Monthly Archives: May 2018

One of the passions of Alex Jordan, the builder of House On The Rock, was the circus, and he had a respectably sized collection of circus models, as I inadequately photographed here. Sadly, some of the shots are a little out of focus, as there wasn’t time to take great care with the camera. In a sense, that reflects our entire experience at HOTR. There is so much stuff that we began to lose focus and become a little bleary.

Complete with the circus train!

And, finally, a full sized diorama shot of showwoman and elephant.

A reader reacts to National Security Advisor John Bolton’s influence:

Why the hell does John Bolton have so much influence and/or power to cause so much mayhem in so many different agencies?

Because he looks the part of a national security advisor, and his views are what President Trump would expect of such a person on TV. Television is Trump’s world, defining its possibilities and its restrictions. He doesn’t seem to be able to think much beyond it, in fact.

I had to laugh – if in horror – at Eugene Volokh’s “final thoughts” (in reality, a defense) for his proposal to rid the U.S. Constitution of part of Article II, Section I.  The passage sets forth the qualifications for President to include, among other things, being a natural born citizen:

1. Anomalous Article II: If you were running a public company in the United States today, would you limit the CEO position to natural-born citizens? Be honest. Consider, too, whether POTUS is so distinct as to merit different treatment not only from how an American public company would define CEO eligibility but also from how the U.S. Constitution defines eligibility to be a federal lawmaker or life-tenured federal judge.

Note the use of the Be honest intercession – this elides the central question by quickly pushing beyond it. That question? Why consider this analogy? As we discussed at some length on this blog, there are fundamental differences between the various sectors of society. Here we run across one which I haven’t discussed, which has to do with the fundamental loyalties of humans.

Eugene is talking about two distinct categories of entities in his proposal: nations and corporations. Let’s briefly look at each from a historical perspective with respect to the loyalties we expect from them and their motivations.

Nations: A nation is an extension, through several steps, of the primeval family unit. I use the word primeval not for rhetorical effect, but because it is an instinctual behavior of the normal human being to have a fundamental loyalty to that unit; an instinct no doubt fostered by the relative safety offered by the family unit^[1]. Since those prehistoric days, we have discovered that, by expanding our “loyalty circle”, we enhance our safety. This is not an unlimited, linear progression, of course. As one circle impacts another and competes with limited resources, individual safety may be impacted.

But, skipping over that complex subject, we progress from family to villages to towns, cities, regions, and on to Nations. Interestingly, those intervening steps do not always retain loyalties.  Some folks never move away from their villages or towns, but as Lafayette noted, some have restless feet and never really put down roots. But once we reach the level of nations, people’s loyalties often become more steadfast. Ingrained. They see, from their often limited perspective, the advantages being a member of their nation; they are subject to the threats, real or not, of other nations, and seek safety in their own, offering loyalty in return.

But, more importantly, the nation is often an embodiment of a religious or ethnic mythology. As Americans, we have a certain mythology, originating in and used to justify various wars as well as the conquering of the American West.  But given our heterogenous nature with regard to religion, we rarely conflate being American with any particular religion^[2]. Our mixed ethnicity hardly even needs be noted, although certain emigré communities have attained notoriety in American culture: the Irish of Boston, the Poles of Chicago, the Norwegians of Minnesota. The point is that our experience with the mixing of national pride with ethnic and/or religious mythologies is meager.

And, I suggest, that mythology, regardless of origin, asserts an influence over the attitudes, judgments and actions of those born under it. Rationality recedes; loyalty comes to the fore. Throw in a tradition of self-sacrifice, which is often a worthy element of religious traditions, and you have a recipe for the effective mole.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a “mole” in this context is a person who joins some organization, professes loyalty, and remains with an organization for an often substantial period of time acting as an effective member, but waiting for a signal from another organization to engage in an act deleterious to the first organization. The time period in which they act in the interests of the first organization gradually immunizes them from suspicion and detection, so when they strike, they are still unsuspected. The more their faux loyalty has resulted in elevation within the organization, so much the greater is the damage they can inflict. Intelligence communities spend many hours worrying about such creatures, having been victimized over time.

Eugene’s proposal is a perfect opening for moles.

Corporations: A corporation is an organization created in order to supply  goods or services in hopes of scoring a profit in the transaction. The CEO is the person in charge of the strategy of the corporation, often in conjunction with a corporate board.

Do corporations inspire an instinctive loyalty? Some might argue they do. I grew up in a period of flux in which the corporations’ reputation as life-long employers became ragged. I recall my own father’s emotional distress as his employer, Sperry, became less an institution worthy of loyalty, and more an institution that was a member of a culture of mercenary necessity, ready to lay off employees or sell off divisions as thought necessary to preserve the bottom line, paying off the loyalty of their employees with little more than cold cash. For some, this was appropriate, but for others, the culture — that sense of community and belonging — was broken, rendering the corporate community little more than a cash extraction mechanism.

And that’s my point. If the corporate culture engendered instinctive loyalty, how often would we see the movement of a person from a CEO position at one company to the CEO position at another? Never. But, in fact, in the real world we do see that phenomenon, and it’s not even an unusual move. Do we see this in the public sphere? No doubt, there have been a few instances, mostly involving peaceful annexations, but, in general, no. Heads of government do not move from one country to the next. The question of ultimate loyalties is paramount.

This lack of instinctive loyalty to one’s corporation is, in fact, sensible. Few of them provide what I would call true essentials: food, water, safety, health. Most corporations exist to provide chairs, tables, cars, a vast host of things we think are essential, but aren’t. The benefits of corporate culture can be obtained from the culture we live in. Corporations are simply a convenient, and some would argue best, way to provide the goods with which we enhance our lives. It is, in fact, unlikely that a CEO will move to another corporation with the goal of destabilizing that corporation in favor of his former employer, because that instinctive loyalty simply doesn’t exist. Their motivation is uncolored by ethnic or religious mythologies in most instances. It’s often motivated by compensation, although some individuals have higher motivations.

Eugene’s implicit suggestion that there’s a viable analogy is dubious at best, as I think we can see now, but I think one more element needs to be examined to understand why his analogy is completely inappropriate, and that is the question of governance.

The selection of our method of governance was made by the Founding Fathers years ago, but that doesn’t really reduce one of the most difficult questions human societies face: how, in the face of human greed and fallibility, do we govern our public organizations? For this discussion, I mean nations. The Founders provided a framework designed to mitigate the bad actions inherent in our selfish natures, but I’ll skip any digressions on the nature and efficacy of this framework^[3]. Within that framework, though, we have to select leaders, and this may be the most difficult question for the Nation as a whole to solve.

Voting is our current method of selection, and while it has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages in that it expects a substantial fraction of the electorate to responsibly investigate the competency and character of the candidates. This is a difficult thing to do. I shan’t belabor the point, but merely point out that much of our judgment must come from secondary or tertiary sources.

How does the Article II clause play into this? By removing the question of a foreign loyalty bound by foreign mythologies, it slightly simplifies the task of judging a candidate. It’s not impossible that a candidate has been previously subverted, a concern that was noted during the JFK candidacy by the rumors that Kennedy, the first Catholic President, might be controlled by the Vatican. While dismissed as religious bigotry, it is symbolic of the fundamental concern of loyalty to the Nation. But such subversions are far more likely to be detected and publicized, even prosecuted.

Keep in mind, in the selection of the governors, just as with governance itself, certainty is a very scant quantity. We must deal in probabilities and work from a disinterested perspective, self-aware of our flaws and eccentricities.

Eugene asks “… whether POTUS is so distinct as to merit different treatment … from how the U.S. Constitution defines eligibility to be a federal lawmaker or life-tenured federal judge.” The President is an unique position with the Federal government, and while, during the current fiasco of an Administration, the role’s limitations have been brought into sharp relief, the fact remains that the Presidency also has powers unavailable to the rest of the Federal government, and they are under the control of one person.

Consider the lawmakers: do they operate in a vacuum, making laws without regard for others? No. In fact, the lawmakers must persuade their colleagues as to the wisdom of the laws they propose^[4], and those laws must satisfy those limitations imposed by the U. S. Constitution, as amended.

Who interprets the Constitution and the law? Eugene’s federal judge. None of those operate in a vacuum, either, as there are courts of appeal used to correct the improper interpretation, and the final court of appeal is composed of a collection of judges whom we hope excel in their chosen field.

But the occupant of the Presidential role need not persuade others of the wisdom of his actions, insofar as those actions are those preordained to be licit, he need merely take action. The president does not make law, but only implements it. The president chooses nominees for non-elective executive positions, but even if they are rejected by the Senate, the Senate has no power of selection, but only that of confirmation or rejection. Today, the President can make War in all but name.

Yes, the Presidency is a very special position, which is why it must be renewed every few years. It can be an enormous force for positive – or it can do enormous damage to the polity, even if it is tempered by a competent Legislature.

Collectively, this is why Eugene’s defense of his proposal is flawed.

Finally, during composition of this post one more thought came to mind. The United States is a polity of 300+ million people, of which the overwhelming majority satisfy, or will satisfy, the requirements of the Presidency. If a nation of this size must import an individual to be a President, if we cannot generate an individual of more than satisfactory competency, then what does that say about American culture? Here I don’t address the problematic question of “best President,” because we don’t need that. We cannot need that, because we cannot agree on the meaning of that phrase. But we need to be able to agree that someone is competent to execute the post in a disinterested manner. We know that the government’s responsibility is dispersed through a number of positions, such as the President’s Cabinet, who may report to him but may also examine him as well. He is neither King nor Autocrat, but rather a central role in a decentralized government. He needn’t be best, as we cannot even agree on what this means; he merely need be good enough.

Yeah, stop laughing. I know we can’t define that, either.

¹I think American law recognizes this instinctual and overriding loyalty by exempting the testimony of spouses against each other. Or is this just TV law?

²As a matter of dreary certitude, it should be noted that the truth of this observation is to the frustration of certain American religious leaders who are eager to illicitly co-opt American strength to their own religious causes. As an agnostic, I remain appalled at their ignorance of American law and tradition – or their deceit. Take your pick.

³Especially as the answer to the efficacy question remains in the future and will be inversely measured by the damage done by our current Administration.

⁴Obviously, during the current trend of using “team politics,” this requirement has been somewhat obviated.

On Lawfare, in a longish post Matt Tait of the University of Texas-Austin laments the damage done by the CIA’s torture program, and his final point is telling:

Finally, the RDI [rendition, detention and interrogation] program was reckless in ways that the officials who designed it may never really have understood, and for which they have never been held accountable. It is perhaps hard to fully convey how much of a threat the legacy of torture still poses to the United State’s ability to interact with its allies overseas and to its ongoing counterterrorism efforts.

The risks and subsequent fallout from this recklessness is vast. When the U.K.’s domestic security service, MI5, found out that the U.K. foreign intelligence service, MI6, had been involved in the rendition—but not torture—of suspects who had later endured torture, MI5 threw all MI6 officers out of its headquarters. This caused a prolonged rift between two of the main intelligence agencies of one of the United States’ closest allies—agencies that are themselves responsible for no small amount of intelligence that reaches the president in his daily brief.

Similarly, some extremely bad people are walking free with large payouts because the evidence against them was contaminated by torture. The program has directly led to considerable litigation in the U.K., Canada, U.S. and elsewhere. It has put top-secret documents at risk of discovery through litigation. It has caused a sustained foreign policy firestorm for the United States and its allies with enormous costs.

Defenses of this program ignore or undervalue these costs, or pretend they are not directly attributable to it. And even putting values aside, advocates of starting a new torture program as a matter of “toughness” ignore that the price of doing so will not be measured in a few hurt feelings.

Torture is a deeply flawed instrument when it comes to intelligence collection, easily fooled and  unverifiable. It’s real purpose is vengeance and fear; its results is loathing and disdain. It’s the tool of fools who have no faith in their own value systems. Matt’s story, which includes new CIA Director Gina Haspel, is a story of failure, law-breaking, and ego. She should not have been confirmed, and wouldn’t have been by adults.

Fecund:

• able to produce a lot of crops, fruit, babies, young animals, etc.:
  fecund soil
• producing or creating a lot of new things, ideas, etc.:
  a fecund imagination

[Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Saturday Waterfowl Extravaganza,” Kevin Drum:

This has been a very fecund year for the ducks and geese here in our little suburban watering hole. Last year we had no ducklings and only two broods of goslings. This year we’ve had three broods of ducklings and either four or five broods of Canada goose babies—so far.

Refik Anadol’s http Infinity Room.

A reader sends a link to an article on Ars Technica further documenting the energy costs of Bitcoin:

The bitcoin network is run by miners, computers that maintain the shared transaction ledger called the blockchain. A new study estimates that this process consumes at least 2.6GW of power—almost as much electric power as Ireland consumes. This figure could rise to 7.7GW before the end of 2018—accounting for almost half a percent of the world’s electricity consumption.

The study is an updated version of calculations performed late last year by analyst Alex de Vries. In this new version, de Vries has gathered more detailed information about the economics of the mining business. But his new numbers are broadly consistent with the old ones. Last December, he estimated that the bitcoin network was consuming roughly 32TWh annually, or 3.65GW. His website, which is updated daily, now shows the network consuming 67TWh annually, just under that upper bound of 7.7GW shown in his new study.

But even more interesting:

A crucial point here is that the difficulty of the mining task automatically adjusts to maintain a 10 minute average block creation rate. So if more computing power joins the network, the result isn’t that more bitcoins get created. Instead, it takes more computing power to produce each bitcoin, making existing mining hardware less profitable than before—and driving up the energy consumed per bitcoin.

I was not aware of this, and is a rare sighting of an anti-scalable algorithm, if I don’t miss my guess.

He’s working on frogs this week.

Those frogs you dissected in biology class? Fake. Real frogs are full of beans!

On 38 North, Joseph DeThomas agrees with my own suspicions concerning Kim Jong Un and his adversaries:

Kim Jong Un has to be given a great deal of credit for tactical diplomatic acumen. He began 2018 totally isolated and under severe economic and military pressure. He had no reason to believe any of the main participants would relent in sanctions pressure and he had reason to fear that they would lament but do nothing to halt any ill-conceived US military action. In five short months, he has totally reversed the diplomatic momentum of the situation. While he is still under sanctions pressure, he has eliminated any hope the US could resort to military action and maintain its alliance with the ROK. He has likely shifted China’s position back to its more traditional semi-supportive approach to the DPRK, especially as long as Kim refrains from further provocations, and he has isolated President Trump should the President wish to return to a policy of maximum pressure.

Kim did this through very slick public diplomacy in which he shifted his image from that of a comic book villain to that of a normal and quite approachable statesman. At the same time, he made himself the center of the diplomatic geometry of the Korean Peninsula. He began the year as the target of diplomacy. He has emerged this spring as its prime mover by dealing with each of his opponents bilaterally—offering them what they wanted in isolation from the others and by leaving Donald Trump until last, with Japanese Prime Minister Abe still on the sidelines, ignored by all actors.

The Japanese will carry the blight of World War II for another couple of generations, I suspect – because their Asian neighbors find it too profitable to let it drop. And it’s sensible to be wary of any entity that displayed such barbaric violence towards them.

But the real star of the show is Kim, I think. He remains the scion of a vicious family monarchy, no matter how many skills he displays in the diplomatic arena or how much good press he may garner, and that’s another key element of the drama playing out on the southern border of China. Is he building a mask? You bet. He may end up denuclearizing the peninsula, but it’ll be on his terms, not ours, or no dice. His biggest task may be decoding Trump’s utterances, which tends to descend into gibberish when he talks about anything beyond the American borders.

So I don’t expect any instant successes. The North Koreans have never been known for quick movement at the diplomatic table. And if Trump comes back from the summit claiming victory, well, don’t be naive.

Scofflaw:

Scofflaw is a noun coined during the Prohibition era to mean a person who drinks illegally. It is a compound of the words scoff and law. Its original meaning was someone who mocks or ridicules anti-drinking laws, but has extended to mean one who flouts any law, especially those difficult to enforce, and particularly traffic laws. [Wikipedia]

Used by my Arts Editor last night. Couldn’t remember last time I’d heard it, that must mean something significant.

The carousel of House On The Rock is reputed to be the largest in the world, yet lacks any of the traditional horses at all, instead populated with creatures out of legend and cockeyed mind. These pics may be a little out of focus, unfortunately, but a smartphone camera is hardly a match for a whirling dervish of paper maché and gearing!

Not that HOTR lacks for carousel horses. They are mounted on the opposite wall, of which I apparently didn’t take pics. Or haven’t found them, yet.

I was a little surprised on Wednesday night when Colbert of The Late Show said that previous independent and special counsel investigations have lasted longer than the Mueller investigation so far, during which I feel like I’ve aged a decade. (Sorry, I’m feeling a little manic tonight.) But here’s WaPo confirming Colbert:

“When you’re talking about an investigation that involves international activity, with a foreign government and foreign actors who have no incentive to be cooperative, such an investigation takes a lot of time,” said Jacob Frenkel, who worked in the independent counsel’s office in the late 1990s and is now at the firm Dickinson Wright.

By comparison, it took nearly a year and a half for the independent counsel to bring charges in what is now known as the Whitewater scandal — which began by exploring Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in a suspicious real estate venture — against Arkansas’ governor and two others. That case stretched on for nearly eight years, drawing in multiple independent counsels and exploring a wide range of allegations about the Clintons. They were never charged, and Bill Clinton was impeached, but not convicted and removed, for obstructing justice.

“Judged by historical standards, I think that the special counsel has amassed a remarkable record of achievement in the first year of his tenure,” said David Kris, a former assistant attorney general for national security who now runs the Culper Partners consulting firm. “It’s fast and it’s productive, and there’s obviously more to come.”

This is how I feel about the purpose of the investigation:

Legal analysts, say, though that Mueller is probably unconcerned with accomplishing a particular result — such as charging the president, or forcing his impeachment. Ron Hosko, a former FBI assistant director who worked under Mueller at the FBI, said Mueller’s main aim was always to be thorough, and “if at the end of that investigation he’s able to say, we found no evidence of collusion, kind of the core mission, I think Mueller would see it as, ‘we’ve accomplished our mission.’ “

Horse firmly in front of the cart. Let the evidence lead the way, and if there’s no conclusive evidence, then that’s that. I’ve seen the disasters that can happen by assuming a conclusion and then trying to prove it – reality comes sailing in through the window and steps in your freshly baked cake after mucking out the barn. Yech. And that’s just in programming.

Of course, those of us of a mendacious nature might ask if that’s how a member of either base (that is, the restless extremists in the Republican and the Democratic parties) would feel as well. But I shan’t. Nyah.

There’s no real point here except to note that investigations of this sort are lengthy processes and shouldn’t be hurried. Watching the various Trump lawyers and associated minions complain about the length of the investigation is, in its own way, a telling remark on how many of them feel about the matter – let’s close this up before they find something! Or, at least, that’s a congruent explanation. No firm facts, just a bunch of arrests, guilty pleas, and indictments.

Pass the popcorn. We’re not even to the fifth inning!

A reader corrects me concerning the possibilities of crowd-computing cryptocurrencies:

Serious miners often run multiple “rigs” (machines) and each may have as many as 8 to 32 GPU cards in it. It would take a huge amount of “idle” cycles ala SETI at Home to cover the resources of even a few miners.

Ah, truly dedicated systems. I wonder if they use bespoke computing solutions….

WaPo reports on the sudden weakening of the American capability to respond to global pandemics:

The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.

The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.

Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.

Pandemic preparedness and global health security are issues that require government-wide responses, experts say, as well as the leadership of a high-ranking official within the White House who is assigned only this role.

It’s simple to suggest that the Trump Administration is using a false libertarian view of the matter: that other countries should take care of their own problems. It’s false because political and even geographical boundaries are permeable: disease does not respect the former and can surmount the latter. As WaPo points out:

The day before news of Ziemer’s exit became public, one of the officials on his team, Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the NSC, spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That event killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.

Worldwide. That means the virus traveled from wherever it originated to just about everywhere, and this in a time when travel was not as cheap and easy as it is today. So, just as pathogens do not respect national borders, nor can our public health system.

All that said, reasonable people can disagree on the precise structure of how we prepare for eventualities such as this one. Perhaps we don’t need a high ranking official who concentrates on this one issue and sits on the National Security Council. Perhaps that’s a waste of money. I’m no expert on matters like this.

But when experts comment that the Trump Administration is screwing up by not having a high official working on this one problem, and given how terribly we all suffered last time, I’m more than a little nervous. Once again, this feels like third-rate amateurism at its worst. All the walls at the southern American border won’t stop another potential pandemic – it won’t even slow it down.

A reader reacts to the news that SCOTUS has ruled that states have the right to legalize, or more accurately regulate, sports gambling as they desire:

The sociopaths have gotten near complete control of society, and they are bent on extracting as much wealth and power as possible, never mind the misery and suffering inflicted on the majority. This is just another small step in that pogrom to enrich the 1%, and anyone who fancies him or herself to have a chance at it. “Screw you, I’ve got mine” is the guiding principle today.

While it’s easy to point out that no one is forced to gamble, the reality of the situation is that people, at least in American culture, have an inclination to risk small amounts of wealth in hopes of recouping greater wealth. The gambling business is constructed to take advantage of that inclination.

I suppose we could call this a learning opportunity for the American people, but I fear it’ll never be effective for the vast majority.

Do you wonder how Trump lawyer Michael Cohen might be persuaded to flip? Harry Litman on Lawfare has some details based on his experience with Sammy “the Bull” Gravano:

For this sort of defendant, the adroit prosecutor must deploy a gradual and nuanced psychological campaign to wean them from a total identification with the family and its values, and a disgust at the mere thought of talking with the government. As John Gleeson, the prosecutor who led the prosecution of Gotti and flipped Sammy the Bull, told me, “It’s not something that happens instantly. The heart of it is convincing the would-be cooperator that there is no such thing as honor among thieves. If the tables were turned, the guy he’s reluctant to give up would throw him under the bus in a heartbeat.”

To be sure, the prospect of a long time in jail is a strong start. In fact, few people realize that it was the passage of long mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes—justly controversial in other settings—that, in combination with the mobs’ ill-fated decision to go into the drug business in the first place, broke the back of organized crime. The refrain of the Sammy the Bulls of the world had been, “I can do a nickel standing on my head,” meaning they were more than willing to serve a five-year sentence and keep quiet. That calculus changed with ten- and 20-year sentences.

If Cohen faces a sentence, it will be driven by the amount of money at issue in his putative financial crimes. Given their possible number and magnitude, his exposure could potentially be very long—certainly long enough to deprive Cohen, by all accounts a family man, of seeing his children grow up.

But for Cohen to agree to flip, he’d likely need to undergo a gradual transition that permits him to feel justified in breaking the Trump camp version of the omerta, or code of silence. As Cohen has pledged, “I will always protect Mr. Trump.”And with the intense focus on the case, it is likely that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York would want to apply a soft touch and avoid possible charges from the president’s supporters of overbearing treatment.

Step one in that transition is the isolation of the lieutenant from the family and the daily social life, which usually consists largely of a lot of hanging out and killing time and not all that much actual criminal activity. That much seems already to have happened, notwithstanding that Cohen has yet to be arrested. The Times reported recently that Cohen has told associates that he feels isolated since the FBI search.

With the spell of daily connection to the family broken, the feds will seek to persuade the made man that the Don doesn’t esteem him—or worse—doesn’t even respect him.

Since Trump doesn’t appear to treat his subordinates with much respect, this might be easier than one might think.

On our way to Chicago, we stopped at the House On the Rock (HOTR) in Wisconsin. I find it impossible to give insight into this echo of a guy who seems to have gone completely around the bend, so I’ll just post pics of this part of the trip with very little comment. There’s a lot of pics, I’ll do them over the next few days.

One of our favorite collection items, for that’s one of the themes of HOTR, was the gigantic iron pots decorated with whimsical reptiles.

Our recent vacation trip to Chicago included stops at the Field Museum, where we saw the Mummy exhibit and we holstered the cameras, and the Art Institute of Chicago, which was awash in camera wielding art warriors. We had a great time at both (and Geno’s East as well, where we ate lunch after the Art Institute visit), and snapped a few pictures of our own.

Here’s our Arts Editor gawping at the subject of a recent film:

Here’s a couple of pics, just to prove we were really in the building. Honestly, I didn’t want to live behind the camera during the visit, but I liked these paintings a lot.

I enjoyed these abstract representations of a firebreathing dragon.

And then we finished up with a visit to Geno’s East, Chicago’s finest deep-dish pizza. Excellent!

One of the unexpected consequences of the bitcoin trend has been its impact on specialized graphics processing units (GPUs), which the miners find very useful for the sort of calculations necessary to verify the transactions and thus earn cryptocurrency for themselves. From The Motley Fool:

The conundrum has been that soaring cryptocurrency prices have angered both NVIDIA’s and AMD’s core gaming customers. Rising graphics card prices have made it difficult for these core customers to upgrade, or even replace their graphics cards, should they need to. NVIDIA and AMD were left with a choice: Either risk their long-term success by alienating their core customer, or increase GPU supply and risk cratering near-term GPU prices (and thusly their own margins). As we now know following their respective quarterly reports, these companies have chosen the latter.

Understandably, meeting GPU demand won’t happen overnight. In late March, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang admitted that his company still has a long way to go in an interview with TechCrunch. Said Huang, “We’re sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so it’s a real challenge keeping [graphics cards] in the marketplace for games … we have to build a whole lot more.” AMD has echoed this challenge, suggesting that its ramp-up of GPU production may be limited by the ability of its memory partners to meet demand.

While there’s always a certain amount of demand for high end computing resources, this unexpected competition for resources is certainly an interesting aspect of the entire scenario.

I wonder if the computations are amenable to public computing, a la the SETI@Home effort. If so, and if you could find some way to convince your everyday user to dedicate part of their machine to the calculations, that might be a way to alleviate the problem, and even decentralize the generation of the currency, which is a problem noted here.

Paul Rosenzweig’s comment on the elimination of the White House Cyber Coordinator Role:

This is not just nonsense: It is nonsense on stilts.

Ever get the feeling that National Security Advisor Bolton, responsible for this move, has fallen behind the times?

philology:

Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics.^[1] Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The Eternal Exile,” which is a review of two biographies of Gershom Scholem by Nathan Goldman, The Hedgehog Review:

The resemblance of the Kabbalah as portrayed in Scholem’s work to its actual historical content is a complex subject beyond the purview of both Prochnik and Engel, neither of whom are scholars of Jewish mysticism. But both writers subscribe to the increasingly popular reading of Scholem’s scholarship as a creative project. Engel writes that he sees Scholem “not as an explorer but as a poet.” This is not to say that Scholem was fundamentally a fabricator—though Prochnik notes instances in which he clearly was—but that he shaped what he found; his philology was guided by a philosophy. His scholarly interest in recovering the history of Jewish mysticism was inseparable from his political desire to rejuvenate the Jewish people in the present. Scholem wrote about the Kabbalah as a distinctively Jewish resource for cultural renewal. His spiritual yearning brought him to Palestine, where he became a librarian in the Hebrew department of the National Library and, through his writing and political activity, worked to realize his vision of Zionism.

On The Resurgent, Peter Heck complains that Senator and former GOP Presidential nominee John McCain (R-AZ) is mistaken in seeing his junior partner on that ticket, former half-term Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, as a ball & chain his campaign:

To say that Palin wasn’t ready for the national stage is fair. To say that, in hindsight, she turned out to lack the policy chops that would have made her an effective player in D.C. is fair. But to say that McCain’s margin of loss without her wouldn’t have been staggering is engaging the worst kind of historical revisionism.

I can’t agree. The selection of Governor Palin, especially when she went on display and became the iconic incoherent right wing extremist, was the moment when I believe most independents realized that McCain’s campaign was profoundly flawed. I know that, until then, I was willing to give McCain a fair hearing, but once he had selected Palin, my requirement that competent people, regardless of gender, had to occupy the seats of President and VP had not been met, and cast serious doubt on McCain’s future staff selections.

I agree with the sentiment that Obama was inexperienced at the national level upon his election to the Presidency, although I think Heck overstates the case, but Obama convinced me to vote for him based, in part, on his personnel selections. Let’s face it: no President can do this job without excellent help in the form of his selections to Cabinet posts and subsidiary positions, and that’s why the Senate has confirmation power -to help the President make good selections. To an overwhelming extent, the effectiveness of a President depends on those picks, and, for the non-partisan observer, I think history will prove that Obama made excellent selections. At the time of the campaign, Biden was somewhat suspect based on his previous plagiarism scandals, but he proved to be an articulate and convincing spokesman for the election, and has subsequently proven to be an excellent vice president.

But, more importantly, Heck betrays the limited vision of the extremist which loses elections and causes the party of any persuasion to become more hermetic and estranged. Why the latter? Palin was emblematic of the extremist right wing, and when the McCain campaign lost, and lost to a relatively inexperienced community organizer and only recent Senator, it became a full-scale rejection of the extremist offering of their best. For the citizen of flexible and inquiring intellect, this is an opportunity to learn and grow, but for the dogged zealot, convinced of the rightness of their cause, this is an embittering experience. Their best, stomped by someone they are already convinced is inferior, whether due to race or inexperience – keeping in mind McCain’s years of service in the military and in government, too – had to feel like sand in the teeth.

Palin may have attracted and appeased the extremist wing of the GOP, but she repelled just about everyone else.

And I think Heck overstates the case against Leiberman. Leiberman would have occupied the vice-president slot, not the president slot, and that’s not necessarily a policy making position. The only real consideration against Leiberman from a GOP perspective is if McCain were to die or become incapacitated during his Presidency. In another time, a conservative Democrat wouldn’t have been a problem – and his appeal to the independents would have been undeniable and even huge. But in 2008? The extremists were solidifying their hold on the heart of the GOP, and Leiberman was considered anathema. I think McCain, realizing he had little chance, decided to roll the dice on an unknown who had charisma and unknown other potentialities.

And he rolled snake-eyes.

The latest from Boston Dynamics:

In the hubbub of the SCOTUS ruling that the individual states may legalize gambling, I’ve not run across a certain bit of information: what’s the real worth of gambling. Not this:

While it’s probably impossible to accurately estimate, experts suggest that illegal betting in the United States is a $50 billion to $150 billion business — perhaps significantly more.

According to research by UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, legal sports betting in Nevada totaled nearly $5 billion last year, led by football — both college and professional — which accounted for $1.76 billion.

A 2017 report from Eilers & Krejcik Gaming estimated that legal sports gambling could be a $6 billion industry — perhaps as much $16 billion if more states eventually get onboard. [WaPo]

The oxygen produced by my little fern garden may be more valuable than the entire gambling industry.

Because that’s merely the churn of the industry, isn’t it? I mean, outside of the minor expense of paying the employees, paying taxes, and skimming profits, we’re not producing anything, are we? It’s not as if we’re buying paper towels, or food, or a handyman’s service – all transitions that have something of value.

So I’m uncomfortable with this terminology that obscures the question of whether this is really an industry like others – or just a lot of financial masturbation. Even entertainment has its value in the stories it produces and how that enhances the lives of those who can learn from those stories.

But gamblers? Some are vaguely entertained, obviously, but others are addicts.

Where’s the value?