Monthly Archives: August 2018

Over the weekend, WaPo reported the removal of former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance was reportedly due as much to his criticisms of President Trump as for the activities of a fired aide:

[An unnamed] White House official acknowledged that the step against Brennan had been prepared in late July, when Sanders first said Trump was considering it. But the decision to take that step was made this week to divert attention from nonstop coverage of a critical book released by fired Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman.

Consideration is being given to holding other prepared documents in reserve for similar opportunities in the future, the official said.

Deliciously, retired Navy Admiral McRaven wanted in to Director Brennan’s club:

I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.

As more wannabe members want to join the club, I can’t help but suggest a template for their letters:

Dear President Trump,

    Thank you for qualifying me for the finest club in the land. CIA Director Brennan has sent me a warm welcoming letter, which I have framed. You have truly made today a high point of my life.

    And now, back to the controversy du jour, wherein I haven’t the least doubt that your incompetent Presidency will be sunk by the rocks on which it finds itself.

Sincere regards, XYZ, latest member of the Patriot Club.

It’d at least tick him off.

Atelier:

noun, plural at·el·iers [at-l-yeyz, at-l-yeyz; French atuh–lyey] /ˈæt lˌyeɪz, ˌæt lˈyeɪz; French atəˈlyeɪ/.

1. a workshop or studio, especially of an artist, artisan, or designer. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in the movie McQueen (2018), wherein one of the tailors is noted to run an atelier.

This is your brain on narcotics.

The theme of Mutant Hunt (1987) is probably We wanted to make a movie showing off our skills! From Mr. Cleft Chin to Mr. Martial Artist to the ladies who also did a bit of kicking, each gets to show off in this clumsy movie about a genetic engineer who discovers that adding a contaminated narcotic to the hydraulics of cyborgs results in vastly increased strength and a desire to commit murder of humans – which apparently makes them mutants. From the awful synthesizer music to the terrible stage combat skills, this was a colossal waste of time and effort. OK, I liked the cyborgs during their meltdown phase.

But it’s a bit of a shame. Somewhere in this swamp, some sort of theme concerning the cyborgs, such as their resemblance to slavery and what that says about those who use cyborgs, might have been found and worked out.

But that didn’t happen.

Avoid! Avoid! Avoid!

In case you were wondering if only the United States experiences religious-based cultural wars, look no further than Egypt and the decision of a former actress who had decided to give up her career and wear the hijab has now reversed her decision. From AL Monitor:

… [Retired Egyptian actress Hala] Shiha created new Twitter and Instagram accounts, posting pictures of herself without the veil. In one caption, she tweeted “strong independent woman from the beginning.” Within hours of its creation, the Twitter account had gained thousands of followers, according to the BBC, but it was suspended by Shiha shortly afterward, when the pictures drew mixed reactions from supporters and critics. Liberals hailed Shiha’s decision to take off her veil while ultra-conservatives decried the move, exhorting her to reconsider her stance.

“We applaud her; hopefully other women will follow,” cheered an Alexandria resident on Twitter.

A critic, meanwhile, rebuked Shiha in a demeaning tweet on Aug. 10: “Who cares about an ‘uncovered apple’ except flies?”

Not only has Shiha been lambasted by hard-line critics, she has also been the target of a fierce campaign to pressure her into changing her mind, with some even offering cash.

“I’ll pay you 300,000 Egyptian pounds [$16,727] if you keep your veil on,” offered one Twitter user who claims to be a Saudi banker, on Aug. 10.

Osama Gaweesh, a London-based TV presenter with the privately owned Mekameleen Channel, which is often critical of Egyptian government policies, tweeted Aug. 8 that removing the headscarf was “a personal choice.” Nevertheless, he chided those hailing Shiha’s move as “stepping out of the abyss of darkness” and “a slap in the face of the Muslim Brotherhood,” warning that such rhetoric is “purely racist and a form of hate speech against all veiled women.”

The tug of war over culture is a universal phenomenon.

An outfit from Highland Rape.

The biography of late fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen in McQueen (2018) speaks to one man’s obsession for telling stories, vignettes if you will, with fashion as a central element of that story. That obsession is perhaps not called out as such, but as we saw runway couture show after runway couture show, up to fourteen a year in his own words, it was clear that these were stories with subplots, each model striding down the catwalk embodying an element of the story McQueen strove to tell without words. An example was his Highland Rape show that drew on his Scottish heritage, speaking to the English invasion of Scotland and the butchery of the Highland Clans. This was not a show to attract consumers to any specific item of clothing; it was, at least as presented, an ephemeral memorial to the victims of a long-ago and savage war of conquest.

As his shows evolved, the traditional runway changed to support his evolving notions of  narrative, a literal mutation of the medium itself, as he looked for ways to tell his stories more clearly. His presentations mirrored changes in his own life. Beginning as a lad from humble origins who happened to have a literal single-minded obsession with designing clothes, his obsession took him to the heights of Chief Designer at Givenchy and, later, Creative Director at Gucci. During the early parts of this journey, he appeared to be a humble, happy-go-lucky type, but as the pressures of his work molded him, his response wasn’t necessarily positive. The biography suggests he became somewhat abrasive and sometimes unwilling to share the results of his good fortune. Yet his team remained loyal, even during his unreasonable periods, suggesting that his personal genius and charisma remained constant.

But the curse of the truly single-minded is the instability of their lives; in McQueen’s case, possibly aggravated by sexual abuse when he was young. Such obsessions are often fueled by the positive feedback one receives, and I have to wonder if that blinded him to building the necessary supporting structure of his life. This is brought briefly into focus by McQueen himself in an informal interview, where he seems to express unease concerning his future, summoning the ennui many folks feel when it comes to understanding one’s place in the Universe. I know little of the fashion industry and how it affects those shooting stars working in it, but it strikes me that the end-point for a star designer within the industry is not necessarily a pleasant ending in a chair of dignified achievement.  The essence of fashion, even for a trail-blazing story-teller such as McQueen, seems to be analogous to the old phrase Flavor Of The Month. Granted, he lasted nearly two decades, but the journey appears to have been draining, even if he was highly respected.

The difficulty of his journey was, indeed, exemplified by his death. It’s not enough to note that he died of suicide, for, in my view, absent an underlying biological terminal condition, that is in itself a positive act that requires explanation. The darkness at the end of his life began earlier, as one of his team confides to the audience that McQueen spoke of committing a very public suicide: at the end of one of his shows, he’d make the traditional appearance to acknowledge the applause, and the put a gun in his mouth and end it. This suggests a deadly entanglement with the possibly pathological elements of the industry.

But he did not go out an as an accusatory finger pointing at his industry, but silently and alone.

The first deadly blow was the death of his mentor, stylist Isabella Blow, who died of suicide motivated by terminal cancer. She had bought the entire collection he constructed for his graduation from fashion school and became an important influence in his life. Already profoundly shaken by her death, the death of his mother soon followed, causing his support structure to crumble. His family had always been important to him, always attending his shows; they, in turn, often provided snacks for cast and crew. That he and his family were close is not, I think, in doubt.

At this juncture, his story is obscure, as tales of sudden death often are. I speculate, coming from some analogous observations from within the previous generation of my family, that the death of his mother, for him, presaged the ultimate and inevitable dissolution of the family. That is, the structure in his life had crumbled, and that, in combination with some hints that his own health was unstable, may have given the less stable portions of his mind dominance and ultimately led to his own decision to take his life. It was a fast decision, for he was dead before his mother was buried.

This is a movie rife with beautiful images, yet many are internally contradictory. Throughout the film, we see the motif of a damaged skull, beautifully gilded with gold, often with something equally lovely associating with it, such as a butterfly. In current Western culture, the skull symbolizes death, while gold is commonly associated with wealth and all the positive facets that go with wealth. Photographed luminously, that skull dominates a movie about a a genius fashion designer who nearly always appears in the most informal of aspects: jeans and sneakers and shirt half-tucked, goofy grin and Cockney accent. Maybe the silent, withdrawn, stereotypical genius was there, but I didn’t see it; just looking at him, I’d expect maybe he drove a truck for a living, or worked at the gas station.

Appearance vs. reality; the meat of high fashion.

Don’t go to this expecting to see a complete biography, for this is a depiction of his stories and himself, and how they were at the core of himself. There’s little mention of any mundane consumer work he might have done, for instance, and I see in other sources that he was also an avid scuba diver, a fact not mentioned in this movie. I don’t know what else is omitted, but I suspect that it’s just as well. This is a biography about a story-teller telling his own story in the only way he knew how.

Recommended.

Comity:

1. a : friendly social atmosphere : social harmony • group activities promoting comity • bipartisan comity in the Senate
   b : a loose widespread community based on common social institutions • the comity of civilization
   c : comity of nations • trans-Atlantic comity
   d : the informal and voluntary recognition by courts of one jurisdiction of the laws and judicial decisions of another
2. : avoidance of proselytizing members of another religious denomination [Merriam-Webster]

I tried to use the word comity while speaking to my Arts Editor yesterday, and we discovered that neither of us have a precise notion of its meaning.

Returning to a dormant thread, I can remember 20 years ago, when climate researchers speculated that the Gulf Current might be weakened by climate change, and, if that happened, it could have dire consequences for Europe. So perhaps this article by Michael Marshall in NewScientist (4 August 2018, paywall) shouldn’t come as a surprise:

THE northern hemisphere is roasting. Greece is battling lethal wildfires, and even the UK’s weather has been so hot and dry that record-breaking fires have broken out in its usually damp climes. In Oman on the Arabian peninsula, thermometers registered the hottest night on record anywhere on Earth on 28 June: the temperature never fell below 42.6°C.

Climatologists have been quick to point out that extremes are to be expected in a warming world. But there may be more to it than that. The ongoing European heatwave may have been made worse by a consequence of climate change rearing its head after decades of Cassandra-like warnings. For more than a century, the oceans have been changing right under our noses, as a powerful Atlantic current has weakened. The result, it seems increasingly likely, is more extremes of both heat and cold on both sides of the Atlantic – and the prospect of even more dramatic switches to come.

The object of concern is the Atlantic ocean conveyor belt, also known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation or AMOC. It is part of a global network of currents that push all the water in the oceans up and down the length, breadth and depth of the various interconnected basins. From the tropical Atlantic off the coast of South America, warm surface water flows north towards Greenland and western Europe, bringing with it an uncharacteristically warm climate, carried by the Gulf Stream.

And there’s more, much more. But the real point is that, yes, the predictions of climate change are being fulfilled. Humanity’s made some efforts, but they haven’t exactly been whole-hearted, have they? Speaking of, what are the latest measurements at the NOAA Mauna Loa CO₂ measurement site?

Well, I suspect Nature’s going to be making its own corrections for us. I hope they’re not too painful.

… try to stop by the New Bedford Whaling Museum and see four-fifths of one of the largest paintings ever produced:

Image: New Bedford Whaling Museum Blog.
“Detail view of the port of New Bedford with the Seamen’s Bethel flag flying at left and the Greek Revival steeple of the First Christian Church clearly visible at right. NBWM #1918.27.1.2”

On July 14, an artwork equal in length to 14 blue whales placed in a line will go on display in its entirety for the first time in more than half a century. Incidentally, those colossal creatures are central to the work. At 1,275 feet long, the Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World, which was painted in 1848 in New Bedford, Massachusetts by Benjamin Russell, an artist and merchant, and Caleb Purrington, a sign painter, is the longest painting in North America, according to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which is staging the work’s big return. …

Over the last three years, it has undergone extensive restoration work, having damage that it incurred over its action-packed life repaired. During the mid-19th century, the Panorama traveled to cities around the country—Boston, New York, and St. Louis, to name a few—and was exhibited as a lively, cinematic experience, often narrated by Russell himself over the course of a two-hour performance. The spools of painted cotton sheeting that comprise the work were furled and unfurled, revealing rich scenes of far-flung wonders, seen by Russell while working as a steerer on the Kutusoff, which set sail from New Bedford in 1841 and returned in 1845. The ship traveled to New Zealand, Tahiti, Cape Horn, and the Hawaiian Islands, among other distant locations, and Russell, entangled in many debts, created the fanciful Panorama with the hope that it could function as a commercial attraction. Audience members for these displays were “armchair travelers,” as Christina Connett, the Whaling Museum’s chief curator, put it. [ARTNEWS]

And then send me a letter telling me if it was worth the time!

NewScientist (4 August 2018, tragically hidden behind a paywall) gives a sampling of AI-generated sonnet quatrains and suggests they have a ways to go before we can claim to have cloned the mortal Bard. Here’s one:

with joyous gambols gay and still array
no longer when he twas, while in his day
at first to pass in all delightful ways
around him, charming and of all his days

Fun!

Am I the only one wondering this? If the GOP is completely blasted in the mid-terms, President Trump will pivot like no one’s pivoted before and proclaim a glorious victory for the Democrats, and it’s all due to himself for revealing what a bunch third-raters they’ve become?

Man, that makes me ill just thinking about it.

She puts it in a glass of water and calls it ‘art’.

Still, murder is murder. So sorry, Mr. Poppy.

Recently, President Trump admitted he took former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance away because of his perceived involvement in the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential election, thus apparently destroying the official White House statement that rationalized the decision while insulting Brennan. On Lawfare, Robert Litt comments on the consequences of Trump’s public pronouncement for the future of the power of the Presidency:

I don’t know whether Brennan intends to challenge the revocation of his clearance in court. There are good reasons not to, including the burdens inherent in litigation and the fact that he likely has little need for the clearance. But if he does, he should have little difficulty persuading a court that his clearance was revoked in retaliation for his exercise of his First Amendment right to criticize the president. That will then squarely present the issue of whether courts are powerless to prevent such abuse of the clearance system—and the result may be that the president’s control over security clearances, long jealously guarded, will have been weakened as a result of one president’s tantrum.

The judicial system, with some exceptions, has shown little favor or deference to the Executive in this Administration, presumably due to the extreme amateurism and probable abuses of power inherent in many of the activities of this Executive. If the courts were to rule against Trump in such a hypothetical suit, the advocates of Executive Power would scream holy hell about the loss of discretion on the part of the Executive, generic – but I think the truth is that using the Executive to persecute political enemies is a far worse problem than a loss of discretion when it comes to security clearances, especially if the courts were to rule in such a way as to criminalize the specific motivation of persecuting an enemy.

But does Brennan himself lean towards or against Executive discretion?

My Arts Editor liked it. Here it is.

I occasionally joke that men of a certain age, shall we say, tend to walk in ruts with edges roughly at the level of their eyebrows, and even if they generally believe change can be a good thing, they’re still muttering Change is bad! Change is bad! when it comes to themselves.

So I’m sort of wondering as to the age of Michael Gerson, who believes that, post-Trump, our Republic will never be the same, as published in WaPo:

But the broader influence of celebrity culture on politics is to transform citizens into spectators. In his book “How Democracy Ends,” David Runciman warns of a political system in which “the people are simply watching a performance in which their role is to give or withhold their applause at the appropriate moments.” In this case, democracy becomes “an elaborate show, needing ever more characterful performers to hold the public’s attention.” Mr. Madison, meet Omarosa.

Trump is sometimes called a populist. But all this is a far cry from the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan, who sought to elevate the influence of common people. Instead, we are seeing a drama with one hero, pitted against an array of villains. And those villains are defined as anyone who opposes or obstructs the president, including the press, the courts and federal law enforcement. Trump’s stump speeches are not a call to arms against want; they are a call to oppose his enemies. This is not the agenda of a movement; it is the agenda of a cult.

Will the republic survive all this? Of course it will. But it won’t be the same.

Whether this is good change or bad change will depend on how our leaders, liberals and conservatives, treat the aftermath of the Trump Administration. We can already see the broad outlines of the tremendous mess that’ll be left behind, from a healthcare system that had promise for reducing health care costs to unbalanced taxes, an overweight military to trade wars that benefit only the very few positioned to take advantage of them, and so much more.

But this can be an opportunity for a civics education. Some of it is already taking place, as evidenced by high turnouts for the mid-term primaries here in the Midwest, as well as far more women running for elective office than ever before. But that is the easy, reactive stuff. When the full results of the Trump Administration comes into view, how will we convince a substantial portion of the conservative base that there’s a serious problem when a large group of voters devote themselves to an obvious liar, braggart, and business failure? That they were conned?

No one likes to admit they’ve been conned.

But it’s become evident that there’s a serious dysfunction in the electorate. “Dyed in the wool Republican” doesn’t cut it anymore, if it ever did. Nor does “dyed in the wool Democrat,” because membership does not connote honesty, integrity, or competency in matters of government.

One of my hopes is obvious, I’m sure, for long-term readers: the expungement of the notion that a successful businessman will be a successful politician. (See here for more elucidation.) He can be, as George Romney, father of Mitt Romney, demonstrated a long time ago. But I suspect Romney spent a lot of time studying and thinking about the differences between the private and public sectors, and was willing to learn as he went along. But a businessman unwilling to acknowledge and work on these subjects is going to be a failure, and it’s the electorate’s responsibility to determine if a politician has made the effort to understand how our government works and the issues that it faces.

Secondly, I’d like our electorate to become more self-aware, to understand their particular triggers and how to learn to ignore them properly. A story about a family with the names obscured to protect the innocent: when the mother was quite ill, her doc, quite the cheerful and voluble sort, gave an upbeat report and then took off on vacation. A few days later, his partner, a rather dour fellow, called the family into a conference and gave another report in his own style.

One of those family members became upset.

The reason for the panic was because they were reading the body language and non-verbal signals and all those other things that make for charisma, or lack thereof. The first doc had lots of it, the second did not.

And that panic was unwarranted. The rest of the family calmed their family member by simply noting that the second doc had delivered the same information as the first doc, plus one minor detail. The facts hadn’t materially changed. But because that family member naturally tried to gather all the information they could, they picked up irrelevant information which actually just reflected the personality of the doctor, rather than relevant to the prognosis at hand.  Because the doc was less upbeat than his partner, his delivery made the prognosis seem much less optimistic than had the first doc. The lesson here is to discard all those non-verbal signals and simply listen to the content of the message. In Trump’s case, discard the “fact,” dubious as it is, that he acts like a “great boss” (a quote from an article I read a while back, which made me slightly ill). What is he saying? Is it true? As well all know, or should know, the odds are considerably less than even that he’s going to tell the truth anytime he opens his mouth or Twitches his thumbs. This will be a prime, if unhappy, opportunity to learn the results of voting for a confirmed liar, boaster, and braggart.

Finally, and perhaps hardest of all, it’s clear that a lot of folks were desperate to hear certain phrases from any prospective leader. “Clean coal” is the iconic example, the cry of an industry in a death spiral, and of the workers who viewed their work in it as deeply honorable and important, and they didn’t want to leave that industry. My general interpretation is that a lot of people quite understandably fear change. There’s no surprise there. It’s not true of everyone, but a lot of people see the world as essentially static. Consider the coal miner who, upon being offered free educational opportunities, decided to study business practices connected to the coal industry. Definitely a WTF moment for someone who embraces change, but this makes sense for those who believe strongly in the status quo.

That desperate need, that fear of change, led a lot of people down the road to a bad decision, even if they do not yet agree with me. It’s not enough to acknowledge that and move on, but to also consider how to improve ourselves, collectively and individually, so that this doesn’t happen again. It’s not as if we were not warned, because a lot of pundits on both sides of the spectrum were horrified as Trump advanced through the Presidential campaign – but obviously a lot of voters voted for him when the time came. How do we, as the electorate of a signal democracy, find a way to improve ourselves and not go into a quagmire like this again?

This is one of the tests for democracies, one of those tests that will either indicate that democracy is a good governing model – or is on the way to the junkheap, to assume a place next to such models of madness as absolute monarchies and communism.

This is our chance to change. So stop that muttering and get on with it.

Part of the push for legalization of marijuana have been rampant claims of how it cures just about everything under the sun. However, as any medical researcher will tell you, making out what’s true and what’s not when it comes to med is quite difficult, and it turns out marijuana is actually a little more difficult. NewScientist (4 August 2018) and Graham Lawton has the skinny:

Performing large and high-quality clinical trials of whole cannabis is possible, but difficult. The lack of standardisation is a problem, and the characteristic taste and odour makes finding a placebo tricky. A review by the World Health Organization found only 12 placebo-controlled trials of whole cannabis; most were small and inconclusive.

The same article notes there are risks to recreational usage:

The exact make-up of what is being ingested is often not clear. Different cannabis strains vary widely in their constituents, especially in their ratio of the two most abundant cannabinoids: delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is powerfully psychoactive, and cannabidiol (CBD), which is not. That’s true even for medical-grade cannabis grown under controlled conditions. The Canadian grower Tilray, for example, sells products with specified amounts of THC and CBD, but they all come with a disclaimer that THC and CBD levels may vary considerably. This is a serious problem, says [Deepak D’Souza of Yale School of Medicine]. “Patients will have to experiment with different strains and doses to achieve the desired effects.”

The use of whole cannabis also opens people up to some of the well-known risks that recreational users face. One is dependence, which despite cannabis’s reputation as a non-addictive drug is a real risk. According to [Robin Murray at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London], about 1 in 11 people who try cannabis become dependent on it. People also become tolerant to the drug and need to escalate doses to get the same effect.

Next on the checklist of concerns is psychosis. Cannabis consumption is a proven risk factor for short-term psychotic breaks as well as chronic psychoses including schizophrenia. “We can say with absolute certainty that cannabis carries severe risks,” says Adrian James, registrar of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists. A body of work by many research groups suggests that the average cannabis user is about twice as likely as a non-user to develop a psychotic disorder.

Something to keep in mind if advocating for the legalization of marijuana.

Gary Sargent in The Plum Line is trying to understand President Trump’s behavior in the wake of the removal of former CIA Director Brennan’s security clearance, because it appears that Trump decided to contradict the statement put out by the White House:

The latest example of this: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Wednesday night, Trump openly declared that his revocation of former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance was actually about the Russia investigation.

The detailed statement that the White House released Wednesday to justify this act only referred obliquely to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe, insisting Brennan had misrepresented the importance of the “Steele dossier” to the investigation. …

Why does Trump keep admitting to his real motive in such cases? The best answer is that Trump sees nothing whatsoever wrong with trying to derail the investigation.

And that may indeed be the reason. But I’d like to return to an earlier interpretation of his behavior.

Dementia.

Honestly, his actions, his unwillingness or inability to learn, his lack of impulse control, his inability to follow through, and his fascination with irrelevancies, such as his reported inclination to continually bring up his electoral victory in 2016, all point to a man whose mental faculties are deteriorating. His willingness to lie, especially about his health, also correlates with such a conclusion.

And an elderly man with dementia and his hands on some of the biggest levers of power around is a frightening thought.

Spaceweather notes our atmosphere is behaving a little oddly:

A MYSTERY IN THE MESOSPHERE: This summer, something strange has been happening in the mesosphere. The mesosphere is a layer of the atmosphere so high that it almost touches space. In the rarefied air 83 km above Earth’s surface, summertime wisps of water vapor wrap themselves around specks of meteor smoke. The resulting swarms of ice crystals form noctilucent clouds (NLCs), which can be seen glowing in the night sky at high latitudes.

And, no, that’s not the strange thing.

Northern sky watchers have grown accustomed to seeing these clouds in recent years. They form in May, intensify in June, and ultimately fade in July and August. This year, however, something different happened. Instead of fading in late July, the clouds exploded with unusual luminosity.

They may know why – the mesosphere has been exceptionally wet and cold this year, although exactly why is not yet clear. Fascinating stuff. And cool pics.

It makes you want to giggle and throw up at the same time, doesn’t it? From NewScientist (4 August 2018):

STUDENTS in the US who have a type of brain parasite carried by cats are more likely to be majoring in business studies. …

Now an analysis of almost 1300 US students has found that those who had been exposed to the parasite were 1.7 times more likely to be majoring in business. In particular, they were more likely to be focusing on management and entrepreneurship than other business-related areas.

The study also found that professionals attending business events were almost twice as likely to have started their own business if they were T. gondii positive, and that countries with a higher prevalence of the infection show more entrepreneurial activity.

This, from the abstract of the paper in The Proceedings Of The Royal Society B, is a lot more thought-provoking:

Disciplines such as business and economics often rely on the assumption of rationality when explaining complex human behaviours. However, growing evidence suggests that behaviour may concurrently be influenced by infectious microorganisms. The protozoan Toxoplasma gondii infects an estimated 2 billion people worldwide and has been linked to behavioural alterations in humans and other vertebrates. Here we integrate primary data from college students and business professionals with national-level information on cultural attitudes towards business to test the hypothesis that T. gondii infection influences individual- as well as societal-scale entrepreneurship activities.

Economic systems are built on an assumption of rationality in the actors of the system; when rationality is replaced, if partially, by the programmed inclinations of a micro-organism, it certainly goes a long way towards explaining the failures of those systems.

I wonder if anyone’s performed a similar study on investors, from the fearful mutual fund investors to the folks who invest in stocks with a beta in excess of a standard variation off the average, where beta is the average volatility in the price of stocks in a given category.

But not our dinner. Asian beetles are dining on our lone hibiscus! Here are some pics before I noticed.

The damage around the rim on the upper left are the consequences of voracious buggers.

For those who were eager to see how Kurt Kobach, Secretary of State for Kansas, locked in a very tight race for the Republican nomination for the governor’s seat in the upcoming election, would do when presented with the moral crisis of having to preside over the recount in his own primary, well, I’m afraid we’re all disappointed because his opponent conceded.

Secretary of State Kris Kobach won the Republican nomination for Kansas governor Tuesday after Gov. Jeff Colyer conceded following a week of stunning twists in the razor-thin contest.

The concession came after Kobach widened his lead to more than 300 votes with the counting of provisional ballots in Johnson and Sedgwick counties. Johnson County had been seen as a bulwark in Colyer’s effort to overtake Kobach.

Colyer conceded in an evening news conference from the Statehouse, where he said he wouldn’t ask for a recount or challenge the election results in court. [The Wichita Eagle]

Steve Benen thinks Democrats should be ecstatic:

The question, of course, is whether Republicans will end up regretting it.

The reason that so many GOP officials urged the president not to endorse Kobach is that he’s a poor choice for the party. As we discussed last week, he’s earned a reputation as an anti-immigration and voter-suppression crusader, but Kobach has also been stung by a series of humiliating legal defeats.

What’s more, the Kansas secretary of state was also recently exposed for his role in a “sham” in which he traveled from town to town, persuaded local officials to pass anti-immigrant ordinances, defended the communities against lawsuits, and lined his pockets while the towns lost money on losing cases.

There’s also the matter of the white nationalists Kobach reportedly put on his campaign payroll.

All of which suggests Democrats, despite Kansas’ ruby-red status, may have a chance in this race. State Sen. Laura Kelly, the chamber’s Senate Minority Whip, will be the Democratic nominee, and will enjoy the party’s enthusiastic backing.

Steve points out there is a third party challenger as well, which is unfortunate for my thesis – this, much like the Minnesota contest for the same seat, makes Kansas a measuring stick with regards to President Trump’s staying power. Kobach, more than Johnson in Minnesota, is a Trumpist who believes in doing or saying anything to achieve his aims, as Steve has documented. How much of this will Kansas voters be willing to swallow, and at what point will the majority vote for the Democrat, instead?

I’m uncertain as to the future preferences of both states.

Another innocent dip into the ol’ mailbag produces an embarrassing bit of mucus:

We, you know, the citizens of the United States who have an unlimited capacity for the political shenanigans of the Republicans, yea, those of us who’ve had that cast-iron stomach installed –

Sorry.

Anyways, we’ve been hearing of late that Omarosa Manigault Newman was going to be sued by the Trump Campaign, which is a private entity distinct from the White House, for breaching her NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), and I figured, since we’re not talking the government, which is banned from interfering with free speech, she probably would lose, the NDA would be found to be binding, and she’d be ordered to shut up. That’s why I found this article in WaPo so fascinating, because it appears that my amateur interpretation may be false:

The NDA would constitute a restriction on matters of the utmost public importance, according to Kitrosser. “It would be a blanket prior restraint, one that goes well beyond a narrowly tailored way of keeping, say, sensitive national-security information out of the public eye. Such an agreement — if considered one between the government and a private person — would go well beyond anything that I could imagine any court approving.”

There is also an existing body of law on the state-action doctrine — when something normally done by a private actor is effectively the work of the state.

It would be an unusual, though not implausible, argument because, as Kitrosser said, “This is an unusual president.” He is trying to not only silence Manigault Newman but also prevent her from speaking about things he did as the president of the United States of America, she said.

If the Trump campaign was deemed a state actor, it would be viewed in the same light as the White House. “Absent some overriding government interest, the First Amendment would foreclose it from enforcing an NDA that barred a private citizen from addressing an issue of public concern,” said First Amendment Knight Institute Fellow Ramya Krishnan.

And then that might apply to all those NDAs that White House staff have been required to sign in order to work at the White House, and if they become invalid … it’ll be a bloody wave of inside information on Trump and his top aides. I suspect most of it would be unsurprising and not of real importance, but there’s always the chance that the wrong nugget of information might come popping out, that one bit that alienates half of his base.

And perhaps would embolden a cowed GOP to finally do something about a President who has been busy destroying the safety of this country. In fact, if they wish to preserve any semblance of respectability post-midterm elections, it might be their only opportunity.

But they continue to look like third-raters, so don’t bet on it.

My occasional contributing blogger Chris Johnson addressed the popularity, or lack thereof, of former governor Tim Pawlenty in the conservative parts of Minnesota, and, as Minnesota readers should be aware by now^[1], Pawlenty did in fact lose to Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson in the primary yesterday for nomination the governor’s seat of Minnesota.

This brings up two issues with regards to GOP nominee Jeff Johnson.

First, the various news outlets are proclaiming this a shocker, and that the polls showed Pawlenty comfortably ahead. I have not been able to find these polls, beyond something called MN-Emerson that had Pawlenty at +9. I’ve not heard of them before, they are perhaps not credible. Perhaps these polls don’t exist? Certainly, the superior Pawlenty name recognition could be considered a plus for the former governor, but as Chris implicitly pointed out, this may not be true, as Pawlenty’s years in office were undistinguished no matter which way you were inclined. His name may have reminded Minnesota GOP primary voters of years where his achievements did not measure up to their expectations – realistic or not.

But let’s stipulate I’m too dull to find these polls. What happened, then? Is polling that awful? Keep in mind that, although Jeff Johnson once called Trump a jackass (Pawlenty went further), he’s has since clasped Trump to his breast. Are Trump voters refusing to be truthful with the pollsters?

Is that even an American thing to do?

Second, I saw Jeff Johnson’s admirably short victory speech, but I was still unsettled. He went in for the code word “political elite,” but this must be read as “throw out the experts who do things we don’t like, let us amateurs at the controls of the airplane!” Now, Johnson isn’t a political neophyte, having been County Commissioner of Hennepin County for the last 9 years, but if he’s talking that way, and he wins the Governor’s seat, we may find our government crawling with amateurs and money-seekers.

Just like the White House.

¹Shame on you if you’re not!

WaPo’s headline says it wrong: Do children have a right to literacy? Attorneys are testing that question.

The judge plunges into the same quicksand, but sticks a hand up to get the right answer just as he’s about to sink into error:

When Jamarria Hall strode into Osborn High in Detroit his freshman year, the signs of decay were everywhere: buckets in the hallways to catch leaking water, rotting ceiling tiles, vermin that crisscrossed classrooms.

In the neglected school, students never got textbooks to take home, and Hall and his classmates went long stretches — sometimes months — with substitute teachers who did little more than supervise students.

“It doesn’t seem like a high school,” said Hall, who graduated in 2017. “It seems like a state prison.”

Hall was part of a class of Detroit Public Schools students who sued state officials in federal court, arguing that the state had violated their constitutional right to learn to read by providing inadequate resources.

A federal judge agreed this summer that the circumstances at Hall’s school shocked the conscience. But what is shocking, he concluded, is not necessarily illegal — even if some graduates of Detroit’s schools struggle to complete a job application.

“The conditions and outcomes of Plaintiffs’ schools, as alleged, are nothing short of devastating. When a child who could be taught to read goes untaught, the child suffers a lasting injury — and so does society,” Judge Stephen J. Murphy III wrote.

By making this a question of individual rights, they put the burden on the student to make the case that their rights have been violated.

But think about it – will our society be successful if our citizens are NOT literate? This ain’t the 18th century, where one could learn a trade and get by without knowing how to read; no, no, this is the 21st and if you can’t read, you’ll never get anywhere, and you’ll be a burden on society, either through welfare or crime. Oh, sure, we can always find exceptions to that statement – but this is not a case where an exception proves anything but that there are extraordinary, or extraordinarily lucky, individuals who do well without being literate – but they’re exceedingly rare.

A society that banks on luck is a society on the way out.

I think we need to turn around these questions about rights – some of them rather questionable when viewed through that particular prism – and ask ourselves how society benefits, or doesn’t, from the application of that “right.” I’ve done this before here with regards to fast food workers’ pay, but this is different.

The results of these two approaches may not, in the end, differ greatly, but it’s worth keeping in mind that societal benefits must entail societal investment – that is, TANSTAAFL (to quote the old libertarian/Heinlein-esque saying of There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, but a libertarian might cry out of context!). Thus, the existence of public schools – our shared belief that educated people make invaluable contributions to society, while those who could have been educated, but weren’t, are a drag. And that drag doesn’t just slow us down, in a world of competitors, it endangers us.

The article does go on to discuss the benefits to society of the literate, and the converse – but there’s no real attempt to connect that to the true alternative viewpoint which I am attempting to embrace here. From this viewpoint, it seems to me that each school would be evaluated for the environment it provides to the students, the teachers provided, & etc., and properly outrage and corrective action taken any element fails, with citations not to the harm to befall the students – but society.

It does come to much the same thing?

You’d think so. It does seem so to me – until I remember some previous discussions I’ve had on education. I wish I could find it, but I’m pressed for time – it’ll be somewhere in Sectors of Society. Suffice it to say, education is not a hammer, nor is it waitering at a restaurant. Why does this matter? A right, tangible or not, is binary – you have it or not. Education is not binary. It can’t be, strictly speaking, given to you. The mentally challenged, the unwilling or rebellious, these are all examples of those who, in the best of environments, will not gain their “right” of literacy no matter how hard it is thrust at them. Conversely, auto-didacts may learn how to read on their own, and in general do learn on their own, from extensive reading and experience.

Clearly, literacy is not a right. I suggest it’s a requirement of being a citizen, a critical interest of the government. Any government refusing to provide it should be ousted. But it’s hard to see it as a “right,” as rights are far too binary, far too easily granted to withheld, for literacy to be subject to such. The best one can say is that a right to the process of education is a requirement.

And I wonder if that’s what a lot of statutes in this area already say. Perhaps this is an ode to more precision in newspaper articles.