Monthly Archives: October 2018

Gary Sargent on The Plum Line notes one of the Republican strategies is to keep President Trump away from swing districts:

And so Trump’s advisers are keeping him away from “the entire Pacific Coast,” since numerous contested races are playing out in California. They are also keeping him away from media markets that include suburbs around places such as Minneapolis and Kansas City, and other areas where GOP incumbents “are attempting to convince their suburban electorate that they are independent of Mr. Trump.”

In other words, in many of the suburban and well-educated districts that will decide control of the House, Trump remains at least partly toxic. This is directly relevant to the argument about the caravan.

So perhaps a creative Democratic operative should rent out medium sized arenas in these swing districts under an anonymous name, and then start a rumor that President Trump is expected to show up with just a little warning.

Stir up the ant-hill, as it were.

Yep, already.

I’m a political independent, and always have been. We’re two weeks or less from the mid-term elections for 2018. Long-time readers know my inclinations with regards to voting in the upcoming mid-term elections, but I thought I’d share my explicit reasons for my approach to voting this season, and why I’m varying from my usual Evaluate each race and vote according to their merits, which, by the time I reach the judges, I’m bored and have wandered off. Fortunately, I don’t think judges should be voted upon in any case, so my conscience is only minimally impacted.

So, for my readers, especially those of a conservative bent, here is why I did not (having already voted) vote for a single Republican candidate, and why you should also not vote for a single Republican candidate. Incidentally, this is not an ordered list of deep concerns, but as they occurred to me while I wrote.

1. Tear Down, Not Build Up. As a nation, it is important to build upon the accomplishments of previous Administrations and Congresses in order to continue the momentum of success. For just one example, we saw this used to great effect during the Cold War, as my more mature readers will recall. Successive Administrations negotiated important arms control treaties and, in general, utilized a united front to stop the growth of the barbaric Soviet Union empire, and eventually caused it to implode. We didn’t see a whipsaw of tactics, but rather each Administration building on the last, regardless of Party, until, finally, victory was achieved.But during the last decade this spirit of cooperation has palpably withered, and this may be laid at the feet of Republican Party. The most vivid example is the Iran Nuclear Weapon deal (JCPOA), which was painstakingly negotiated by the Obama Administration. Once completed, it was consistently mischaracterized by the leading Republicans and conservative pundits. Worse yet, most of the Republican Senators issued an unprecedented letter to Iran, which brought opprobrium down on their heads, and allowed adversaries to legitimately mock the United States.

   A properly skeptical conservative reader may think I’m naive, or a fool, but I do not rely on liberal or Democratic sources for information on this matter, but on non-partisan, third-party expert sources, who examined the text of the agreement, examined the situation, and suggested this was a good agreement. Over the years that it ran, experts in nuclear arms control noted that it achieved. or was making excellent progress, towards its stated aims.And perhaps I merely amuse easily, but, to me, the fact that it infuriated Iranian hard-liners, those folks who hate the United States the most, was perhaps the best proof of its efficacy and appropriateness.

   Without being a fly on the wall in the White House, it’s difficult to know the true reasons for its abrogation by President Trump, but since he chose not to share substantive, detailed reasons for that abrogation – and simply saying the Iranians had violated it doesn’t fly – I am uneasily aware, even suspicious, that there’s no reason to think it wasn’t simple jealousy on the part of the Republicans, and the agreement was abrogated simply to salve tender Republican egos, at the possible expense of our national security. For more information concerning the matter on this blog, search using the search box on the right, using JCPOA.

   The JCPOA abrogation is not the only sad instance of tearing down rather than building upon. Just as an example, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are considered by Republican leaders to be programs ripe for cutting. This has been stated in the wake of growing deficits brought on by the Tax Reform Act of 2017 (more anon), as if these social net programs are to blame, rather than the mismanagement of our tax system exemplified by the Tax Reform Act. Shall they just be torn apart and their beneficiaries left to struggle with their burdens, whether age or infirmity, with no help from society?

   This is just destruction for the sake of destruction.

2. Environmental. Transitioning from the previous point is the environmental blindness exhibited by the current government, leading with perhaps the most important struggle this country will ever face: anthropocentric climate change. President Obama had taken the first small, inadequate steps towards resolving this problem. Did President Trump charge ahead with more ambitious plans to safeguard our future?No. He, with the full-throated support of the Republican Party and assorted conservative pundits, began the process to remove the United States from the leadership position in the project to save our current biosphere, for which our civilization is well-suited, and ceding that leadership position to our national competitors, such as China, and in the process discrediting ourselves and our system of government.I am more than aware that conservative kant says that it’s all a (Chinese) hoax, or that it’s a natural cycle for which we have no responsibility, and, hey, there’s great scientific controversy over it all anyways.Well, no. Speaking as a science groupy (and software engineer, complete with a science degree), with at least one friend in the climate scientist community who, until 2016, was a card-carrying Republican, no, there’s no controversy. None. 98% of climate scientists agree with the statement that Climate change is anthropocentric.Which makes the lack of response to the recent report on climate change all the more discouraging. It was the sort of report that should have caused an uproar in Congress, complete with committee meetings and grandiose proposals from both sides of the aisle. Instead, hardly a word. I addressed this phenomenon a little here.

   But that’s not the end of my disappointment in the Trump Administration and Republican Congress.  There are several more topics here, such as the President’s stated goal to open up oil drilling on the Eastern Seaboard, which is a recipe for catastrophe (see: Hurricane Florence, or here for another), but I’ll limit myself to his iconic selection of Scott Pruitt for the EPA. This was, in my view, rank folly. Mr Pruitt was an industry lobbyist who, during his time at the EPA, tried to disassemble the agency which works to protect our environment from selfish fools like himself. Fairly predictably, Pruitt chased himself out of his position through a series of scandals, but not before casting a revealing light on Republican thinking when it comes to wilderness refuge areas such as the Minnesota BWCA.

3. The Swamp. Speaking of swamps, do you recall candidate Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp?” His utter disregard of this promise as underlined by him nomination of Price, Pruitt, Zinke, Flynn, and a number of others, makes the President a terrible joke – and the confirmation of those nominations by the GOP-controlled Congress indicates just how little they care about corruption in their midst.If you doubt this judgment, consider this. Pruitt and Interior Secretary Zinke are currently in a race to see which one is being investigated for more scandals. Pruitt, having left the field with at least 14 scandals, probably won’t win., because Zinke is still in the Cabinet and will likely be caught up in more scandals – he’s not far behind Pruitt as it is, and he seems to be quite avaricious.Meanwhile, the grand number of scandals for the Obama Administration? Present count is 0. Zero. If you’re a conservative, then you may be shouting at the screen WHAT ABOUT BENGHAZI?!

   Yes, well, what about it, my friend? It was investigated eight times, last I heard, and several of those were run by openly hostile GOP legislators. Given the powers of Congress, if there was anything to find, they would have found it.

   Instead, Clinton handed them their ass at the big hearing. I know that, for the doctrinaire conservative, that’s a heavy load to swallow, but there it is. An honest assessment is that this Administration is top-heavy with scandal compared to the circumspect Obama Administration. All these scandals are something which Trump explicitly promised wouldn’t happen.

   This simple comparison of two years of Trump to 8 years of Obama only heightens the disgust I, and anyone with any sense, has with the Trump Administration. How much worse will The Swamp get under Trump? I had some hopes that he’d really get himself a quality, straight-ahead Cabinet. Instead….

4. Presidential Mendacity. It really says something when the major neutral news sites such as The Washington Post find it’s actually useful and important to keep running counts of the lies spewed by our President.
   It’s even more impressive when the conservative pundits who have made it their business to close their eyes to his antics while defending him have actually taken to redefining the meaning of the word honesty so that he doesn’t look like a congenitally dishonest and dishonorable person. I addressed this situation here as it pertains to Marc Thiessen, conservative columnist for The Washington Post.

   That implicitly raises a question for the committed conservative: of what value is honesty?Well, I’ll tell you what. I may be a big-city boy, living here in the Twin Cities (you NYC folks can just stifle the guffaws, eh?), but I was raised by parents who came from small towns like Crystal Lake and Bemidji, and served in the Air Force, and grandparents who served in the Army.

   They taught me NEVER to trust a dishonest person. You can never comfortably predict what he (or she) will do beyond lie. Let’s take an example. Say he says 4. What’s the opposite of 4? Hard to say, isn’t it? That means we can’t just say we assume the opposite of what he says and it’ll all be copacetic. It just won’t work.

   His quantity of lying is way beyond the scope of this Voter’s Guide, but just consider his excuse for not punishing Saudi Arabia for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi: an arms deal worth $100 billion (or possibly $450 billion) and bringing, at last count, 1 million jobs to the defense industry of America. But, as PolitiFact, a professional fact-checking website notes, this is just an escalating lie.

   In short, putting a known, documented liar in a position of responsibility was a mistake.

5. Who Cares, He’s Too Useful. This excuse, used primarily by Evangelical voters desperate to have their agenda concerning abortion enacted, is really so morally repugnant that it’s embarrassing that a group of people who like to consider themselves the moral examples of America have enfolded it in their arms. Want more on this subject? Click here.
6. Republican Party Use Of Judgment. But, the skeptical conservative reader, exclaims, this election isn’t a Presidential election, so why does this appertain?I’m glad you asked. For those of us who have been watching the House of Representatives and, in particular, the House Intel Committee, have been absolutely appalled by the antics of Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA). A member of a “co-equal branch of government,” which I put in quotes because Nunes doesn’t appear to understand the duties that go along with that, Nunes has been responsible for running interference for President Trump, rather than monitoring his activities in order to snuff out illegalities by same.

   This indisputable lapse in fulfilling his duties, which has happened several times, isn’t limited to him. In fact, Speaker Ryan (R-WI) is responsible for Nunes’ performance, so if Ryan does nothing in response, Ryan becomes equally responsible – and he hasn’t. And Ryan’s position is only his because the House GOP members decided he would be Speaker. Their refusal to replace him with a Speaker that would replace Nunes speaks volumes.

   So Trump may not be up for election, but his fellow Party members have refused to properly monitor him or even admonish him on such national security matters as emoluments.

7. Republican Party Operation of Congress. When it comes to running Congress, I don’t want ideologues trolling for endless arguments, I want competency. Do you want some goombah working on your truck who doesn’t think you need to tighten the carburetor mount? Who doesn’t think you need oil to run the damn thing? I didn’t think so.

   Yet, in both House and Senate, the GOP leaders Ryan and McConnell, respectively, have not been competent leaders. Now, I’m not making the mistake of complaining about the policies they’ve pushed. They hold the majority, they can push what they want, just so long as they’re willing to take the flak for it.

   But, for God’s sake, pay attention to tradition! (Are they really conservatives?) We hold committee meetings and consult with experts and take our time to get things right because when they go wrong on a national level, it’s like a nuclear bomb going off. Clean up is no fun at all, right?

   I’m referring to the methods for writing the major legislation of this Congress, the AHCA (the failed replacement for the ACA, aka ObamaCare) and the 2017 Tax Reform Bill. Both were written by small groups of GOP Senators in secret. Yes, you can go look this up, it was in all the papers at the time, at least the reputable news sources. In fact, in my opinion the House abdicated its legal responsibility to originate the latter bill, since by Constitutional directive tax bills must originate in the House, by writing and passing a “straw-man” bill, which the GOP-controlled Senate promptly discarded and replaced with their own and then moved back to the House through reconciliation committee.

   Bills like these should take months of careful consideration. True, each received a couple of hours of hearing and debate, so the GOP can truthfully claim they received same – but it’s all hollow to my Independent ears. It’s the sort of lying I might expect out of a poorly brought up 13 year old, not from adults who are responsible for the future of our country.

   Remember, love or hate the ACA, it took the Democrats roughly two years from conception to final signing. Hours and hours of debates, testimony from experts, all the sort of thing I expect from good legislators.

   To my eye, the GOP acts like nothing more than a marketing machine. Sure, a couple of pieces of shitty legislation they can point at, passed by GOP members who didn’t have time to read it, written in secret by God knows who.

   As an independent, it makes me sick.

8. The Conservative Mail Stream. Long time readers know that I occasionally receive mail of a conservative nature via friends, and, as a public service, I dissect it. Which is to say, I note how it’s always written to stimulate anger and fear, while playing on the minor keys of xenophobia and racism. This is done by mixing truth with deception.

   The final purpose? Division of our great nation by playing on our differences.

   I’ve seen lies about the NFL, lies about charitable endeavours, lies about our Nation’s founding. The conservative mail stream is really quite revolting, yet it appears to be taken quite seriously. As someone who prefers truth, I find that mail stream loathsome. (For a few examples, go to my search box and enter email.)

   This applies to my appraisal of how to vote in that it tells me what the bloodstream of the Republican Party is like these days, and one might as well just say it teams with syphilis.

   Fair is fair. Somehow I got on the wrong email list, and I’m so overwhelmed with lefty email that most of it I just delete without reading. I think in their case they’re looking to use their current minority-should-be-majority position in Congress and the White House to gouge for money. Also, the Kavanaugh debacle also resulted in a lot of begging.

   I give very little, if any.

   Oh, and, yes, they can be very snooty, indeed. Some of them should take remedial courses in communications – how not to alienate your readers.

9. Ideology Over Reality. Stepping back and taking in the big vista, my overall impression is that the GOP is running on illusions. They want to believe markets function best when they’re not regulated, for example. They want to believe Trump’s promises about how he’s going to return everyone back to a Golden Age when Coal is King, American steel is the gold standard, and no one builds as well as us.

   Unfortunately, given Trump’s record, I don’t have to even discuss why any or all of these assertions, as well as others, aren’t going to happen. Trump lies. He may try to fulfill these promises, but he has no idea what he’s doing. Just look at his Swamp, his selfish lies, etc.

   There are many other instances of GOP illusions, and they frighten me. They suggest a Party with little connection with reality. All you can really say is they have a marketing machine to kill for.

Uff-da. Close readers will have noted I didn’t engage in speculation to make my case. These are all verifiable facts.

I haven’t paid much attention to the various races in Minnesota. I can guess my current Rep, Betty McCollum of the 4th District, will win, just as Tom Emmer will win in the 6th District. But here’s my thoughts:

• This country needs a viable, responsible conservative party to balance the progressives,
• And the Republicans are no longer it. None of them deserve an Independent’s vote.

In light of the above …

• If you are a Republican, my advice to you is either vote Democratic or just sit it out. Even if you’re in a safe district, do it. The Republican Party seems to be haplessly out of control, and the more of an electric shock that can be delivered to them, the more likely it is they’ll recover. And do ME a favor – if you think the Democrats are “evil,” if you feel yourself turning red every time you think about those damn liberals, GO FIND ONE AND MAKE A FRIEND. Yeah, I’m not kidding. You’ll find they’re just like your current set of friends for the most part. Maybe they won’t go shooting, but they’ll play poker. They probably bet on football, and fix cars – and maybe join you in wondering about electric cars. Remember, they’re Americans, too. And, if I may – Washington, Franklin, Jefferson – they were all liberals, too. (Sure, I’m happy to discuss that, just send me some mail.)
• If you are an Independent, vote Democratic. No, don’t go voting for some obscure third party. If you don’t think it matters, read this.

Hey, have a good day!

For those who agreed that this SCOTUS decision would be interesting, CNN is reporting that Ross has escaped the net of the ACLU and allied states:

The Supreme Court blocked a deposition of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Monday in a case challenging the decision to reinstate a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

The action is a partial victory for the Trump administration that argued such a deposition of a cabinet official is “rarely, if ever justified.” The court did, however, allow the deposition of a top Department of Justice official in the case, acting Assistant Attorney General John M. Gore of the Civil Rights Division, as well as other discovery to proceed at least for now.

Very sadly, there’s not much to munch on here:

It took five justices to grant the government’s request. There was no recorded vote attached to Monday night’s unsigned order.

The Justice Department hailed the Supreme Court’s decision, calling it a “win for protecting the rights of the Executive Branch.”

“The intrusive and improper discovery in this case disrupts the orderly functioning of our government and is, as Justices Gorsuch and Thomas noted, ‘highly unusual,'” the department’s statement continued. “The Department of Justice is committed to protecting the rule of law and looks forward to further proceedings before the Supreme Court.”

For all we know, it was 9-0. CNN notes AG Sessions didn’t think much of the lower court requirement that Ross be deposed:

“But the census question — which has appeared in one form or another on the census for over a hundred years — is either legal or illegal. The words on the page don’t have a motive; they are either permitted or they are not,” Sessions said. “But the judge has decided to hold a trial over the inner workings of a cabinet secretary’s mind.”

Sounds like typical partisan kant to me.

Venire:

A panel of prospective jurors.  A jury is eventually chosen from the venire. [Legal Information Institute / Cornell Law School]

Noted in “How Blatant Must a Prosecutor’s Racism Be for the SCOTUS to Notice?” Michael C. Dorf, Dorf On Law:

Flowers was tried by a jury that included only one African American, despite the fact that the venire was 42% African American. The prosecutor — the same prosecutor whose conduct led to the prior reversals based on Batson violations — exercised five of his six peremptory challenges against African American potential jurors. The trial judge found his ostensible race-neutral justifications credible and the Mississippi Supreme Court credited that finding.

Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute sounds off on a proposal in the pages of National Review:

They want to politicize everything! Now, in the name of promoting “health,” doctors are urged to engage their patients about politics.

At least, that’s the gist of a column in the New York Times by Bellevue Hospital physician and NYU Medical School professor Danielle Ofri, who argues that since part of a doctor’s work entails helping patients live healthy lifestyles, physicians should therefore engage their patients politically in the clinical setting to highlight policies (liberal, of course) that she sees as germane to that effort. …

Ofri wants hospitals to become centers of voter registration:

When patients are admitted to the hospital, they are asked about their tobacco use and their flu shots, their employment status and their religious affiliation. Why not ask if they are registered to vote? Just as hospitals and clinics help the uninsured obtain coverage, they should also help eligible voters register.

Is she kidding? The last thing sick people need while being admitted to a hospital is a nurse or clerk trying to get out the vote.

No. I don’t want to be harangued by my doctor about politics during a physical. I don’t want my doctor asking me if I have guns or preaching to me about firearms policy (as some have urged they do). I don’t want to hear my doctor pontificating about the Affordable Care Act or what our public policy should be about the opioid epidemic–all of which would happen inevitably once politics entered the exam or treatment room.

Written in the typical emotion-invoking style of the right-wing, with a complete lack of analysis, it’s all about his irritation. But Kevin Drum agrees with him:

It’s a bad idea. But the reason it’s a bad idea is not because it annoys Kevin Drum or Wesley Smith. The reason is twofold:

• If doctors are increasingly viewed as political actors, it will affect their authority on genuinely medical issues. If your doctor insists that you should get out and vote to save Obamacare, for example, what are you going to think when she also insists that you should get the full course of vaccines for your new baby?
• Even bartenders are smart enough not to engage customers who are ritually complaining about whatever they’re annoyed about. You’re not going to agree with everyone, so a substantive response just risks pissing a lot of people off. That’s dangerous for folks who are drowning their sorrows in alcohol, and probably also dangerous in the inevitably stressful environment of an exam room. Starting fights is a bad thing.

Plus, I suppose that annoying Kevin Drum and Wesley Smith really is also a good reason to avoid this. I’m never all that thrilled to see a doctor, and if I knew I was going to have to put up with even more than just the usual crap about eating better and losing weight (thanks for the tip, doc!), I’d probably be even less likely to see my doctor. That could end up badly. Alternatively, I could make inquiries and choose my doctor on the basis of her political views, but I’m going to guess that this would end badly too.

And it boils down to fuzzy thinking and personal irritation. OK, so Kevin does have a point.

So let’s talk about the duty of doctors, and that’s to encourage wellness. Whether that’s diagnosing disease and prescribing courses of treatment or evaluating the overall health of the human in front of them, that’s the duty they’ve taken on.

On first glance, it may seem like encouraging voting, even in a non-partisan style, might be part of a healthful lifestyle, since it could lead to a better health system, but the problem is that we don’t vote on singular policy proposals and implementations, but rather on collections of same (once upon a time they were called planks in the party platform). Let’s look at history to understand how societal evolution has shaped the role of physicians.

The traditional mode of health care revolves around prescriptions and treatments, with lifestyle changes coming in a little later. These are moderately easy to categorize as mostly non-political choices, medical necessities without which we’re unlikely to heal quickly or at all, although sometimes spontaneous cures of unknown source do occur. When these choices are politicized, usually for quasi-religious reasons (think of Christian Scientists refusing blood transfusions), they are more or less successfully labeled religious kooks for their strongly held views. Given that they often die because of these views, the situation tends to be self-correcting.

However, Dr. Ofri’s proposal strikes me as straying off the golf course into the alligator-infested swamp.

1. As I noted before, we don’t vote on single issues for the most part, and if we do, we’re mostly idiots, whether it’s abortion or gun control or whatever. I issue a limited waiver if you’re voting against Republicans this time around because of the current infestation of idiocy in their party, as I myself have advocated that position.
2. This is not the direct treatment of anything but the financial situation of the patient, and that single vote does nothing. Votes are interesting things, for I contend they are the most important possession of a citizen, yet they’re damn near worthless in use. A doctor who encourages her patient to vote, or all 330 of them to vote, has wasted her time: the numbers required to accomplish anything are in the millions, and not all of them will vote the way you want them to vote. See (1).
3. Now you’ve stressed your patients unnecessarily. And if they’re already ill, that’s definitely not a good thing to do.

So in the end, I’m in the same boat as Smith & Drum, but I lack the pulsing forehead artery and lack of coherent thought of Smith, and Drum just seems a bit dreamy.

If you enjoy being gulled, or

If you enjoy watching the determined virgin being eaten by a monster, or

If you like your monsters to have lecherous faces, or

If you thought The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001) was charming, or

If you think parody paint applied thickly with a palette knife is the bee’s knees, or

If you think watching locally made movies are just another facet of being a locavore, or

If you think – OK, OK, I’ll stop! Put down that pheromone laden butterfly net!

“Wait, what?”

ANYWAYS, answering Yes! (preferably with a soprano shriek) to any two of the above should probably qualify you for watching the made-in-Wisconsin movie The Giant Spider (2017). Starting off like a 1954 monster movie (yep, I was gulled), a horrid spider monster emerges from radioactive caves to harass the local rural population, which cheerfully harasses it right back. But when it begins making meals out of those who choose the freeze & scream option when presented with the fight or flight response, local professors at Phantom Lake University adopt that grim look and help the military and a representative of the free press lure the beastly, furry, cuddly, oh so so cute MAKE IT STOP critter to its inevitably wretched doom.

A new model train engine. Runs on human juices. Quite efficient.

Not entirely watchable if I’m being honest, as some of the parody is on the awkward side, but it lends itself quite well to straight lines and other forms of parody² (which can be read as parody parody, parody parodied, parody squared, square parody, or advanced parody for those aspiring to advanced degrees in parody science). I had to admire the two dudes allowin’ that, yep, that’s a big spider.

I laughed more than once, and the credits were fun, too. Hell, the credit music is still echoing through my head.

And I noticed they even credited a Twin Cities movie theater, The Heights, which makes me wonder why. I used to know the guy who was rehabbing the pipe organ at that venue, but now I can’t even remember his name.

Nothing insightful here, just a sigh of disgust at how an industry that’s already doomed is damning itself in yet another way:

An oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history.

Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century. With no fix in sight, the Taylor offshore spill is threatening to overtake BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever. [WaPo]

Obfuscation, bad estimates, and on top of that it’s a really shitty situation to clean up.

Taylor Energy spent a fortune to pluck the deck of the platform from the ocean and plug about a third of the wells. It built a kind of shield to keep the crude from rising.

But no matter what it did, the oil kept leaking.

And yet the Eastern Seaboard is now under threat for oil development, despite the fact that hurricanes, the downfall of the Taylor Energy platform, hit the Eastern Seaboard twice as often (although, to be honest, I’m not clear on the exact metric in use here – per mile of coastline?).

It’s the sort of thing where you want to say, We need to stop fucking around and move to renewables ‘cuz this’ll never happen with renewables.

And then someone would embarrass me with their own tale of renewables gone bad, and I’d feel awful.

There, done venting.

On Treehugger, Ilana Strauss wonders whether we’re fitting into the Universe – or just pushing everyone else off-stage:

In his books “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” Israeli world history professor Yuval Noah Harari points out that human spiritualism has gone through a series of stages. While humans were hunter-gatherers, people stuck to animism — a belief that humans, animals, plants, rocks and everything else has a soul and is an important player in the grand story of life.

As humans started practicing agriculture, the human world stopped being about animals and become more about humans and their crops. Polytheism and monotheism ushered in an era of humans and gods. Animals were relegated to the sidelines. Now that religion is fading, gods are disappearing too, and humans are alone, kings of an empty castle. Welcome to humanism.

“The world was now a one-man show,” wrote Harari. “Humankind stood alone on an empty stage, talking to itself, negotiating with no one and acquiring enormous powers without any obligations. Having deciphered the mute laws of physics, chemistry and biology, humankind now does with them as it pleases. When an archaic hunter went out to the savannah, he asked the help of the wild bull, and the bull demanded something of the hunter. When an ancient farmer wanted his cows to produce lots of milk, he asked some great heavenly god for help, and the god stipulated his conditions. When the white-coated staff in Nestlé’s Research and Development department want to increase dairy production, they study genetics – and the genes don’t ask for anything in return.”

Here’s my question: If humans think we’re the only relevant things in the universe, what’s to stop us from dehumanizing everyone else?

Generally, a bigger bully.

While I understand Ilana is dismayed by how we treat other species, and I tend to be as well, I’m more than a little wary of her reference to Harari. I cannot help but think of the American Indian’s buffalo runs (a little research suggests that buffalo jump may be the preferred term), in which entire herds of buffalo were guided over cliffs for slaughter. The past was not a Golden Age, and it’s a common error to assign better qualities to more primitive people than they have earned.

It’s worth considering that the difference between today’s people and yesterday’s people lay not in their wisdom or lack thereof, but in their capability for destruction. Even sending a buffalo herd over a cliff doesn’t compare to opening a manufacturing plant with some sort of toxic pollution spewing into a river or lake that your children happen to enjoy using for swimming.

And we can do that with a little simple-minded planning & a bit of trivial construction work.

So the question becomes, if we handed an aboriginal people the same power as we currently possess, would they really be all that much wiser using it?

PS Add overpopulation to the mix as well.

Readers remark on my review of Magellan (2017) and semi-related subjects:

We watched it last night, and mostly liked it. There were a few hard to explain or “buy” actions taken, but mostly it was an interesting movie.

Yes. The focus on a single character, with a couple of foils to keep him going, made it easy to throw up some interesting questions and answers, while highlighting the sacrifices he and his wife (or perhaps just his wife) are making.

Tonight we watched “Cowboys and Aliens” — no kidding. Have you seen this? It’s not nearly as bad as title might suggest. There’s a bit of horror, and bit less of SF thrown in, but mostly it’s action, a western and an episode of the X Files with several kinds of love stories thrown together in a blender, yet somehow still makes for a sensible and entertaining watch.

I saw Cowboys and Aliens (2011) back when it was on the big screen. I believe I remember enjoying it, being a little disappointed in it, but have seen far, far worse.

Another reading comments on Cowboys and Aliens:

Saw it in the theater and loved it. Will have to watch again. I love this type of humor-injected ridiculous adventure film. (See Hercules & Xena)😊

I was a fan of Hercules and Xena way back when. Silly, silly, silly. Watched some of Andromeda Ascendant when Sorbo (Hercules) started up that series.

Of course, if you were a fan of Cleopatra 2525 and have the series on DVD and treasure it, then I know you’re very silly.

I have it on DVD, but I don’t treasure it. Precisely.

On Order From Chaos, Tamara Cofman Wittes pushes back against the attempt to smear the reputation of Jamal Khashoggi, a man who was apparently passionate and followed those passions – but learned from those experience as well. I particularly liked this remark:

Yes, Jamal Khashoggi had many friends among the Muslim Brotherhood and, as his colleague David Ignatius reported days after his disappearance, had joined the movement himself as a young man before apparently shifting away from it later in his career. No one who knew Jamal at all is surprised by these facts, no matter with what lurid framing they are now “revealed.” Whatever sympathies and associations he may have had, they do not change the apparent fact that Jamal Khashoggi was kidnapped, murdered, and dismembered to silence his freedom of expression. Those on the right who have spent decades fighting for free speech on campus will leap to tell you, correctly, that freedom of speech demands respect regardless of the political valance of the views espoused—and that protecting the expression of unpopular views that challenge current political correctness is the acid test for the security of this right overall. So even if you believe that Jamal Khashoggi was a full-bore Brotherhood member with an agenda of Islamization for the Arab world, you should still condem his apparent assassination for the crime of speaking his mind.

It’s important, always important, to use the ideals and arguments of your opponents against them. Not necessarily those being employed against you or someone or something you wish to defend, but those which aspire to the highest moral level.

If you can’t find a way to do that, it’s quite possible their argument is correct; typically, fallacious arguments will involve either bad principles, or contradictions indicating the present argument is really lost to them, if you but persevere in pushing back the fog of fear and confusion such arguments usually employ. The fog is quite common and has been used by both right-wingers and left-wingers over the decades when they face the problem of actually engaging in a clash of ideas, rather than a clash of arms.

In his youth, Mr. Khashoggi may have had sympathies for certain extremist groups. Quite often, extremists group have legitimate grievances (something the “progressive left” needs to learn); the extremism comes in their response, both ideologically and tactically.

But Mr. Khashoggi was now a respected journalist who happened to be criticizing a theocracy whose links to the United States are merely those of utility, not of sentiment or shared political system. Worse yet, he was bringing to light what appears to be subterfuge by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), in which highly autocratic political maneuvers have been cloaked in apparent liberalizations of Saudi society. If reports are to be believed, MBS is attempting sleight of hand in the consolidation of power in preparation for the death of his father, the King.

Here’s the real threat for the Republicans attempting their smear: they may succeed. And then they’ll find themselves allied with a Muslim theocrat who is a hot-head and willing to wage war to enhance his reputation. This is not a desirable alliance for the right-wing. It’ll continue to damage their brand (to use their commercial jargon), disillusioning young voters even more. But … his bags of gold blind them to reality.

This smear campaign is extraordinarily short-sighted, even for the right.

As a software engineer, if there’s one thing I don’t worry about in my finished product, it’s how much energy it’ll use calculating the final result. That is, I take my electricity for granted, as well as my customers’.

And it’s funny, because I’ve been made aware of the fact that our calculations are becoming more and more involved, although not in my area (I’m fairly mundane as far as programmers go). Two examples are climate forecasting and crypto-currency calculations, where both are consuming so much power that it’s becoming a concern for the future.

But once again I’m surprised at the cost of computing, in a schadenfreude sort of way, in this fascinating report by Michael Le Page in NewScientist (13 October 2018, paywall):

It isn’t widely appreciated how incredibly energy hungry AI is. If you ran AlphaGo non-stop for a year, the electricity alone would cost about £6000. That doesn’t matter for one-off events, like an epic Go showdown. But it does matter if billions of people want their smartphones to be truly smart, or have their cars drive themselves.

Many potential uses of AI simply won’t become widespread if they require too much energy. On the flip side, if the uses are so desirable or profitable that people don’t care about the costs, it could lead to a surge in electricity consumption and make it even harder to limit further warming of the planet.

AI consumes so much energy because the technique behind these recent breakthroughs, deep learning, involves performing ever more computations on ever more data. “The models are getting deeper and getting wider, and they use more and more energy to compute,” says Max Welling of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. …

Take self-driving cars. These require all sorts of extra systems, from cameras to radar, that use power and also increase weight and drag, further increasing energy use. But the single largest consumer of energy besides the engine is the processor running the AI.

According to a study out earlier this year, self-driving cars could use up to 20 per cent more energy than conventional cars. That is a big issue for a battery-powered car, limiting its range and increasing running costs. What’s more, the study assumes the AI processor consumes about 200 watts, even though current prototypes consume in excess of 2000 watts.

For taxi companies using AI to directly replace human drivers, the savings in wages would probably far outweigh the higher energy costs. But for ordinary car owners this would be a major issue.

Wow! It brings up a host of questions, doesn’t it? Of course, Le Page notes the industry is frenziedly trying to get around this energy consumption problem through such tricks as reducing precision where it’s not necessary and the invention of dedicated hardware, analogous to GPUs (Graphical Processor Units). I note, purely because I can say something vaguely relevant, this:

There are more revolutionary designs in the works, too. Shunting data back and forth between the memory and processor wastes a great of deal of energy, says [Avishek Biswas of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. So he has developed a chip intended for smartphones that slashes energy use by around 95 per cent by carrying out key operations in the memory itself.

Which triggers a memory in me. Back when I was learning Mythryl and the functional programming paradigm (which is not related to C functions, but rather to the notion of functions in mathematics, meaning the same inputs to a Mythryl function always results in the same outputs, and there are No Side Effects), the late Jeff Prothero (aka Cynbe ru Taren), chief programmer, administrator, flunky, and janitor on the Mythryl project, mentioned to me that thread programming in Mythryl should be, because of the way data is naturally handled in functional programming languages, far, far more efficient than in other computing languages. That’s because it’s all about data labels rather than data variables, so there is no copying global data to and from processors as the data changed. Because it didn’t.

I see no mention in the article about actually using better computing languages. An oversight by the author? Or by the industry?

Anyways, back to my thoughts on the article, as the above was nothing more than a self-important digression on my part. As the article notes, human brains still far out-perform computers per joule consumed:

ARTIFICIAL intelligence breakthroughs have become a regular occurrence in recent years. One of the most impressive achievements so far was in 2016, when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI beat champion Lee Sedol at one of the world’s most complex games, Go.

The feat made headlines around the world as an example of machines besting humans, but in some sense it wasn’t a fair fight. Sedol’s brain would have been consuming around 20 watts of power, with only a fraction of that being used for the game itself. By contrast, AlphaGo was using some 5000 watts.

This suggests one of two possible explanations. First, our artificial-intelligence designs suck. I don’t give a lot of credence to this conclusion, because it’s self-evident that humans come equipped with intelligence-specific hardware, isn’t it? The brain is specifically constructed, in some large fraction, to be intelligent. That it’s evolved rather than designed doesn’t matter; there are areas of the brain dedicated to intelligence. So perhaps, through clever hardware construction, we can build more energy-efficient AI.

But that does lead to an alternative, highly controversial, and not yet supported conclusion:

Only quantum computers can hope to be as efficient as human brains because human brains work using quantum effects.

Yeah, I’m not going to be providing proof for that one. I understand from some pop-sci articles (so take it as you will) there are some high-level scientists who are researching this possibility, and, given the abilities of a biological organ consuming only 20 watts, there is a certain inclination to wonder if this could be true.

But regardless of whether or not it’s true, it’s always hard to say self-driving cars are the future when you realize that there is a surplus of brains, housed in convenient transport modules and equipped with working limbs, that can just drive the bloody things themselves.

Self-driving cars, even if achieved, and contra Kevin Drum, may end up sitting next to the 3-D televisions in the discard bin at Best Buy. The spinoffs of that effort may be more interesting than the final product. We already know how to drive cars.

Just when you thought you could start breathing again, I discovered that I had forgotten to publish THESE pics. So here’s some more pictures from last Sunday’s inch of snow.

The following were taken that same Sunday morning. Someone in the neighborhood likes to do straw animals as an art form. This one’s apparently in need of shelter.

Vox’s Alexia Campbell reports on a couple of organizations which want to continue to use superstition as one of their filters on employees:

Two conservative Christian groups in Texas believe that businesses and employers have the legal right to discriminate against LGBTQ workers on religious grounds, and they’re trying to get the courts to back them up.

The US Pastors Council and Texas Values, two nonprofit evangelical groups, filed multiple lawsuits in state and federal court this week, claiming that Christian businesses and churches have a constitutional right to fire — or not hire — LGBTQ workers.

One lawsuit challenges the federal Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against job candidates and workers based on their religion, sex, gender, and race. Two other lawsuits seek to strike down part of an Austin city ordinance that prohibits employers from discriminating against similar groups, and explicitly includes protections based on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”

In one of the lawsuits filed Saturday against the city of Austin, lawyers for Texas Values said the organization will not comply with the law.

Yes, you, too, can be divisive. Perhaps the Center For Inquiry, an atheist organization if I’m to judge from the mail I receive from them, should protest that it should not be required to hire Christians and other evangelical religious types because it fears that they will attempt to convert their atheist employees to their chosen sects, and that would be against the Center’s code of ethics.

Yeah, I can hear the hypocritical howls from those same organizations from here.

Campbell goes on to note:

The US Pastors Council says Christian employers are allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ workers based on protections in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The federal law, enacted in 1993, sets a high standard for government legislators when writing laws that might burden a person’s right to exercise their religion. The act states that such a law must further a “compelling government interest” and must be tailored to minimize the burden on individual religious practices.

The law has generally been used to analyze other laws that might infringe on an individual’s religious freedom. But in a controversial 2014 ruling, the US Supreme Court extended the protection to Christian-owned corporations. In that case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts superstore chain challenged the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, which required businesses to offer health insurance plans that covered the cost of birth control.

I’ll note in passing that a single-payer health care law would take care of that fairly awful exception to the ACA.

But that’s not really my point. A “high standard” might be enshrined in law, but, in view of my post on how society appears to be breaking up, I’d like to suggest that Texas Values and the US Pastors Council are contributing to that very breakdown in American society of which Senator Sasse (R-NE) writes. They may think it’s effective to “hate the sin, not the sinner,” but by rejecting the “sinner” who has done nothing wrong but find their own gender more attractive, they are damaging that person on an individual level, and sending a message to other persons of that class that they are not valuable parts of society.

Perhaps in other countries it’s traditional to suppress those minorities which are troublesome, but this is America, where the European invaders who settled here while and after hating the American Indian virtually out of existence, had to learn to do better, first with their fellows from other European countries, and then from China and other non-European countries. Many of those met initial hostility and xenophobia, but eventually – usually with some sharp raps across the knuckles of the “natives” (cough) – they were accepted, and now heritage is merely a matter of curiosity.

And it’s this tolerance and recognition of the trivialities of differences which has helped to make America great. By disrespecting this tradition, they disrespect a great American tradition.

These two groups may be merely trying to follow the supposed precepts of their faith traditions, irrational as they may seem to be. Or there may be a darker undercurrent going on, because it’s fairly well known that, by emphasizing some group as being adversarial or, better yet, theologically repugnant, it is easier to focus the members of the group on the group’s agenda and to be successful carriers of it. So you tell them that the Bible frowns on the LGBTQ (did I miss any letters?) community, that God hates them, and to associate with them is to be tainted by their sins.

What better way to feel superior than have God on your side?

Of course, I’d never dream of suggesting Jesus never hated oppressed minority groups. (Ooops!) Or that Jesus’ message was more or less just Love thy neighbor! (Ooops! Just slipped out. Won’t happen again.)

Even this simple-minded agnostic devotee to straight-thinking knows that much. Maybe this Pastors Council should go back and read their Bibles again. Or wait for Jesus to appear to them while they’re laying hands and praying over D. J. Trump hisself.

Or perhaps return to the rationality on which the United States truly functions and try to figure out if there’s any rational reason to reject LGBTQ folks, and, if they discover that they can’t find any such, welcome them with open arms.

That’d be more in line with proper spirituality.

So to reconnect with the title of this post, I think any rational court would laugh these lawsuits out of court on the simple observation that a divided, embittered society is not a desirable end state in the eyes of government. Stop sowing hatred, folks, or get out of the country.

Sanguinivorous:

1. Subsisting on a diet of blood. [Wiktionary]

Sanguinivore heard on the Vampires episode of Monster Science two nights ago.

Yeah, I’m disappointed, too, at the loss of the presagement of snow shoveling. So here’s a couple of pictures from a couple of months ago – the height of summer:

Almost abstract in result. I’ve already forgotten the actual subjects.

NOTE: I’m not an investment advisor, I am neither trained, licensed, nor bonded, and this is not specific investment advice, simply some observations after, oh, 30 years of investing in individual stocks. Think about how much you’re paying to read this and respect it accordingly. -Hue

If you’re new to investing in publicly traded companies, there can be a lot of baffling choices to make: go with mutual funds? Play the stocks like horses, resulting in many trades? Learn all about technical trading, wherein a stock’s past pricing patterns guide the decisions of the investor?

If you’re not going into technical trading, there come questions of interpreting a company’s financial results, operations, and market, and here it’s important to not let yourself be led around by the nose. Much is made about companies making their quarterly numbers, which usually means a bunch of business analysts make public their expectations, someone else averages them, and that’s the “market’s expectation.” But what do they know? They’re not sitting in on company strategy meetings, or anything else – they operate on the same information which is available to you. They are paid to take the time to read it and evaluate it, which you may not be able to do so.

And while companies are required to make public their quarterly results, they’re not required to make public their own expectations, although if they do so they’d better be honest about them, or a trigger-happy lawyer is likely to open up the next class-action lawsuit on them.

Worse yet, quarterly results are the hurdle most investors watch closely, even the mutual managers. If a “stumble” occurs and a company doesn’t make its numbers, what happens? The stock price tumbles and you’re a “victim.” You didn’t see it coming and you “lost” money.

But if you’re a properly skeptical & mature investor, your hackles should be rising at my repeated use of the word quarterly. Why should this be an important word to you? If you’re an owner of the company, rather than a trader of bits of paper, then the answer is that it’s not a primary information for you. If you find this a little puzzling, let me direct you to this article by Roger Lowenstein in WaPo, where he tells a small but pivotal part of the baffling story of struggling industrial giant General Electric:

The 126-year-old General Electric was once a company your grandparents knew; it made lightbulbs, consumer appliances and plastics.

In the 1980s and ’90s, a CEO named Jack Welch expanded into broadcast, defense electronics and financial services. Welch was fawned over by security analysts for seemingly making his numbers every quarter. He was lauded for managing earnings, a euphemism for gaming the numbers so he could hit performance targets.

Welch retired wealthy. But it turned out that pursuing a series of short-term managerial goals was not a ticket to enduring prosperity for GE. In finance in particular, quarterly results bore little relation to the long tails of liability or to the intrinsic value of the underlying assets.

Welch’s successor, Jeffrey R. Immelt, was left to clean up the mess. Immelt frenetically traded businesses, doubling down on fossil fuels, selling NBC, buying and later selling water filtration, getting into a predictive (and risky) health-care venture, and dumping most of GE’s assets in finance.

The old businesses were always one that didn’t fit. The new ones all had great potential and fit some strategic plan. Along the way, GE promised that Immelt would be paid only for performance — as shareholders prospered, too.

What GE really did was reward Immelt for a series of near-term goals without respect to whether GE’s value increased in the long run. Which it didn’t.

A year ago, Immelt was retired ahead of schedule. During his 16 years, GE shares (including dividends) returned a pitiable 1 percent annually, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 7 percent a year.

While compiling that abysmal record, Immelt collected hundreds of millions of dollars — $91 million in 2014-2016 alone. He exited with deferred shares and benefits worth an estimated $100 million, to help with the rent I guess.

It’s a good article for the new investor who distrusts mutual funds and technical trading, and therefore is faced with the substantial task of evaluating companies, because it’s contrarian – it always sounds good when a board says their new CEO will have his pay tied to meeting performance goals, but out in the real world this phrase is often code for Hit those short-term goals and don’t worry about long-term goals, we’re all here for the quick buck.

It is, in fact, another form of the infamous Pump ‘n dump stock trading scheme in which a company with little to no prospects is talked up by “analysts” who often have little or no training or experience, but merely sell their names and media mechanisms to the company that wants to be pumped. Via these analysts, the company acquires a reputation for having the Next Big Thing, the stock price zooms, and the pumpers who bought the stock before the pumping began sell out at the zenith, leaving the suckers naive investors holding worthless bits of paper. In this form, the companies are not worthless, but the long-term viability of the companies are jeopardized by executives whose pay is tied to short-term goals, rather than long-term goals.

For the short-term investor, who plans to hold stocks for no more than a few months to a year, this may not actually be a problem if they can find a way to recognize these companies before they experience their short-term jump in price. Get in at the right time, catch the pop, sell out. It’s investment fast food, not as awful as the speed traders who are busy raping each other by measuring their trading speed in microseconds (let’s call that sugar is my primary nutrient trading), but still short term investors are not a particularly healthy ownership model.

But the long-term investor, who hopes to find companies such as Berkshire-Hathaway or Amazon and hold on to them for twenty or thirty years, this is the central problem they have to solve. Are the senior leaders appropriately incentivized? This is probably the primary reason Motley Fool founders Tom & David Gardner tend to put a lot of faith in those companies in which the founders are still heavily involved in the leadership roles and have a substantial ownership stake. While there’s definitely a financial incentive, to my mind there’s going to be a reputational incentive as well, which is to say, I created this, I want it to succeed! Whether it’s a startup trying to build an AI to solve a difficult problem, or a janitorial services corporation, company founders more often than not regard their companies as their babies and want to see them succeed in the long-term. While there are no guarantees, at least their motivations are congruent with the long-term investors’ goals.

Quarterly results are of interest to the long-term investor who wishes to own more stock of some company, but feels the company is currently over-priced. A poor quarter, the naive short-termers and speed traders get out, the price drops 5-10%, and now maybe the long term investor has an opportunity to pick up some cheap stock in a favored company.

But using quarterly results to evaluate the long-term potential of a company is a tricky business, because the focus is often purely on profit & loss, and less on market penetration, the societal good the company’s product might engender, or whatever else is considered important by the investor. Those evaluations often come from somewhere else than quarterly results.

My reader continues the dialog on mid-term early voting:

Photo supplied by correspondent.

I’m sure I come off paranoid, but consider my community: wealthy, conservative, red. “Home of Denny Hastert.” Folks have been demanded of a photo ID to vote, and turned way if they lacked one. We also made front page of the Tribune with the attached photo of a beloved citizen. Go ahead. Call me paranoid.

Given the straits of minority voters in Georgia, my reader may have justified paranoia. And then there’s this new CNN article, also concerning Georgia:

One suburban Georgia county has become a flashpoint for concerns over voter suppression for rejecting hundreds of mail-in absentee ballots weeks before Election Day.

Gwinnett County, located northeast of Atlanta, now faces two federal lawsuits and accusations from voting rights activists who say the rejections disproportionately affect minority voters, particularly Asian Americans and African Americans.

The county has rejected 595 absentee ballots, which account for more than a third of the total absentee-ballot rejections in the state, even though Gwinnett County accounts for only about 6% of absentee ballots submitted in Georgia, according to state data analyzed by CNN Friday. More than 300 of the rejected ballots belonged to African Americans and Asian Americans.

Officials tossed out the ballots due to missing birthdates, address discrepancies, signatures that do not match those on registration records and other issues, according to the data.

I’m particularly appalled at the signature matching requirement.

1. It’s entirely a subjective judgment. The State already has required a match on addresses with no regard for human frailties and mistakes. Now they turn around and, using a judgment that’s entirely subjective, they want another match.Well, I’ll tell you what, if I was subject to that requirement, I WOULD FAIL. I’ve always noticed that my signature varies wildly from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. I don’t have that perfect signature, that perfect cursive form^[1]. A “handwriting expert,” which I tend to categorize along with astrologers and phrenologists, would laugh if he saw all my signatures, and write me off as MPD.
2. Mistake free identification. The purpose of signatures is not an early form of biometric identification, despite many attempts to use it as such (see previous point). The purpose is to have someone explicitly agree to a statement of fact. It becomes a legally binding document, especially when witnessed, such as by a voting judge. In the event, someone may be asked if they signed a document, and be shown the signature, but this is not biometrics; it’s a statement of legal fact by a person.

I think the ACLU should be bringing suit against Gwinnett County on an emergency basis on at least the signature requirement basis, if not all of it. If a judge agrees that the signature judging requirement is illegal, then all those ballots should be returned to the valid pool. I do see the Coalition for Good Governance is bringing a lawsuit. I really should finish these articles, as I see the ACLU has brought suit.

And if the County pleads that they didn’t keep track of why they invalided ballots, then they are ALL returned to the valid pool on a permanent basis. Sometime you need to wallop folks upside the head with a law volume. It does appear that they do track that, so there will be no whacking.

And now on to the reader-supplied appalling photograph. That’s the sort of pic which I hope is a joke, but given the grim look that woman’s face as she executes Nazi-like salute, she’s either a great actor – or quite resolutely anti-American. It’s an upsetting picture of someone terrified her society is going to hell and she’s all set to jump into a different Circle Of Hell, instead.

Here’s a message for her:

Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t. Kiss El Diablo for me, baby.

¹ Hell, I think the only reason I passed the handwriting portion of my schoolwork is my Mom went into the school and begged them to pass me! (I joke.) (She did require me to practice handwriting over summer vacation.) (I refused.) (That turned into a war.)

I tend to agree with Steve Benen and others that, while Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) can sure talk purty, when it comes to the actual voting, he’s no better than his Republican brethren, and given how the Republican Party has sped to the right in the last couple of decades[1], that’s saying something. Perhaps, though, I’m unfair, as his FiveThirtyEight-supplied Trump score as of this writing is only 87.2%.

But he is sensible enough to write up a useful op-ed column for WaPo warning about a subject already covered on this blog – deepfakes. This undetectable doctoring of pictures and videos may result in the complete collapse of the industry, or some sort of technical solution – I don’t know.

Along the way, Sasse brings up an exacerbating factor:

We are so domestically divided right now, about who we are and what we hold in common, that malevolent foreign actors can pick at dozens of scabs as they seek to weaken us. In many of the current domestic flash points — over guns and geography, race and gender, religion and institutions — the nation’s cultural, political and even economic leaders often seem more interested in fomenting discord than in rallying us around a shared battle plan.

I completely agree, but he’s put it so baldly that I thought about President Trump’s eagerness to terminate the Mueller investigation, and suddenly wondered…

Are we the victims of one of the longest-running, subtle, and grandest foreign societal influence schemes ever put together?

Sasse hints at it a little later, and probably unconsciously:

We can work hard to roll back the distrust of our opponents that makes us more susceptible to the effects of disinformation. Rising political tribalism, shamelessly exaggerating our opponents’ claims or behavior, is leaving us vulnerable: No one loves America’s internal fighting — and our increasingly siloed news consumption — more than Vladimir Putin.

Sasse doesn’t connect the dots, but I will: what if our societal uproar has actually been the result of Russian meddling? Robert Mueller’s indictment of the Internet Research Agency certainly hints at Russian aims. OK, it’s not a hint, it’s a fucking banner towed behind the Cessna passing overhead as you read this post.

It’s blatant.

But what if that’s just a small part of a scheme of ol’ Vlad to retain power and punish the United States, which is, after all, responsible for the destruction of the Soviet Union? Comrade Putin was a KGB Agent – revenge is not out of the question.

That opens up the subject of how? Influencing American society requires people with strong, undiluted messages to come to the fore, because a lot of Americans respect strong messages that lack nuance. Then those people take control of organizations to use for their planned goals. If Mueller is uncovering such schemes, then we should expect those personalities to begin drifting away, dropping out of sight, that sort of thing, as their Russian handlers get word of their schemes being investigated. On the left, that might include key influential academics who have discredited the reputation of the left through radical pronouncements and proposals. I’m not familiar enough with the left to name names, which may be fortunate for me.

On the right? Sharpening division requires the activation of System 1 thinking, and that’s certainly been a salient feature in the messages of many right wing leaders, both sectarian and secular. Voices from the National Rifle Association (NRA) certainly come to mind, as do the more extreme religious leaders, particularly those who’ve hopped up and down on the issue of abortion so many times that they no longer have ankles. This post from Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Poza concerning a program at the Heritage Foundation is also of interest, although I always have to consider the source when it’s the The Daily Kos.

So as Mueller continues to hint at an upcoming report release, we might expect to see a few people disappear. I don’t know if disappear means turn up dead or turn up in Moscow. Just think of it as getting out of reach of the enraged.

¹ Which brings to mind President Reagan’s comment on his former membership in the Democratic Party:

“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”

Which, when you think about it, should have given the Republican Party more than a little pause.

With regard to the best response to the Khashoggi now-admitted murder, I advocated the extreme response of demanding those responsible, and those who conspired to do so, be delivered to Turkey for trial. I have my doubts that’ll happen.

However, I forgot one important point. When it comes to Princes eligible for the throne, those of us in the West are not accustomed to a large selection. Two, maybe three princes or even princesses, but inevitably, like bad produce, one will have worms be crazy as a loon. But when it comes to the House of Saud?

The family is estimated to comprise 15,000 members, but the majority of the power and wealth is possessed by a group of about 2,000 of them. [Wikipedia]

Not all of those 2,000 will be eligible for the throne, but a sizable chunk will be. And while I know there are rules of succession and a council of Saudi princes who are supposed to select successors, it’s a monarchy. The King gets what he wants.

And if he has a lot of princes to choose from and a sense of responsibility towards the future of his kingdom, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), thought to be responsible for this plot, may find his head on the chopping block, metaphorically or literally, even though MBS is the son of King Salman. There are lots of potential successors, and King Salman may regard MBS’ performance as Crown Prince as an audition of sorts. And, along with the failing war in Yemen, this may be viewed as a failure.

My advice to President Trump? Go all in on demanding justice. You are, after all, in a role where you are to advocate for justice, not to protect economic advantage at all costs. There are reports that MBS is sacrificing aides and allies to divert responsibility, so he may be wobbly, giving the King the option of sacrificing the Crown Prince.

That would leave both the King and Trump smelling damn good, and that’s what Trump desperately needs – a good point with the independents with elections coming up.

But we know he won’t. He’s cunning, but not bright.

And that’s my thought of the day.

In response to my FB post announcing that I have already voted in the midterm elections, a reader writes:

I refuse! Earlier voters in my county found that, when they went to enter their ballot in the machine, it didn’t work. “The State sent us the wrong software.” Riiiiiiight….I’m waiting til November. So they can also tell me I need a photo ID. Please. Tell me.

The process for Minnesota early voting was simple: fill out an application, show them a driver’s license or other form of identification. They give you a ballot, you fill it out with your choices, put it in an envelope, put that in another envelope, and dump it in the box. The counting will occur at a later date.

The only computer involved was the one verifying we live in Ramsey County.

All that said, it’s regrettable that our country has polarized so much that what might otherwise be a simple, honest mistake has been transformed into a grim suspicion of incompetence or malevolence. Examples include my own writing with regard to Secretary of State Kris Kobach of Kansas and SoS Brian Kemp of Florida, candidates for governor of their respective states.

If & when the Republican Party is burned to the ground, metaphorically speaking, and rebuilt, hopefully honor will be part of the foundation of that new Party, along with a commitment to truth.

A few days ago Katrina vanden Heuvel asked an important question in WaPo:

Why isn’t the media covering climate change all day, every day?

She ventured a few of the standard answers:

So why isn’t the media covering this story all day, every day? There are several reasons, including the collapse of local daily newspapers and excessive conglomeratization. But the biggest reason right now is distraction. As [Margaret] Sullivan put it, “There is just so much happening at every moment, so many trees to distract from the burning forest behind them.”

And the Internet is the primary contributor to this. As the cost of disseminating information, true or false, has fallen, we’ve been inundated by the stuff. It’s like the locusts, not only in numbers, but even in their operationality. In case my reader didn’t know, locust swarms are about as you’d expect from the phrase, but the reason that they move en masse isn’t that they’re looking for something to eat so much as they’re trying to avoid being eaten. One locust will happily make a meal out of another, given the opportunity, so they’re all on the march in order to stay out of the maw of their cousin. Similarly, news comes fast and furious because each is pushing the others out of the way to get your attention.

Worse yet, the outlets have become ubiquitous. I don’t use “outlet” in the traditional meaning, such as a newspaper office, but, to select a concrete example, a device. It used to be that all the news was word of mouth; then came the printing presses, which permitted the creation of newspapers, dedicated, ideally, to the collection and dissemination of local news. The discovery and mastery of radio waves permitted their use as a new medium, and that led to its cousin, TV stations and televisions.

Now it’s the Internet age, and that 50 pound device sitting in the corner of the living room is now a 5 ounce smartphone in your pocket. Turn it on and it will ceaselessly blare “news” at you until your eyes cross and you get the jitters.

Literally. Metaphorically, literally.

As Andrew Sullivan has noted on several occasions, this may be the greatest damage the Web has inflicted on the United States, the near costlessness of information transfer cheapening and even blurring the information until we can’t truly evaluate whether information is true or false, trivial or monumental.

Speaking of, back to climate change. Heuvel (and her colleague Margaret Sullivan) want climate change to be on the front page of WaPo every day, but …

The corporate media seems to prefer distractions and even capitalizes on them. At least, that’s what veteran journalist Ted Koppel suggested in a recent conversation with CNN’s Brian Stelter. “CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump,” Koppel said.

Stelter rebutted later in a tweet that the cable news business is “more complex than he makes it seem.”

Is it? In corporate media, ratings are prized above all else. So, the president gets his reality show because scandal plays better — and pays better — than substance. Then-CBS chief executive Les Moonves admitted as much in 2016 when he said that Trump’s political ascent was “damn good for CBS” and bragged that “the money’s rolling in.”

Which is a fantastic affirmation of two things. First, it marks President Trump’s instincts concerning the news media and his election leading to great profits as being top-tier^[1], although some may argue this was obvious.

Second, it’s an affirmation of an observation and argument I’ve been developing and making for years, namely the transfer of processes and goals from one societal sector to another results in sub-optimal results, see here for more details. In this case, Heuvel and Sullivan would argue that the news media is not giving sufficient coverage to literally the most important topic in the world, climate change, while Moonves provides the description of the private sector process which motivates coverage selection and results in a sub-optimal selection.

Enough chest-thumping.

However, it would not be intellectually thorough to stop here. In this specific situation, it’s worth noting that the participation of the concerned individual common citizen or corporate entity, uncoordinated and possibly burdened with information of dubious quality, will be hesitant and possibly wrong. We’re facing a situation that, despite the Pentagon labeling it as a national security threat,

… has been described as a “catastrophe in slow motion.”

That is, it’s subtle, difficult to understand, and is larger than us.

That means we need the Federal government involved in a leadership position. EPA scientists have already sounded the alarm, in concert with scientists world-wide, fulfilling a critical function of government in detecting future disasters. But the balance of our government, with the exception of our vigilant military, is shirking its duty with respect to climate change. Elected officials run about with their hands over their eyes, shrieking No! No! No!

And this is where the dominance of the Trump Administration in the news cycle comes in. Through the constant drumbeat of negative results from the Administration and a GOP-dominated Congress across a spectrum of subjects, we’re becoming more and more aware of the necessity of replacing them. Clearly, the GOP has already rejected the science behind climate change, and so the paradigm behind putting climate change on the front page of all major newspapers every day is invalid – the responsible leaders^[2] have already demonstrated their ideological loyalty to the “talking point” that climate change is a hoax.

The dominance of brand-destroying news from the White House and Congress should, in an ideal world dominated by honest news services, result in the expulsion from their positions and disgrace of every elected member of government who engaged in these activities which has enabled a national security threat. Today? That’s where the rubber will hit the road. Will the conservative news outlets, convinced that climate change is nothing more than a liberal hoax, win their propaganda war and retain enough of Congress to continue to forestall action on this very difficult and existential problem? Or will their base, which is just beginning to be chastened by physical evidence of climate change that smacked them in the nose, begin discarding those news sources that continue their allegiance to ideology over reality, and return to questions of news quality as their standard for selecting news sources, rather than the intellectually inferior method of merely finding a source that suits their predilections?

Or, in other words, if your news source isn’t making you uncomfortable, maybe you need a different news source.

So, in answer to Heuvel and Sullivan, the dominance of news other than that covering climate change isn’t an unalloyed negative; it is, instead, a necessity if we are to address climate change effectively. It may feel like the old observation concerning democracy,

The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.^[3]

It’ll leave us more badly damaged than if we had acted wisely in the first place, but if we measure up to being the best Americans we can, every one of us, then we’ll find a way to get through this.

¹ I may consider Trump’s Presidency as one of the greatest incompetencies and calamities to ever grace the United States, but underestimating the true competencies, if any, of an opponent or adversary is the mark of the amateur buffoon.

² That is, those leaders who will be held responsible when all is said and done.

³ Legend gives credit to the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but apparently this is not true.

Antefix:

From the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal Volume 24 / 1996

A painted terracotta antefix, a covering at the end of a building for the joints of a tiled roof, once decorated the shrine of Mater Matuta [in the ancient Italian town of Satricum]. [Noted in “All Roads, Eventually, Lead to Rome,” Roger Atwood, Archaeology (November/December 2018, print only).]

The provided image is not from the magazine article, but appears to be the same artifact as pictured in the magazine.

When glaciers are old hat.

You just know that someone, somewhere, will try to turn this into the world’s biggest musical instrument.

Gotta wonder about this plan:

Southwestern China’s city of Chengdu plans to launch its illumination satellite, also known as the “artificial moon”, in 2020, according to Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co., Ltd.

Wu made the remarks at a national mass innovation and entrepreneurship activity held in Chengdu on Oct. 10.

The illumination satellite is designed to complement the moon at night. Wu introduced that the brightness of the “artificial moon” is eight times that of the real moon, and will be bright enough to replace street lights. [People’s Daily]

First thing that came to mind was to wonder if Chengdu is on the equator, but that’s not really necessary. A geostationary orbit should be possible so that the artificial object appears over the Chengdu at night and disappears over the horizon during the day. It might appear over Korea on its way to and back from the Indian Ocean, if my informal understanding of orbital mechanics is sound.

So it’s possible.

But why would you want to inflict so much more light on the city? People need periods of dark and light, our bodies evolved to expect it. Is Wu planning to force everyone out of the city? Maybe someone needs to show some ego?

It just seems weird.