Monthly Archives: October 2018

Shooting moles suggests a dull life, no?

Crooked House (2017), a BBC production of an Agatha Christie novel of the same name, is an exploration of how the combination of extraordinary wealth and a domineering personality, the latter from someone we see only in brief flashbacks, can combine to overwhelm standard morality and produce offspring who view morality as a barrier to their acquisition of anything they want. It is, in fact, a condemnation of the old maxim The end justifies the means.

Murder is the mechanism through which we’re introduced to these offspring. Aristides Leonides may have been a midget, or so we infer from the remarks, but coming to England virtually penniless didn’t stop him from becoming one of the moneyed elite and marrying a beautiful woman. He had children with her, then she passed away, and, now elderly, he remarries, leading to children and grandchildren living in the same magnificent estate; even his first wife’s sister lives there.

But now he’s dead, his insulin replaced by his glaucoma medicine, resulting in it being injected, possibly accidentally, into him by his young wife. His youngest daughter has brought in the son of a Scotland Yard legend that she met in Cairo to help find the murderer, and soon everyone but the family dogs are suspects.

But the murder is almost incidental, because the real horrific aspect are the behaviors of everyone in the house. The nanny and the tutor may be the most normal, one indulging a memorable taste for hot chocolate, while the other cavorts with the old man’s wife – with, it’s rumored, his approval. But the eldest son, quite embittered at his father and, by extension, himself, and his wife indulge in, well, indulgent art and gambling, while the second son runs one of the family businesses – into the ground. His wife works on levering him out of the family, and by that measure may be the most normal of all.

And the grandchildren are the most alien. While their parents long for normalcy, forever denied them by their father, they embrace their strangely non-empathic lives, engaged in discovering what they want, and then pursuing it with little regard for decency. Only their youth and hormones are preventing their morphing into monsters.

Into this strides our detective, the aforementioned son of the Scotland Yard legend, and he’s got a good bit of lust going for his employer, the youngest daughter of the murdered man. Her demons are a little more elusive than her brothers’: a detachment from the emotions of the day, a willingness to play with the men in her life with no inclination to fully commit, leaving broken hulks in her wake. For the young private investigator, she’s both a distraction and a suspect.

But when an unexpected Last Will and Testament appears, granting the same daughter the bulk of his estate, the story accelerates out of control. She reveals she was being trained by her father to take over the family fortune, and that some of that training is the use of ruthlessness. But, for all that, when someone’s confession – or exultation – of murder appears, she is still stricken in grief as two members of the family find their doom.

One to protect the family by killing the other.

This story has plenty of twists and turns, although sometimes I felt I needed a scorecard to keep track of it all. But it was fun. And I watched it late enough at night that I had some associated nightmares.

Which says something, I suppose.

Hormesis:

Hormesis is a term used by toxicologists to refer to a biphasic dose-response to an environmental agent characterized by a low dose stimulation or beneficial effect and a high dose inhibitory or toxic effect. In the fields of biology and medicine hormesis is defined as an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a moderate (usually intermittent) stress. Examples include ischemic preconditioning, exercise, dietary energy restriction and exposures to low doses of certain phytochemicals. Recent findings have elucidated the cellular signaling pathways and molecular mechanisms that mediate hormetic responses which typically involve enzymes such as kinases and deacetylases, and transcription factors such as Nrf-2 and NF-kappaB. As a result, cells increase their production of cytoprotective and restorative proteins including growth factors, phase 2 and antioxidant enzymes, and protein chaperones. A better understanding of hormesis mechanisms at the cellular and molecular levels is leading to and to novel approaches for the prevention and treatment of many different diseases. [PubMed.gov]

Noted in “Is a Little Radiation Good For You? Trump Admin Steps Into Shaky Science,” Nathaniel Scharping, The Crux:

This week, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration may be reconsidering that. The Environmental Protection Agency seemed to be looking at raising the levels of radiation considered dangerous to humans based on a controversial theory rejected by mainstream scientists. The theory suggests that a little radiation might actually be good for our bodies. In April, an EPA press release announced the proposal and included supporting comments from a vocal proponent of the hypothesis, known as hormesis. It prompted critical opinion pieces and sparked worry among radiation safety advocates.

I love stories that concern Nature’s infrastructure. Yes, yes, imputing human engineering and motives to a life form fairly alien to us is an intellectual error, but there it is: not a dying salmon, flopping around on a cold Alaskan beach, but one of those silly koi, wandering about its tank, serene or bored – I can’t tell.

Anyways, Katherine Martinko of Treehugger has gathered up just such a story:

These busy filter-feeders clean the water, attract biodiversity, and offer protection from storms.

When English explorer Henry Hudson sailed into New York City harbor in 1609, there were oysters everywhere. Accounts say he had to navigate carefully to avoid running into some 220,000 acres of oyster reefs. Fast forward 400 years and most of these oysters are gone, their population decimated by polluted water.

One group of citizens, however, is on a mission to restore the harbor’s oysters to at least a shade of their former glory. The Billion Oyster Project grows baby oysters and replants them on the bottom of the Hudson River in order to kickstart a rejuvenation of the ecosystem. So far the group has planted 28 million pounds of oysters across nine reefs and the water quality is measurably improved.

It’s the fascination with evolution that it generates, not a system on a knife-edge, but one that has built-in correction mechanisms. The idea that we recognize this mechanism and can use it to clean a polluted area, with very little damage, if any, to other areas, delights my sense of how to solve problems.

I remember having the same sense of wonder and delight when I heard of mycoremediation, the use of mushrooms to remove poisons from the soil. A well designed program which can be enhanced with ease can induce something like the same feeling, but Nature is better at it.

Most readers may not be aware of it, but Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the supposed billionaire Cabinet member who may have lied through his teeth about his personal wealth^[1], has been ordered to testify concerning the addition of citizenship question to the next Census form. This question has been controversial because it’s thought this will frighten many immigrants, legal or not, into not answering the call of the Census, thus lowering resident counts and reducing how many Representatives are allocated to areas that traditionally vote Democratic. The order comes because it’s thought, by some, that Ross may have previously lied to Congress.

The Administration has been fighting this order, and now Steve Benen reports that soon SCOTUS will be taking up the issue.

Yeah, that SCOTUS. The one with the newly confirmed Justice Kavanaugh.

I think this should be an early indicator of Kavanaugh’s attitude towards the Executive Branch. If he votes that Ross is under no obligation to testify, it’ll indicate that he’s quite supine towards his President. (Yep, I used that phraseology entirely on purpose.)

His problem may be his fellow conservatives. I don’t know much about how ideology will play into this decision, so – and maybe I’m the only one ignorant enough to be so – I’m on pins and needles. If it goes 8-1 against him, he’ll just look worse.

But my wild-eyed guess is that it’ll be a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice Roberts, ever mindful of the legitimacy of the Court, as well as his own legacy, siding with the liberal wing of the Court, requiring Ross to testify.

¹ An issue that has never had much importance for me, and, as I age, becomes even less and less important. The multitudinous ways to accumulate wealth, many dishonorable or, at best, technically permitted by an ill-designed economic system, make wealth an exceptionally poor proxy for the measure of a person.

A coal chute, we think, at a semi-estate sale in Minneapolis last week:

They came out better than I expected.

From JAAD Case Reports:

The above-referenced article has been voluntarily retracted by the authors who subsequent to publication learned that the patient was taking the medication Ustekinumab at the time of the eruption and not Secukinumab.

Ummm, volcanic? I don’t think I’ll be taking Ustekinumab.

Jamal Kashoggi

Beyond the sad tragedy of the disappearance and probable murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey lies a maze of international responses which should reflect our Western moral system, but more probably will reflect our energy interests in the big, oil-fueled theocracy of the Middle East. The general picture at the moment has Khashoggi entering the consulate in order to get pick up a piece of paper which would enable him to marry his fiancee, a Turkish woman, where he was set upon and killed by a team of Saudis. Some speculation has it that it was to be punishment for his criticisms of the relatively young Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (usually known as MBS).

I’ve remarked on MBS before, in connection with his increasing control of the kingdom, and his responsibility for the Saudis’ problems in Yemen. He appears to be foolishly ambitious, at least from half a world away. It’s easy to see a rising panic on his part, as his clampdown on leading businessmen and members of his own extended family generates unexpected backlash, the Yemeni war grinds on endlessly, absorbing precious resources, and the King is known to be afflicted with dementia of some sort. MBS may see the criticisms of a journalist as threatening to an overblown ego, or even part of an existential threat. And keep in mind that Saudi Crown Princes can be changed at the whim of the King. MBS himself displaced a former Crown Prince.

My point up to now is that it’s entirely credible that MBS is ultimately responsible for whatever happened to Khashoggi. So what is to be done, and by whom?

The Turks are not happy, but they’re in a bit of a bind, seeing as their own military was depleted by the putsch following the failed military coup of a few years ago, and the economy’s not doing particularly well. Nor is Turkey an economic powerhouse that can punish the Saudis with much hope of a positive result.

But they may have hopes for the United States, and I noticed that CNN is reporting that an American pastor who’d been held on charges of complicity in that failed coup. Given that Turkey had been intransigent on this issue, it’s interesting that suddenly the pastor has been released. Could the Turks be looking to link their capitulation on this issue with American backing on the Kashoggi murder?

President Trump has reportedly not been responding quickly to Kashoggi’s disappearance, but he’s at least addressed it, with an expected slant to it here:

Q You mean sanctions in that case? You oppose sanctions against Saudi Arabia?

THE PRESIDENT: I oppose — I would not be in favor of stopping a country from spending $110 billion — which is an all-time record — and letting Russia have that money and letting China have that money. Because all they’re going to do is say, “That’s okay. We don’t have to buy it from Boeing. We don’t have to buy it from Lockheed. We don’t have to buy it from Raytheon and all these great companies. We’ll buy it from Russia. We’ll but it from China.”

Money, money, money. That, I think, encapsulates his typically short-sighted approach to foreign relations – let the money flow and don’t worry about what MBS might do, thus encouraged, in the future. And that’s the sticking point, isn’t it? If MBS isn’t punished for this transgression, who might be the next annoying person to be killed as if it were a normal part of doing business?

That sounds like the Soviets, doesn’t it?

And it’s not just MBS, either. Any thin-skinned strongman, or a would-be strongman in a precarious position, will see MBS getting away with murder and figure he can indulge in it for political reasons as well.

Trump observed that Kashoggi, while U.S. based, isn’t an American citizen, and I suspect he’s using that as an excuse. That’s likely to lead to bad consequences.

For my part, I’d prefer a cleaner response, one modeled on the Western response to the Lockerbie bombing. That is, if it is determined the Saudis are almost certainly responsible, demand the Saudis hand over those responsible, and specify that all conspirators be included.

And if that includes MBS, so be it. Let King Salman decide if he’s more interested in keeping his allegedly murderous Crown Prince around, or keeping good relations with the United States. Even if he decides to not deliver MBS, MBS may be removed from the Crown Prince position for incompetence.

And make it clear that if King Salman declines, then we’ll decline implementing any further arms shipments to him, and we’ll begin investigating how to stop all oil shipments from Saudi Arabia.

We really should not reward murderous autocrats, which appears to be a tool MBS wants to use to further his ambitions. It would be much the same as cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face: blood everywhere, people repulsed and pitying, and all that money would have to be shoved up the nasal passageway to stop the bleeding.

Someone should inform Trump that standing firm on moral grounds has more potential for profit than just running frantically after money. After all, turning the world into a shooting gallery may be profitable for the shooters, but not so good for the targets.

My Arts Editor responds to the gene drive report:

Yes, repercussions if they start sequencing human genes. But much more serious: there would be grave repercussions to the eco system if we, in our infinite wisdom, decide to eradicate entire species that we deem inimical to human life. Visit genocide on the mosquito and the fish, birds and bats that eat them also die, then the larger predators and environments that those species influence are affected, and so on. Just because you CAN do something to achieve a short-term benefit doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Humans have a remarkable myopia when it comes to playing God.

Much like my own concerns about disturbing the energy profile of the Earth, even through green systems such as wind farms and the like. Disturbances to such non-linear systems are difficult to impossible to predict, so, like my Arts Editor, I find the invention of the gene drive not a matter of celebration.

On a larger scale, I have to wonder about how we’d respond if we had rejected the idea of medicines long ago. Would our species have perished? Or would our numbers be far lower, leaving the ecosphere far more stable and suitable for us? But at what price anguish, not to mention the loss of elder’s wisdom?

Hackaday notes the failure of the latest Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) last night, and while the crew escaped unharmed on a bumpy re-entry, the ISS itself is now at risk:

The Soyuz MS-03 crew ship (foreground) and the Progress 66 cargo craft are pictured as the International Space Station orbits about 250 miles above Earth. Image Credit: NASA

ISS crews are rotated out on a six month schedule because that’s about how long a Soyuz capsule can remain viable in orbit. It has a design life of only 215 days, any longer than that and the vehicle’s corrosive propellants will degrade their tanks.

The currently docked Soyuz vehicle is the emergency escape vehicle for the ISS crew, so this is highly important for them. Meanwhile, the investigation into the failure could take months.

So ISS may be abandoned. This is a testament to the difficulties of getting into space.

For those readers who can’t understand why we “waste all that money” to go into space when there are so many problems down here on Earth, consider this: weather satellites have saved literally millions of lives by enabling accurate forecasting. Imagine recent hurricanes Florence and Michael hitting the American mainland with little warning and no real measurements of their strength.

And the spinoffs of the technological developments, which were amazing when I wrote a paper on this in high school, are jaw-dropping, from dental drills to smartphones. I’ve forgotten the estimated return on investment for the space program, but it’s well over 1.

So, yeah. I’m a fan. It’s an example of the American government doing its job. It could have quit after reaching the moon, but instead they saw we had more benefits by working in the hard environment of space.

This incident also illustrates how poorly managed the manned space vehicle program has been managed. Whether it’s Congress or NASA itself, someone needs to step up and fix things. Maybe private industry will work out, what with SpaceX’s FalconHeavy supposedly getting ready for manned flight, but it’s not there, yet.

It’s Nature’s art, savagely beautiful and uncaring about the audience’s sensibilities:

Greg Sargent in The Plum Line remarks on the response of the news media of candidate and President Trump’s endless lying:

It is a great irony of the current political moment: By broadcasting forth Trump’s lies in tweets and headlines — while declining to inform readers that they are just that, and while burying the truth deep within accompanying articles — the organizations that Trump regularly derides as “fake news” are themselves spreading a species of fake news.

That is, fake news authored by Trump himself.

There is little doubt that a deceiver as prolific and innovative as Trump grasps — whether instinctively or consciously — that those getting news from social media and on mobile devices often read no further than headlines or tweets, and that the transmitting out of disinformation that gets amplified in headlines and news feeds helps him exploit this facet of the shifting information landscape.

The audience bears a responsibility as well, particularly when someone like Trump has such potential and actual influence. When it became clear to me that candidate Trump lies and lies and lies, as fact-checkers pointed out during the primaries, I no longer took anything he says straight – in fact, I always have a very large grain of metaphorical salt sitting next to me at the table, because I assume he’s lying, boasting, grasping after unearned credit, etc.^[1]

And this, in my non-partisan opinion, is what every single American adult should be doing.

It occurred to me, during the final push on the Kavanaugh hearings, that the decisions of many Republican Senators, as well as a few Democratic Senators such as, in the end, Manchin of West Virginia, were made not with their solemn responsibilities in mind, but with an eye towards the mid-term elections.

Sure, there’s no real news there. because it happens all the time. I can accept it for legislation, because governing is hard and compromise is not failure, but the acceptance that maybe your side is wrong, or both sides are wrong, and the compromise is how you make progress without running into utter destruction.

But when it comes to a SCOTUS nomination, there’s little point in compromise, or deference, but to keep someone in power happy, be they elected or not. It sounds like politics, but it’s really corruption. The Senatorial duty is to ascertain whether the nominees meets the standards and has no stains on their background of a disabling or extortionate nature, and then vote him up and down.

And what of it?

Do you remember the rampant theme of the 2016 Election? Drain the swamp! the Trump partisans cried. No more Politics As Usual! because it looks so sleazy.

And here we are. The swamp is far, far worse than it was just two years ago. And the politics continue to control the decisions of our Senators.

But I’m not going to stop here, because it goes the other way as well. Long time readers may remember my remarks about the moral turpitude of the Evangelicals. They back Trump because, as a family member involved in Evangelical churches recently vented, of the abortion issue.

So long as he delivers on the abortion issue, they’ll back him. That’s corruption, folks, corruption not of the politician, but of the voter. Or, for the Evangelical reader, that’s selling your soul to the devil. You, my Evangelical Trump-supporting reader, don’t think so? Congratulations, the devil just won and is hanging your soul to dry on his clothesline. There it’ll flap in the Hellish breeze until, forgotten, it disintegrates, and the righteous Evangelical voter will be struck from the Rolls Of The Select Of God for that utter failure to understand morality.^[2]

Similar remarks can be made by the anti-immigrant crowd, the pro-business crowd, and no doubt a few others.

The corruption isn’t only in Washington. It’s in Michigan and Minnesota, Iowa and Kansas, any place where Trump’s gifts of SCOTUS justices and big border walls and xenophobic Executive Orders and excessive military spending buys the favor of Trump loyalists who otherwise avert their eyes every time he lies through his teeth, claims successes he’s never had, and the balance of his mendacity. After all, they got their’s. It’s the epitome of selfishness.

The corruption isn’t just in our leaders. It’s in our fellow citizens as well. And it can apply to everyone on the spectrum if we don’t all demand the highest standards of ethics and competency.

I wanted to say one more thing, and I suppose I could have put it in another post, but it connects with this as well, and, besides, it’a from the same Sargent post. The lead-in concerns how the media is transitioning towards a more responsible, fact-checking approach to news dissemination, and how a similar transition took place during and after the Nixon Presidency.

So we may be in the midst of another transition, similar to the one that unfolded a generation ago. The news media seems to be retaining its core institutional independence and appears to be finding new ways to adapt. But as Hannah Arendt put it in a famous 1967 meditation on “Truth and Politics,” back during that previous period of serious institutional adaptation by the press, those two things — politics and factual truth — are perpetually “on rather bad terms with each other.”

Thanks to the rise of Trump, those terms are particularly bad right now. Perhaps we will get through this. But we are learning all over again, as Arendt put it, that “factual truth is fragile in politics, and its survival is never guaranteed.”

Arendt’s observation is the reason we have norms in Washington. That horrid tension or even dislike of facts, brought about by overweening ambitions of so many of those in Congress, as well as the religious fantasies with no connection to the real-world of some, ill-informed provincialism that has been the complaint of virtually every President we’ve had, the suppression of scientific information, and a few other factors, is the reason we have norms. It’s why the FBI and other intelligence agencies are explicitly non-partisan, it’s why their Directors are supposed to be non-political. Every single bloody norm has come about in reaction to some self-interested abuse which threatened the stability of our government.

And that’s why those who conserve those norms, the real conservatives, whether they’re Republican (mostly ex- at this point), Democrats, or Independents, are horrified when norms are trampled. It’s not that the dike has been shattered and now the water, black and poisoned and full of dead fish, might leak in, but the fact that all that repulsively poisoned water HAS ALREADY RUSHED IN. Flynn, Miller, Bannon, Price, Pruitt. They, and so many others, are that water that sluiced through the broken dike of norms, ravaged the government, left it open to manipulation by adversaries and the malicious.

It’s not some mythical Deep State twitching at the sword chop of the hero into its hide. It’s the real conservatives valuing some of the most important institutions of the United States, watching them being shattered.

And, when this is all over, those norms will have to be recovered and reinstalled, all to the bitter howling of those who are convinced it’s the Deep State covering its wounds. Or those realizing they are once again barred from skimming profits off the people.

Never realizing how much they’re betraying the United States.

¹ His continual lying and aversion to nuance in favor of his own illusory world of racism, in fact, motivated me to label him President Irrelevant, because his tenuous connection to truth renders any opinion he wants to put forth suspect and, therefore, truly unimportant for the adults trying to find the best path forward on any issue. Any issue at all. Only the fact that he’s the President makes him worth a moment of our time.

² Sure, I’m an agnostic. Doesn’t mean I can’t use the logic of Christian mythology against Trump-supporting Evangelicals. Consider this a full disclosure.

Remember Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas and candidate for Governor, who found himself in charge of voting in an extremely close contest for the GOP nomination? As noted, his opponent conceded before any horrific ethical transgressions on Kobach’s part were discovered. Turns out there’s another situation in which a Republican Secretary of State is running for Governor, and being presented with some interesting ethical challenges, this time in Georgia, where a school teacher was attempting to teach a little civics to her students and discovered that, despite her excellent voting record, she had been stricken from the voting rolls:

She tried re-registering, but with about one month left before a November election that will decide a governor’s race and some competitive U.S. House races, Appling-Nunez’s application is one of over 53,000 sitting on hold with Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office. And unlike Appling-Nunez, many people on that list — which is predominantly black, according to an analysis by The Associated Press — may not even know their voter registration has been held up.

Tuesday is Georgia’s deadline to register and be eligible to vote in the November General Election.

Kemp, who’s also the Republican candidate for governor, is in charge of elections and voter registration in Georgia.

His Democratic opponent, former state Rep. Stacey Abrams, and voting rights advocacy groups charge that Kemp is systematically using his office to suppress votes and tilt the election, and that his policies disproportionately affect black and minority voters. [AP]

The AP story has a lot more, mainly Kemp trying to take the moral high ground, while Abrams and her allies continue to dispute his assertions, especially in regards to a pile of suspended voter registrations which Kemp’s office is apparently simply sitting on.

But, as Steve Benen notes, Kemp should have found a way to recuse himself from the situation as an interested party. It’s an interesting situation: Republican Kemp is a white guy, while Democrat Abrams is gunning to become the first black female governor of Georgia. If Kemp is caught out manipulating the vote, would it cost him anything in Georgia? Ordinarily, I’d guess he’s playing a dangerous game, but this time I’m wondering if he’s safe behind a wall.

And, of course, any such guilt in this matter would continue to blacken the national reputation of the GOP, something they can ill-afford.

Autocephalous:

An independent Ukrainian church — or “autocephalous” in ecclesiastical terms — would mean little in everyday terms for the faithful. But for Ukraine’s political leaders and others, it would mark another important symbolic break from Russia and its reach into Ukrainian affairs. [“Tensions between Russia and Ukraine spill over to Byzantine world of Orthodox church,” David Stern and Amie Ferris-Rotman, WaPo]

A gene drive is the insertion of a gene sequence onto a chromosome which automatically copies itself into the other chromosome of the pair, thus raising the odds of it appearing in the offspring of the organism which has had the gene drive inflicted on it. It’s a new bit of technology. So what, you say? Well, this report by Michael Le Page in NewScientist (29 September 2018) made my blood run cold:

MILLIONS of lives might be saved or transformed for the better by the first working gene drive. This piece of “parasitic DNA” could spread through mosquito populations, wiping them out by making them infertile and halting the spread of deadly malaria.

In the lab, the gene drive killed off all mosquitoes within 12 generations. “There were no progeny,” says Andrea Crisanti of Imperial College London, whose team’s gene drive is based on the CRISPR gene-editing method.

There are 200 million cases of malaria each year and half a million deaths. Those who survive may have lasting health issues, and can become trapped in a cycle of illness and poverty.

“Gene editing holds the potential to save millions of lives and empower millions of people to lift themselves out of poverty,” billionaire Bill Gates, whose charity is helping fund the work, wrote earlier this year.

Gene drives are pieces of parasitic DNA inserted into one of an organism’s chromosomes. Chromosomes generally come in pairs, only one of which is passed from a parent to its offspring, so such a piece of DNA would usually pass to half an animal’s progeny. But gene drives “copy and paste” themselves onto both chromosomes when eggs and sperm form, meaning they get passed on to all offspring and spread through a population.

And scientists found a way to ensure that mutations won’t affect the gene drive. Basically, a gene sequence can be spread throughout a population just by inserting it using gene drive into a few individuals of reproductive age and inclination.

The scientists are jubilant, but it strikes me that this could cause havoc in a human population if used with malicious aforethought. The dangers should be obvious.

I’m a day late and a dollar short, but this amused me too much not to put it up.

Steve Benen calls this a gender chasm:

I’ll call it a useful measurement of just how little men generally understand the sexual harassment problems of women. By nearly two to one, women disapprove of the Republican Party and intend to vote for the Democrats in the mid-terms, while men actually intend to vote for the Republicans by a 5 point margin.

Fortunately, for those men who think there’s nothing to the plaints of “their womenfolk,” there’s this video, which had my Arts Editor and I howling with laughter, available to instruct you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX5w_SjGSUs

And if you think she’s just  a freak or whatever, think again. Every sexual harassed women would love to do what she did.

As the Republicans continue to try to cover up their behavior during the Kavanaugh hearings, I suspect the numbers will just get worse for them. Stubbornly stupid is no way to live a life.

Professor Julian Ku discusses the strategic goals of China on Lawfare:

While China’s international organization influence strategy seeks to expand its global prestige in ways similar to any other great power, it also has narrower, “China-first” interests to pursue. First and foremost, China’s growing influence in international organizations is aimed at ensuring the government of Taiwan is excluded and marginalized. China has succeeded so well in this regard that Taiwan has not even been able to achieve observer status at technical, nonpolitical organizations such as the World Health Organization, Interpol, or the International Civil Aviation Organization

Second, China seeks to use its newfound influence to pre-empt criticism by international organizations on long-sensitive issues such as human rights. For instance, China has been able to shape the agenda and build support within the Human Rights Commission for its own state-centric concept of human rights protection. To a lesser extent, it has been able to leverage influence in the United Nations Development Program to win endorsements of its controversial Belt and Road Initiative from UNDP leaders.

I see this as a part of their offensive against American democracy, touting their combination of reformed communism + managed capitalism as superior to more democratic, less controllable forms of government.

While the first explanation for their sensitivity on human-rights and other issues in that category may be the traditional reputation or “face” argument, I think the second explanation has to do with metrics. That is, many people like to have metrics that indicate how good something might be. So much the better if someone else is doing the measurements. So if China can control those organizations which can be seen as measuring the various competing forms of government, then China has a better chance of having the dominant form of government in the future.

And it won’t matter if the United States is a province of China in that future, just so long as it’s form of government is something that China can understand and, preferably, control. Because then they look better, relatively speaking, and have a better chance of surviving in their current governmental form.

Because who wants to run for election in China when you can make your way up the ranks in the Communist Party instead?

I tend to place more value on the critiques of those in the camp of that which is critiqued, or former such members, over those claiming a place in the opposing camp. Not because I doubt the sincerity of the latter, but for the simple reason that the member, or former thereof, is more likely to be familiar with the important facets and critical, but obscure, details. Even if their observations function merely to confirm the criticisms made by the opposition, it remains a pivotal and extremely persuasive part of the entire assemblage of critiques cast against a philosophy.

Therefore, when conservative Max Boot writes something like the following, I tend to pay more attention than if the name were, say, Hillary Clinton:

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

The ur-conservatives of the 1950s — William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest — were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ideological conservatives viewed Eisenhower as a sellout; John Birchers thought he was a communist agent. Why the animus against this war hero? Conservatives were furious that Eisenhower made no attempt to liberate the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe or repeal the New Deal, and that he did not support Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. Worst of all, from the viewpoint of contemporary conservatives, Eisenhower was a moderate on racial issues. He appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren, who presided over the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, and then sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. [WaPo / from Boot’s new book, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right]

It’s an enlightening and affirming remark as to the nature of cultural conservatism, vs the intellectual and more respectable conservatism I often encounter. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Boot confirms my observations of the nature of current conservatism:

The history of the modern Republican Party is the story of moderates being driven out and conservatives taking over — and then of those conservatives in turn being ousted by those even further to the right. A telling moment came in 1996, when the Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole, visited an aged Barry Goldwater. Once upon a time, Dole and Goldwater had defined the Republican right, but by 1996, Dole joked, “Barry and I — we’ve sort of become the liberals.” “We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater agreed. “Can you imagine that?”

I have often written of moderate Republicans being RINOed out of the Party by extremists, and then in turn being RINOed out by the even more extreme. In fact, I can recommend the entire article as enlightening. Boot has been a long time Republican Party member, who worked in the intellectual sphere for the Party, and so he speaks from certain knowledge, not malicious opposition.

For those who are casual conservatives for reasons of tradition or sloth, it’s important that they understand that today’s Trumpist Republican would have little to do with Goldwater, Dole, Reagan, or many other honorable conservatives of the past. To them, the compromises and decisions they came to would mark them as apostates in today’s Church of Extremist Conservatives, where to be bipartisan is to admit to uncertainty and error.

This unrealistic certainty, the denial of realities which I’ve run into the ground in other posts, mark them as uniquely unsuited for governance of even a village, much less the Federal level of the United States. Boot provides the confirmation of the processes and attitudes about which I and many others have been writing. It’s now up to my conservative readers to decide if they will be fellow-travelers with such regressive and damaging attitudes, or if it’s time to begin removing them from the Republican party in the most effective way possible.

By making them losers at the ballot box. Again and again, until they learn that there’s more to life than righteous indignation and amateurism, or they all just die off.

In case you’re thinking a war with North Korea would be confined to the peninsula, think again. In the days of global trade, the backlash isn’t military, as Jacob Marx points out on 38 North:

A war with North Korea would have the biggest impact on the automotive industry in three states—Michigan, Alabama and Georgia. Between autoworkers, distributors and other supporting industries, nearly 25,000 Americans could lose their jobs.

In Georgia, more than 11,000 jobs would be eliminated. Some of those losses would be at the Kia Motors plant in West Point, Georgia, but lost shipping means the port cities of Savanah and Brunswick could be hit even harder. There would also be major layoffs at car dealerships, which, with average annual salaries of $57,200, could have an outsized impact on the Georgia economy.

While Georgia would lose the most jobs, Michigan would be hit hardest because its autoworkers earn relatively high wages compared to other states. With the average auto manufacturing job paying $73,100 a year, mass layoffs would be devastating for many Michigan families.

And asking them to make it without help would be despicable, so either taxes or the national debt would go up some more.

Not that we can’t go to war with North Korea if we must – but we should be aware that a war far, far away is not a war that stays far, far away.

Following President Trump’s criticism of Senator Murkowski (R-AK), The Hill is reporting the following:

Leaders of the Alaskan Republican Party are weighing a reprimand for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) for not voting to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Alaska’s GOP has asked Murkowski to send its state central committee any information she thinks may be relevant to its decision, The Associated Press reported on Monday.

The basic struggle between  the merciless competition decreed by theory of games and humanity of shared community is at the heart of Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993). This is not the literal search, but, as we’re told early in the film, the search for the transformation from game to art that Fischer supposedly had discovered.

Young Josh is a newly discovered chess prodigy, and he learns early in Washington Square Park, where chess hustlers, who are drug addicts, make scratch money from playing speed chess against park visitors. Under the tutelage of Vinnie, who unfortunately isn’t given enough of a load to be really significant, he becomes quite good, and his parents choose to take him to a local chess club for more formal training, where a retired chess teacher, Pandolfini, a man burdened with his own demons coming from having been a prodigy, reluctantly agrees to teach him.

The personal costs of complete victory, the pieces of the soul that must be given up in that pursuit, are illustrated as Josh is stripped of Vinnie, his other friends, and even his beloved father, who falls into the trap of the competitive parent. But his mother, another under-utilized character, has become wary of this work in progress, and it doesn’t help when a new rival, Morgan, appears, lacking friends, hobbies, or even basic humanity, but with his own chess coach. When Josh bows out early at the school championship he was favored to easily win, there’s a clue: he’s not enjoying it anymore.

Vinnie reappears and returns the focus to the excitement of the speed version of chess, and when, against the advice of his coach, they go to the national championships for Josh’s age group, the tension is high as it comes down to Josh and Morgan, and Josh demonstrates both his humanity and his capacity for synthesis in the final game of the movie.

As noted, some of the characters could have been better utilized, but it’s a gifted cast and they make it fly; I just wonder if it would have been better with more contributions from the mother and Vinnie. As it is, it’s a fascinating look into the hard-core chess world, and almost makes me want to play another game of chess. I don’t think I’ve played more than a couple in 30 years, since high school chess.

Oh,  yeah. I was terrible. But this film isn’t. I won’t quite recommend it because I didn’t like the pacing, but it’s worth a gander if you’re so inclined.

On Lawfare, Nicholas Weaver comments on a report of certain servers in use by various U.S. companies being compromised by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA):

Robertson and Riley report a scheme in which Chinese intelligence bribed, threatened or cajoled at least four separate subcontracted manufacturing facilities in China to modify the design of SuperMicro server motherboards to include a small chip—smaller than a grain of rice—that would insert the backdoor into the BMC.

This scheme is less crazy than it might seem.  Modern circuit boards are filled with small support chips, and the backdoor chip would appear to be just another faceless component to all but the most detailed examination. And while the Bloomberg article doesn’t go into the mechanics of how this would work, there’s one likely culprit: the serialEEPROM chip or a serial FLASH chip, which is used to store program and other instructions used during the startup process. The BMC itself loads at least some data from such a chip, which itself needs only two wires to communicate—so it would only take two connections for a rogue chip to mask the contents of a SEEPROM or SPI FLASH, replacing the contents and thereby corrupting the BMC by installing the backdoor code. …

Then there is the question of whether the NSA is aware of other supply chains compromised in similar manners. If so, a quiet nudge may be a good idea. This style of backdoor can be very hard to find until one knows where to look, but is reasonably discoverable once the searcher pointed in the right direction.

This is one of the problems with free trade with adversarial countries such as China that can supply components cheaply – we end up revealing our secrets without ever realizing it.

But it also suggests a business opportunity, the supply of components and servers certified to be free of industrial espionage. Manufacturers would probably be required to provide proof, probably through inspection, and perhaps even a bond for each server sold – although bonds may not be sufficient to restrain some avaricious businessmen.

In essence, it’s a trade war without the drama.

Another reason to distrust private sector folks who think it’s all about making money.

I thought the cut grinder at Kramarczuk’s was quite lovely. My Arts Editor insisted on some staged pics.

BTW, that grinder will be my lunch today.

Sometimes applications of mathematical fields can leave me boggled. Topology is about deformation of one shape into another, and include insights into which shapes can never be reached from a starting shape. This comes from “Shape Shifters,” Devin Powell (Discover, October 2018), which also includes this:

For a long time, these bizarre shapes — and others revealed by topology — were mere curiosities. But then they started showing up in surprising places, like black-and-white digital photographs. About 10 years ago, [Gunnar] Carlsson, the Stanford mathematician, was analyzing photographs a colleague had cut up into 9-pixel blocks when a pattern emerged. Plot the blocks as points on a graph with nine dimensions, one for the value of how dark each pixel is, and a shape emerges that looks like a Klein bottle. Carlsson applied this knowledge to invent a new way to digitally compress images to smaller sizes. A company he founded, AYASDI, has used topology to look for patterns in genes involved in different cancers, for instance, and bank transactions that indicate fraudulent activity.

Wait, what? How does this work? I can’t even guess, no intuition on this one at all.

But for all those who whine about the money that goes into obscure scientific investigations, results like this should be a redoubtable retort.