Monthly Archives: September 2018

I am terribly sorry to have to be the first to tell you that our poor Miss Brennan died. We have her head here in the office, at the top of the stairs, where she was always to be found, smiling right and left and drinking water out of her own little paper cup. She shot herself in the back with the aid of a small handmirror at the foot of the main altar in St. Patrick’s cathedral one Shrove Tuesday. Frank O’Connor was where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving a penance to some old woman and he heard the shot and he ran out and saw our poor late author stretched out flat and he picked her up and slipped her in the poor box. She was very small. He said she went in easy. Imagine the feelings of the young curate who unlocked the box that same evening and found the deceased curled up in what appeared to be and later turned out truly to be her final slumber. It took six strong parish priests to get her out of the box and then they called us and we all went and got her and carried her back here on the door of her office. . . We will never know why she did what she did (shooting herself) but we think it was because she was drunk and heartsick. She was a very fine person, a very real person, two feet, hands, everything. But it is too late to do much about that. [Maeve Brennan of The New Yorker, 1959]

In response to a letter from a reader requesting “… for more of the Irish hired-helps.” Via Joanne O’Leary in London Review of Books.

See, doc, I brushed every single tooth! How about a little flossing now?

The Land That Time Forgot (1975) is a lurid World War II movie in which the remnants of the crew of a merchant vessel sunk by a German U-Boat, led by Bowen Tyler, submarine maker, and biologist Lisa Clayton, manage to ambush the U-Boat and take it over, with some average plot twists and turns. Then, when the starving and fuel-short crews find a mysterious island, the movie transforms into a lurid “Hey, the dinosaur just grabbed Lassie and ran off – oh, dear.” Well, OK, not the dog, but otherwise, yes.

The submarine is low on fuel, but this now-composite crew, nourished on dino-meat and sporting a captive local, has the knowledge to find and refine their own fuel oil. The crew turns out to be a killing machine, shooting up the dinos, the local hominin tribes, and occasionally each other, all the while not shedding a tear when one of them takes it in the neck, an emotional reaction I thought a bit off-putting.

In the end, as the island’s volcano goes off (this has happened far too conveniently over the last few weeks – see here and here and here for other such volcanoes getting guest-star roles recently), Tyler and Clayton, on a hunting expedition, lose their companions to various thrown objects, and then get back to camp to discover the U-Boat is leaving, trying to escape via the mysterious underwater passage. The U-Boat’s crew shoots each other up, as some wish to wait for their leader Tyler and his cute lass, while the more resentful German members would prefer to leave him and Lisa to their fates, but in the end the U-Boat blows up before escaping, another victim of the island, before the horrified eyes of Lisa and Bowen.

Yep, you guessed it. This is noir. Dinosaur noir.

We leave the enchanting couple, now heavily bearded (I’ll leave that to your imagination), heading north on some unexplained quest to discover why the more primitive hominins lived on the south end of the island, while the northern seemed to house fewer but more advanced forms of life.

And snow. Lots of snow.

And they’re south of the equator. Maybe it was the hills they were climbing. Sure.

Nothing to really see here. A straight-ahead adventure with the corners cut off it. Traitors die, tragic figures die, red-shirts die, dinosaurs die. Bad special effects. Especially that pteranodon.

Heck, my pick for most heart-rending scene is the one where the crew shoots two Allosaurs to death. You wouldn’t think two viciously toothed killing machines that drool like Niagara Falls could evoke pathos, and yet, there I was, wondering if I could fake a tear. I couldn’t, but I think it was the emotional high point of this fairly directionless story. Hey, here’s a clip of that scene, starting at about the 3:54 mark:

It wouldn’t be unfair to say I’ve seen much worse, but in the end it still seemed like dreck.

This thread has been dormant for a while, but WaPo’s report on a court battle over the vulnerability of electronic voting in Georgia reminded me of it. It sounds like a shining example of why voting machines should be distrusted:

On one side are activists who have sued the state to switch to paper ballots in the November midterm elections to guard against the potential threat of Russian hacking or other foreign interference. On the other is Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who has declared the electronic system secure and contends that moving to paper ballots with less than two months to Election Day will spawn chaos and could undermine confidence among Georgia’s 6.8 million voters.

Kemp, a Republican endorsed by President Trump — and an outspoken critic of federal election security assistance in 2016 — is running for governor in a competitive, nationally watched race against a Democrat who could become the nation’s first black female governor.

And so Kemp cannot admit to a mistake, because that’s not the Trump way. On the other side are the technologically literate:

Logan Lamb, a cybersecurity sleuth, thought he was conducting an innocuous Google search to pull up information on Georgia’s centralized system for conducting elections.

He was taken aback when the query turned up a file with a list of voters and then alarmed when a subsequent simple data pull retrieved the birth dates, drivers’ license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of more than 6 million voters, as well as county election supervisors’ passwords for use on Election Day. He also discovered the server had a software flaw that an attacker could exploit to take control of the machine.

And then he found the server was vulnerable, and then the folks responsible for it did nothing about the problem. Clusterfuck city, sounds like.

Well, I know which I’m on – dump the fucking computers. Chaos? Maybe. Discourage voters? I doubt it. They can suck it up, so long as the polling places are run in a fair manner. But the computers are turning out to be potentially even less fair and trustworthy than those darn humans.

So perhaps the humans should run their own damn affairs for themselves for a change, rather than depending on us damn computers.

Think of it that way, eh?

Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society, doesn’t appear to be the type to mince words about the future of space, at least as the Trump Administration sees it. NewScientist (8 September 2018, paywall) has the opinion:

While the Trump administration says that it is setting its sights on a return to the moon, its actions do not lend credence to such claims.

If it intended to put people on the moon again, it would fund the development of a lunar lander. Instead it is funding the Lunar Orbit Platform-Gateway, a costly boondoggle that serves no useful purpose. US Vice President Mike Pence talks of it as a done deal.

What he fails to add is that we don’t need a lunar-orbiting base to go to the moon, or to Mars, or to go anywhere. Not only that, crewed trips to anywhere beyond Earth orbit would be designed to use the gateway as a staging post, adding to fuel requirements and decreasing the load they can carry, which is why I call it the Lunar Orbit Tollbooth instead.

As I was reading this, it occurred to me that Zubrin, President of an independent entity, doesn’t have to depend on President Trump for anything, and therefore he doesn’t have to harness his tongue for fear of losing funding for the future.

NASA scientists, engineers, and professional administrators, on the other hand, must be vividly aware that catching the negative attention of President Trump could lead to the demise of the programs they think are best for NASA to pursue in the best interests of the United States. If they were to honestly express their opinions of the leadership, they might find their projects gone, and, worse, their careers finished.

That’s another one of the problems of having an incompetent, narcissistic, amateur President in charge. You daren’t prick his hide if your job, and your country’s future, depends merely on his good humors. Therefore, you have to … avoid the truth. Dance a scary dance. Not say what’s on your mind.

It may not be precisely the same as lying, but the effects can be just as damaging. That’s why we have whistleblower laws, because the deceit which occurs otherwise can easily have side-effects which we don’t expect or even recognize.

Until some avoidable catastrophe occurs.

Over the weekend, the report of an accuser of Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct came forth, and while I didn’t comment on it due to other commitments, my reaction was similar to my reaction to those accusations against Rep Keith Ellison (D-MN) of domestic abuse by a former girlfriend, who claimed to have a tape of the abuse occurring but will not release it. If Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser prefers to remain anonymous, then, in the absence of any other evidence, I see precious little reason to take the accusation seriously.

It’s not so much a matter of fairness as it is intellectual integriy. In each case someone has been accused, with no evidence presented, and so the only fair step to take, even if I suspect Kavanaugh is a radical anti-abortion proponent who’ll overturn Roe v Wade at the first opportunity, is to express skepticism the incident occurred.

But now Professor Christine Blasey Ford of Palo Alto University has stepped forward as the accuser, and this certainly complicates matters, stating she’s ready to testify concerning the incident. Professor Ford will be facing a committee of 11 GOP Senators and 10 Democratic Senators. The latter have already made their feelings known on the matter, but the Republican ranks include retiring Senator Flake (R-AZ), who I’ve discussed before, who has little love for President Trump. Will he become the speed bump over which the President’s scooter jumps and dumps?

Politico reports:

Flake flashed a yellow light Sunday night on Brett Kavanaugh’s high court bid, telling POLITICO that he won’t support advancing the nomination this week if fellow senators don’t do more to hear out a woman accusing the nominee of sexual assault more than three decades ago. Opposition from the Arizona Republican wouldn’t doom Kavanaugh outright, but it already has ratcheted up political pressure on a GOP struggling to keep Trump’s Supreme Court nominee from a full implosion. …

“I think it’s too soon to tell, but Flake is the one man with the leverage to do this,” GOP strategist and vocal Trump antagonist Rick Wilson said. “With the one-vote margin on the committee, Jeff Flake has the power to stop Kavanaugh, and to humiliate Trump. Revenge is a dish best served cold, as the philosopher once said.”

But I think I’d prefer Senator Flake only put the kibosh on Kavanaugh if relevant testimony and, better yet, evidence is produced of the incident in question. Regarding the nature of this incident, it’s likely to degenerate into a he-said / she-said incident, which is going to be messy and infuriating, but if the accusation is made and the accuser is going to stand forth, then we will have to wade through the sordid matter. And if, in some surprise turn, incontrovertible evidence is brought forth, or a confession is ripped from Kavanaugh’s lips, then so much the better: the pretender can be rejected, and President Trump can try again.

But I do not expect this to be a pleasant matter, and one side or the other will be sorely disappointed and outraged: an outcome that will do nothing to reunite the nation. Unfortunately, in the unlikely case that Kavanaugh is rejected, no doubt the conservatives will be bitter that an incident occurring back when the man was a teenager was used to block his path to the highest judicial court in the nation. However, I agree with Steve Benen that this is not the nature of the hypothetical rejection:

And what of the current defense? The White House re-issued Kavanaugh’s “categorical and unequivocal” denial to the Washington Post, which is no small detail. There were some suggestions over the weekend that it’s a mistake to condemn the judge for actions he allegedly took when he was a drunk teenager. The incident, if it happened at all, was decades ago, the argument goes, and it’s not fair to define a 53-year-old Supreme Court nominee by what he’s accused of having done in high school.

The problem with this argument is that Kavanaugh isn’t the one making it. On the contrary, the judge’s official line is that the incident in question simply never happened and that his accuser is lying.

And that pushes us away from a debate about holding someone responsible for alleged actions from his past and into a debate about holding someone responsible for their current actions. If Kavanaugh is lying now about an alleged attack on a teen-aged girl, there’s simply no credible way this dishonesty can be dismissed by senators as irrelevant.

Lying to Congress used to be a serious matter, and some Senators still take it seriously. Will this Congress? Will we ever know the truth of the matter? Probably not.

On Lawfare, Suzanne Spaulding and Harvey Rishikof warn of Russia’s attacks on our most precious institution – the Justice system:

In the summer of 2016, a Facebook group called “Secure Borders” began fanning the flames of rumors that a young girl had been raped at knifepoint by Syrian refugees in Twin Falls, Idaho. The group accused government officials, including the prosecutor and judge in the case, of conspiring to protect the immigrant community by covering-up the true nature of the crime. Secure Borders attempted to organize a rally, demanding, among other things, that “[a]ll government officials, who are covering up for these criminals, should be fired!” The claims were riddled with falsehoods. There were no Syrian refugees involved, and there was no knife. But because the suspects were minors, privacy laws made it difficult for the court to publish facts that could correct the public narrative.

The “Secure Borders” Facebook group was not the product of outraged Twin Falls residents. It was created by Russian operatives as part of Russia’s ongoing campaign to weaken our institutions of American democracy—in this case, by sowing discord and painting the justice system as an agent of politicians.

It’s tempting to paint President Trump as the lead Russian operative in this effort, isn’t it? But propaganda efforts like this are not new – we experienced them during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It’s just that the Internet now takes the place of little offset presses and the like as the medium of choice. Spaulding and Rishikof note one of the recommendations of a Reagan-era group that worked on anti-propaganda efforts:

Back in 1983, Dennis Kux, who chaired the Reagan administration’s Active Measures Working Group tasked with countering Soviet propaganda, pointed out that “[t]he best means of rendering the ground less fertile is to ensure that people … are fully aware of attempts to deceive them.” The public needs to be made aware that an adversary is working to exacerbate declining trust in our democratic institutions, including the justice system. Judges and their administrative staffs need to be prepared to respond quickly, and other community voices must be prepared to help set the record straight when misinformation threatens to overwhelm the public discourse.

I think Spaulding and Rishikof may understate the scope of the problem when the speak of “community voices,” because today’s Internet makes community both more fragmented and more global. It’s far more easy to scrape up a good dose of outrage at the target of your ire just by doing a few searches – and that’s only if you’re not on someone’s mail-list for disliking that group.

Speaking of mail, long-time readers know of my hobby of dismembering (metaphorically speaking, of course!) emails which I believe are motivated by a poisonously anti-American ideology. While it may be good fun to rip those hate-filled email to pieces, my real hope is to activate in my readers, particularly those targeted by those emails, a warning system that triggers on those feelings of outrage; that is, if you’re outraged, it may be someone trying to manipulate you. And although nearly all my examples come from conservative friends, outrage knows no ideology. Just read the progressive site The Daily Kos. Justified or not, outrage is a deep, viscous river.

What else can we do? Spaulding and Rishikof mention that the legal system’s tendency to “protect the privacy” of children makes for a weak point:

It is no coincidence that cases swarmed (surrounded) by disinformation often involve children. In addition to providing the shock value that makes stories go viral, court cases concerning minors are bound by privacy restrictions. As a result, prosecutors and police cannot comment on the details of an investigation, allowing rumor, innuendo and conspiracy peddlers to fill in the blanks with theories and their own narratives.

Perhaps it’s time to revisit that philosophy. I don’t pretend to have any deeper recommendations than simply review the matter, but I’m sure sharper minds than mine might suggest useful revisions.

And stay thoughtful out there, folks.

Political reporter Marcy Wheeler seems convinced that Manafort will provide the key for uncovering a putrid swamp of corruption in Washington. With regard to the many exhibits that accompanied his confession, she think Special Counsel Mueller has a hidden agenda:

They’re there to show what Paul Manafort does when he’s running a campaign.

Because they show that for the decade leading up to running Trump’s campaign, Manafort was using the very same sleazy strategy to support Viktor Yanukovych that he used to get Trump elected.

In other words, these exhibits are a preview of coming attractions.

TAKE OUT THE FEMALE OPPONENT BY PROSECUTING HER

It describes how Manafort used cut-outs to place stories claiming his client’s female opponent had murdered someone.

MANAFORT took other measures to keep the Ukraine lobbying as secret as possible. For example, MANAFORT, in written communications on or about May 16, 2013, directed his lobbyists (including Persons D1 and D2, who worked for Company D) to write and disseminate within the United States news stories that alleged that Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian official. MANAFORT stated that it should be “push[ed]” “[w]ith no fingerprints.” “It is very important we have no connection.” MANAFORT stated that “[m]y goal is to plant some stink on Tymo.”

& etc. I’m not an expert on any of this, so I’ll just have to wait and see how this all turns out. What bothers me, though, is how effective this sort of thing will be in dismembering the Trumpist base. Trump, on his own, is fangless; it’s his supporters which make him dangerous, which convinces those who should be overseeing Trump’s Executive activities to turn a blind eye. The extent to which the Trumpist base exists and continues to support Trump is, in my opinion, the extent to which the American Republic has failed to properly educate its citizens.

I know the Trumpists would bristle and consider me to be preaching at them without authority, which is why I preface this with in my opinion. We all render judgments, and the extent to which Trumpists swallow the fake news and Deep State memes and do the Lock Her Up! dance is, in my judgment, the measure of Americans who are failing the test of responsibly using their votes.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Wittes, et al, on Lawfare come to the expected conclusion, regardless of the opinion of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani:

Spotted this beauty loitering near a church.

Based on the seats, I don’t think it’s a reproduction.

Arturo Casadevall and Ferric C. Fang want to improve the quality of scientific literature, and along the way make this observation in JCI, a publication of Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine:

vii. Fostering a culture of rigor. In recent decades, many life science researchers have learned to accept a culture of impact, which stresses publication in high-impact journals, flashy claims, and packaging of results into tidy stories. Today, a scientist who publishes incorrect articles in high-impact journals is more likely to enjoy a successful career than one who publishes careful and rigorous studies in lower-impact journals, provided that the publications of the former are not retracted. This misplaced value system creates perverse incentives for scientists to participate in a “tragedy of the commons” that is detrimental to science (17). The culture of impact must be replaced by a culture of rigor that emphasizes quality over quantity. A focus on experimental redundancy, error analysis, logic, appropriate use of statistics, and intellectual honesty can help make research more rigorous and likely to be true (18). The publication of confirmatory or contradictory findings must also be encouraged to allow the scientific literature to provide a more accurate and comprehensive reflection of the body of scientific evidence (19).

For the scientist who values fame and fortune over getting it right, this is a golden observation. However, we shouldn’t depend on the researcher to have irreproachable ethics, but rather to structure the system so they don’t have a choice but to get the research right in order to gain that fortune and fame.

And here’s the cast and director of the movie.

For a mostly pleasant, if slightly mindless, time, The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is hard to beat. An exploration into the more salacious side of the famed detective’s life, it has not aged well. In its time, the suggestion that the detective was homosexual might have seemed risque, and such an intimation for Dr. Watson might be an outrage (a term mentioned multiple times, in true Brit fashion) for him, but today they come across as quaint and nearly irrelevant – a resolution to the matter that might have surprised director Billy Wilder.

The story itself, which centers around the development of the first working submarine by the British navy for Queen Victoria, and its secret technology, and how this connects to the mysterious cessation of letters from one of the men working on it to his wife in Belgium, is mildly interesting, but not as compelling as the actual Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Part of the problem is that the story is telegraphed, and with little subtlety.

But it’s also neither offensive nor incompetent. Dr. Watson may be a bit frenetic, but he’s not a bumbling boob, as he’s sometimes portrayed, and Holmes remains cool under pressure, even graceful in the face of failure.

The closest it comes to a theme is that some men rise above their hormone-laden ways to fall in love with women for their minds, as Holmes does with the doomed German spy who masquerades as the woman desperate to find her husband. It’s not as compelling as one might hope, though. Not Wilder’s best work.

But pleasant.

I was just reading up on Paul Manafort’s various confessions:

Before he was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort embraced extreme tactics in his lobbying efforts: He schemed “to plant some stink” and spread stories that a jailed Ukrainian politician was a murderer.

He enlisted a foreign politician who was secretly on his payroll to deliver a message to President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

And he gleefully fueled allegations that an Obama Cabinet member who had spoken out against his Ukrainian client was an anti-Semite, according to court papers.

With his guilty plea Friday, Manafort admitted the lengths to which he went to manipulate the American political system and the media for massive profit, exposing how he thrived in the Washington swamp that Trump railed against during his campaign. [WaPo]

And more. And more. And more.

This all in pursuit of massive pecuniary profits. It becomes quite clear that any moral system Manafort might have probably only extends to his own family – and even that might be an exaggeration. Clearly, treating people fairly was of inferior priority to gaining profits.

Which leads to the question of the moment, Why would President Trump expect Manafort to hold up under the pressure? I mean, I’m amazed Manafort didn’t fold his cards the day the trial started. He must have felt that he could win at trial. But now that it’s clear he cannot, and Trump doesn’t appear to be riding to his rescue, he’s simply following his age old pattern:

Do what you have to in order to advance your own cause.

Why would Trump think Manafort would do anything else? He’s as morality-free as the President himself. I suppose Trump thinks of himself as the master manipulator, the one who can put something over on anyone, but, given Manafort’s apparent mindset, that’s one vulnerability he doesn’t have. Once you discard a moral system which says you must treat others fairly, which can lead to self-deception when it clashes with self-interest opportunities, you aren’t quite so easily manipulated.

You may not understand why your tactics eventually lead you to the jail cell, but at least you can see clearly what’s happening in the short-term.

A dismayingly predictable finding appears to exist in this academic paper, if I understand the abstract properly. Although the abstract doesn’t label it as such, it’s about civil asset forfeiture, an old interest of mine. By Alex Tabarrok, Michael Makowsky, and Thomas Stratmann on SSRN:

We exploit local deficits and state-level differences in police revenue retention from civil asset forfeitures to estimate how incentives to raise revenue influence policing. In a national sample, we find that local fine and forfeiture revenue increases at a faster rate with drug arrests than arrests for violent crimes. Revenues also increase at a faster rate with black and Hispanic drug arrests than white drug arrests. Concomitant with higher rates of revenue generation, we find that black and Hispanic drug, DUI, and prostitution arrests, and associated property seizures, increase with local deficits when institutions allow officials to more easily retain revenues from forfeited property. White drug and DUI arrests are insensitive to these institutions. We do, however, observe comparable increases in white prostitution arrests. Our results show how revenue-driven law enforcement can distort police behavior.

That last sentence should be unsurprising to long-time readers, because revenue-driven law enforcement means there are now two goals of law enforcement, the first being justice^[1], but this new goal of collecting revenue for law enforcement is not constrained by the first goal. As independent goals, in the abstract they may affect each other, but in the real world, where law enforcement agents are compensated primarily with money, which just happens to also be the content of revenue, the distorter is the revenue, and the distorted is the authentic goal of law-enforcement, justice.

This is the wrong way to run a societal sector.

Kevin Drum interprets (no doubt from the paper, which I’ve chosen not to read):

The more black (and Hispanic) an area is, the more likely it is that strapped local governments will turn to civil asset forfeitures to raise revenue. But the more white an area is, the less likely they are to increase the use of civil asset forfeitures.

Just to make it a bit worse.

Ban civil asset forfeiture now!

¹ I know, I know, law enforcement is rarely or never concerned with justice, but all the same it should be, and hopefully we’ll continue to move that way as society continues to evolve towards justice and away from arbitrary laws.

And an impressive one, too.

He’s hanging out on the northern outside wall, behind the ferns.

A reader disagrees concerning the Paulsen attack ad:

I don’t think that ad is as tone-deaf as you think. It plays right to the base with dirty, scurrilous accusations. It’s pure attack ad, and it matters not who is in the White House or anything else. All it says is that Dean Phillips is a liar and implies he’s a tax evader.

And yet, the base and, more importantly, the independents that Paulsen has to win in order to gain re-election will be reminded of who Paulsen supports in the White House – a shady businessman of dubious bona fides, a character who talks big, yet whose biggest wins have been that he can pick judges that are mostly rubber-stamped by a GOP-controlled Senate, an absolutely chronic liar who should be sitting in an alley, drinking avidly from a whiskey bottle, rather than sitting in the Oval Office.

That’s the risk for Paulsen, that reminder that he supports Trump. And if his district has tired of Trump’s antics, that may hurt him.

But I have an awful record when it comes to political prediction, so never mind me.

And a disconnect of the worst sort, in my opinion. Catherine Rampell remarks on some of the expert conclusions concerning the Great Recession of a decade ago in WaPo:

Second, the financial system is complex and hard to understand. It was, in fact, at least partly the growing complexity of the system that got us into such a mess in the first place.

And third: No amount of oratorical flair, they say, would ever convince the public to support a policy that felt so offensive.

“The core of the political problem and the communication problem is the deep conflict, to any normal human, between what it takes to break a panic and protect from a Great Depression, and what people think is moral and just in the moment,” [former Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner says. “And that is not a reconcilable thing. It can’t be solved with eloquence.”

Davis argues: “We need to be very clear that winning public opinion should not be your measure of success, because you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

I disagree. The top priority in the short run is preventing Armageddon. But public opinion absolutely matters in the longer term, as voters act upon their fury. And if winning public opinion over any time horizon really is hopeless, what happens next time there is a crisis?

Look, one of the central tenets of the general citizen is that they be treated fairly in the context of a capitalistic liberal democracy. From this viewpoint, then, the economic system should embody that desire for justice. We have discovered that a rules-based system is far more likely to lead to just outcomes than, as they say, the Rule of Man, i.e., a monarchy, so long as the rules are of a just nature.

So the rules in the economic system should reflect that fact and be followed. Consider the predecessor to the quasi-meritocratic capitalist system we think we have, the mercantile system. In this system, the status quo is deeply entrenched, basically resulting in a system where winners and losers are selected based not on their performance, but on the whim of the elite currently in power – and those last three words sums up why status quo is such a popular phrase for mercantilists. This leaves the common citizen meager opportunity to improve one’s situation, and the entire situation becomes moribund at all levels of society, until some other nation-state that happens to have better technology moves in and wipes them out.

The bailouts are equivalent to picking winners, and, as Catherine points out, Lehman Bros didn’t get a bailout – they were a loser. But the entire economic system was perceived as being abused by the players who were too clever by half for their own good. By the precepts of justice, if they’re going to dance on the edge of the cliff and take a misstep, they should be permitted the pleasure of plunging to their deaths.

But, as numerous economists and a couple of Treasury Secretaries pointed out, this might have wrecked our economy.

This confluence of facts – the urge to fairness and justice, the dangers of a deeply interlocked economy – brings us to an easy and definite conclusion, that we need a regulatory regime where the sudden collapse of one or more foolishly managed companies (particularly banks) isn’t going to overly^[1] endanger the economy. If the common citizen perceives the economic system as a way to reap great rewards while avoiding the responsibilities that go with them, then why should they have any great use for it?

Sure, there are highly pragmatic reasons for regulating the banking system. But perhaps the most important reason is not immediately pragmatic, but actually begins as a moral reason which then transmutes into a pragmatic reason: if people do not see the economic system as a fair, then they’ll repudiate it.

And then where will we be?

¹ I say overly because there is a certain value to the economy being somewhat endangered from time to time, a reminder that the economy is not a self-regulating mechanism which requires little attention as to its internal structures, but instead a highly useful mechanism which can run out of control if not properly regulated.

Erik Paulsen (R-MN), a current Congressional Representative, has aired a completely tone-deaf ad attacking his opponent, Democrat Dean Phillips:

If you didn’t listen to the end, it says Congress doesn’t need another “shady businessman.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, Rep Paulsen, neither does the White House. Perhaps you could get rid of the one we have now?

But it is interesting that this ad, this blunder of an ad that’ll remind every listener who sees it and is paying attention that Paulsen’s own Party has a shady businessman in the White House, a shady businessman with poor polling numbers and a large number of scandals hanging over him, making bad decisions, well, how could this ad be made? Just who did Paulsen employ to make an ad that’s this tone-deaf?

Another bunch of amateurs? It is a theme for the GOP.

Or is Paulsen subtly bucking his Party leadership with this ad, telling them very quietly to fuck off and trying to tell his constituents that, no, he really doesn’t like his President at all, and this proves it?

I dunno. I’ve never paid much attention to Paulsen, so I can’t say if he’s really that subtle. But my money is on it being a mistake.

In connection with the sudden controversy over the number of deaths in Puerto Rico last year following the impact of Hurricane Maria, in which an academic, independent group raised the total number of deaths on Puerto Rico to 2,975, a number which President Trump has rejected, Steve Benen laments:

These defenses are as wrong as they bizarre. Nothing about the federal response in Puerto Rico was “well done,” and to believe George W. Bush “did the right thing” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is to ignore the assessments of the Bush administration.

But the broader lesson here is that it’s well past time to give up on the idea that congressional Republicans, en masse, will ever give up on defending Trump. If they’ll defend the nonsense we saw yesterday, they’ll defend just about anything.

I don’t think Congressional Republicans are defending President Trump. I think they’re defending themselves. If they and their Party gain a reputation of being the Party of incompetency and amateurs, which in the latter case they’ve embraced, then they and their Party will go down to ruin as Americans discover the consequences of putting amateurs in important positions is death and destruction.

Unfortunately for them, the GOP has such sterling examples as famed “Mr. Snowball” climate denier Senator Inhofe (R-OK), plus an impending Federal Debt blowout which will expunge their reputation for fiscal responsibility – as if their behavior when they last controlled congress, 2001-2007, wasn’t enough.

As Speaker Ryan explained, they don’t need no steenkin’ experts to tell them how to do things. And now that their constituents, those folks who handed them the reins of power, are being served up the results of that action, the Republicans simply have to deny, deny, deny.

Because, when  you’re supremely ideologically and religiously driven, you can’t be wrong. You can’t. It’s just not permissible.

I took some pictures of my Arts Editor’s succulents dish:

   And then she decided the pics needed more than subtle enhancements.

I think the first of the black background pics might even be more interesting if only the top third, quarter, or even fifth was present.

The Arts Editor replies:

There’s been a lot of blather about the “category” of Hurricane Florence, currently inflicting itself on the Carolinas of the United States (South and North, about which many political jokes could be made, but out of respect for their travails of the day, I shall desist), but as someone at work pointed out, it may not be as useful for predicting the impact of a Hurricane as one might wish. For those with a taste for technical details, the Category of a hurricane is a measurement of the sustained wind speeds in the hurricane, and the metric is known as the Saffir–Simpson scale. See the link for more details.

Hurricane Harvey (Wikipedia)

Not that I’m dissing the dangers of the wind, of course, but remember Hurricane Harvey, which afflicted Houston, TX, in 2017? For all that the wind did damage, the major part of the damage was inflicted by the rainfall, as nearly 40 inches of rain fell in some areas around Houston.

Did we have a clue it was going to be that bad? No. Now, perhaps the NWS (National Weather Service) didn’t have a clue, either, but it seems to me that when they do, they should find a way to inform the public of the expected characteristics of the storm^[1]. But it’s not enough to claim that they’ve worked up forecasts and made them easily available to the public. This is especially true as it becomes apparent that the characteristics of hurricanes are changing such that the “Category” isn’t as important as its expected rainfall.

And, finally, given the relative success of the Category system of classifying hurricanes, it should not be thrown out – it should be extended.

I think it should be extended so that, iconically, it looks like this

Category<wind-speed ind>,<expected heaviest rainfall>,<area of substantial impact>

As suggested, we keep the wind-speed indicator, as most folks know what it means or how to look up the mappings from the symbolic 1-5 values to wind speeds.

The expected heaviest rainfall value, which I suggest be in inches only because I live here in the States^[2], should be obvious. However, I argue for the heaviest expected rainfall, not average, because the difference between average and heaviest may be so large as to be misleading, and the go-to statistical alternative to average, which is median, has no meaning in this context. Best to be prepared for the expected worst.

Finally, area of substantial impact, probably best measured in square miles^[3], would describe the expected coverage of the weather event over the geographical territory it is most likely to hit, as constrained by substantial impact. I would limit this to dry land, since land is typically far more densely populated by humanity than is the ocean.

One more refinement is that the latter two measurements, unlike the first, would be predicted values, not current values. That is, they are the expectations as of the moment the categorization is issued of the amount of rain still to fall, over the specified area. As a hurricane hits a land mass, dumps its rain, and loses energy, these latter two values would fall (as would the first, in most cases, as winds need energy to blow). So we might see Harvey, before making landfall, and assuming the meteorologists saw this coming, as a

Category 4,40,1660

40 inches was the worst rain rain Houston saw, and, while I don’t know how much of the Houston and non-Houston area Harvey impacted, I decided to substitute, for the purposes of this example, the metropolitan area of Houston, which is roughly 1660 miles².

This approach, I think, will encode this brief, predictive, and descriptive categorization of a Hurricane into the public consciousness, and will hopefully lead to more thought about the potentially disastrous effects of any given hurricane. It may even lead to more easily understood comparisons, and perhaps some intrepid data visualization people can use these for graphing purposes.

And now I look forward to some reader telling me that the NWS is already doing this. Still, I hope this pushes them forward on this useful pursuit.

¹New readers may not know that I live in Minnesota, which, in the United States, is just about as far as you can be from any hurricanes. That should explain any ignorance I’m displaying in this post.

²Call us barbarians if you must.

³See note 2.

A pensive monster, looking for a moment of introspection.

Much like the giant, possessed squid that’s shambling across this island, mysteriously upright on its tentacles, Space Amoeba (1970) is a shambling wreck of a movie. The general conceit of this mess is that space aliens, having hijacked our first ship to Jupiter, have returned it to Earth, ended up in the Pacific Ocean near a quaint little island full of quaint islanders, which is scheduled for commercial development. They then “possess” (think The Exorcist (1973)) some innocent squid. Well, the movie calls it an octopus, Anyways, it mysteriously grows to be maybe 80 feet tall, makes landfall, can walk on its tentacles, kills a few people, tosses the head priest of the islanders about, and then exits the island holding its head as bats pursue it.

My Arts Editor’s favorite bad special effects scene. That would be victim #1 on the right, and our octopus on the left, experiencing a growth spurt after eating Mr. Doan’s Liver Pills.

One of the foreigners, a smarmy corporate spy, is next on the hit parade, while a crab and a sea turtle joins him as other members of the possessed. The spy doesn’t grow like the octopus, but the turtle and crab do. The possessed spy is the mole in the human community. Meantime, somehow the doughty humans have figured out that the dominating space aliens have one weakness, and it’s not that fungal problem afflicting bats. I’ll leave it to be the movie’s little secret. The humans blow the crab into an outsized meal, while the octopus and the turtle, attacked with the human secret weapon, lose their minds, attack each other, and eventually fall into a conveniently suddenly active volcano. The corporate spy, still dressed like a fop, manages to save humanity by throwing himself into the volcano after them.

Wow. It’s just awful. The turtle really just looked like a guy in a rubber suit. And the rest of the special effects were wretched. So was the acting, story, and audio. Oddly enough, I liked the space trip, and while I’m sure the “wide angle” shot showing the ship heading for Jupiter consisted of a photo of Jupiter pasted to a black board speckled with sparkles, I really felt like that might be what  you said. Too bad I didn’t find a frame of that portion of the flick.

But not much else.

Avoid.

syllogistically:

A syllogism (Greek: συλλογισμός syllogismos, “conclusion, inference”) is a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two or more propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “George W. Bush Raising Money to Maintain Trump Cover-up,” New York:

George W. Bush, who declined to endorse Donald Trump (or anybody) in 2016, and made muttered elliptical criticisms of the 45th president, has thrown himself into the task of covering up Trump’s many crimes. Bush, reports Politico, is raising money for candidates who are committed to maintaining the cover-ups.

To be sure, Bush doesn’t put it that way, and almost certainly doesn’t think of it that way. But it is syllogistically true. The Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress have followed a course of non-oversight, blocking disclosure of Trump’s tax returns, allowing him to to be paid by figures at home and abroad known only to him, and preventing investigations of multiple cases of misconduct. Working to maintain Republican control of Congress is ipso facto working to maintain the cover-ups.

A description of Hurricane Florence from meteorologist Eric Holthaus via WaPo:

Since modern tracking began, no hurricane with its origins in the hundreds-of-miles-wide patch of the central Atlantic where Florence traveled has ever made landfall on the East Coast, or even come close. Thanks to unusually warm ocean waters, Florence has intensified at one of the fastest rates in recorded history for a hurricane so far north. Thanks in part to unusually warm ocean waters between New England and Greenland, the atmosphere has formed a near-record-strength blocking pattern — not unlike the one that steered Hurricane Sandy into New York Harbor in 2012 — that is propelling Florence toward the Southeast coastline. Another blocking pattern, expected to emerge later this week over the Great Lakes, could lock Florence in place for days — which would result in an abject freshwater flood that could extend hundreds of miles inland.

Will it be enough to change some climate change deniers minds? Probably not. The problem is not the sort we’re equipped to even recognize, and some folks just can’t get over they’re preconceptions to understand that the world is changing all around them.

And, if this continues, their kids will have a lot worse set of conditions to contend with than current generations.

There’s recently been quite a hubbub over the pressure being applied to Senator Collins (R-Maine) concerning the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. In essence, a group is collecting IOUs from donors that will be burned if Collins votes against the Kavanaugh nomination, and will be collected and donated to Collins’ next re-election opponent if the Senator votes for Kavanaugh.

Reports have the total IOUs worth more than $1 million [WaPo].

The surface storm concerns the appropriateness of this approach to campaign finance. Senator Collins calls it bribery, and while I think that’s nonsense, it’s apparently getting some serious attention from legal experts.

But I don’t think that’s the real problem for the GOP. I think there are two underlying ideas that upsets them, or at least should upset them.

First, there’s the fact that this can happen at all. The people, who they’d like to claim to represent, just rose up and took a stand in opposition to a GOP-anointed SCOTUS candidate. Remember way back when Speaker of the House Ryan (R-WI) endorsed amateurism, the collective wisdom of the unwashed masses?

Well, if this funding effort is really constituted of small donors, then this is the unwashed masses kicking Ryan in the nuts.

But there’s another dynamic playing out here that I only became aware of this morning as I thought about Senator Collins’ dilemma, and it’s this: the types of donors to the political parties. While it’s true that both have what are termed mega-donors, it sure seem as if the Republicans are far more heavily funded by the mega-donor class than the Democrats.

A quick look at the table of mega-donors OpenSecrets vitiates my point slightly, but I think I can rebolster my point by citing the experience of Rep. Collins (R-NY) (no relation to the Senator to my knowledge) (yes, the guy who was just indicted on insider trading charges) with his donors, as noted by The Hill last year:

A House Republican lawmaker acknowledged on Tuesday that he’s facing pressure from donors to ensure the GOP tax-reform proposal gets done.

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) had been describing the flurry of lobbying from special interests seeking to protect favored tax provisions when a reporter asked if donors are happy with the tax-reform proposal.

“My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’ ” Collins replied.

So what, you say?

So this: these mega-donors are, virtually by definition, individuals or small family groupings. These aren’t the hoi-polloi of which Speaker Ryan spoke in such confident and glowing terms. These are people such as Adelson and the Koch brothers and, presumably not for this election but verifiably in others, Betsy DeVos.

In other words, people with specific agendas that are quite often well out of the mainstream. DeVos, for example, is an outspoken advocate for for-profit and religious schools.

And this means the GOP is swinging back and forth, quite like the Sword of Damocles, where the thread is made of the opinions of all these mega-donors.

This crowd-funded financial weapon being waved in Senator Collins’ general direction, on the other hand, represents the opinions of many people, all agreeing on at least one thing: that Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions on abortion are incompatible with the American mainstream. By implication, that crowd of donors are also backing the Democrats. And it’s the multiplicity which virtually guarantees mainstream support for the Democrats.

The rise of the mega-donors is a great strength for a party, left or right, but it’s also an Achilles’ heel for them, because the outsize influence on the party’s direction and operation must be right – or it can wreck the party.

Taken out in Traverse City.