progresses, blurring their stereotypes into real people. Eventually, they run into the fifth player, another teenager who’s been here longer than he realizes. They learn to work together, to trust each other – even to sacrifice for each other. And if their plans sometime work out a little to conveniently, well, that’s OK – you don’t want too much challenge for the kids. Unfortunately, some of the personal changes came far too easily, and they constitute a flaw in the movie.

In the end, through persistence, cleverness, and teamwork, their goal is achieved – and, as in its predecessor, the cry of Jumanji! releases them from these deadly confines.

And if I was a little unhappy with the conclusion, when the Jumanji drums begin to beat at their school, to the confusion of all, that’s OK. This Jumanji game should certainly be able to survive a beating with a bowling ball, right?

But the keys to this success story are its links to today’s social customs and technology. They render it relevant to the target audience, who then can start learning those age-old lessons, but in the modern context. Just as it’s ever been.

If you have kids of the right age – and there’s some penis humor that might make some parents uncomfortable – I think they’ll enjoy this movie, and learn from it.

On Out There, Corey S. Powell describes one of those cosmological phenomenon that makes my jaw drop:

One of the most intriguing destinations out toward the Oort Cloud is not an object but a conceptual location, the “solar gravity lens” point. Bear with me for a second, because this one is weird but truly wondrous.

The gravitational field of the Sun subtly warps the space around it, following the rules of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. At a great distance from the Sun, the warped light rays come together, just like the focal point of a magnifying lens. If you are standing at that point and you look back at the Sun, you see a greatly magnified version of whatever is on the other side–again, just like a magnifying lens.

A new study funded by NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) demonstrates the astonishing sights available to a space telescope placed at the solar gravity lens point. So far, astronomers have observed only a handful of planets directly, and these are seen merely as unresolved dots; most are detected only indirectly. But using the Sun’s magnifying power, a properly sited space telescope could scan the surface of an Earthlike planet 100 light years away at a resolution of about 1 kilometer!

Wow! Here’s a diagram from the academic report from which Powell is working:

Figure 8. Imaging of an exo-Earth with solar gravitational lens. The exo-Earth occupies (1km×1km) area at the image plane. Using a 1m telescope as a single pixel .detector provides a 1000 × 1000 pixel image

Notice the telescope will be staring at, or near, the Sun. Fascinating stuff!

Animus:

1. [mass noun] Hostility or ill feeling.
   ‘the author’s animus towards her’
2. [mass noun] Motivation to do something.
   ‘the reformist animus came from within the Party’
   More example sentences
3. Psychoanalysis
   (in Jungian psychology) the masculine part of a woman’s personality.
   Often contrasted with anima [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in “Trump’s DACA lie is rooted in transparent cynicism,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

This isn’t complicated: if Trump wanted to help Dreamers, he would. He could restore DACA. He could also accept one of the many bipartisan offers he’s been presented with. He could take deportations off the table. He could accept the wall-for-DACA compromise he said he wanted.

But the president hasn’t done any of these things, and that’s almost certainly because he doesn’t want to.

But instead of defending his position, Trump, whose rise to power was fueled in part by anti-immigration animus, is lying about it.

We don’t normally think of medical treatment as a component of game theory (remember A Beautiful Mind (2001)?), but someone has decided to apply it to prostate cancer treatment. NewScientist (10 March 2018) has some fascinating, if preliminary, results:

In this “game”, the oncologists are predators, and the cancer cells are prey. The oncologists’ objective is to kill the prey, or to at least keep it in check. But conventional cancer treatment shifts this balance. By giving a patient repeated strong doses of a cancer drug, the cells are pushed to evolve resistance.

When this occurs, the oncologists stop leading the game and instead have to keep up with an evolving, stronger cancer. By using the algorithm to deploy drugs more subtly, and closely monitoring what the cancer does in response, [Robert] Gatenby [of the Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute] says oncologists can stay ahead.

To test this approach, his team turned to people whose prostate cancer has spread to other parts of the body. They kept track of whether the cancer was growing or shrinking by measuring how much of a chemical called prostate specific antigen was shed by tumours into the blood every month. As this chemical rises and falls, the algorithm calculates how much of the drug abiraterone to administer in each treatment cycle, tailoring dosages and treatment to each individual.

And how’s this working out?

It typically takes prostate cancers 15 months to evolve resistance to standard doses of abiraterone, at which point the tumours are able to grow bigger than their initial size. But in an ongoing trial of the algorithm in the treatment of 17 men, this timescale has more than doubled to an average of 33 months – and could keep rising. Cancer has been able to progress in only three men in the trial, and some of the participants have now lived for four years without this happening, Gatenby told New Scientist. These results are so impressive that the team is beginning a larger trial, and plans to extend the treatment strategy to skin and thyroid cancer.

“This is an approach that could revolutionise cancer therapy, and it doesn’t even require the discovery and approval of a new drug,” says Carlo Maley of Arizona State University. “I want to try this on every cancer we can.”

And since this does not involve new drugs, the development costs are much lower. There are no safety tests, simply evaluation of how the administration protocol is working – and it appears to be working very well.

Coming from a family where the paternal side mostly dies of cancer, this is very encouraging. Innovative thinking seems to reign there.

While the state legislature of Pennsylvania decides whether or not to commit gross murder upon the body of the PA Supreme Court, rumor has it that Representative Ryan Costello (R-PA-6) will not be seeking re-election. From City&State Pennsylvania:

Sources have told City&State PA that Republican U.S. Rep. Ryan Costello has decided not to seek reelection in Pennsylvania’s hotly contested Sixth Congressional District.

Despite filing petitions on Tuesday to run for another term, four Republican sources said Costello indicated at a recent meeting with state and local GOP officials that he intends to drop out of the race in the weeks before the May Primary. The sources all spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of the meeting.

Costello reportedly met with state party chair Val DiGiorgio, former 6th District Congressman Jim Gerlach and several other top Republicans early Friday. According to sources, he indicated that he intended to seek a job in the private sector rather than face a costly reelection fight.

Not knowing much about Costello, I entertained the delusion that he couldn’t stomach the idea of impeaching judges just because they rendered an unfavorable verdict. But no:

Many observers say the new Sixth District, in the highly competitive Philadelphia suburbs, is even more favorable for Democratic candidates – last month, Costello called for the impeachment of the state Supreme Court Justices involved in that decision. A bruising Republican loss in this month’s PA-18 special election also sent shockwaves across the national GOP landscape and is generally seen as an ill omen for upcoming midterms across the country.

Which leaves me with two alternative explanations.

First, he just isn’t cut out to be a Representative. Quite possibly the direction the House of Representatives has taken doesn’t sit well with him.

Or, second, he doesn’t think the impeachment effort will be successful in preventing the new district map in Pennsylvania, drawn up by the PA Supreme Court, from taking effect for the upcoming midterms, and he doesn’t see a re-election effort as being successful in a district in which the Democrats have a stronger presence.

I wonder if this is a signal that, even among PA Republicans, the impeachment effort is stirring up some concerns about going too far, and Costello is reading the tea leaves and getting out while the getting is good. Certainly, this kind of maneuvering may stir up anti-Republican sentiments among the independents, and perhaps even deflate the Republican faithful.

Long time readers are aware of my definition of science being The study of reality. However, a recent book review of philosopher Angela Potochnik’s book Idealization and the Aims of Science in NewScientist (3 March 2018, paywall) has brought another facet of science to the fore in my mind:

But philosopher Angela Potochnik’s ambitious book Idealization and the Aims of Science is an antidote to the view that the philosophy of science tries to pronounce grandly on what scientists ought to do. Even so, many might still resent her assertion that “science isn’t after the truth”. But she’s right. While our picture of the universe is in some sense truer than it was in the Middle Ages, and science typically does work its way closer to some sort of truth, that isn’t what scientists are trying to achieve.

What they want are useful, comprehensible, workable theories of the world. Understanding trumps truth: scientists will generally settle for a less accurate model if it is more cognitively transparent. They don’t strive to map models perfectly onto reality. This doesn’t seem so controversial. Even Hawking agrees, indulging in a bit of philosophy himself when he states: “There is no model-independent test of reality.”

Potochnik’s strength is in stressing the human dimension of the enterprise. Ultimately, scientists use simplified models because, as she says, our theories and models “are designed to facilitate human cognition and action”. It’s not a question of them being mere social constructions or fashion statements. She means we are looking for what works for us. Our theories must fit the human mind, although the universe need not. “Scientists’ cognitive characteristics and interests,” she writes, “can never influence what is true, but these can shape what generates understanding.” I’d like to think that the more thoughtful philosophy sceptics, like Weinberg, would have some sympathy with that.

Unmentioned, but lurking right under the surface, is the shark labeled Can we understand the Universe? Does the human mind, at its best, have the capability to understand the how this Universe works? Or are there phenomena for which we’ll never be able to account? Perhaps the orbital mechanics of galaxies, which supposedly betray the existence of dark matter, will be one of those phenomena, seeing as there is no direct evidence of dark matter. Or the small matter of consciousness, and how anesthesia extinguishes it.

So it’s a good point – we undoubtedly massage our observations to permit them to be processed in some rational manner by us, and we’re aware of this, but does this mean we can’t understand, fully, the Universe? Or we just need to keep working on that problem?

Just what are our limitations?

I’ve been neglecting my usual update of our tomato project to UMB. With my Arts Editor, Deb, out of town, succoring her mother, it has fallen to me to plant and raise the tomatoes. That doesn’t mean Deb hasn’t contributed, of course. The last two years we’ve started them on various platforms laid across the pool table in the basement, which has been fairly successful, but makes it impossible to play pool (as if I do on a regular basis), and the coolness of the basement renders the endeavour’s goals somewhat dubious. Heat rises, after all, and Minnesota in March doesn’t ordinarily feature a lot of warmth.

Therefore, this year she moved the tomato complex from the basement into my computer room. We have a southern facing window in this room, although it’s somewhat shaded. But the actual physical platform? Why it’s something that she was going to throw out when we married, and I insisted she keep – and now it’s useful! Here it is:

Grow lights above, sun to the south, and some motherly succulents down below to comfort the tomato plants. Here’s another pic, from an atypical angle:

And how’s it going? Quite well – nine of the ten varietals have at least one little green head showing. Only the Yellow Pear is being surly. Here’s a good angle on the Opalka and the Mortgage Lifters:

And a better angle on the Cherokee Chocolates and Grandma Mary’s Paste:

I planted on March 10th, and we have a long ways to go – but it still feels like success!

My reader remarks on corporate responsibility vs government responsibility:

This is precisely why I chose the word “effectively” because corporations are not moral actors, good or bad. But our current legal landscape allows them to act amorally to maximize their profits, and externalize their costs. And they do this because they’ve captured to a great extent the government whose responsibility you say it is to restrain that behavior.

Yes, capture is a well-known phenomenon, and no doubt explains some of the odder laws we run across these days. For example, consider this, from Daniel Webster at something called TEDMED:

Whether a gun dealer allows illegal straw purchases, colludes with gun traffickers, or fails to secure his guns depends on whether our policies hold them accountable.

Here’s a perfect example. In 1999, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – the ATF – published a report identifying the gun stores that had sold the most guns that were later connected to crime.¹⁰ At the top of the list – the nation’s leading seller of crime guns – was a gun shop near Milwaukee, Badger Guns & Ammo.

Within days of ATF’s releasing the data, Badger’s owners announced that they would voluntarily take measures to prevent their guns from being used in crime.

What happened next was amazing. The rate at which new guns were diverted to criminals after being sold by Badger immediately dropped 77%.

But in 2003, Congress passed a new law to protect gun dealers like Badger and prohibit the ATF from publishing or sharing data connecting crime guns to the gun dealers who had sold them.¹²

If the owners of Badger Guns & Ammo were polite, they sent a thank you note to Congress. The rate at which their new gun sales were going to criminals immediately shot up 200% immediately after the law.¹³ By 2005, Badger was back on top as the nation’s #1 seller of guns used in crimes.

Or think of the “Dickey Amendment,” which chilled government research into gun violence – apparently, the wording may be clarified to indicate that research isn’t prohibited. No doubt, whatever the identity of the captors of Congress in regards to this issue will not be pleased.

Returning to my writer’s point, yes, I think the scope of the government’s remit is the good of the people. Government has the resources, and more importantly, no one else is going to take that responsibility on. Corporations focus on provision of goods and services in return for money, and that’s more or less it – and it’s a little hard to blame them, since the resources required simply to envision the current status of the nation are beyond nearly any corporate entity – and, if they are available, they are often earmarked for dividends to the shareholders.

Sometimes corporate entities are the first to notice a problem, such as the ozone hole discovery my climate scientist friend worked on many years ago – but, as ever, their attention is to their primary mission, not to the country or world.

From WaPo:

One schools superintendent has a novel way to keep his students safe from school shooters: arming them with rocks.

David Helsel, superintendent of a school district in northeast Pennsylvania, explained his plan to a legislative education committee last week, drawing a flurry of local media coverage.

“Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone,” Helsel explained about his Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County, northeast of Harrisburg, in a video broadcast by ABC affiliate 16 WNEP. “If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full of students armed with rocks, and they will be stoned.”

I actually like this idea.

1. A single rock won’t likely kill anyone, no matter how hard it’s thrown in anger during a fight.
2. Dropping a rock won’t endanger the classroom.
3. Their presence doesn’t spur violence.
4. You can use them safely to hold down the pages of books.

And if someone does come in with a gun, well, I wouldn’t care to be met with a barrage of rocks from all sides. So long as the NRA is going to continue to endanger our children with their absurd claims, we might as well use relatively safe emergency procedures as a final backup.

Keeping in mind, of course, that this is not a solution – merely a stopgap until the adults can reassume control of this asylum.

This guy doesn’t sound like he gets it, BTW:

Kenneth S. Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services, a K-12 security consulting firm, told the Associated Press that the idea was illogical and could possibly cost lives, adding that it fills an emotional security need but does not actually improve security.

Given the number of gun accidents that happen involving even trained people, such as the police, neither does putting armed people – even SWAT officers – in schools.

I recall seeing a headline somewhere that suggested the opinions of the teenagers and young adults should be disregarded. Since I didn’t read the article, I don’t really know the reason given, but I’ll guess it’s because they’re young and inexperienced.

But here’s the thing – the incessant school shootings are becoming the defining incidents for that generation. Remember your history, specifically how the assassination of JFK defined the Boomers? I once asked my Mom, who was about 20 at the time of the assassination, about some remark I’d heard about the nation’s mothers coming together to help raise JFK’s youngest child, JFK, Jr., after the assassination, and she replied that, yes, she and all the other mothers of that generation really had felt that obligation, a collective obligation towards the Kennedy family. They had felt it on that tragic, historic day that JFK’s coffin rolled down the street

As much as I’ve never felt a part of any generation, I do acknowledge that the idea of generations do exist for many people, tied together by some incident with a large impact. For those Americans currently in their early teenage years through, say, their early twenties, these school shooting incidents, and, to a lesser extent, other mass shooting incidents, taken together, are becoming their defining set of moments. It’ll tie them together, the background fear, the preparations to survive sudden death in the form of armed madness – and, for a few well-publicized students, the marching out of schools, hands held high, under the gaze of the police – and the bodies.

I must admit that I didn’t pay much attention to the news yesterday, being busy and not much of a news watcher in any case. However, my Arts Editor (and wife), who is currently in Michigan caring for her ill mother, did have the opportunity to watch a lot of news coverage of the event. I gathered two things from talking with her. First, she was impressed by the March.

Second, the variance in coverage. The traditional mass media covered in depth and seemed to be earnest about getting the story. Fox News?

Not so much.

But it doesn’t matter, because those of that age range who didn’t go will avidly pursue news about the March. We are a social animal, we look for cues from others as to how to behave. They are a generation raised in an ocean of information. They’ll find that information regarding the March, regardless of the failures of news organizations with slanted agendas, and think about it.

And they’ll remember. Granted, humans don’t get their brains fully connected and working until their twenties, often their later twenties. This is how science understands the brain today.

But they’ll remember. They’ll remember their dead schoolmates. They’ll remember the calls for gun control.

And they’ll remember who opposed the more sane approach to guns, the one used by many other nations around the world. Who was in control of Congress and did nothing? The Republicans.

Oh, they made some sad noises, didn’t they? But they’ve done just enough, in their minds. Clarifying the Dickey Amendment surely must mean something! 

This will become a blot upon the Republican brand. A big blot. The blot that drives away a generation.

And this may be the beginning of the end of the National Rifle Assocation (NRA) as an important political force. They are the 2nd Amendment absolutists who push the assertion that more guns of all kinds make for a safer society. As the years have passed, their statements have become more and more unhinged; with their unexpected victory in the Presidential campaign, they lost their biggest rallying threat – that a liberal President would take away everyone’s guns – and have resorted to incoherent statements seeking to invoke basic fears about government taking away our guns and enslaving us all.

Here’s their statement on the March, via MSN:

“Stand and Fight for our Kids’ Safety by Joining NRA,” it said. “Today’s protests aren’t spontaneous. Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones.”

This was an opportunity for them to reverse their course and begin a reasonable conversation on how to reduce gun violence. It was a test of their sanity. They failed. That failure, that clinging to a failed ideology, that desperate grasp of power, will be remembered by the young Generation which held a peaceful, civic-minded March. In a country of often limited rights, the NRA are the ones shouting that their favorite right should be unlimited – that not even training should be required.

In the end, the reactions of the forces for 2nd Amendment absolutists will define their fate for the generation that made it’s way to the nation’s capital and demonstrated one of the highest forms of civil discourse possible in our society. If they continue to pursue a course marked by a refusal to acknowledge that rights are necessarily limited in any society, this generation will not contribute to them, be it bodies or money.

And those leaders in positions of responsibility who did nothing? Their legacy will be that of shame and dishonor, no matter how much they shout they did the right thing by doing nothing, by digging their heels in and indulging in ludicrous proposals. Because legacies are defined by those who came after, and that’ll be the generation that Marched.

A Generation that felt its lives were risked, and lost, for a fallacious ideology.

OK, whose pigtails did he pull this time?

I’m not sure why, but somehow I never engaged with Forty Guns (1957). It’s undeniably a quality movie, with fine acting and a tight plot, but I think in my mind the characters never quite presented as sympathetic. Griff Bonnell and his brother, Wes, with reputations as killers, are now working for the government, looking to serve warrants on men located in the town of Tombstone. Riding the hills surrounding the town are Jessica Drummond and her forty men. Naturally, it’s one or more of her men that interests them.

But arrests are inadequate, as the local judge is in Jessica’s pocket. But not in her pocket is her own brother, Brockie, a young man with no self-control and no respect for others, and that includes injuring the current marshal of the town, who is suffering from blurred vision, just for giggles. Even though he has a position in law enforcement himself, he engages in a little light banditry on the side.

Griff and Wes become the targets of Brockie and his buddies for breaking up their fun, and after some missed opportunities, Wes is killed on his wedding day by Brockie or someone connected to him, who is subsequently arrested. Jessica, even knowing that Brockie is no good, tries but fails to secure his release: the judge and jury can no longer be bought. As she confesses her failure to her doomed brother, he takes the opportunity to seize upon the deputy’s gun and, using his sister as a shield, try to shoot his way out of town, but he runs into Griff. Griff, by now romantically involved with Jessica, shoots Jessica in a non-critical, unspecified location, and then deliberately kills Brockie after disarming him.

And then Griff and Jessica ride off into the sunset.

There’s a lot to like about this movie, from the acting and story to the big tornado scene (I loved the blurriness), but there was little to really like about the characters. True, Griff and Wes are not vicious killers, but they’re tough men going about their business. Jessica is leading those forty men about, but at least a few she’s playing games with, and that doesn’t go over so well. It didn’t help that the guys looked a lot alike.

But you may have a different reaction. There’s nothing here that’s a real turnoff here. I just didn’t ever get hooked into it.

Apitherapy:

Apitherapy is a type of alternative medicine that uses substances from honeybees — including honey, pollen, royal jelly, bee venom and beeswax — to treat a variety of conditions, from pain to arthritis, according to the American Apitherapy Society. Live bee acupuncture is a procedure that falls within apitherapy. [“Woman dies after ‘acupuncture’ session that used live bees instead of needles,” Amy B Wang, WaPo]

I’d be curious to know the “theoretical” rationale for this sort of therapy, if any.

Andrew Sullivan’s latest column is quite the downer, as he compares Plato’s tyrant – who apparently arises from a corrupt and decadent democracy – to President Trump. I’ve never read that particular bit of Plato, so I don’t know the details, but there’s also a striking comparison to the last days of Rome’s old and impotent Senate:

The real possibility of a nuclear conflict with North Korea is getting more real by the day (can you imagine Bolton’s counsel for the Kim Jong-un meeting?); and with Bolton in place, the groundwork for ending the Iran nuclear deal is also finally complete. And what’s noticeable in all this is the irrelevance of the Senate. They refuse to reclaim their treaty-making powers with respect to trade (they could end Trump’s China shenanigans overnight); they have abdicated any influence on foreign policy and war just as they have done nothing to protect the special counsel. They are just like the Roman Senate as the republic collapsed. The forms survive; there is nothing of substance behind them.

And the key figure here is Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY). He’d have to rally his Republican colleagues, of course, but as their long-time leader, that would not be difficult; and I suspect the Democrats would be more than happy to remove Trump’s treaty-making and return that power to the Senate (I’m assuming Andrew has this assertion right). It’s within him power to do so.

But Andrew’s point concerning the current Senate is also true in the larger context. It’s been confirming the Trump appointees, rag-tag as many of them have been, with nothing more than a bit of whimpering, at least until Trump sent three very dubious candidates and had them rejected.

Additionally, their efforts to pass the AHCA (failed) and the tax change bill (successful) have not been impressive. Those sorts of efforts should have been a matter of months of work, with public hearings, testimony from experts, and all the usual grinding that goes on in a republic. Instead, they were written in secret by a small group devoid of expertise, and ramrodded through the Senate with no bipartisan support.

In short, Mitch McConnell’s record in this Senate has been pathetically inadequate.