Monthly Archives: July 2018

Noted in Minneapolis’ Loring Park:

This bird was evidently the lookout for some ducks busying themselves with the algae.

I’ve barely begun a new book, Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov, both Russian with Ph.D.s, I’m not even done with the freakin’ Introduction, but a report from The New York Times rings an interesting bell in conjunction with it:

The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing taxpayers to adjust the initial value of an asset, such as a home or a share of stock, for inflation when it sells.

“If it can’t get done through a legislation process, we will look at what tools at Treasury we have to do it on our own and we’ll consider that,” Mr. Mnuchin said, emphasizing that he had not concluded whether the Treasury Department had the authority to act alone. “We are studying that internally, and we are also studying the economic costs and the impact on growth.”

Add in the lone piece of legislation to be passed by Congress and signed into law during this term, the tax ‘reform’ bill, which, as predicted by independent economists, has resulted in a windfall for the wealthy. Then add the greediness of investors just prior to the Great Recession, as augmented by a couple of recent articles by Professor Pearlstein referenced here, and it all adds up to a feeding frenzy by those who already have more than enough.

And in Turchin and Nefedov’s book?

Such a happy state (for the elites) cannot continue for long. First, expansion of elite numbers means that the amount of resources per elite capita begins to decline. This process would occur even if the total amount of surplus stayed constant. But, second, as general population grows closer to the carrying capacity, surplus production gradually declines. The combination of these two trends results in an accelerating fall of average elite incomes.

The dynamic processes described above also have a sociopsychological aspect. During the good times the elites become accustomed to, and learn to expect, a high level of consumption (this is the growing extravagance of noble households” of Dobb and Sweezy). An additional elements, as pointed out by Sweezy, is the ever-increasing quantity and variety of goods available to the elites  as a result of urbanization….Modern studies of consumption level expectations suggest that people generally aim at matching (and if possible exceeding) the consumption levels of their parents. …

The deteriorating economic conditions of the elites during the late stagflation phase of the secular cycle do not affect all aristocrats [elites] equally. While the majority are losing ground, a few lineages, by contrast, are able to increase their wealth. The growing economic inequality results from the operation of what some sociologists call the “Matthew effect”… [pp. 10-11]

(All typos mine.) It’ll be fascinating to see how this book applies to our current era, and to make some guesses concerning our current position in the secular cycle and how we might expect our economy to respond to the growing rapacity of the elite part of our society. A key question will be whether their materialistic urges will surge out of control, or if they’ll heed the moralistic requests that the sinking balance of a very rich, if lopsided, society be saved from utter poverty. While carrying capacity was certainly the most important economic measure of the medieval ages, I don’t know if that still applies to today. We’re not yet at mass “soup kitchen” stage, and it’s not clear to me that this’ll happen, unless climate change destroys substantial portions of our arable land.

But it won’t get read fast. Dense prose will slow me down.

Regarding the letters I sent to my various Congress people concerning civil asset forfeiture, I just received a reply from Senator Smith, a delay of maybe a month and a half. Unfortunately, it’s a form letter. Here’s the meatiest paragraph:

To make a more equitable and cost-effective system, we need to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to justice and confront sentencing disparities, prison overcrowding, and bias in our criminal justice system. Mandatory minimums — which require fixed sentences for specific criminal convictions — have been used too widely and led to mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts people of color and costs taxpayers billions of dollars. That’s why I am a cosponsor of the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bipartisan bill that would reduce mandatory minimums for some non-violent drug offenses and allow people sentenced under previous, harsher laws the chance to have their sentences revisited. I also support the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, another bipartisan bill that would give judges greater discretion in sentencing, make some of the drug sentencing reforms enacted in recent years retroactive, and support anti-recidivism initiatives. I am also a cosponsor of the End Racial and Religious Profiling Act of 2017 (ERRPA), which would prohibit racial profiling by law enforcement and require trainings and updated procedures to eliminate this practice.

That has little to do with civil asset forfeiture. While I appreciate that she’s active in this area, I’d place far more value on knowing her opinion on the topic I selected, rather than her activities in other, if related, areas.

In fact, it’s more campaign literature than an honest reply.

Which probably won’t stop me from voting for her – or at least not voting at all. But it’s disappointing that she, or her staff, failed to address an important question in today’s justice system, a question which, answered improperly, damages the faith that citizens have in their system being a just system.

A month or so ago Professor Pearlstein of George Mason University published an article in WaPo concerning the ripples in the national financial pond, and now he has another unsettling article out chronicling current corporate greed in WaPo:

Now it is happening again [the rush after poor investments, as seen just prior to the Great Recession], as investors and money managers scramble to buy floating-rate debt — debt offering interest payments that will increase as global interest rates rise, as they are expected to over the next few years. A big new source of floating-rate credit is the market for “leveraged loans” — loans to highly indebted businesses — that are packaged into securities known as “collateralized loan obligations,” or CLOs. Because the market seems to have an insatiable appetite for CLOs, leveraged lending and CLO issuance through the first half of the year are already up 38 percent over last year’s near-record levels. …

Although some sophisticated investors have begun to pull back from the CLO market, they have been replaced by retail investors seeking higher yields who have flocked to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that specialize in CLO debt.

Which sounds like wretched amateurs chasing the big return with little thought as to the underlying risk. The sheep will be sheared. But where are the regulators who protect investors against deceptive investments?

Although financial regulators have taken passing notice of the increased volume and declining quality of corporate credit, they haven’t done much to discourage it — just the opposite, in fact.

Earlier this year, after complaints from banks and dealmakers reached sympathetic ears in the Trump administration, the newly installed chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Comptroller of the Currency Office declared that previous “guidance” against lending to companies whose debt exceeded six times their annual cash flow should not be taken as a hard and fast rule.

Whether intended or not, however, the market read the regulators’ announcement not only as a green light to the banks to step up their leveraged lending but also as an indication that regulators would be more responsive to industry pressure than during the Obama years.

And that’s the problem. Regulators don’t exist to increase the profits of an industry – or a company. They exist to keep the economy, or more often some sector of the economy, stable and safe, and thereby create an environment in which reasonable profits are possible. When they collude with the industry they are regulating, there’s a vastly increased chance of a disaster born of the greed of the amateur, the inexperienced.

Or even the cautious, wise citizen.

Because our economy has become so large and convoluted, even the most wise financial actor can get their fins caught in the net of blind bad chance, and dragged onto the beach for a good beating and then a meal. The ceaseless plaints again Glass-Steagall, crowned by its repeal and soon followed by the Great Recession, have been replicated by the grousing about the terrible burdens of Dodd-Frank, which have since been lifted somewhat, ironically with the help of one of its authors, retired Representative Barney Frank (D-MA). Will financial disaster once again befall the nation because of ignorance about the role of regulators?

I shouldn’t be surprised.

But I don’t know enough to even guess, either. But when the experts are shaking their heads …

Accounting firm PwC (aka PriceWaterhouseCoopers, for those of us who don’t keep up so well with corporate name changes) doesn’t think the advance of artificial intelligence and robotics means the permanent creation of an unemployed underclass:

Furthermore, other analysis we have done5 suggests that any job losses from automation are likely to be broadly offset in the long run by new jobs created as a result of the larger and wealthier economy made possible by these new technologies. We do not believe, contrary to some predictions, that automation will lead to mass technological unemployment by the 2030s any more than it has done in the decades since the digital revolution began.

Nonetheless, automation will disrupt labour markets and it is interesting to look at the estimates we have produced to get an indication of the relative exposure of existing jobs to automation in different countries, industry sectors, and categories of workers. We summarise the key findings in these three areas in turn below.

Nevertheless, I do believe that AI and robotics have the potential to continue the long term trend of concentrating wealth and power in the (corporate) hands of a few, at least until a transition occurs in which artificial intelligence no longer refers to what are simply correlation engines and begin to refer to actually conscious creatures. At that point we’ll be seeing questions concerning person-hood popping up, as I’ve discussed before, and then it becomes a lot harder to predict what will be happening to the distribution of all that wealth, much less the actual availability of jobs at all ability levels.

You just have to laugh at some of the people – and things – coming out of the wood work.

[tweet https://twitter.com/LeslieCockburn/status/1023701334434959362]

Leslie Cockburn (D-VA) is running for Congress in Virginia’s 5th District, and Riggleman is her opponent. Along with this accusation, he’s also allegedly been seen in the company of white supremacists.

Just remember, entertainment like this doesn’t translate to good governance. We’ve seen that already.

Or flowers.

They tried to trade for DC’s Batman, but when DC asked for Stan Lee’s head, the deal fell through.

It’s tempting to simply label Avengers: Infinity War (2018) as tripe and move on. After all, the only discernible theme in this story appears to be the all-too serious question of over-population (except in this case it’s of the Universe, not just Earth), which the bad guy offers to fix by killing off half the population of the Universe, but it’s not developed in the least. After that, the movie seems to consist of

• Action
• Superheroes piled on superheroes with a few on the side as seasoning
• More action
• Screw character development
• Murder excused by theme
• More meaningless action

Yeah, it’s dull, outside of the occasional pop-culture reference, which is itself meta-associated.

My only caveat is that perhaps this movie thrills the knowledgeable Marvel Universe fanatic. Maybe. And if you happen to be such a fan, go see this movie.

But for the rest of us, it’s a waste of time.

The Civiqs website has some nifty charts, of which I’m lifting snapshots but not providing their full functionality. I think they’re interesting in showing how favorable / unfavorable ratings shift in reaction to events. First, the Republicans:

And the Democrats:

Relatively speaking, the Democrats should be feeling fairly good. Absolutely? Neither party is doing well. Perhaps this is reflective of political parties throughout the history of the United States, but I’d still be a trifle dispirited if I were a member of either party. The evident distaste for political parties suggest that both are doing something wrong.

We’re starting to harvest, just a couple, but it’s nice to be underway.

And then there’s the garage tomato plants…

I ran across more information concerning the decision of Judge Messite to permit the emoluments lawsuit pursued by the Attorneys General of Maryland and D.C. against President Trump to go forth. It boils down to John Mikhail researching the dictionaries available to the authors of the Constitution and using the information to rebut the Department of Justice’s defense of the President’s continuing business links. It’s at the Balkinization blog, as mentioned by WaPo, and here’s a bit from what appears to be the initial blog posting on the subject:

… why the Trump Justice Department’s narrow definition of “emolument” in CREW v. Trump cannot withstand scrutiny.

In its motion to dismiss in CREW et al. v. Trump, the Department of Justice (DOJ) defines the word “emolument” as “profit arising from office or employ.” DOJ claims that this “original understanding” of “emolument” is both grounded in “contemporaneous dictionary definitions” and justifies an “office-and-employment-specific construction” of that term. On this basis, it argues that the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution “do not prohibit any company in which the President has any financial interest from doing business with any foreign, federal, or state instrumentality.”

Unfortunately, DOJ’s historical definition of “emolument” is inaccurate, unrepresentative, and misleading. Particularly because the government may seek to utilize its flawed definition in subsequent court filings, this Article seeks to correct the historical record. It does so based on a comprehensive study of how “emolument” is defined in English language dictionaries published from 1604 to 1806, as well as in common law dictionaries published between 1523 and 1792.

Among other things, the Article demonstrates that every English dictionary definition of “emolument” from 1604 to 1806 relies on one or more of the elements of the broad definition DOJ rejects in its brief: “profit,” “advantage,” “gain,” or “benefit.” Furthermore, over 92% of these dictionaries define “emolument” exclusively in these terms, with no reference to “office” or “employment.” By contrast, DOJ’s preferred definition — “profit arising from office or employ” — appears in less than 8% of these dictionaries. Moreover, even these outlier dictionaries always include “gain, or advantage” in their definitions, a fact obscured by DOJ’s selective quotation of only one part of its favored definition from Barclay (1774). The impression DOJ creates in its brief by contrasting four historical definitions of “emolument” — two broad and two narrow — is, therefore, highly misleading.

Followed by some lovely tables demonstrating, I assume, the fallacy of the DoJ’s position. In some ways, I dislike the Internet, but WaPo suggests that, prior to the Internet, this research would taken years; now it takes weeks. But it’s also an incidental rebuttal of my own position that legal words shouldn’t change their meaning over time, since it appears emoluments has done so. Will legal proceedings become ever more slower as the years pass and we must translate every law from its original wording to contemporary wording?

And will there be a word describing this occupation?

Family reunions never went well for this family. Megalon was shy and hid his face, Godzilla was drunk and combative, and Gaiman showed off his spine ridge to the cousins, with whom he was desperate to sleep. They just giggled and hid in the wainscoting.

Godzilla vs Megalon (1973) might have been better entitled Godzilla & Jet Jaguar vs Megalon & Gaiman, Sans Referee!, or something similarly silly. The movie’s plot is awful: a nuclear test has damaged part of unknown underwater civilization Seatopia (“they’ve even built their own Sun!”). In retaliation, the Seatopians steal the just-developed flying robot Jet Jaguar and use it to release and control their monster, Megalon, who proceeds to stomp on a city or two.

The humans regain control of Jet Jaguar and send him off to Monster Island to summon Godzilla to the war, while the Seatopians summon Gaiman from another dimension. Since Godzilla has to do some traveling to reach the battleground, Jet Jaguar returns to find Megalon and inflates to the monster’s size, but when Gaiman appears and teams up with Megalon, he’s in trouble until Godzilla finally reaches them.

Then the stomping begins.

Yeah, it’s awful. I mostly watched this while making meals or trying to wake up in the mornings. It. Is. Terrible. Nothing to recommend it at all.

It’s always interesting glancing through a blog new to me. Some reveal what I consider psychosis, such as the blog devoted to proving another blog was engaging in Catholic blasphemy for suggesting that the Pope was blaspheming for … now I forget. Some demonstrate the eternal human need to be right with the Boss Upstairs, without ever wondering if he exists. Others are political, and they run around with their eternal prism before their eyes, interpretation guaranteed and rarely surprising.

Even technical blogs can be interesting. Balkinization, which appears to be devoted to legal issues of some sort, had this bit by Rebecca Crootof which surprised me. I just had to sift through the legal pieces:

Once upon a time, missing a payment on your leased car would be the first of a multi-step negotiation between you and a car dealership, bounded by contract law and consumer protection rules, mediated and ultimately enforced by the government. You might have to pay a late fee, or negotiate a loan deferment, but usually a company would not repossess your car until after two or even three consecutive skipped payments. Today, however, car companies are using starter interrupt devices to remotely “boot” cars just days after a payment is missed. This digital repossession creates an obvious risk of injury when an otherwise operational car doesn’t start: as noted in a New York Times article, there have been reports of parents unable to take children to the emergency room, individuals marooned in dangerous neighborhoods, and cars that were disabled while idling in intersections.

This is but one of many examples of how the proliferating Internet of Things(IoT) enables companies to engage in practices that foreseeably cause consumer property damage and physical injury. But how is tort law relevant, given that these actions are authorized by terms of service and other contracts? In this post I’ll elaborate on how IoT devices empower companies at the expense of consumers and how extant law shields industry from liability.

And while the legal issues are of only minor interest, the alienation we’ll experience as the absolute letter of the contract is enforced is the bigger issue.

I’ve seen this already, as I remember from many, many years ago an old friend of mine recounting his experience with the bank and loans. It used to be, he said, that if you were a day or two late on paying the monthly loan installment, no big deal. But then computers came into use, and now if you were a day late, you were charged up the wazoo for it.

He was livid. And he had a right to be. In the name of enforcing the contract to its absolute letter, the bank was disrupting the societal bonds which are so important in keeping societies functioning smoothly.

So now I’m wondering how much more damage the Internet of Things will be doing to those societal bonds, and if we’ll fragment even moreso.

There’s a hoary and slightly shady tradition of submitting for publication of papers of, shall we say, a dubious nature, and Gary Lewis recounts his successful entry into this tradition, in pursuit of the flushing out of predatory journals, on The Conversation:

I had what seemed like rather a good idea a few weeks back. Building on some prominent findings in social psychology, I hypothesised that politicians on the right would wipe their bum with their left hand; and that politicians on the left would wipe with their right hand.

Ludicrous? Yes – absolutely. But for once my goal wasn’t to run a bona fide scientific study. Instead, I wanted to see if any “journal” would publish my ass-wiping “findings”. …

My (fictional) research assistant camped outside the Houses of Parliament and essentially stalked “MPs”. She used a large folder of pictures to identify these politicians’ left vs right leaning tendencies. And when a potential participant was seen on the street, the research assistant walked up alongside the politician, indicated that she was a psychological scientist doing a study, provided a brief consent form, and then asked which hand they wiped their bottom with.

This yielded nine (fictional) participants in total, including “Boris Johnski” and “Teresa Maybe”, although one data point had to be discarded – that of “Nigel F. ‘Arage”. He, rather meanly, told my research assistant to “bog off” when asked the hand-wiping question. And so his data was necessarily excluded from the analysis.

But that didn’t matter – because the data from our sample of eight fully confirmed the theory. Politicians do indeed wipe their asses with the contralateral hand. I could scarcely believe my eyes – but of course the statistics never lie. …

Having submitted the bogus manuscript, I soon got an email informing me that the manuscript was safely received and under review. Just a few days later, I was informed that it was accepted for publication. With a request for US$581.

I told the journal I couldn’t afford any publication fees. So they dropped it to US$99 (for “web hosting charges”). I was tempted – but I’ve learned that you should never accept the first counter offer. So I went for broke. And it turns out that the paper was so groundbreaking that they agreed to publish it for free: “We do understand from you [sic] end. As per your previous conversation, I had a session with financial manager and have decided to provide complete waiver.” It must have been a truly magnificent session with the financial manager.

It’s quite the story, and a sad commentary on the disrespect certain individuals have for the importance of science in today’s society.

A reader can’t stomach the current politicians with regard to our attitudes:

I disagree, strongly. Yes, the letter does what you purport, mostly, and ends in some pretty slimy pro-gun sentiment. But you are extremely far too generous to sitting Congress members. Virtually all but a very few deserve every brickbat this letter delivers. It was not always that way, which is how we survived this long.

Yes, we’ve improved upon the system designed by the Founding Fathers, but we’ve also damaged and diminished it as well. It had faulty design problems from the start (e.g. voting rights distribution, technological changes) which are in desperate need of correction.

It’s the career civil servants, inertia and resting on the system of the past that keeps it going. If we really had to rely on Congress in the past 10 to 20 years in a serious way, we’d be screwed. In fact, we are pretty much in a big fat mess right now, much of it thanks to them.

My problem with the letter is that it doesn’t name names, it doesn’t make credible allegations. The attack is not on the current Congress, which would be far more reasonable, but instead it’s making accusations against the very structure of the institute itself.

Look, our representatives are those that we picked, and if they are not up to snuff, then we need to get a better quality of person to run and then elect them. To some extent, the current state of affairs is the result of a planned attack on those structures by conservative media outlets such as Limbaugh, and have resulted in such noxious, toxic, or pretentious personalities as Hastert, Gingrich, Coleman, DeLay, Jordan, Gohmert, Ryan, McConnell, and a number of others^[1].

But the hidden message of the letter is to permanently disaffect ourselves from Congress as an institution. If you look throughout the history of Congress, they often squabble, their issues are often provincial, and ignorance and ideology often gets in the way of getting things done. But the great advantage they also bring is to blunt the decisive mistake often made by the princes of monarchies and the leaders of autocracies. For all that Congress can be discouraging in any given period, at least its sheer weight means that it doesn’t often destroy the good quickly, but instead so slowly that it can often be stopped before the damage becomes irrepairable.

It is, in my view, almost certainly part of a long term plan to cripple one of the most important institutions in America by making it attractive to the second- and third-rate person, while discouraging the competent and self-sacrificing from running, and defeating them when they do run. Taking advantage of the resentment of those impacted by Federalism, and spreading revised history such as that the Civil War was about States’ rights rather than the poison of slavery, we’re now faced with a core GOP made up of extremists, and independents who are deeply suspicious of the Democrats, who have partly brought it on themselves through a variety of mistakes.

My reader sees a Congress full of dubious personalities, with which I agree, but I see a letter aimed at the institution, not its current occupants.

And, since we’re talking about Congress, I found this report interesting. From The New York Times:

Trying to ease gridlock in Congress, a bipartisan group of frustrated House members is coming forward with a rules overhaul intended to give rank-and-file lawmakers more say.

The proposal, to be formally unveiled Wednesday by the House Problem Solvers Caucus, also seeks to rein in hard-right Republican forces in the chamber that have wielded significant influence over the majority party in recent years. …

The rules proposal was drafted over months of negotiation among the 48 members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which is equally split between Republicans and Democrats. It would institute new standards for the automatic consideration of legislation with strong bipartisan support. The authors believe the plan, which has the backing of at least 75 percent of the group’s membership, would foster more bipartisanship and incite debate on major issues that are being sidelined by political considerations.

“Due to the House floor being controlled by a select few, most members of Congress are not able to bring their ideas and proposals to the House floor for a fair vote that would allow us to begin solving some of the most contentious issues facing our country today,” said Representative Tom Reed, Republican of New York and a chairman of the group.

The fact that they recognize there are problems and are looking for process solutions must surely count for a few points in their favor. There’s still the problem of team politics, of course, but the threat that their own proposals will not receive any consideration has to be a problem for Republicans (and Democrats!) with little political traction within Congress itself.

¹And no doubt a few Democrats as well, although I’m hesitant to pick any of them as they are often the targets of professional & misleading smear campaigns; the Republicans, on the other hand, distinguished themselves through direct actions as reported by reliable media.

A reader has more information concerning the medical device tax that may be repealed:

That tax was intended to fund ACA premium rebates for low income families and individuals to make their health insurance more affordable. Without that revenue stream, the ACA doesn’t work financially. Nothing more than a repub scheme to cripple the ACA when they lacked the votes to simply repeal it.

Shame on Klobuchar for caving to Medtronic who ships all their profits to Ireland anyway.

No doubt a bit of rock and a hard place for Senator Klobuchar, but at least it demonstrated that the Democrats were willing to differ among themselves when it came to a major piece of legislation – unlike the Republicans, who practice strict ideology and then whine and piss and moan when their unworkable legislation fails to get a single vote from the Democrats. A little compromise might have gotten them a long way, especially 8 years ago.

Remember when then-AG Loretta Lynch happened to run into Bill Clinton at the airport, chatted with him, and this was seized on by the conservative media as some sort of mysterious illicit meeting? Try this one on for size:

SPOTTED — ROBERT MUELLER and DONALD TRUMP JR. both waiting for their flights this morning at the 35X gate at DCA. And yes, there is a photo. Picture of the two waiting at America’s worst gate [Politico]

Here’s the thing: If the Trumpists who are so frantic to protect their blundering leader from were thinking deviously, they’d be proclaiming that Jr. and Mueller were having an illicit meeting (probably in the public loo), and thereby delegtimizing the Mueller probe.

It’d be odd, and somewhat unbelievable for those of us who are actually thinking, but the base would be too relieved to not buy it.

And the United States could assume the status of banana republic.

Sharon Bradford Franklin on Lawfare discusses the impact of Carpenter v. United States (2017):

Writing for the majority in Carpenter v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts called the court’s momentous Fourth Amendment decision “a narrow one.” The specific holding—that a warrant is required for law enforcement to access historical cell site location information (CSLI)—may indeed be narrow, and the decision rightfully cautions that “the Court must tread carefully” when considering new technologies. Yet, despite its limited scope, the opinion provides a framework for recognizing that the digital trails Americans create through their daily lives are protected by the Fourth Amendment. The decades-old “third-party doctrine,” under which Fourth Amendment rights are extinguished whenever individuals share their information with third parties such as banks and telephone companies, has appropriately been confined to the pre-digital age scenarios in which it arose.

As others have already argued, the Carpenter decision does not provide a clear legal standard for when the Fourth Amendment applies to data shared with a third party, and it raises many questions about the future of Fourth Amendment doctrine. But the decision does offer a resounding declaration that Fourth Amendment analysis must take account of the “seismic shifts in digital technology” and the power of modern surveillance tools. In particular, the Carpenter decision should foreclose, once and for all, any claim that bulk surveillance of Americans—or bulk collection of their digital records—would be constitutional. Through the USA Freedom Act of 2015, Congress ended the government’s bulk telephone records program, known as the Section 215 program, and provided new authority for collection of call detail records using a “specific selection term.” With reauthorization of this act to be considered next year, Carpenter’s analysis should preclude any attempt to retreat from the narrowing of surveillance authorities achieved under the 2015 law.

And so the judiciary is not insensitive to the implications of digital media and how they differ from other collectors of your information. I think this is as important as does Franklin, although it’s taken the courts 30-40 years to figure it out. I recall, back in the early to mid 1980s, a course in college concerning computers and society, and one of the hypotheticals of the day was using computers to track your purchases, and making deductions from that – and the computer’s recommendation that cash be extinguished so that the tracking would be more comprehensive. Not so different from this, is it? Of course, you can’t rule on hypotheticals … can you?

Why do we find the appearances of survival mechanism so amusing sometimes? Here’s our Amaranth:

Apothegm:

a short cryptic remark containing some general or generally accepted truth; maxim [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing,” Quote Investigator:

First, “The Quote Verifier” volume has my highest recommendation. The impressive research of Keyes is presented in a fascinating, entertaining, and fun manner. Second, yes, QI will try to trace this expression. Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill both produced apothegms that are loosely similar to the quotation under investigation but are unmistakably distinct.

WaPo points out that things are going according to prediction, not to plan:

In the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a record-breaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer.

This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.

Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfiresthat have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed 200.

Ouargla, Algeria, hit 124 degrees on July 5, a likely record for the continent of Africa. And the 109-degree reading in Quriyat, Oman, on June 28 amazed meteorologists because that wasn’t the day’s high temperature. That was the low . It was the hottest low temperature ever recorded on Earth. …

The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say. Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer.

It’s been a bit warm for us here in Minnesota this summer, but not too much out of the ordinary. We’ve been lucky. The hot, hot temperatures, wild storms, and wildfires world over are reported and bring home how we’re changing the weather.

But not in a planned way.

In the meanwhile, is President Trump trying to do anything to repair years of governmental neglect brought on by GOP disbelief? Or does he still think it’s all a Chinese-inspired hoax? Then again, I have no idea how to interpret any answer he’d care to give. He’s literally become that awful of a leader, of a man.

I do fear that an awful lot of us will have to die before this planet’s ecosphere regains its footing.

My reader continues the conversation concerning the 14th Amendment:

My reaction was only to what you wrote and quoted; I haven’t researched the issue closely. I do think the meaning of legal words does drift with time; how could it not? See arguments about the second amendment as a for-instance, although there’s a difference between legalese, the language of the amendments and the language of legislation, if one really wants to split hairs. I only know enough linguistics to be dangerous. :-)

Yes, words do drift in meaning; but I continue to believe it’s dangerous if legal jargon drifts in meaning.

Back to the main point of this thread, which was an article by Michael Anton claiming the purpose of the 14th Amendment was not to provide birthright citizenship, later rebutted by Elizabeth Wydra (same link as above), I have noted one or two more rebuttal articles in WaPo since, at least one of which suggested Anton actually misquoted Senator part of the debate to bolster Anton’s position. While I have no expertise in the area, it does appear Anton’s intellectual reputation is in tatters.

For readers unfamiliar with serial killer history, Ted Bundy was basically the archetypal serial killer, charming, raping and killing an unknown number of young women in the 1970s. My most recent dive into the ol’ mailbag reminded me of him in the slimy way this missive is written. It’s not a long one, so I’ll interweave my thoughts with the text.

What a marvelous, superlative, ingenious way to simply ruin a perfectly good weekend.  Read on, fellow travelers, read on!!  Remember, evil triumphs when good people do nothing!!

So we start with a reference to the famous quote^[1] concerning the need of men to take positive action when confronted with evil, and by so doing the author is attempting to wrap his devious message in the cloak of goodness. It’s a common rhetorical approach that attempts to manipulate the reader into accepting the hidden message of the following text. Indeed, the attentive reader will have noticed I used the exact same technique to start this post by referencing a loathsome & deceptive personality (Wikipedia’s description: “Many of Bundy’s young female victims regarded him as handsome and charismatic…“) to place the reader in a state of mind receptive to the idea that this mail, which many may have seen before, is actually a deceptive and destructive missive.

Not incidentally, the fonts used in the mail change in certain places, which I was unable to capture in this post. The point? To build up momentum for accepting the hidden message by suggesting that others have already accepted it. We live in a busy, busy world and it’s common practice to use secondary clues as to how we should react to a given message; it’s much harder to strip away clues which may be extraneous, or even malicious, and evaluate a message on its own merits.

Letter to My Boss,

I have enjoyed working here these past several years.  You have paid me very well, given me benefits beyond belief.  I have 3-4 months off per year and a pension plan that will pay my salary till the day I die and a health plan that most people can only dream about.

Withholding important information is a common and important story-telling technique. It builds suspense and lets the author channel the thoughts of the reader in such a way as to build a successful story. Note I don’t fault the author  for using it; after all, he or she is trying to be effective. But I do want to draw the reader’s attention to how it affects them intellectually and emotionally.

Despite this I plan to take the next 12-18 months to find a new position.

During this time I will show up for work when it is convenient. In addition I fully expect to draw my full salary and all the other perks associated with my current job.

Peeking ahead, I’ll let the Jack out of the Box: we’re talking about sitting members of Congress. This author would have the reader believe that members of Congress are lazy, underworked, overpaid, and feckless. This is the meat of the letter.

So let’s think about the assertion. Upstanding members of Congress must be knowledgeable about a large range of topics from the perspectives of policy and regulation. Think of it: agricultural policy, energy policy, death penalties, should we declare war, how do we monitor the Executive and Judicial branches, the list goes on and on. Sure, we can all point at members all both parties who slack the job, or even worse use their position in a self-interested way. If you want names, Menendez of the Democrats and Price of the Republicans come right to mind as members who’ve been accused, but not convicted, of corruption.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking a couple of examples of malfeasance characterizes all 538 members of Congress, along with all their predecessors. If this were true, the United States would have become the Disunited States way back in the 1800s simply through incompetence.

I think my reader knows where this is going, but let’s digest the next paragraph first.

Oh yes, if my search for this new job proves fruitless, I will be back with no loss in pay or status. Before you say anything, remember that you have no choice in the matter.  I can and will do this.

This lovely bit completes the exercise of making the execrable Congresscritter completely contemptible by giving him a high ‘n mighty air comparable to your favorite arrogant monarch. By instilling this bias in the reader against one of the three important legs of the governmental stool, this is, in reality, an attack on the American way of life. The form of government we use was not selected at random or to benefit those who can attain positions in it; it was selected by the Founding Fathers in reaction to the abuses of the English monarchy. As it’s been improved in the years since its formation, it has proved relatively effective compared to other forms of government.

And, for that reason, it comes under attack in letters such as these, letters designed to foment discontent and distrust of a government which, we are often encouraged to forget, is our government. Not the property of a monarchy, never to be transgressed upon. No, at its best, when we’re talking to each other, trusting we have everyone’s best interests at heart, and using our best intellectual efforts to understand the world around us, from science to politics, it’s highly effective.

We wouldn’t be the most influential country in the world, otherwise.

So that’s the real purpose of this letter, to discourage the reader from trusting that our government can work to our benefit. This mail came from a conservative source, but given the behavior of the GOP these days, a Democrat might take similar delight in it. Readers on the entire American political spectrum would be mistaken in accepting this message at face value.

Sincerely,
Every Senator or Congressman
running for re-election

I just find it funny that in one part of this mail the mythical author of the letter says he or she is looking for a new position, yet here they reference their re-election efforts. Apparently the real author is having trouble with their cognitive processes.

The 2018 Elections are just around the corner.

——
Are we stupid or what?

Our work is not over, it has just begun, good and faithful patriots!!

If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do, you are misinformed.  (Mark Twain)

This is simple reinforcement of the false trope that this mail was written for the reader’s welfare. Twain is a favorite of such authors, given his radiant reputation.

REMEMBER:  If you forward this, PLEASE REMOVE all email addresses before you send it on.

REMEMBER:  Please help stop email address harvesting and subsequent spamming your family, friends and yourself.  Use BCC when sending to multiple email addresses and also delete old email addresses BEFORE forwarding on emails.

One of those harmless reminders about removing mail addresses, isn’t it? But think about it: the author of this bit of destructive trash has just asked that anything that can be traced back to his or her mail account, and perhaps on to them personally, be removed. One more bit of deceit.

“Peace is that brief glorious moment
in history, when everybody stands
around reloading”
— Thomas Jefferson

An unexpected allegiance to the Chaos Theory of History in which nations eternally grind away at each other, rather than cooperate peacefully. The author is getting off message at this point, again perhaps indicative of a poorly disciplined intellect.

I saw a movie where only the military
and the police had guns:
Schindler’s List.

Here we wander off message some more. Which reminds me, I saw a movie where everyone with a gun shot law enforcement and innocent citizens dead: The Untouchables. See, we can find all sorts of examples supporting ideological positions from popular stories. I find it much more useful to ask what science discovers. But you know what? For years, government funded basic science, which constitutes most of the basic scientific research performed in this country, was forbidden by law to study gun violence and gun control. So there’s not much science out there with respect to guns and society.

In conclusion: read warily, my readers, bits of mail that impute terrible personal traits to our elected officials. Most of them labor at a thankless job for praiseworthy reasons. And without them?

We’d be fucked.

¹Quote Investigator reports the source of this quote may be famous British politician Edmund Burke, or perhaps the much less well-known Rev. Charles F. Aked.

Cousins and neighbors to our orange lilies, I like the color combo.

I think my Arts Editor enhanced the colors a slight bit. Gorgeous comes to mind. But not Gorgeous George.