Monthly Archives: November 2018

It may be time to compile a list of Senators who appear frantic to not have the President found guilty of various crimes. NBC News has a couple adding themselves to the list right here:

[Senator John] Thune [(R-SD)] added that the Mueller probe should be thorough and complete, but can’t go on forever. He said Trump has important work to do for the American people and it is time to “move on.”

“And the longer these things drag on, it just, it gets, I think, very wearing on the American people,” he said. “The report needs to come out. We need to know what happened, but I agree with my colleagues that the time I think has come to start drawing this to a conclusion.”

Senator, it may be wearing on the shrinking Trump base, and on a GOP membership that is slowly becoming more and more disillusioned with the GOP leadership. The rest of us, however, are settling in with some popcorn to see just how far into the swamp President Trump strayed while claiming he was going to drain it, even as he partook of its dark charms. Your continued support of him will look very poorly indeed on your next re-election effort, especially if he gets marched off in handcuffs.

[Senator Lindsey] Graham (R-SC), who has emerged as one of Trump’s fiercest defenders, said he had “no idea what that’s all about” when asked his reaction to Cohen’s guilty plea, adding that it “seems to be a process crime.”

“I’ve yet to see anybody indicated for actually colluding with the Russians,” Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill. “I don’t know where Mueller is going but it is up to him to get there sooner rather than later.”

No, no, no, Senator. It’s up to Mueller to get it right. If there’s nothing, then there’s nothing, and that’s fine, but all the guilty pleas and indictments would suggest to the logically minded that there’s already a something, and it may point to a huge something.

We already know you’re frantically defending an incompetent President. The question is if you’re trying to blight an investigation into a criminal President.

On to the list you go. I already know you can’t seem to follow simple reasoning. Vapid defenses are not a positive sign for you.

Regarding my bafflement at quantum radar a reader writes:

My understanding of quantum entanglement would seem to say that such a thing is theoretically possible — although I question just how much quantum-level information gets changed by bouncing photons off a target. I’d guess it was a more macroscopic level of information in a radar signal. But assume that much works. The real next problem is how does one generate a few billion entangled photons, and separate them into the 2 described streams? My understanding is that it’s difficult to create and isolate quantum entangled (maybe we should just start calling them QE particles?) particles.

It occurs to me that one of the strategies of stealth aircraft is to absorb and even transmit the absorbed EM radiation out the other side, much like the conceptual “invisibility cloak,” and I wonder if that action of absorption would actually disturb the entangled photons as to dissolve the entanglement. Identify those disentangled photons and you have a picture?

I dunno, just guessing here.

From UMNews:

Researchers have known for years that tumors have patterns that are like little “highways” that cancer cells use to move within the tumors and ultimately toward blood vessels and adjacent tissue to invade the body. Patients who have high numbers of these patterns in their tumors have a lower chance of surviving the cancer.

What the researchers haven’t been able to figure out until now is how the cells recognize these patterns and move along them.

In this study, the University of Minnesota team examined in the lab how breast cancer cells moved and used medicines to try to stop the cells. When they stopped the mechanisms that serve as the motor of the cells, the cells surprisingly changed the way they moved to an oozing-like motion, almost like a blob.

“Cancer cells are very sneaky,” said senior author Paolo Provenzano, a University of Minnesota biomedical engineering associate professor and a Masonic Cancer Center researcher. “We didn’t expect the cells to change their movement. This forced us to change our tactics to target both kinds of movements simultaneously. It’s almost like we destroyed their GPS so they couldn’t find the highways. This stopped the cells in their tracks. The cells just sat there and didn’t move.”

Fascinating. I assume they’re talking about metastasization. This bit gave me pause, though:

The researchers studied the cells in the lab in two-dimensional, engineered microenvironments, that are almost like a microchip with cells. These microenvironments mimicked how the cells behave as they do in a tumor and allowed researchers to speed up their research.

How good a mimicry might it be? Does the loss of a dimension change how the cells react, or even how the unnamed med works?

Restless impatience over here. Family history of cancer on my Dad’s side.

Karst got back to me concerning me being a curmudgeon about their site in quite a hurry:

Hi Hue!

Thanks for reaching out. We appreciate the feedback and rest assured, I’ll pass this along to our web development team.

We regret that you’ve had this experience and thank you for the chance of improving our services. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Sincerely,

[Omitted]

Nice of them to do so. On the other hand, as my Arts Editor pointed out, this is not a web development issue. It’s a marketing issue.

Missiologist:

[Concerning John Chau]

Obviously, the long-term strategy did not work, and Chau will become not only a topic of debate but of study for missiologists, people who train missionaries. That’s my field. I have a PhD in the subject and have trained missionaries to go to many places, including India. I am also the dean of the mission school at Wheaton College, where we unapologetically and enthusiastically train missionaries to engage their own cultures, as well as cross-culturally, from their culture to another. [“Slain missionary John Chau prepared much more than we thought, but are missionaries still fools?“, Ed Stetzer, Dean of the School of Mission, Ministry and Leadership at Wheaton College, WaPo]

For those readers following the story of the late missionary John Chau and his attempt to bring Christianity to the isolated Andaman Islanders, this claim may also be of interest:

But new information released Wednesday paints a more complicated picture of Chau, including an interview with Christianity Today. In the interview, Mary Ho, who leads All Nations (the agency that sent Chau on missions), indicated that he was heavily vaccinated and even quarantined before going on the mission.

It sounds good, but I’d rather here hear from an infectious diseases doc and researcher who also knew which vaccinations were employed. I remain worried this was the work of amateurs who only think they know what they’re doing.

I had been planning to write a post about the troubles of discerning truth in an age of political polarization, with a concrete example of the nomination of Thomas Farr for a seat in a U.S. District Court. The Democrats have been four-square against him, both now and back in President Bush’s tenure, when he was also nominated. Their complaint was that he represented Jesse Helms back in the day, and was instrumental in the voter suppression efforts ever since, usually used against black communities.

This was denied by the Republicans, and in fact the lone black GOP Senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, stated he had discussed the matter with Mr. Farr and had come to the conclusion that he could support him. This left only Senator Flake (R-AZ) as the only Republican Senator voting no, and in his case it’s a protest against the failure of Senator McConnell to bring the Special Counsel protective legislation up for a vote. From the News Observer:

Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican and the only black Republican in the Senate, called Farr on Wednesday and spoke with the author of a Department of Justice memo obtained by The Washington Post this week before casting his vote to advance Farr on Wednesday. Scott also spoke with Obama appointees about Farr.

“If he was the architect of that nasty, racist campaign, I would have been a ‘no’ without question. What I found so far from appointees of the Obama administration to my conversations with the author of the memo is that he was in fact not the architect of the campaign and that the character witnesses from the Obama administration coming forward on behalf of Tom Farr have been pretty strong,” Scott told Fox News Channel’s “Fox News at Night” on Wednesday.

So how does a casual observer come to a conclusion on this particular incident? Are the Democrats becoming tribalists, which would be awful for the nation?

However, the story changed in just a couple of hours. From CNN:

Republican Sen. Tim Scott announced Thursday he would oppose President Donald Trump’s nominee to be a US district judge in North Carolina, effectively ending the nomination that had been plagued with accusations that Thomas Farr supported measures that disenfranchised African-American voters.

“This week, a Department of Justice memo written under President George H.W. Bush was released that shed new light on Mr. Farr’s activities. This, in turn, created more concerns. Weighing these important factors, this afternoon I concluded that I could not support Mr. Farr’s nomination,” Scott said in a statement.

Scott, who is the Senate’s sole black Republican, told reporters Wednesday that he wanted to speak to the author of a 1991 memo obtained by the Washington Post, which outlines a controversial postcard campaign distributed by the 1990 campaign of Sen. Jesse Helms that the Justice Department said were used to intimidate black voters from going to the polls.

Scott’s decision to oppose Farr prevented Farr from being confirmed by the Senate, where Republicans hold a 51-to-49 seat majority. Also opposing Farr was Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, who has sworn off advancing Trump judicial nominees until the chamber votes on a bill to protect special counsels such as Robert Mueller. All 49 Democrats opposed the nomination.

There’s not a lot of insight to be drawn from this. We know that Trump’s selections for judges is not guided by good judgment or some sort of process that rewards both competency and good character. We know that both sides are becoming more and more tribalistic, and I believe that this will lead to a breakdown in one of these parties in the not too distant future, and I think the GOP is the leading contender.

The Democrats have to find a way to stand strong while preserving their trademark penchant for disagreements and even, yes, squabbles. That’s the yeast that keeps them going. The lack of that will turn the GOP into a pillar of salt.

Reporter: President Trump, how much foreign money has entered the Treasury’s coffers due to your tariffs on China and other countries?

President Trump: Billions & billions, I tell you –

Reporter: No, sir. Those countries do not pay the United States anything –

Trump: Sure they do!

Reporter: No sir, as your own Administration knows, foreign governments don’t send money in response to tariffs –

Trump: Well, then, if you’re so smart, then who does, young woman?

Reporter: The customers do, sir. The American citizens who voted you into office. Those billions and billions of dollars come out of the pockets of the blue collar workers of America.

Trump: No, no, no –

Reporter: Which leads to a second question, sir: Are you lying to the American citizens about how tariffs work, or do you truly not understand how they work themselves?

Trump: <stomps off cursing>

Reporter: <barely audible> Dumbshit.

One must indulge one’s fantasies from time to time. Since the rest are X-rated fantasies involving Trump and our favorite Minnesota herbivore, the moose, I’ll stick with this one.

While I was poking around the web, looking for a Christmas gift for my Arts Editor, I ran across a site which occasionally pops up a soft sub-window announcing that, “Joe just bought XYZ”. It lingers for a moment, and then goes away.

And I Hated It.

It’s one thing when social nudges are used to move folks to make good social choices, such as utilizing employer 401Ks or becoming Organ Donors in case of death.

But on a commercial site, it’s not appropriate. Hell, how do I even know these are authentic?

And the sad part is that this is a site selling products which – they claim – are eco-friendly. It’s Karst, who sell stone paper and woodless pencils, for which trees are not consumed. Or – now – so they say. Now I’m inclined not to buy from them, because I dislike manipulation.

They’ve pissed me off.

For those of us with an interest in civil asset forfeiture, the case of Timbs v. Indiana was argued in front of SCOTUS yesterday, and observers have walked away with a positive impression of the proceedings. From Bloomberg News, among others:

Supreme Court justices signaled they will curb the power of cities and states to levy fines and seize property, hearing arguments in the case of a man trying to keep his Land Rover after he pleaded guilty to selling drugs. …

Justice Brett Kavanaugh said it was “too late in the day” to argue that states are exempt from particular parts of the Bill of Rights. Justice Neil Gorsuch said the only question was what exactly the excessive fines clause prohibits.

“Whatever it in fact is, it applies against the states, right?” he asked Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher. When Fisher hedged, Gorsuch added, “Really? Come on, general.” …

The liberals seemed similarly skeptical of the Indiana case as well. Ilya Somin, who writes about the proceedings in a readable manner here, sounds convinced that civil asset forfeiture will go down in flaming defeat.

Hurrah!

Apparently the body of the missionary killed by the Andaman Islanders will not be retrieved, WaPo reports:

The fishermen have been arrested, as has a friend of Chau’s who helped organize the boat trip. Police have no strategy to retrieve his body and don’t plan to confront the islanders, Pathak said.

To this agnostic, his diary entries sound quite disrespectful of the natives:

Chau spent years planning and training to travel illegally to remote North Sentinel Island on a mission to convert its residents to Christianity, including learning emergency medicine, and studying linguistics and cultural anthropology, his missionary group said. Though he knew the islanders had long violently resisted outsiders, he conducted a covert mission to the protected island this month. …

“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?” …

“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote.

By the third day, he became convinced he was going to die.

“Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful — crying a bit . . . wondering if it will be the last sunset I see,” he wrote.

I’m appalled, actually.

Bruce Riedel is hoping the travails of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) continue and, I suspect, end in MBS crashing and burning, if only metaphorically, as he opines in AL Monitor:

The premeditated murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month was an act of terrorism. The Saudis are desperately trying to salvage the reputation and credibility of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who undoubtedly ordered the assassination. The Donald Trump administration is colluding with Riyadh. But revelations about the prince continue to emerge, further sullying his brand. At home there is unease in the royal family about what his tarnished reputation means for the kingdom. …

Desperately seeking rehabilitation, the crown prince is hoping the world will forget about Khashoggi and move on. So is Trump. But the reality is that the Saudi leader has a closet full of skeletons and horrors that won’t be shut.

The war in Yemen tops the list. After more than three years of war, 18,000 coalition airstrikes and the crippling blockade, 18 million Yemenis are at risk of malnutrition and disease. Save the Children estimates that more than 85,000 children under the age of five have already starved to death in the war. The coalition is pouring weapons in to the country, arming various fractious militias. There are so many weapons in the country that Yemen is an exporter of small arms to other countries in the region.

The Yemeni catastrophe is MBS’s signature policy initiative, and he has been the biggest obstacle to a cease-fire. According to several sources, MBS threw a temper tantrum when the British suggested a truce earlier this month.

A temper-tantrum? Grown-up leaders do not throw temper-tantrums. They may narrow their eyes and veil their thoughts and swear revenge to their lovers, but hopefully their obscured rage results in strokes and heart attacks before they do anything serious.

And I’m really quite serious. The idea that the successor to the King of a major country is impulsive, vain about his capabilities, and ambitious to put his stamp on history is deeply unsettling to me. Saudi Arabia, despite our national incompatability, is an important American ally, and is consequently well-armed. Whether Saudi impotence in Yemen is due to wretched Saudi planning, inferior troops, improper weaponry for the war terrain, or the heroism of the Yemenis is really irrelevant; the fact that MBS stepped into such a situation and is consequently failing is really all the current King should need to know in order to can his ass – or worse.

And so we see why nepotism is frowned upon in enlightened countries. Too often, it’s merely another word for tolerated incompetence.

Because of their continuing, and perhaps mistaken, importance as an ally, we can’t just laugh at them as clowns. But it should also be clear that the United States will not be clearing them off the table as an ally. President Trump’s alleged financial ties to the Kingdom won’t permit that (and, thus, why no President should be permitted to retain commercial interests as has Trump).

So we’ll just have to grit our teeth and hope King Salman decides his kingdom is more important than his pride and his son and dumps him as Crown Prince. Will the King exercise good judgment? Let’s ask Riedel:

The crown prince rules by terror, not consensus. His ascent to power has been entirely the work of his father, and the king seems determined to stick with his son. Nonetheless, the region is rife with speculation about the kingdom’s future and how it will play out. Will the king retire early? Will the family accept MBS? Will the security apparatus turn on the crown prince if he executes officials who were doing his bidding?

The only certainty is that the crown prince is likely to remain a reckless and dangerous player. Istanbul will not be the last debacle he leads the kingdom into.

Yeah, seems unlikely.

Hyde-Smith (R) wins the contest to occupy the open Mississippi Senate seat, beating former Ag Secretary Espy (D); WaPo reports the margin to be about 8%.

So I think this shrinkage in victory margin in Senatorial race (recent history has the GOP winning by 20 points, remember) may be the political version of Hyde-Smith breaking a mirror: 7 more years of bad luck for Mississippi. The base won’t be badly shaken enough to start reconsidering. They’ll just keep doing whatever it is they’re doing, no matter how destructive it is, and that’s just about it.

Tough to be them right now.

Returning to this quiet thread following the recent roller-coaster, today the markets went blasting upwards, as the chart for the DJI shows:

That’s 2.5%. Still nowhere near it’s high, but still a respectable jump. So what happened?

CNN/Business suggests a reason:

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell gave investors reason to cheer on Wednesday when he suggested that the Fed may slow down its interest rate hikes.

The Dow surged on the news, finishing the day with a gain of 618 points, or 2.5%. It was the fifth-biggest point jump for the Dow ever. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq each rose more than 2% as well.

Powell reassured investors that the Fed wouldn’t risk killing off economic growth by continuing to aggressively raise rates next year.

I heard similar reasoning on NPR tonight. But I have to wonder if there’s a bit more going on here. Remember that President Trump was yelling at the Fed a week or two ago?

….The United States should not be penalized because we are doing so well. Tightening now hurts all that we have done. The U.S. should be allowed to recapture what was lost due to illegal currency manipulation and BAD Trade Deals. Debt coming due & we are raising rates – Really?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 20, 2018

Some might wonder if Powell is kow-towing to the President, but I doubt it. In the face of Trump’s persistent claims of credit when the markets are doing well, and marked lack of remarks when the markets collapse, I think Jerome just dropped his pants and showed Trump just who has the bigger penis.

Yeah, guys can be that way sometimes.

Comets plunge into the Sun all the time. Quite often we see this happen using a coronagraph.

But when I clicked on this link, provided by Spaceweather.com, to see the latest, I was also greeted with a fairly eerie narration. I have no idea what’s going on.

Untrammeled:

Not deprived of freedom of action or expression; not restricted or hampered.
‘a mind untrammeled by convention’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “Trump Threatening GM Over Its Plant Closure Is the Real ‘Gangster Government’,” Jonathan Chait, New York Intelligencer:

The Obama administration considered its dilemma carefully. The administration had strong reservations about wading into the economy on a firm-by-firm or sector-by-sector basis. Obama ultimately decided the economic and social repercussions of the auto industry failing was too great a calamity to bear, and extended loans to Detroit. (They have since been repaid.) As part of the deal, the administration forced both unions to accept wage reductions and creditors to take some losses.

It is almost impossible to convey the tenor of the freak-out this generated on the political right. Conservatives, already whipped into a lather by the fiscal stimulus and Obama’s plans to reform health care and create a cap-and-trade system, treated the auto bailout as the literal death knell for capitalism. Michael Barone quickly coined the phrase “gangster government” to capture the conservative belief that the Obama administration was threatening the private sector with the untrammeled power of government. Denunciations of “gangster government echoed from editorials (the Washington Examiner “the way Obama strong-armed creditors who rightfully expected to be treated justly under the law was right out of Juan Peron’s playbook”) to tea-party rallies to a book by David Fredosso (Gangster Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy.)

The weekly Gallup Presidential Approval / Disapproval poll has the pundits stirred up this week because of the change from last week:

It’s a bit like a roller-coaster, isn’t it? I had not expected the drop in approval to 38%, although the jump to 60% disapproval is more striking. I still find it a little difficult to find any serious conclusions to draw, especially short-term, but Jennifer Rubin thinks there’s more bubbling under the surface than I do, based on a poll taken concerning Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation:

The poll, conducted after the midterm election, found that 76 percent of voters say Mueller should be allowed to finish his work. While there are differences by party, Trump should be alarmed to find large bipartisan majorities standing up for Mueller:

Majorities of Democrats (94%), independents (78%), and Republicans (55%) say that Mueller should be allowed to complete his investigation. In this regard:

— 83% of voters, including 68% of Republicans, agree that “it would be an abuse of power for Donald Trump to try to stop an ongoing investigation of him and his campaign because no one is above the law, not even the president.” Fifty-nine percent strongly agree.

— 82% of voters, including 66% of Republicans, agree that “Robert Mueller should be allowed to finish his investigation and follow the facts wherever they lead, because everyone must abide by the rule of law, even the president.” Fifty-eight percent strongly agree.

Even though they think the investigation is biased (as a vast majority of Republicans do), large majorities of Republicans want the investigation completed. …

Amplifying the support in the Senate and among ordinary Republicans to keep Mueller at work, GOP ads run by Republicans for the Rule of Law have been pushing Republicans to defend Mueller. The cumulative effect of these developments finally may have registered. “While Republicans have at times over the last two years been swayed by the demagoguery of Trump and [Rep. Devin] Nunes and Fox, they’ve come back around to the core American belief in the rule of law,” says Bill Kristol, the group’s co-founder. “The GOP is less solidly Trump’s party than people think.” Even if they still support Trump, Republicans may have figured out that firing or interfering with the special counsel would be politically disastrous for the president and the party.

Does this all have an endpoint advantageous to the nation? Hard to say. The cult of the leader that has paralyzed the GOP over the last two years may be running into the rock of reality, and the latter is more of a mountain the Trump.

But I’ll keep my optimism on the back burner.

Trump wants to take away General Motor’s subsidies, according to CNN/Business. But there’s a problem:

President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to cut all General Motors subsidies after the automaker announced thousands of jobs cuts.

“Very disappointed with General Motors and their CEO, Mary Barra, for closing plants in Ohio, Michigan and Maryland,” Trump tweeted. “We are now looking at cutting all @GM subsidies, including for electric cars.”

GM (GM) stock declined as much as 3.8% on the comments. GM closed 2.6% lower, wiping out a chunk of Monday’s gains.

Trump’s threat came a day after GM announced plans to cut 14,000 jobs and shut five facilities in North America, dealing a blow to the president’s promise to help auto workers. GM said the moves are designed to prepare the company for a future of driverless and electric vehicles. GM is also responding to a consumer shift away from sedans in favor of trucks and SUVs.

It’s not clear what subsidies Trump was referring to.

A person familiar with the matter told CNN Business that GM is unaware of any significant federal subsidies the company is receiving beyond a $7,500 plug-in tax credit, which goes to the consumer, not the company.

It doesn’t matter which mythical subsidy he’s whining about, because it’s not about the subsidies. It’s about sustaining the tough guy myth that Donny-boy always punches back twice as hard. He made promises to his base that he’d bring back all those automotive jobs that went away, and now he’s going to look bad because GM is closing those plants.

So he has to look like he’s doing something to ward it off, and, whether or not he actually talked to GM, he has to make it look like he’s working ever-so-hard to back the little guy.

But, as GM notes, this is partially about the Trump tariffs, and partially about an environment that is perceived to be in the midst of rapid change. Now, I may have my doubts concerning whether or not anyone is going to come up with a reasonable driverless vehicle, but that’s neither here nor there. GM, who has far more resources than I do, thinks it’s coming, and that those manufacturing plants will become superfluous. Given those facts and today’s private sector ethical system, the shuttering of those plants is almost unavoidable.

In reality, Trump would do the exact same thing as GM is doing if he was the CEO. But he can’t be seen to be that cold to the workers who are being tragically hit by the winds of change, so he’s out there making loud noises in the confident hope that his “failure,” which is only partially self-inflicted, will not hurt him with his base.

Ironically, Trump is interfering in the free market, which is certainly a violation of one of the tenets of the Republican Party. Would Obama do the same thing? I doubt it. I’d expect to hear such words as retraining in any speech he gave on the subect, because his advisors would tell him that the plant closings were irreversible, and Obama always seemed to be oriented on the future, not the past. And to listening to expert advice.

While Trump remains the ever-incompetent and overconfident amateur.

Maine is the first state in the Union to employ rank-choice voting (RCV) for a Congressional office, in this case Maine’s Representative from the 2nd District. The end result was a close race in which the incumbent, Bruce Poliquin (R) had a lead, but not a definitive lead, and as the process of RCV unfolded, his lead disappeared and ultimately his opponent, Jared Golden (D) was declared the victor.

Poliquin has cried foul, and along with filing suit against the use of RCV (approved twice by the Maine electorate), he’s also asking for a recount, citing some interesting reasons, as reported by the Press-Herald:

“We have heard from countless Maine voters who were confused and even frightened their votes did not count due to computer-engineered rank voting,” said Brendan Conley, a spokesman for the Poliquin campaign.

Frankly, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this group of voters, if they even exist. The process is simple to use, and I assume this change in voting has been well-advertised. The informed citizen should have shown up at the polling place with choices made and ready to fill in boxes.

“Furthermore, we have become aware that the computer software and ‘black-box’ voting system utilized by the secretary of state is secret. No one is able to review the software or computer algorithm used by a computer to determine elections,” Conley said. “This artificial intelligence is not transparent. Therefore, today, we are proceeding with a traditional ballot recount conducted by real people.”

This is where things get interesting, and a bit disingenuous. Why? Because the voting machines supplied for the traditional “1 person, 1 vote” style of elections come from private manufacturers, and, at least last I heard, the software was also a private, uninspectable affair. The resulting suspicions I discuss in the thread starting here.

Frankly, the good Representative may not want to stray into the swamp of voting machine politics, where revelations concerning the nature of voting machine software might lead to vast embarrassments for the GOP brand.

But there’s more to unwrap here.

This spokesman mentions ‘artificial intelligence’, and at this juncture I’d like to say that I’m becoming more and more convinced that this term should not be applied to any entity which lacks volition, or at least is intended to have volition, failed or not. That is, if your software entity is only intended to do is, say, detect whether or not someone has cancer by examining an X-Ray after having been trained on a collection of X-Rays, then I find it difficult to classify this as AI. Really, this is Machine Learning (ML), in which the entity has learned a set of rules and applies them.

Off of my rant stool and back to the story, the incumbent Representative and his spokesman have cleverly attempted to slip something by the reporters. When they mention that artificial intelligence [or ML] is not transparent, this is not a lie. Much of ML is opaque to everyone, from us common folks to the designers who designed the system and the programmers who wrote it. Let me defer the why of that for a moment, because it plays into my objection to their statement.

And that objection is that neither AI nor ML should be involved in this operation (and, if it is, someone needs a good smack upside the head)!

RCV is not a difficult problem to solve, at its core. The real problems are in security and transparency (see links above).

But let’s briefly discuss why I’m asserting this with such certainty, despite no real relevant experience in ML.

When a programmer is given a task to solve, typically the steps that we’re encoding for the computer to follow are either well-known at the time of the assignment, or they can be deduced through simple inspection, or they can be collected out in the real world. An example of the last choice comes from the world of medicine, where early attempts at creating a diagnosis AI began with collecting information from doctors on how to map symptomology to disease diagnosis.

These steps may be laborious or tricky to code, either due to their nature or the limitations of the computers they will be run on, but at their heart they’re well-known and describable.

My observations of ML, on the other hand, is that ML installations are coded in such a way as to not assume that the recipe is known. At its heart, ML must discover the recipe that leads to the solution through observation and feedback from an authority entity. To take this back to the deferment I requested a moment ago, the encoding of the discovered recipe is often opaque and difficult to understand, as the algorithms are often statistical in nature.

And this is not RCV at all. It has well-understood steps that lead to the final result. There’s no secret to it. In fact, the recount will be by humans, not by computer, so that proves the point.

So when the losing side complains about AI and it not being transparent, don’t be fooled. They may have legitimate worries about security and hacking by malicious entities, or even bugs (sigh), but the core algorithm should not be of an ML or AI nature. They may not realize it, but that’s how this really all plays out.

WaPo has a look at a senior care brand that was bought up and wrung out by the Carlyle Group, and how that seems to have affected the level of care:

Under the ownership of the Carlyle Group, one of the richest private-equity firms in the world, the ManorCare nursing-home chain struggled financially until it filed for bankruptcy in March. During the five years preceding the bankruptcy, the second-largest nursing-home chain in the United States exposed its roughly 25,000 patients to increasing health risks, according to inspection records analyzed by The Washington Post.

The number of health-code violations found at the chain each year rose 26 percent between 2013 and 2017, according to a Post review of 230 of the chain’s retirement homes. Over that period, the yearly number of health-code violations at company nursing homes rose from 1,584 to almost 2,000. The number of citations increased for, among other things, neither preventing nor treating bed sores; medication errors; not providing proper care for people who need special services such as injections, colostomies and prostheses; and not assisting patients with eating and personal hygiene.

It’s always suspicious to me when a private sector group intrudes into medicine – which happens all the time – but it appears that others are catching on. Long time readers will find this to be a familiar sentiment:

Ludovic Phalippou, a professor at Oxford who wrote the textbook “Private Equity Laid Bare,” says it is a question of whether private-equity methods are appropriate in all fields.

He has praised the ability of private equity to streamline companies but he has also described the firms’ approach as “capitalism on steroids.”

He said, for example, that while private-equity ownership of nursing homes is accepted in the United States, people in some other countries would be “aghast” at the idea.

If this doesn’t ring any bells, click here to see my previous meditations on moving the processes of one societal sector into another.

Naturally, private sector folk think they’re doing good:

One of the founders of Carlyle, David Rubenstein, explained to Freakonomics Radio last year the role of private equity: “You spend three to five years improving the company, incenting the managers to work harder, do more efficient things, and ultimately, after three or five years, you sell or otherwise liquefy the investment.”

He sees private-equity firms as a force for good.

“Private-equity people think that, while we’re not perhaps guardian angels, we are providing a social service, and that social service is making companies more efficient,” he said.

Unfortunately, the processes developed for the private sector are optimized for enhancing revenue and profit, not for stabilizing and enhancing care to seniors. I don’t dispute that it sounds good to make companies more efficient, but that’s not the whole story – a better description is that they make companies more efficient in terms of financial results as their first priority, which is an inevitable result of importing processes optimized for financial results; the care delivered to the seniors, or more generally the patients, turns out to be secondary.

Hey, it followed me home from school!

One of the sad things about cinema is when it tries and utterly fails to translate a good book into a movie. I don’t know how many folks realized that happened with The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (Jackson, it was all about temptation, not killing orcs!), but I think anyone familiar with the source material knows it happened with Starship Troopers (1997) as compared to the eponymous book by Robert Heinlein. True, there are characters by the same name in book & movie, and most of those that die in the book also die in the movie – albeit in differing ways.

Hey, they even briefly touched on the primary theme of the book, which had to do with the idea of making service, be it military or otherwise, be a necessary condition of receiving the right to vote.

But that’s really the heart of the book, the reason Heinlein wrote it. The movie? Not so much. The movie’s really all about anger and killing orcs monstrous bugs and all the nasty ways bugs can kill humans.

Oh, and sex. And getting brains sucked out.

I understand, the book was written in the 1950s, and certainly some of the cultural mores in the book are jarring to modern audiences. Sort of like The Odyssey, ya know? But add in the erratic characters and scant characterizations, and in the end this was really a disappointment.

But the special effects are great on the big screen.

While looking for a picture, I see some folks laud it as a great anti-militarism movie, a satire. It may, in fact, be such a thing. But it doesn’t help the cause of this particular sect of critics that the movie essentially ignores the intellectual subject that Heinlein was deftly introducing to the 12 year old boys who probably made up the initial fandom for this book, and substitution is hardly a valid intellectual approach. If you’re gonna satirize something, please don’t steal someone else’s intellectual property in order to do so.

I still see it as a splashy, poorly done mess. If I want well done satire, gimme Buckaroo Banzai!

And yet it’s sundown.

Sigh.

I must admit I was a little intrigued by this article on the re-use of bread that would otherwise be tossed, as pioneered by The Bread Factory in London. From The Guardian:

But what makes this particular sourdough a first in the UK is the intriguing ingredient also being added to the dough mix. Bado calls this “bread porridge” – a brownish, flecked mush of fresh breadcrumbs from leftover loaves which have been blitzed into tiny pieces.

It is a tasty solution to the shocking daily waste of bread, with more than 24m slices thrown away in Britain every day.

On Thursday the first 100 loaves of”waste bread” – baked in the early hours – will go on sale in 10 selected branches of Gail’s Bakery, before being rolled out across the rest of its 43-strong chain in London and the south-east. Roughly one-third of each baked 750g loaf consists of leftover bread and the chain calculates that the 100 loaves being baked daily will save approximately 10kg of bread being wasted per day.

“We’re calling it Waste Bread which some people think might sound a bit odd but we think this is being honest and clear with our customers” says Roy Levy, Gail’s head baker and head of development. “It’s re-using leftover but edible bread from our own supply chain which means we know exactly what is in it and where it has come from.”

I suppose this is a cousin to the Ugly Food movement, in which edible but unattractive food still makes its way to consumers’ stomachs.

If you’re still keeping score, the Democrats officially lost the Georgia 7th district race. Feeling bad that the Republicans haven’t been jolted hard enough to get their attention? Don’t.

Incumbent Rob Woodall (R) has a margin of victory of 433 votes, or roughly .2 percentage points. Yep, that’s two tenths.

And in the past? Representative Woodall typically wins this district by 20 percentage points. If I’m doing my math properly, that’s something like a 99% drop in the winning margin.

While some of this drop is attributable to changing demographics, this should catch and hold the attention of Republicans. The GOP brand is leaking oil all over the place. They need a new gasket, or more likely better ideology. At the moment, I’d sell them short on the stock market.

Came from nowhere, going nowhere.

While the North Korean epic Pulgasari (1985) is sometimes mentioned as a monster movie, this is actually a straightforward fable concerning the tradeoffs necessary for survival in times when men are ambitious and food may be scarce. It is also a condemnation of the hard, exploitative feudal system from which Korea transitioned following the Japanese invasions of World War II.

An unnamed village, supposedly under the protection of the local King, is instead preyed upon by its appointed Governor, who has stripped the village of food and men. Now he needs weapons, as the locals are in revolt.  He travels to visit the village blacksmith and demands immediate service. When the blacksmith points out he lacks the iron to make the requested weapons, the blacksmith’s village is stripped of the farming implements necessary to grow the food for the village.

The  confiscated tools are then stolen and once the governor learns of it, he blames the blacksmith and imprisons him without food. Scraps of rice are surreptitiously thrown to him by his children, and he shapes the rice into a toy creature.  With his last noble breath, imbues the figure with life. His daughter later finds it and accidentally cuts herself.  A drop of her blood completes the process of animating the figure. She names the tiny black figurine Pulgasari.

But this is not a monster that magically grows big. No, in order to grow, Pulgasari, which might be called an Eastern Minotaur, must consume iron. Any handy sword or tool will do, and these are presented in plenty when the governor’s troops come to destroy him.  Munching his way through swords, spears and pitchforks, he’s soon standing 40 feet tall.

There is quite the sophisticated war, as the King, now involved, has no intention of giving up his possessions or position, while the farmers, emboldened by Pulgasari, are loathe to give up the gains made possible by their pet monster. But as the war continues, iron continues to disappear into the maw of Pulgasari, and the farmers find it harder and harder to find the tools to grow food.  In the end, Pulgasari may have helped free them from the tyranny of the King, but now they face starvation. What will they do with their ally?

Technically speaking, I was expecting far worse from a North Korean movie. True, the visuals and audio are somewhat blotchy, but the acting wasn’t awful; more along the lines of some of the better Asian karate movies of the period. Pulgasari himself could have been better constructed, but as rubber-suit monsters go, he was far from the worst I’ve seen. I appreciated the attention given to the symbols of war and farming as forces in a dynamic tension that, ill-managed, can result in excess suffering. The director and writers of the movie may be reaching for even more symbolism, which I, as an American, may have missed.

Another political observation: this is a tug-of-war of the extreme narcissism and greed of the upper classes vs. the collectivism of the village. Neither is a happy situation, as the former exploit the villages, but the collectivist mentality inevitably morphs into self-preservation for the collectivist entity as a whole that, sadly, grinds the villagers into dust.  None of the original leading members of the villagers actually survives to the end of the movie, having sacrificed themselves for the greater good. The message, even if unintended, lends quite the noir atmosphere to the movie.

I don’t recommend it unless you have some interest in a movie that was made by a pair of hostages under the guidance of their kidnapper, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, who is listed as the film’s producer.

But in case you’re intrigued, here it is in its entirety: