Monthly Archives: March 2018

Politico is reporting on the latest rock star climbing up the rope in the GOP primaries:

National Republicans — on the heels of the Roy Moore and Rick Saccone debacles — worry they’re staring down their latest potential midterm election fiasco: coal baron and recent federal prisoner Don Blankenship.

With Blankenship skyrocketing in the West Virginia Republican Senate primary and blanketing the airwaves with ads assailing his fractured field of rivals as career politicians, senior party officials are wrestling with how, or even whether, to intervene. Many of them are convinced that Blankenship, who served a one-year sentence after the deadly 2010 explosion at his Upper Big Branch Mine, would be a surefire loser against Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin — and potentially become a national stain for the party.

The discussions have intensified over the past few weeks. During separate meetings with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, aides to Blankenship’s two primary opponents, Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, pointed to Blankenship’s traction and questioned what could be done to stop him. The Senate GOP campaign arm, which heard out the appeals, recently commissioned a survey to gauge the coal king’s electoral strength and determine his staying power in the race.

It’s fascinating how discredited figures such as Blankenship – convicted of coal mine safety violations which impact the working man more than anyone – can achieve such popularity. Is it because they are emblematic of the hungry grasping for wealth and prestige, no matter the cost for his employees, which appeals to the darkest primitive urges from our primeval past? Is it his willingness to break the rules that appeals to many who feel over-regulated (see this post on our personal insensitivity to matters of scale)?

But this is within the West Virginia GOP. Does Blankenship have a similar popularity throughout West Virginia? I suspect there are enough sensible people there that will prefer current Senator Manchin (D), who is considered the most conservative of the Democratic Senators, that Blankenship’s bid for the seat will fall short, particularly if he has more extremist views to share.

But his increasing popularity is a measure of the extremism of the GOP these days – and another reason why the party really needs to be destroyed and reconstituted with reasonable adults.

If you look closely, you’ll see Pia Zadora.

The clash of the forces for preserving the status quo, or conservatism, vs improvement of society, or what is generally considered liberalism, are the focus of Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (1964). This particular example is illustrative of the error of shrinking from change to society over the welfare of children.

The children of Mars have become despondent, perhaps finding the eating of their food in pill form and engaging in accelerated learning techniques to be enervating, and a meeting is called by the leaders of Mars to discover the problem. Consulting an ancient oracle, the leaders discover that it’s nearing Christmas Day on Earth, and while the Earth children anticipate the receipt of gifts, the Martian children do not.

The leaders discuss the problem under the leadership of Kimar, and, against the protests of Bomar Voldar, decide to proceed to Earth and kidnap Santa Claus. Against the background of continued grumbling of Bomar Voldar, who believes the disturbance of the children of Mars will soon pass, the Martians proceed to kidnap a couple of children to help them find the proper Santa Claus, as every street corner seems to have a Santa Claus, and then, at the North Pole, to actually abduct him, after knocking out some mouthy elves. During this operation, the fell power of Santa Claus is hinted at, as their supposedly impregnable robot, Torg, becomes immobile and useless. Claus himself, however, puts up little resistance and accompanies the Martians and the children, who had temporarily escaped, back to their ship.

The return to Mars is not without excitement, for the evil designs of Bomar nearly come to fruition when he traps Santa and the children in an airlock and attempts to asphyxiate them by opening the outer door to the airless void outside the ship, but Claus and the kids find a way to stop him. Bomar Voldar finds himself imprisoned for this attempted crime.

Upon landing on Mars, Bomar Voldar escapes and, with some cohorts who seem to have watched too many Three Stooges escapades, plots to undue the damage being done to Martian society by Claus. And what might that be? A might toy machine has been built, and all Santa must do is press buttons in response to the requests from the children of Mars to fulfill their wishes. But Santa is not without discontent, for his fingers are not accustomed to this sort of work, and he yearns for the days when toys were hand-built by his elves.

So when sabotage damages the machine, Santa sees an opportunity for excitement. He organizes the Earth kids and a couple of Martian kids to set a trap for Bomar Voldar and his minions, all the while cultivating another comic failure Martian named Dropo as his own replacement. Upon the capture and restraint of Bomar Voldar, Santa points out that the machine and Dropo can take his place, and he is returned to Earth by his grateful Martian friends.

And it’s awful.

It’s so awful it’s almost charming. The dialog is dull, and the delivery is stilted. Worse yet, the Martians appear to be wearing plumbing on their heads. Kimar, the glorious leader, appears to be bereft of a sense of humor, much like his antagonist, Bomar Voldar. The cinematography is dull, special effects almost non-existent. And why oh why would the United States dispense heavy bombers to investigate that blip in the sky?

And yet … the charm comes from the eccentricities. Who can resist mouthy elves? And there’s this polar bear that menaces the kids at the North Pole that I found I just wanted to hug.

And Torg, the robot, for all that its role was severely limited, made me laugh for its unfalteringly naive appearance.

And in the end, I couldn’t help but speculate that Santa Claus should have snapped his fingers and returned to Earth. We’re already a little puzzled at the escape from the airlock trap, not to mention the immobilization of the fearsome Torg. The suggestion that Santa has magical powers might set the ears of the Martians back a little. A little humble pie, as it were.

But don’t waste your time on this unless you’re involved in a tour of odd Christmas movies. Then this should be the first one on the list.

And here’s a link to the YouTube of it, in color. The version I saw was black and white, and not well done, either. Consider yourself lucky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dhvdnzHBr0

CNN is reporting yet another school shooting, and that the shooter is dead – shot by the school resource officer:

One person is dead after an armed student shot two other students at Great Mills High School in Maryland on Tuesday morning, according to St. Mary’s County Sheriff Tim Cameron.

Cameron said the school resource officer engaged the shooter and ended the threat, and the shooter was pronounced dead. A male student is in stable condition and a female student is in critical condition, he said.

The school resource officer fired a round at the shooter, and the shooter fired a round as well, but the officer was not injured.

I wonder how many 2nd Amendment absolutists will celebrate the death of the shooter as proof that having more guns works. To my mind, the fact that a single shot was fired is proof positive of the failure of having guns out there, readily available. Shots were fired, students endangered and terrorized – this is not the behavior of a good society. And what if the school resource officer had been the first down?

If you’ve heard of the proposed “Mueller protection laws” and are wondering how they’re structured, Steve Vladeck on Lawfare has a summary and opinion:

There are actually two different legislative proposals on the table to deal with this problem. Although they differ slightly in their particulars, they have the same basic structure: Both bills would allow a Special Counsel terminated under §600.7(d) to challenge his termination before a “three-judge” D.C. district court (which would include two federal district judges for the District of Columbia and one judge from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit). That three-judge court, in turn, would be able to decide if the substantive standard set out in §600.7(d) had been satisfied. Like all other decisions by three-judge district courts, whoever loses would have a right of mandatory (not discretionary) appeal directly to the Supreme Court. And that’s it. As I wrote in January, “[t]he bills don’t change the procedural or substantive rules governing the special counsel’s authority, or the grounds on which he can be fired; they simply ensure a role for the courts in reviewing any dismissal to make sure it’s done for the right reasons and not the wrong ones.”

It adds a review step to firing process, with the review by the judiciary. This is appealing as it falls right into the American tradition of legal review. Additionally, it spreads the power over all three branches. The Executive may fire, but the Legislative provides a review process, and the Judiciary actually implements it. In this way, the demagogic instincts of the dictator are muffled. But what does Vladeck think?

I’m generally in favor of more judicial review, not less—and of broader federal remedies over narrower ones. So wholly apart from the (insane) politics of the moment, this proposal seems like a no-brainer. But even for those who are more circumspect, the arguments against such review presumably turn to some degree on confidence that the Justice Department will abide by its own regulation, and that allowing for judicial review of a removal decision is just unnecessary. Of course, there are plenty of reasons to doubt the efficacy of the internal checks and balances in this case—all the more so given the increasingly overt political pressure from the White House. So as between potentially inefficient judicial review and the possibility of firing a special counsel for illegitimate reasons, it seems to me that the scale tips rather overwhelmingly in favor of these proposals, rather than against them.

The other prudential objection is that the judicial review provided by the legislation could cause chaos; what would be the status of the investigation while Mueller litigated the validity of his termination before the courts? And would that litigation in turn become a referendum on Morrison, rather than the desired inquiry into the propriety of Mueller’s sacking? To me, this is a far more well-taken objection, but I think it ultimately misses the mark. It’s far less likely that whoever would otherwise be swinging the axe toward Mueller would do so for blatantly inappropriate reasons if they knew there was even the specter of judicial review. And if somehow the dismissal were undisputedly for good cause, presumably Mueller wouldn’t turn around and bring suit. So conceived, the particular genius of the Mueller protection bills is that, if they’re enacted, the judicial procedure they would create would almost certainly never have to be utilized.

Vladeck definitely feels that it’s time to pass this legislation.

Returning to the thread of the unannounced war with Russia, it appears Putin’s strategy also addresses America’s ally Great Britain, as noted by Jackson Diehl of WaPo. First he addresses the out of power Labor Party:

When confronted with his government’s conclusion that Russia was responsible for what amounted to a military attack on his country, the opposition Labour Party leader [Jeremy Corbyn] and his spokesman (a) refused to accept that the Kremlin was responsible, (b) cast doubt on British intelligence, (c) complained that Moscow had not been accorded due process and (d) said the right response was “robust dialogue.” In other words, Corbyn echoed almost exactly the line advanced by Putin’s own propagandists.

But the Conservatives are hard as nails, right?

[Prime Minister Theresa] May’s government is indeed handicapped by its impending departure from the European Union, which has isolated it. But there is much more her government could do, if it chose. There are billions of dollars of Russian money laundered into London real estate — a good part of it connected to Putin’s circle. Senior Russian officials send their children to English private schools. Russian companies and banks raise money in London markets.

May was vague about targeting that money in her speech to Parliament. It was hard not to be reminded of what might have been Corbyn’s only legitimate point: Russian oligarchs, he claimed, have contributed more than $1.1 million to the ruling Conservative Party.

While I’m not particularly impressed at a mere $1.1 million, who’s to know if that’s an accurate accounting – or a number on the low side? The suggestion that Conservative politicians have been soaking up foreign money suggests they’re just as avid for power as is the GOP.

But Corbyn, along with his bizarre retro-ideas of how to run Great Britain, also appears to share the soft-on-Russia ‘tudes of some of his predecessors, but without the excuse that it’s Marxism! Ah, forgive me, as an independent I’ve always been a little confused by those who found the Soviet Union so charming in the face of its brutality and, worse, built-in instability. A political structure built on nothing more than who can be the most brutal and unethical is a frightening thing, and not only did we see the final results, but the ongoing progress reports were, at best, vaguely encouraging, before the mask was taken off. The best one could say is that it was better than the monarchy which preceded it, but not by much.

When I heard that President Trump had his White House advisors and staff sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), I thought nothing of it. So much for my assumptions, eh? The ACLU has an admirably brief remark on these NDAs:

“Public employees can’t be gagged by private agreements. These so-called NDAs are unconstitutional and unenforceable.”

Which is admirably sensible in a public institution in which we all have an explicit stake, isn’t it? If a White House staffer witnesses some breach of the Constitution, s/he should not have to weigh their future economic fortunes against their duty to report the violation. Nor should they be restrained from writing a memoir, for that matter, about public matters.

If President Trump should like to complain that his private matters should not be a matter of public airing, then he should not bring them into the White House. That is one of the virtues of divestment in the first place.

In Pennsylvania, where the PA Supreme Court found the state has been gerrymandered in favor of the GOP, and then issued its own map, the GOP has lost its latest appeal to SCOTUS. From CNN today:

The Supreme Court has denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block new congressional maps that could tilt several key races in Democrats’ favor from being used in the midterm elections.

The court issued one sentence to reject the request. There were no noted dissents.

Dissents may be noted if a minority of the justices wished to take on the case – here’s an example of Thomas and Gorsuch registering a dissent. The fact that SCOTUS, with a 4-4 ideological cast, with 1 swing vote, turned down a plaint from the GOP without dissent suggests they think the PA Supreme Court did not break any rules, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth – or that it’s up to the people of Pennsylvania to put it right. Which is within the possibilities, since PA Supreme Court justices are elected.

Since it appears the Pennsylvania GOP is more or less without shame, I suspect there’ll be more maneuvering.

XKCD:

I can’t help but think that the other group of people referenced above are the unwilling progenitors of a new species – or, if you prefer, would-be slave owners.

Put this in the Nature is Cruel book. From NewScientist (3 March 2018, paywall):

Zombie ant fungi are parasites that are mostly found in tropical forests. Once inside its host, such a fungus alters the ant’s behaviour in ways that favour its own reproduction, for example by compelling the ant to seek a place other ants are likely to pass. The fungus then sprouts a long stalk, sometimes right through the back of the ant’s head. Infectious spores bloom at the end, making it easier for the fungus to brush onto another ant.

“Besides their beauty, it’s striking how these fungi evolved and are so well adapted morphologically and ecologically to infect their hosts,” says João Araãjo at Pennsylvania State University.

Nature may be endlessly inventive, but the byproduct seems to be a particularly vibrant form of the macabre.

Jack Goldsmith talks about the vulnerabilities of the U.S. energy infrastructure on Lawfare:

Moreover, the U.S. government has for many years warned that foreign adversaries have penetrated U.S. networks in ways that could be preparation for devastating cyberattacks. As long ago as November 2014, NSA director Mike Rogers warned that China and “probably one or two other countries” were inside the networks that controlled U.S. critical infrastructure, including the power grid, and could thus attack or disrupt those networks. At least twice in 2017, the U.S. government warned that foreign hackers had penetrated the computer networks of companies that run energy facilities in the United States. In November 2017, Symantec reported that hackers, including ones linked to the Russian government, had gained access to the computer networks of electrical utility companies.

So there is little that is new or surprising in the revelation that Russia is probing and placing potentially offensive implants in the computers that operate the U.S. electrical grid. But of course the revelation comes in the context of deep anxiety about Russian interference in the 2016 election and is exacerbated by deteriorating relations between Russia and the West.

The news that Russia and other adversary nations are deeply embedded in U.S. critical infrastructure networks—and that we are embedded in theirs—raises at least the following questions:

While reading Jennifer Rubin’s column in WaPo on the McCabe firing, I came across this concluding paragraph:

In sum, once more, a Trump-inspired stunt is likely to backfire. The politics are irrelevant to Mueller, who now views each of Trump’s antics through a single lens: Does this reveal corrupt intent to disable an investigation into Trump’s conduct? In this case, Trump leaves little doubt as to his motives.

And it occurred to me: does it matter? That is, suppose Mueller’s investigation comes to an end. Then what? He delivers a report. And what if the House GOP shrugs its collective shoulders and doesn’t do anything about it regardless of its contents?

I know the headlines are screaming that Trump may fire Mueller at any moment (although that’s actually up to Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein), but for Mueller, there’s a big question: supposing he does have evidence worthy of indicting the President. Does he deliver it to this DoJ and Congress?

Or does he wait for the next, possibly more mature, Congress?

There’s been some puzzlement over President Trump’s anecdote about making up facts (“fake facts”) during trade discussions with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Here’s Steve Benen:

It was striking for several reasons. The president not only admitted that he makes stuff up, Trump also acted as if this is worth bragging about – even in the context of trying to mislead the prime minister of one of the United States’ closest allies. It also served as a reminder that the president doesn’t feel like doing his homework, even on one of his signature issues.

I haven’t seen this explanation, though: he’s connecting with his base. He’s showing that any person can keep up with the best in the world, and that expertise isn’t needed.

Let the dance begin!

Red Rock West (1993) is a tale in which the least admirable of motivations, avariciousness, dominates nearly every leading character, and this dark path leads to film noir. Michael, a former Marine, is wandering Wyoming searching for a job. He drifts into a bar in Red Rock and accepts an unspecified job from the bar owner when he’s mistaken for someone else. When the job turns out to be to kill the bar owner’s wife, well, he’s dead broke and what else is there to do?

Go to the bar owner’s wife and inform her of her danger. She offers him a job – to kill her husband.

Michael considers his options and ends up writing and mailing a note to the sheriff, explaining the situation. But as he leaves town that night, he hits someone with his car, and, being afflicted with an urge to do good, he picks the guy up and takes him to the hospital, where he waits to hear the condition of the man. What he doesn’t know is that the man is also suffering from gun shot wounds. The surgeon notifies law enforcement when they discover them, and so the local deputies arrive to detain him until the sheriff can talk to him.

And the sheriff is the bar owner.

Soon, Michael’s running across the landscape, sheriff in hot pursuit, until he’s picked up by an out of town man with whom he shares a link – they’re both former Marines. All is well and good until the man mentions that he’s looking for the Red Rock West bar owner in order to get the details on a “job.”

The plot is intricate and, if you’re not paying attention, this movie will turn into a puzzling drag. But otherwise you may find yourself drawn into a plot which is uncompromising in following the twists and turns, including the final crick which explains who shot the man Michael originally took to the hospital, as well as why.

A good story, well told, with good technical support, I found myself really enjoying this movie. It parcels out information in dribs and drabs, making it difficult to guess where the movie might be going next. In the end, I was perhaps a little disappointed at the lack of actual growth in any of the characters, but that’s not unusual. I’d say this is a minor classic of the genre, and worth your time.

In the runup to the event of the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on Friday, two days prior to his retirement (scheduled for tomorrow), I was troubled by both the notion that this would be an enormously petty action by an Administration (or, more accurately, a President) which imagined the FBI’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the Presidential Election was politically motivated merely because McCabe, then a deputy director, has a wife who is a registered Democrat. This seemed like the shoddy work of someone undeserving of an elevated position.

Then came the news that an internal Justice Department inquiry suggested McCabe was guilty of wrongdoing. An internal FBI inquiry would suggest that this would be less a politically motivated lynching, but more likely an actual actionable indiscretion by McCabe. After Attorney General Sessions fired McCabe after months of intense pressure from President Trump (to the extent that it appears Trump was the primary motivation), CNN reported:

The origin of his dramatic fall stems from an internal review conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. That report — the details of which have not been publicly released — is said to conclude that McCabe misled investigators about his role in directing other officials at the FBI to speak to The Wall Street Journal about his involvement in a public corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation, according to a source briefed on it.

Andrew McCabe has vigorously disagreed with the report.

So what to think? Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes cover what we know in detail, with the knowledge of experienced national security lawyers. While counseling patience in the absence of the release of the damning report, they do have some troubling questions:

There are, however, at least two features of the action against McCabe that warrant consternation, even if McCabe himself behaved badly enough to justify the sanction. The first is the timing, which is hard to understand. The only factor we can fathom that might justify it is the notion that if McCabe in fact had acted very badly, the window to punish him and thus make an important statement to the bureau workforce was closing.

But we are unaware of prior cases in which authorities rushed through the merits against a long-serving official in a naked and transparent effort to beat the clock of his retirement. Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who is representing McCabe, described the process as follows:

The investigation described in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report was cleaved off from the larger investigation of which it was a part, its completion expedited, and the disciplinary process completed in a little over a week. Mr. McCabe and his counsel were given limited access to a draft of the OIG report late last month, did not see the final report and the evidence on which it is based until a week ago, and were receiving relevant exculpatory evidence as recently as two days ago. We were given only four days to review a voluminous amount of relevant evidence, prepare a response, and make presentations to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. With so much at stake, this process has fallen far short of what Mr. McCabe deserved.

Even allowing for a certain degree of lawyerly hyperbole in this account, the process described here seems highly irregular. McCabe, in his statement Friday, suggested one possible reason for the acceleration:

The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey’s accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG’s focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens.

In an interview with the New York Times, McCabe said directly that his dismissal “is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness.”

Without commenting on the appropriateness of firing McCabe, they still discern the curves of another attempt at obstructing justice. If they see it, is there little doubt that it’ll catch Mueller’s attention as well?

Naturally, President Trump, long infuriated by various aspects of Deputy Director McCabe’s existence, as noted above, celebrated on Twitter in his usual faux-triumphant manner:

Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!

Why do I say faux? Because it’s actually a frantic spin to tarnish the FBI. Consider the statement “… great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI …” as if they suffered under former Director Comey. Subsequent interviews with numerous FBI employees revealed that Comey was actually widely respected and even admired. Keep this in mind when reading anything from Trump in regards to this matter – it really changes the tone and purpose of Trump’s releases. You begin to realize that he sounds desperate, not triumphant.

I checked National Review, but beyond a simple news report, no opinion has yet been rendered.

Former CIA Director John Brennan (2013 – 2017) has little patience with this circus, as he posted in response to President Trump on Twitter:

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.

A more honorable man than Trump would be humiliated by Brennan. Trump, though? I’m not sure he’ll take it in the proper vein.

Kevin Drum sees it as Trump’s insecurities writ large:

This whole affair has been contemptible from the start. Trump knows perfectly well that he won the election solely because of the FBI’s interference. This is something he finds intolerable, so he has invented a fantasy in which that never happened. In fact, he’s spent the entire past year spreading the preposterous lie that the FBI actually helped Hillary. Then he went about defaming and firing all the people whose very existence was a continuing rebuke to his election triumph. McCabe is one of them.

Which suggests the President is a man not in command of his faculties, but a victim of his emotional needs. Such men are easily manipulated.

Andrew McCabe’s statement is here, and is worth a read by every American.

And former FBI Director Comey has posted a most interesting statement on Twitter:

Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.

In the context of Mr. Comey’s statement, what are we to think about the situation? Certainly, it’s reasonable to settle back and wait for more information to come forth. However, for the partisan, that is quite unsatisfactory, for the feel the pull of the tribal loyalty, while forgetting the importance of getting to the truth of the matter, regardless of who comes up guilty – and who innocent.

That’s what concerns me. For the moment, there’s really not enough information. However, for those who need a preliminary position, my approach is to look to the history of the principals of the matter. To my knowledge, Comey and former CIA Director Brennan were (or are) highly respected by all. The whispers of corruption only came after it became apparent that they (Comey in particular) might have information suggesting that President Trump is, shall we say, less than he would like to pretend to be.

And President Trump? There is documented proof in media and legal records that he will lie to advance himself, and will do so as often as necessary. This is not proof positive that his position in this incident is the defective one, of course, but that combined with the entire timing is certainly the sort of thing, for a preliminary position, which moves me to consider that, regardless of McCabe’s culpability in the Justice Department investigation in which it was suggested he may have abrogated FBI conduct standards in the Clinton investigation – and which would have perhaps damaged Clinton’s campaign even more than he would have otherwise, much to Trump’s benefit – I see this as a dirty move on Trump’s part.

But I stand ready to change my position as more information comes out.

Me? I’m a snake juggler. Here, throw me this one when I have the other two in the air.

It’s another damn infestation of snakes, and I do mean that literally – every word. Jaws of Satan (1981, aka King Cobra) is another in a long line of earnestly unconscious films about the ongoing hunger of Satan for the souls of humans. In this particular case, he’s taken the form of a king cobra and has invaded some unnamed town via a rail car load of dogs meant for a soon-to-open opening dog race track.

But on arrival, everyone on the train is dead or dying, and at least one displays a most gruesome wound to the face. The doctor in charge calls in a herpetologist, who spends most of his time lusting after the doc. Satan busies himself by influencing the local tribe of rattlesnakes, driving them to distraction with his mean-spirited orders. Meanwhile, the local Catholic priest spends time in the self-doubt lane, a part of the highway overly crowded in this particular genre, and dismisses his monsignor’s claim that the priest’s ancestors were cursed by Druids and therefore he has trouble a-brewin. It’s all superstition to him, a hilarious assertion for a fellow in his line of work.

Meanwhile, the story zigs and zags such that a snake ends up in the doctor’s bed – and then so does another and then so does her knight in shining armor, the herpetologist. Or so I infer from the morning after, which includes a visit from our priest, who seems quite unconscious of the entire hypothetical evening incident. But he’s a little distracted as a local witch, who warned him of trouble coming, is now dead with ghastly wounds as well.

Oh, yeah, a sheriff’s deputy dies, too, but beyond finding the body, nobody seems to notice. Maybe the actor’s vacation day was over and he had to go back to waiting tables.

In any case, in a rather dull climax, they find the king cobra in a cavern, where the herpetologist trips over his big feet and knocks himself out, the doc is offered up on a rocky altar, and they’re rescued by the priest, who sets the snake on fire with a reflection of, ah, holy light.

It’s all fairly shoddy. It’s not just that I’m not partial to supernatural stories of this sort, but the story lacks emotional punch. It relies on grisly death to draw the audience in – and it doesn’t work. The sheriff’s deputy I mentioned, for example, he must have friends, family, even his boss, but he’s not awarded a funeral, mourners, or anything to make his death poignant. He’s just another spear-carrier, and it’s dull, especially since they tried to build his exit scene up. Maybe he ended up on the TV channel’s cutting room floor.

The acting was so-so, or worse, as was the bones of the story. The snakes, at least, all seemed to be real, and the wounds were annoyingly grotesque. But the story didn’t really care about the people, it just wanted to portray Satan coming to getcha.

It’s another dull bit of propaganda, if you want to read it that way.

As I left dinner a couple of nights ago, I happened to look up. A smartphone camera’s really not up to the task, but that’s all I have.

Nathaniel Scharping on D-brief discusses a delicacy under development:

Henry Kaiser, National Science Foundation
Via Popular Science

News of the delicacy first appeared last summer, when Mie Pedersen, a gastrophysicist from the University of Southern Denmark announced that she and her team had found a new way to prepare jellyfish and turn them into snacks. Her method involves treating the animals, which can be more than 95 percent water, with ethanol and then dehydrating them. The result is a shell of collagen that makes for a satisfying treat.

It’s no new delicacy, either. Jellyfish have been a source of food in Asia for hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of years. There, a month-long process involving salt and alum is used to dry out the jellyfish. The result is something that’s been described as “pickle-like” in texture, or perhaps a wet noodle, without too much flavor.

Which sounds innovative and all that, but this paragraph drove me slightly buggy:

And jellyfish, unlike many other marine animals, are actually doing quite well. This could make them an attractive option for consumption. In depleted fisheries around the world, jellyfish have filled the void. They feed on plankton, tiny crustaceans and fish larvae, and the competition is making it more difficult for fish populations to recover. As ocean temperatures continue to rise over the next century, jellyfish will likely continue their dominance of the sea.

Sure – as if those populations are going to recover without significant progress on climate change? To me, we’ve used up all the other species, so let’s move on to the jellyfish.

Yeah, I know. It’s just human ingenuity doing it’s thing. Taking something that seems useless and making it useful is an admirable thing, you’ll hear that from many. I can even agree.

But there’s an alternative view, and it’s this:

We’ve used up the ocean’s inhabitants, and then ruined it, but we’ll skim off the only thing still prospering and maybe use that up, too.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Jabe Wilson addresses the challenges facing researchers these days, and how publishers are trying to help them find and develop new knowledge on R&D Magazine:

As scholarly publishing has become a digital enterprise, the move to create semantic data that captures knowledge has increased significantly. Another way to describe this trend is as a shift in focus from reading articles as a whole, towards finding individual, semantic ‘facts’ reported in publications. This has been driven by the maturing of automated approaches to identifying and extracting these facts; as well as the steps to bring AI into fruition in the form of machine learning. In essence, recent years have seen a step-change from human curation in isolation to rules-based automated indexing approaches, and then to the applications of statistical approaches such as deep learning and machine reasoning. These approaches are helping researchers to access insights in a far shorter time period, greatly improving productivity.

Semantic data is important to R&D, because it means we can link facts that are related across papers, and over different domains of knowledge – enabling us to deliver insights that might not be obvious from reading one paper alone. To do so requires normalizing the terminology with taxonomies, to allow a network to be created. The increasing reliance on linked facts mean the demands of the modern researcher are changing; researchers need bespoke analytics products for their specific needs, built on robust semantic databases. In today’s world, this more often than not means solutions that combine semantic technology methods, augmented with machine learning and machine reasoning approaches.

The support tools are growing ever more sophisticated. Does this mean they’re also more and more expensive to design, build, and maintain? How hard is it to bring a new engineer on board and have her up to speed within, say, 6 months? But in our current world of science, this is necessary because …

These techniques offer the ability to aim AIs at problems we are interested in solving, and having the means to understand and interpret the answers the AIs provide. Together, these two factors of growing interest in AI and greater collaboration will become increasingly important if we are to overcome the productivity crises that many disciplines of science and research are experiencing. Research at Stanford University has indicated that since the 1930s, the effective number of researchers at work has increased by a factor of 23, but annual growth in productivity has declined. As a result, new ideas are becoming more expensive to find; using AI to augment researchers will be a key weapon in the fight to overcome these issues.

Because, of course, a decline in growth indicates a moral failing in the researchers, or at least the money-driven managers would have us believe. I’d say it’s a matter of a paucity of low-hanging fruit, myself, and now we have to start climbing the trees to get the delicious fruit that beckons us.

And AI will be the guy who boosts our valiant researchers up the tree, I think. I wonder if they’re teaching courses at university on how to work with AI augmentation tools….

Adaptive introgression:

[The researchers] went looking for instances of adaptive introgression — a phenomenon in which a newly introduced piece of genetic material is so beneficial that it quickly radiates out into the entire population. [“Your Neanderthal DNA might actually be doing you some good,” Sarah Kaplan, WaPo]

Reading that last phrase, I was struck by the notion that “population” must implicitly have the modifier “future” on it, since genes, for creatures such as us, is not a directly transferring piece of genetic material.

But it is for bacteria.

“Quickly,” for us, would imply at least a few generations, which would be inversely related to the level of promiscuity practiced by the population.

 

“Of course the wolf flies.” – Duane Johnson, Rampage ad

Paul Rosenzweig, a national security lawyer of long standing, finds he can’t finish a book he’s contracted to write. Why? Because he’s lost the faith. He writes about this on Lawfare:

The last straw for me was this week’s announcement by the Republicans in the House that they have found no evidence of collusion – directly contradicting what the Special Counsel has uncovered and revealing that the function of oversight is now dead in Congress.  Thus two thirds of my thesis (the premise of legality by the Executive and oversight by the Legislative) is now untenable.  And I have 90,000 words that are no longer ones I am willing to publish.

I can hear my liberal friends now, mocking this somewhat.  They have had this skepticism of government for a long time and will, I am sure, both welcome my “conversion” to their view and deride me for how late in my career it was.  I think however (and with respect) that this sort of response undervalues and mis-states the deviance of Trumpism.  The Trump approach has truly stolen the soul of conservatism.  It is different in kind and not degree from past administrations.

And so, for now, I put aside the book.  I hope I can return to it someday with a chapter on the “Trump Detour.”  At this point, however, we can no longer say that Executive and Legislative probity is a given.  The guardrails of American democracy (to paraphrase Jack Goldsmith in describing institutional restraints on authoritarianism) are buckling.  To which one can only respond: Trumpism Delenda Est.

It’s disturbing to me to hear a hardened lawyer looking at the future in such a dismal way. I’m not sure I’m as depressed as all that. The structure of any democracy cannot safeguard against dictators and incompetents if the people are unwilling to participate in that democracy. Trump was elected because a sufficient number of citizens either did not participate, or participated with little attention, in the election. They have since learned that elections have consequences. We’re seeing the reaction to that in the number of new candidates for seats that have become available through special elections, or will be available at the midterms.

I think that’s encouraging, and may portend a change at the midterms of a magnitude such that the Republicans may be forced to begin reforming themselves – finding ways to man the gates, removing certain rules of the Party, as I’ve discussed before, and otherwise guiding their Party away from extremist-right.

Or the Party may simply recede into history, as the old “moderate Republicans” form a new Party which can hopefully grow into a responsible governing entity.

The hidden trick will be for the Democrats not to follow the Republicans into their own form of extremism, or they may also fade into the own forms of depravity and obscurity. In a nation such as ours, we best function through compromise at the center, feeling our way towards correct positions by feel, rather than by ideology. Right now we’re off the rails, but continued pressure on the currently incompetent President and his supporters in Congress may force them from power as their own supporters begin to realize how badly their selections have performed.

The hair may say 70, but the face says 30.

The biographical drama Leadbelly (1976) chronicles the life of Huddie William Ledbetter from his late teenage years through his second prison term for murder. He was a blues musician who worked from 1903 until his death 45 years later. This is truly a chronicle, for there is little attempt to do more than connect his upbringing, the strictures of the American South in which he grew up, and his own lust for life with his prison terms and his music.

Indeed, in some ways this movie is all about the music he composed and performed, the subjects both well-worn, such as women and love, and more unusual, such as the song he sang hoping that the Governor of Texas might grant him a pardon. We’re given performances of his many songs as they fit the time and scene.

But as such, the movie comes off just a little flat. In some ways, I found it hard to connect with Ledbetter, and perhaps that’s just a societal difference of 100+ years and a completely different social circumstance. Some of it may have been questions in my head about whether Ledbetter ever really learned from his experiences, or if the pain he endured was more a function of the racist society in which he lived. Indeed, it has elements of film noir to it, although I wouldn’t classify it as such, as an epilogue suggests there was, in fact, a happy ending to his life, as it claims he later played Carnegie Hall.

It is an interesting movie, but not necessarily a movie you’ll remember a month from now.

Speaking of the original Bolo by Laumer, I just got around to seeing last night’s Colbert where he interviews Paul Giamatti – and gifts him with a copy of one of the classic collections of Bolo stories by Laumer. They didn’t really discuss it, but it was cool to see an obscure ex-diplomat get a call-out on Colbert. (Yes, it was also cool to see Kuttner and Moore mentioned.)

When you’re on God’s team, you don’t lose. Keeping this in mind, we can better understand how the GOP, the party of the Evangelicals, even if they’re led by a lying, boasting, adulterer, can embrace lies such as we’ve been hearing of late concerning the special election in PA-18. From the conservative Washington Times:

“The president’s engagement in the race turned what was a deficit for the Republican candidate to what is essentially a tie,” said White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah. “Also the Democrat in the race really embraced the president’s policies and his vision whereas he didn’t really embrace [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader.”

But as Jon Favreau points out:

Conor Lamb campaigned:

1. For universal health car
2. Against Trump’s tax cut
3. For expanded background checks
4. For stronger unions
5. Against cuts to Social Security
6. For a woman’s right to choose
7. For medical marijuana

Why the ridiculous claim? A mature secular voter knows that this isn’t a horserace – that there’s no financial cost or gain depending on whom you vote for. But the GOP base isn’t made up of mature secular voters (no offense), but rather, to a substantial degree, they’re Evangelicals on God’s team.

Or at least this is where they’d like to see themselves.

But Trump went into PA-18 and campaigned in a district which went for him in 2016 by 20 points, and his most excellent candidate, who was going to win easily (or so Trump pronounced on the eve of the election), lost by a feather – less than 700 votes.

Left to consider it, an Evangelical voter should be appalled that God couldn’t push just a few more votes into the Republican column, let alone give losing candidate Saccone a twenty point victory. Since there must be a God, well, either Saccone (who called his opponent and those supporting him God-haters) isn’t favored by God, despite the blessings of Party leader (and thus favored by God) Trump.

Or God isn’t with the Republicans.

The Republican leaders, despite a lot of foolishness, know their base. What’s the most efficient way to convince their base that God is still with them? By co-opting the victorious Lamb (fortunate name for the Republicans, BTW). I suppose God recognized his innate Republican-ness, and helped him to a wonderful victory.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays with the base, although it may be hard to discern. The next Presidential Approval poll might yield something, but then again it might not. Since there are so many other incidents that can affect that poll, it’s hard to know how to interpret it in this context.

But this loss may chip away a few more Evangelical voters from the Republicans. When you’re in a team sport and your team gets blasted, it has to make you wonder if you’re doing things the right way.