Monthly Archives: November 2018

Exosome:

Exosomes are extracellular vesicles first described as such 30 years ago and since implicated in cell–cell communication and the transmission of disease states, and explored as a means of drug discovery. Yet fundamental questions about their biology remain unanswered. [James Edgar, BMC Biology]

Noted in “We’ve discovered a whole new defence system against germs in our noses, Michael Le Page, NewScientist (17 November 2018):

[Surgeon Benjamin] Bleier’s team and other researchers have recently found that, as well as secreting mucus, the cells of the nasal cavity release billions of tiny sacs called exosomes. Once in the mucus, these sacs can go on to fuse with other cells, delivering cargo such as proteins or RNA.

This made Bleier and his colleagues suspect that exosomes are part of a previously unknown defence system. Now, after studying tissue in the lab and people undergoing nasal surgery, the researchers have strong evidence for this idea.

They found that when cells at the front of the nose are exposed to a potentially dangerous bacterium, the number of exosomes released into the mucus doubles within 5 minutes.

Maybe turn that into a single paragraph, Michael. It’s quite herky-jerky.

Anna-Lisa Vollmer, et al, may have discovered an interesting learning opportunity while researching child-robot interactions. Here’s the abstract in Science Robotics:

I don’t know if readers had noticed the recent story about the Christian missionary who decided to visit the Andaman Islands, which are under the authority of India, but I doubt the villagers know that, as they tend to attack and even kill anyone who comes nearby.

Yep, he’s dead.

Now India is going to try to retrieve the body:

Authorities have started the arduous task of trying to retrieve a US missionary feared killed on a remote Indian island, careful not to trigger conflict with the islanders.

John Allen Chau was last seen last week when he traveled to the forbidden North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal to try to convert the island’s residents to Christianity. The Sentinelese, as they are known, have a decades-long history of repelling outsiders, a fact that is near certain to make the journey to find Chau a treacherous one.

Indian authorities along with the fishermen who reported seeing Chau’s body last week, went near the island on Friday and Saturday in an effort to figure out how to recover the body. [CNN]

I have one message for India: Don’t Bother.

Chau irresponsibly endangered the villagers by potentially introducing deadly pathogens to the villagers. It’s unethical to continue to do so. Since Chau elected to go of his own free will, leave his damn body there, and if anyone else tries to go there, slam them into the pokey and charge them with attempted genocide.

That’s right. That’s what it is. I don’t care how great a family guy this Chau dude might have been, his behavior earned him this end, and there’s no reason to retrieve his body unless it’s a hazard to these villagers.

Octopodes:

One octopus, two octopi? That spelling is actually incorrect because it’s based on Latin grammar. The word octopus is derived from ancient Greek, so the proper plural is octopodes. If that’s a bit too formal, octopuses is also acceptable. [Nathaniel Scharping, Discover]

I’ve never heard of quantum radar before, and I fear this simple explanation in NewScientist (17 November 2018, paywall) may still be too far above my head:

In theory, a quantum radar can overcome this by using two streams of entangled photons. These are pairs of photons that have a weird connection so a change to one affects the other, even if they are miles apart.

The first photon stream is sent out, like a standard radar beam, and bounces off objects in the sky. The second stream remains inside the system.

Because the photons are entangled, the returning photons can be matched with those in the stay-at-home stream, so all background noise can be filtered out. This includes deliberate interference, such as radar jamming or spoofing signals put out to confuse radar. What is left is a clear image of the target, with no extraneous signal.

Maybe if I was a physicist, or an electrical engineer. And, yes, a Chinese defense firm claims to have developed just such a thing.

I’m sure everyone’s seen this one already, but it made me laugh and then think.

I ran across Michael Roggo’s work in NewScientist. I’ve always enjoyed the wonder of icebergs, and the one below looks like a ship underway. It’s the double impression which gets me here.

It’s some beautiful stuff.

Yeah, I have no idea of the nature of the reflective surface shown above. Just one more:

Sure, it’s a pattern in rocks – but it reminds me of an abstract spider. Enjoy!

I see CNN has done some digging and found more dirt on Mississippi Senate candidate Hyde-Smith (R):

Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith once promoted a measure that praised a Confederate soldier’s effort to “defend his homeland” and pushed a revisionist view of the Civil War.

Hyde-Smith, a Republican, faces Mike Espy, a Democratic former congressman and agriculture secretary, in Tuesday’s runoff in Mississippi — the final Senate race to be decided in 2018. The measure, which was unearthed by CNN’s KFile during a review of Hyde-Smith’s legislative history, is the latest in a series of issues that have surfaced during her campaign, many of which have evoked Mississippi’s dark history of racism and slavery.

As a state senator in 2007, Hyde-Smith cosponsored a resolution that honored then-92-year-old Effie Lucille Nicholson Pharr, calling her “the last known living ‘Real Daughter’ of the Confederacy living in Mississippi.” Pharr’s father had been a Confederate soldier in Robert E. Lee’s army in the Civil War.

The resolution refers to the Civil War as “The War Between the States.” It says her father “fought to defend his homeland and contributed to the rebuilding of the country.” It says that with “great pride,” Mississippi lawmakers “join the Sons of Confederate Veterans” to honor Pharr.

The measure “rests on an odd combination of perpetuating both the Confederate legacy and the idea that this was not really in conflict with being a good citizen of the nation,” said Nina Silber, the president of the Society of Civil War Historians and a Boston University history professor.

“I also think it’s curious that this resolution — which ostensibly is about honoring the ‘daughter’ — really seems to be an excuse to glorify the Confederate cause,” Silber said.

I have no idea how this is going to play in Mississippi (I do have a relative in Ham Lake, MS, but he’s not responding to e-mails). But my initial real question is this: Are they applying the same zeal to investigations of Hyde-Smith’s opponent, Mr. Espy (D)? That’s sort of the problem for news sources that wish to be seen as neutral – how do you prove a negative? Or, to borrow the conundrum for atheists, Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. How to look busy when there’s nothing to find, but the boss is watching?

SETI Institute scientist Oliver White, et al, are working out why Pluto has ridges in an article (paywall) for Nature Astronomy. Here’s the abstract:

Image Source: Phys.org

A long time ago I noted the results of a study on computers and education, and somehow this connects with an article a friend pointed out a few weeks ago in The New York Times. The article concerns the practice of high level executives at places like Facebook in connection with … computers:

Over the last few days I’ve been noting there are quiet yet pronounced high expectations for the final, runoff segment of the race to replace Senator Cochrane (R-MS) in the Hyde-Smith (R) / Espy (D) race in Mississippi on the Democratic side of things. This has been strengthened by interesting media reports, such as this from WaPo:

Espy remains the underdog in the conservative state, but Republicans with access to private polling say Hyde-Smith’s lead has narrowed significantly in recent days. Republicans need only to look to next-door Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones pulled out a surprise win last year, to stoke concern.

For Republicans, the Nov. 27 runoff is a chance for a slight expansion of their majority in the Senate, their one bright spot in this year’s midterm elections. If Hyde-Smith wins and Gov. Rick Scott keeps his lead in the Senate race in Florida, Republicans would have a senate majority of 53 to 47. A loss in Mississippi would give the GOP a 52-to-48 majority, only one up from the current razor-thin margin.

From The Resurgent, the home of Erick Erickson, which I class as right-wing extremist yet never-Trump organization, comes an unsigned editorial:

As Sam Hall, executive editor of Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger, put it on Twitter today, the way the “Hyde-Smith only five points up” poll makes sense is if McDaniel voters aren’t planning to show up to vote for her. In Hall’s words, “McDaniel backers are the wildcard voting bloc. A lot of people are asking, ‘How many of them will sit at home?’” Of course, as Hall notes, that might not be the right question to ask—there might not even be enough hardcore McDaniel types out there to deprive Hyde-Smith of a win if they stay home on election day. Still, if Hyde-Smith is in jeopardy, this is very likely the reason why—not the other stuff the national media has been focusing on. And to be fair, some Mississippi political insiders have been worried about this proving to be the case for a long time.

For the uninitiated, a lot of McDaniel fans feel they got screwed in former Sen. Thad Cochran’s re-election, when the Cochran-Barbour machine in Mississippi worked every conceivable angle to deprive McDaniel—who is regarded as a stauncher conservative but also was accused of racism and may even have appealed to some Mississippi voters as a result of it—of a win.

Subsequently, that same machine let a short time pass, Cochran exited the US Senate, and Hyde-Smith—a former Democrat who also has the backing of the same Mississippi GOP establishment—took his place.

McDaniel, in case my reader has forgotten or missed it, is “Trumpier than Trump,” to paraphrase his own description, which makes “staunch conservative” seem to be a misnomer. But the analysis, if true, may make this race exceedingly close.

The Republicans are in an awful pickle, for even victory really isn’t good enough – in one of the most conservative states in the Union, winning by a sliver is a measure of their dying brand. The Republicans will need to win big, or it’s going to start looking like death by a million tick bites, and those are the ticks that carry Lyme Disease^[1]. Worse yet, the length of service for this seat is only until 2020, as former Senator Cochrane resigned midway through his term due to health reasons.

The metric here is the magnitude of victory for the Republican candidate. A quick glance at recent Senate contests in Mississippi suggest that a triumphant GOP would expect a 20 point victory in Mississippi, so I’d say that if Hyde-Smith wins by more than 15 points, the GOP has little to worry about.

If she wins by 10-15 points, the Republicans should be frowning a bit, and worse if it’s 5-10.

The real danger is winning by less than 5 points, because the party activists won’t take it seriously. They’re entrenched and feeding off what makes them feel good, and the fact that they’re the ones poisoning the water will not be accepted by them. Then the GOP in Mississippi will be in danger of becoming irrelevant until they eject the extremists who cling to white supremacist artifacts, such as those clutched by Hyde-Smith.

And if they lose? The Mississippi Republicans will shatter but not die, at least not for a few years. Denial is a strong psychological urge, especially for those who’ve rejected justice in favor of economic advantage.

The election is Tuesday. Everyone will be watching, including President Trump, who supposedly is campaigning for Hyde-Smith. If she fails, it’ll be egg on his face as well as her’s. Not that he’ll admit it.

¹ Which I’ve had, and is exceedingly unpleasant.

Nummy Nummy In The Tummy!

Plot holes are rife in Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), one of those mildly meaningless horror thrillers of the period. A science team arrives on an island that has been exposed to nuclear radiation in order to search for their predecessors, who have disappeared body and soul, as well as continue their research. The first body is produced immediately as one of the sailors falls off their little landing boat and is missing his head when his fellows pull him out.

Why no immediate investigation takes place, not to mention a rapid abandonment of the island, is unclear and left us with feelings of ennui and disinterest. Even the unexplained explosion of their seaplane as it attempts to leave with the body aboard did little to heighten the tension.

One more example of a plot hole: in the middle of the night, a hole opens up in the land. Never mind that it has vegetation growing on its side, never noted by the biologists – the team geologist immediately decides he needs to make the 50 ft descent using nothing more than a rope. His plunge, triggered by monstrous explosions that draw curiously little interest from the team, draws more tsking than anything from the audience.

It’s possible to justify his actions using the antagonists’ capabilities noted below, but at the time, and given the reputation of Director Roger Corman, I just wrote it off as another silly blooper that definitely deflates the credibility of the story.

And as the plot holes and illogical character actions pile up, there was a certain sense of regret, because the central plot mechanism is the idea that the monster crabs, upon consuming their victims, actually acquire their victims’ personalities and at least some of their knowledge, and that makes for a creepy effect. The tendency of the crabs to bait the humans, both literally and in wordplay, has its virtues. The two sides engage in the inevitable tug of war between predators and prey, and, taken in isolation, it’s not a bad little struggle, as each sides’ plans encounter the others, fail, change, and fail again, until the final engagement near the radio tower, which I suppose could be taken as symbolic of, well, something to do with the telepathy of the crabs. Don’t ask me what, though. That there was enough juice in the transmitter (that I thought didn’t work) and the radio tower to produce crab fricassee was surprising enough.

But the final straw is the wretched special effects. While Corman is smart enough to hold off on a full monty of his critters from hell initially, he eventually does give in to the urge to show off his crabs in full detail, and this doesn’t work out well for Corman or his audience. They’re simply too amateurish.

If you are one of those individuals afflicted with the need to see all the work of Mr. Corman, this is not the worst of his output. You may enjoy it. But I’d recommend just a wee dram of the good stuff to help this porcupine of a movie slide down the old gullet.

A note from the arts editor:

While the movie itself is fairly ho-hum, it had one of the best movie posters in the genre:

The overall design is very cool, and the color is spectacular.  It is, of course, pure schlock, which holds much of its charm.

Also fun to note:  the blonde bimbo in the poster does not appear anywhere in the movie, and the brunette female lead in the film was never in a scene similar to this.

But the poster does make a great visual.

A reader reacts to my review of Maria By Callas:

Hue: I haven’t seen the film so it’s difficult to know what to say. Callas is regarded by many as the greatest opera star of all time; she wasn’t by my estimation: That title goes to Joan Sutherland. But Callas was so much more than a singer; she was a “personality,” a diva, a woman of great controversy, intelligence and strong opinion. Driven and temperamental, she was loved by many and hated by others. Her career was cut short because she ruined her voice singing parts that damaged her vocal chords but appealed to her soul. There was and is no one like her, which is why she’s so revered. When it comes to singing, however, there was no one who could touch Sutherland for beauty of tone, technical mastery, and sheer brilliance of sound, all of which she possessed without any of Callas’ airs. It’s the legend of Callas people remember.

Ah. And there was nary a mention of Sutherland in Maria By Callas.

Hercules thinks he could be a display model, too.

Hercules In New York (1969) lacks good dialog, acting skills (OK, Arnold Stang was good), a believable plot, a useful theme, a good soundtrack (it alternated between dated synthesizer and frenetic Italian/Greek strumming), or anything else to make this interesting.

Except, for those with a specialist’s interest, Schwarzenegger’s pecs. A very young Schwarzenegger.

Avoid, avoid, avoid, unless you’re the completist type. Then heavy drinking might be in order, and a notary public to certify you really did watch this bit of tripe.

The annual edition of American Fencing showed up in the mail last week, and during Turkey Day I read it. Most of it was ho-hum, but I was shocked when I read the article by noted fencer and referee Jeff Bukantz, Can Referees Determine Intent? As it is print-only, apparently, I’ll summarize: he polled several high level referees, most with high level fencing experience, as to whether or not referees should pay attention to what they think is on the fencer’s mind, or simply interpret the actions. He found several referees who not only think divining the intent of a fencer is important, someone actually said, “Basically a referee needs to have historical knowledge of a fencer’s catalogue of actions.”

I’ll stop here to mention what some may think is important, but is really incidental – my experience as a referee. In short, I’m not in the same league as these refs. I’ve refereed, in order of difficulty, at Youth Enrichment League, high school (and, to be clear, this is Midwest high school, not Coastal high schools, which are considered much better than Midwest), and MN DIV events (and, for the latter, not in several years). I attended a referee seminar 20 or so years ago, but I declined taking the academic tests or the practicum, because, quite frankly, while I’m part of the fencing community because I enjoy ruining someone else’s day, I far prefer to do it on the strip with a saber in hand, rather than on the side of a strip screwing up a call.

I’m also, at best, a mediocre foil & sabre. (Recent illness hasn’t helped matters.)

But all this doesn’t matter.

To continue my thought, keeping a catalogue on the fencers you are going to referee is NUTS!

Look, the human brain is a weird and wonderful organ, but it’s nowhere near perfect. Among its many faults (or, perhaps, advantages, depending on how different functioning might impact the survival potential of the human organism) is the fact that information it picks up from the environment and from other sectors of the brain, even that which is not consciously detected and may or may not be true, can influence the judgment of that brain. We know this is true and even quite strong through the undeniable existence of the placebo and nocebo effects, and the fact that study participants in pharmaceutical tests will actually pick up on whether or not they’re getting the authentic drugs or the sugar pills when the administrators happen to know what is being handed out, without being told, resulting in the gold standard for such tests being double-blinded tests, wherein the administrators interacting with the patients also don’t know who is getting which.

Is a referee supposed to be using their prior knowledge of the two fencers on the strip before them? I suppose that depends on your definition of a referee. My definition is fairly basic – a referee is an entity, acting in a non-biased manner, that evaluates the actions of the fencers in the context of the rules of engagement for the bout in order to determine who has scored a valid touch on the valid target area of their opponents. This is a good first hack at a definition.

The key is not being biased. If I have a referee who studies the fencers they’ll referee, keeps a book on them, there’s an inevitable bias built into that study. Not that of friendship or teammates, but that of expectation. The observation that Fencer A has a propensity for inviting an attack, parrying, and flicking to the shoulder, while Fencer B prefers simple single feint attacks that he occasionally chokes on^[1] will easily be read as an implicit bias that Fencer A should win all of her bouts with Fencer B. Our referee may loudly proclaim that he won’t let that knowledge bias his calls. Our referee will truly believe it.

Don’t trust him, though. Studies of the brain and how knowledge of this sort can influence judgment have been executed in the field of psychology, and show that unconscious bias can occur. In my early days of referee, I had to fight with that influence, and no doubt I compromised a touch or two as I learned to ignore who was fencing while trying to interpret the actions.

And that’s the sad thing here: we’re talking about the actions that actually take place on the strip. Divining intent, while critical for a coach who’s evaluating the tactical decisions made by their fencer vs their implementation, shouldn’t be needed by the referee. Why?

Historically, fencing, be it Olympic style or the more informal and heavy duty styles such as broadsword, doesn’t derive from an abstract game of some sort in which intent plays a part of a final score. It’s practice for life and death on the dueling grounds and in pre-modern gun warfare. That’s how it started out, and that history continues to influence and justify the existence of fencing as a sport, so evaluating our refereeing needs to take that into account, because otherwise the sport continues to mutate away from its original forms. Frankly, intent in the mind of a fencer doesn’t count for shit if they don’t execute on that intent properly. If I initiate an attack, hesitate, withdraw my arm, and get smacked in the chest, then that’s my opponent’s touch – or me on the ground with a sword through me, if we were on a battleground. My intent to use a double feint isn’t important if I don’t execute it.

To complete the argument, the rule book covers all this as a simple perceptual matter. Is the point threatening target? Is the elbow straightening? Has the attack finished without a touch? Was the parry truly effective? There are various amounts of interpretation of the rules, but divining intent is merely a complicating factor which throws a fog over the real problem the referee faces with each engagement:

Who executed a valid attack on the valid target?

But there’s a bit more reality, as discovered by science, that I need to throw in here, and it’s this: human perception is mostly a myth. It’s a fallacy to say that humans see reality! The truth is that we see and hear little bits, and then our brain constructs a narrative with which to interpret what is happening. This is a survival characteristic that evolved to tell us to run like the wind when the bushes seem to rustle, because if we had to process every element of reality in order to decide if that’s a lion or just the wind behind the bush, well, we’d be a meal long before we reproduced. Our brains, for all their fantastic capabilities, are too slow when faced with that much information.

But this shortcut doesn’t guarantee that narrative is right. Better to expend energy needlessly than to get eaten up, no?

When I go out to referee, I consciously try to remove these filters from my eyes and my brain. I try to just see what’s really going on and take the time to process that raw data from reality. I don’t want my filters making up a story for me based on minimal information.

Additionally, as a referee I have no interest in who’s on the strip. I’d have names removed from uniforms, if I could. This should be a disinterested exercise in evaluation of the actions of two fencers, at that moment, regardless of their histories, their state of minds, or much else, in the context of the rules.

Intent? That’s communicated through their attack implementations and results. Keeping some sort of book in order to have an educated guess on intent just seems like an invitation to biased refereeing to me.

¹ That would be me.

Nostrum:

1. A medicine prepared by an unqualified person, especially one that is not considered effective.
   ‘a charlatan who sells nostrums’
2. A scheme or remedy for bringing about some social or political reform or improvement.
   ‘right-wing nostrums such as a wage freeze and cutting public spending’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “Democracy is in crisis around the world. Why?” Max Boot, WaPo:

These trends are driven mainly by automation, but it is easy for demagogues to put the blame on supposedly disloyal elites such as international bankers, trade partners that are supposedly ripping us off, and immigrants who are supposedly stealing jobs and bringing crime. Conveniently enough, the nostrums pushed by autocratic populists exacerbate the very problems they claim to be addressing, deepening the crisis that gives them the excuse to rule. (Trump-supporting counties have done worse under Trump than counties where the majority voted for Hillary Clinton.)

I guess I wasn’t in on this secret, even though NewScientist (10 November 2018) claims everyone knows it:

IT IS no secret that Elon Musk wants to build a space internet. His company, SpaceX, has been granted permission by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to set up a vast network of thousands of low Earth orbit communication satellites. But the company has been tight-lipped about the project, known as Starlink.

Now Mark Handley at University College London has created a detailed simulation of what Starlink might look like, which he will present at a conference next week.

Although Musk has said he wants more than half of all internet traffic to go through Starlink – Handley’s simulation suggests that the project will be most appealing to high-frequency traders at big banks, who might be willing to fork out large sums for dedicated, faster connections.

But there’s a couple of things wrong here.

First of all, the Internet was designed, and is successful, not because it has a centralized design, but because it has a decentralized design. Routes can change dynamically as computers go offline and come online, as network link availability fluctuates. Routing half of Internet traffic to go through a single entity, even dispersed, is an invitation to sudden hiccup and even downtime if that entity suddenly disappears – and I suspect Musk would run that as a monoculture, meaning that any problems that a particular node of that entity possesses will be a problem for all those nodes.

Secondly, as long time readers know, high frequency traders get little sympathy from me. Their economic activity does not appear to improve society in general that I can find, and in fact probably amplifies the movements of the stock market to a degree unwarranted. That can be damaging to investors, experienced or not.

But Musk will do what Musk will do, and we’ll all be blown about in the aftermath. Hell, I’m scheduled to test drive one of this Tesla 3 models tomorrow. I do not expect to buy one, but perhaps the salesman will be extra-persuasive.

I’ve been puzzling over how to write about Maria By Callas (2017), a quasi-documentary concerning legendary opera diva Maria Callas. It’s composed almost entirely of Callas source material: Callas interviews, home movies, and videos of her performances. At first, it’s charming, at least for myself, who knows virtually nothing about the opera. And, technically speaking, the presentation of the material is more than competent, deftly setting moods through its use of artifacts of the material upon which these memories are stored.

But I gradually became aware that the documentary is inevitably a one-sided view of the star. Was she just an ordinary woman gifted with an extraordinary voice? Was she really an innocent who longed for children and family, but was forced, by the magnitude of her gift and the material aspirations of her husband and lovers, to instead be an opera singer?

There’s little to put this all in frame for an ignoramus like myself, so if you’re looking for an introduction to this icon of the field, you might do better to look for more comprehensive material. But if you’re an opera fan, this may come close to nirvana, not only to get to know a bit about the woman, but a chance to hear pieces of some of her performances.

National Grid, Environmental Defense Fund Europe, Oxford/CSci, and the WWF have developed a forecast tool for the carbon intensity of the current usage of electricity in the various regions of Great Britain:

National Grid, in partnership with Environmental Defense Fund Europe, University of Oxford Department of Computer Science and WWF, have developed the world’s first Carbon Intensity forecast with a regional breakdown.

The Carbon Intensity API uses state-of-the-art Machine Learning and sophisticated power system modelling to forecast the carbon intensity and generation mix 96+ hours ahead for each region in Great Britain.

Our OpenAPI allows consumers and smart devices to schedule and minimise CO2 emissions at a local level.

More here. I’d like to see this tool make its way to the United States, if it hasn’t already.

Chief Justice Roberts has stepped out of the shadows, so to speak, and since I find him to be the most interesting cipher currently on SCOTUS, it’s worth mentioning it. From the AP:

In a highly unusual public statement, Chief Justice John Roberts rebutted President Donald Trump’s statement that a ruling against the administration was made by “an Obama judge.”

Asked Wednesday by the Associated Press about the president’s comment, Roberts responded, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

He added on the day before Thanksgiving that an “independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Needless to say, Trump wouldn’t be reprimanded by such a lowly entity as Chief Justice Roberts:

[tweet https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1065346909362143232]

Thus speaketh President Irrelevancy.

It’ll be interesting to see how the conservatives and the GOP (essentially two completely different entities at this point) reacts to the Chief Justice’s remarks. I suspect the former will cheer, and the latter will revile him as an apostate and even a liberal. It’s not much of a prediction, really, but I don’t see anything up on National Review (pro-Trump), The Resurgent (never-Trump but otherwise far right wing), nor The American Conservative (dunno). However, Joseph diGenova of Fox News has already begun to cast stones:

The spectacle of the ostensibly nonpolitical chief justice engaged in a dispute with the president of the United States is insulting to the Supreme Court and to our system of justice.

Shame on the chief justice. What he did is unforgivable, especially after the corrosive Senate confirmation battle over now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was the subject of bitter and baseless partisan attacks and character assassination by Senate Democrats.

With everyone looking for ways to remove the high court from the political thicket, Roberts strode arrogantly right into it. Sad day.

He thinks Roberts caved to criticism from Democrats, which is a laughable claim. The balance of his column shows he’s either glossing over the travel ban history – or ignorant of it. More importantly, there’s an implicit contradiction in using the 5-4 SCOTUS decision permitting the travel ban to come into effect to condemn the 9th Circuit, and then turn around and claim Roberts, who voted to permit the travel ban and was, presumably, impervious to Democrat opinion, must have caved in other decisions, such as the ACA ruling, that didn’t go diGenova’s way. Perhaps diGenova should consider the possibility that the law and Constitution simply dictated Roberts’ decision. I know, that’s a bit radical of me.

Paul Mirengoff on Powerline thinks there are Obama and Bush judges:

The questions of whether it matters who appointed a federal judge and whether such judges view litigants, including President Trump, with equal regard in any meaningful sense are empirical ones. If one can predict with a high degree of accuracy how a judge will rule in a highly controversial case, or in a case challenging a Trump edict the left doesn’t like, just by knowing which president appointed that judge, then Roberts’ defense of the federal judiciary fails.

That’s a more interesting observation. However, and speaking as non-lawyer, laws are quite often loaded with ambiguous specifications, some of which can be interpreted as contradicting the Constitution, a document itself subject to divergent interpretations. Mirengoff may consider consistent readings as illicit when they’re simply a consistent manner of interpretation of ambiguities. It doesn’t make them liberal nor Democratic per se, but simply as a matter of interpretation. Think of it this way: in many sports, the interpretations of the rulebook are an integral part of the sport, and oft-times those rulebooks, even seemingly well-written rulebooks, are chockful of ambiguities. Let me take a semi-hypothetical case from fencing, which states that when a fencer retreats behind his own end line, the action will stop, his opponent is awarded a touch, and the fencers will return to their en garde lines, unless the opponent has reached the goal of the bout, in which case the bout ends in the opponent’s favor. Furthermore, retreating behind the end line occurs when both feet are behind it^[1]. Sounds rock-solid, doesn’t it? Well, suppose this: one fencer executes an attack, the other fencer leaps back, evades the attempted touch, scores a touch of her own on the attacker while still elevated, and then lands with both feet behind the end line. Whose touch is this? Depends on how you interpret the rule, doesn’t it? Is she off the end of the strip when she lands, or when both feet are beyond an invisible plane perpendicular to the strip, connecting to the end line? (Now imagine the fencers are tied and this touch decides the winner of the gold medal bout at the Olympics!)

That was delightfully indulgent for me. To return to my point, anyone involved in heavily refereed sports will tell you that consistency of interpretation is almost as important as the interpretation being consistent with the rulebook’s text. When judges present consistent interpretations, and even consistent interpretative styles, this should not be immediately considered a symptom of a core intellectual deficiency in the judge’s understanding of the law, but rather a positive attribute of the judge, in and of itself, because I suspect lawyers faced with a judge who is erratic in his rulings will tell you this is a far worse thing than a conservative or liberal judge – and a trial lawyer is already faced with the inherently unpredictable factor of the jury. The last thing they need is a judge who varies interpretation from moment to moment.

In fact, absent evidence that a judge or even a category of judges are actually issuing judgments inconsistent with the law, my opinion of the whole Obama / Bush / Trump judge thing is that it’s the first step down the pathological path of condemning an entire class of judges, fracturing the judiciary, and then politicizing the same. This would be a step that any national-level adversary, such as Russia, China, or ISIS, would embrace with hisses of delight.

The fact of the matter is that if a given Federal judge is consistently issuing judgments at variance with the Constitution & the law, we have a mechanism available to be rid of him or her: impeachment. Mirengoff’s opinion, I think, mistakes disagreement for pathology, and results in a political course detrimental to health of the polity.

So will there be a tangible change in the Chief Justice’s rulings? Hard to say. He surely must realize his Party of old has been overcome by the corruption at its core, but he may continue on with his own ideological roots, as they color his rulings.

But it definitely means that decisions with a strong political factor may be less certain in their final disposition. For instance, the very recent Federal ruling invalidating the abortion law in Mississippi is certainly headed for SCOTUS – but it may not be heard, if the Chief Justice decides Roe v Wade really is settled law, no matter what the other four conservative Justices think. Or it may be heard – and he’ll choose to side with the liberal wing.

In the end, the Chief Justice had no choice but to issue a defense of the Judiciary, because it is one of the pillars of American society. A strong, high-morale judiciary is an important & critical part of American society. Persistent, decades-long mutterings against it on the conservative side of the spectrum has served to fracture it to some extent, which is unfortunate as no major political party’s interests are truly served by a chaotic, ineffective judiciary. Its chronic understaffing, also the responsibility of a recalcitrant GOP determined to politicize a judiciary that has acted as a restraint on its pathological ideology, is another problem, and while it’d be good to see it properly staffed with a qualified collection of judges of either brand, the collective quality of judicial nominees presented by President Trump has been far below the required standard, or at least so qualified observers have noted (I must go with expert opinion, although some nominees have obviously been so unqualified that even the GOP Senators rejected them); that is, the judiciary staffing approved by Senators Grassley and McConnell will be seen, in the light of the disinterested historian, as another black mark against them.

Will there be continued verbal joust? I doubt it. Roberts has made his point, and his defenders should now rush to the redoubts. They should be both liberals and conservatives, because this was an attack on an essential of American society, just as much as the free press is an essential. Without a high quality judiciary which makes consistent interpretations of law and Constitution, we’ll descend into chaos. We’ll be lorded over by amateurs and second-raters. We’ll just be another banana republic, ruled by self-righteous incompetents who think their ideology or religious faith or immaculate intellects justify any action they take, regardless of the law.

But one prediction I will make: At some point, President Trump will attempt to remove a judge he particularly despises through Executive Order, i.e., autocratic fiat. If & when that happens, there’ll be a lawsuit, and when it makes it to SCOTUS, it is imperative that they rule swiftly (i.e., within an hour) after arguments, the decision should be 9-0, and the text of the ruling should be “No, <relevant constitutional section cited>, piss on you, President Trump. Speaker of the House, begin immediate impeachment proceedings. Senator McConnell, we’ll see you in SCOTUS chambers immediately.”

OK, won’t happen. That last part is a bit too imperious. But it’s what should happen. McConnell has been far too busy destroying the United States while in pursuit of his personal goals – or those of his backers.

¹ I say this is a semi-hypothetical example because I haven’t read the USFA rulebook in at least a decade and probably more, so perhaps I’m out of date. Having attended a fencing referee’s seminar and a sabre referee’s short & informal seminar, I know that much of the seminars were devoted to interpretation, so I remain certain the spirit of this example is true.

Plenary:

1. : complete in every respect : ABSOLUTE, UNQUALIFIED
   plenary power
2. : fully attended or constituted by all entitled to be present
   a plenary session [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Another judge just blocked Trump. His ruling contains a warning.” Greg Sargent, WaPo:

But for our purposes here, there’s something remarkable buried deep in the decision: The judge warns that Trump’s proclamation and the interim rule that went with it actually claim for Trump the authority to shut down the southern border to any and all asylum-seeking.

“The rule itself actually gives the President the ability to issue even more restrictive proclamations” later, the judge’s decision says. “The rule gives the President plenary authority to halt asylum claims entirely along the southern border.”

Now that Stacey Abrams (D) has conceded the governorship of Georgia to (very, very recently) former Georgia Secretary of State, aka Counter Of Votes, Brian Kemp (R), the Kemp Campaign to get His Ass Re-elected as Governor has already kicked off, courtesy President Trump. CNN has made available notable parts of a transcript of Fox News‘ Chris Wallace’s interview with the President, and this tidbit comes to the fore, as a number of pundits have noticed:

“And it was all stacked against Brian, and I was the one that went for Brian and Brian won.”

Anyone paying attention knows that Georgia’s a deep-red state in which Kemp should have had an easy win. Furthermore, Kemp, in his role as Secretary of State, pushed for modifications to voter rules, purged voter roles, and in general pursued a number of changes to electoral procedures that were designed to suppress the vote, while looking like reforms. I shredded the “exact match” law into tatters and then danced on them in this post.

But I don’t read the above just as part of the usual Trump self-important fallacious braggadocio. I don’t doubt Trump needs to rain praise on himself as part of his mental disability, but I also think this is the kick-off for Kemp’s re-election campaign. The best campaigns, regardless of the Party or the quality of the candidate, tell solid stories concerning the candidate. Maybe the story is how they were a combat pilot in Iraq, and now they’re up against the terrible odds of battling the bloviating incumbent who’s held the seat for the last 30 years. There’s a good story beginning in this hypothetical case. Or the former Trump voter who was running for Congress and telling it how he saw it – that Trump was not what he claimed, but the candidate was so pissed off that, well, I think his hair caught fire. This one is more or less true. Another good story. (I forget the guy’s name and don’t know if he won or not. It was a House race in West Virginia.)

In Kemp’s case, it’s how he battled against impossible odds in order to pull off the impossible dream – a Republican winning the governor’s seat in Georgia.

Yeah, if you put it that way, and you’re a politically conscious citizen of Georgia, or someone who pays attention to politics in America, it’s a joke. That Abrams came as close as she did to beating Kemp has to leave the GOP completely shattered and, if it was rational, desperately conducting a post-mortem. They may conduct that post-mortem, but I seriously doubt much will come of it. In these situations, certain interests are typically too entrenched to easily ouster, and instead they’ll depend on their deteriorating marketing machine to pull them through 2020 and 2022.

But back on point, notice that Trump didn’t mention Georgia, didn’t mention anything that’ll work against the story he’s crafting. He’s focused on Kemp, on the alleged (and false) odds that he faced, and, boy, with just a smidgen of help from his buddy Trump, Kemp won.

In fact, I’m missing something here. It’s never Kemp. It’s Brian. It’s that friendly touch, using the given name rather than the colder surname. Surnames are impersonal, unless they’ve been mutilated, such as Brownie for Brown. That practice, however, may not be used for a generation because it’ll remind voters of the mismanagement of the response to Hurricane Katrina, the responsibility, deserved or not, of FEMA Director Michael “Brownie” Brown, who worked for President Bush (R), whose name shall only be spoken through gritted teeth by the GOP Faithful.

This is all part of an ongoing effort to shape the narrative of the Georgia electoral battle. The GOP is well aware that it has done its best to shape how the electorate votes, from gerrymandering (not applicable here) to purging voter roles and the whole “exact match” imminent disaster, without regard to “fairness” or even legality. They want to make the next go around into personal battles against the “cheating” of the Democrats, a word that has already been deployed a number of times on the GOP side, in order to distract attention from their own peccadilloes.

It’s easy to write off Trump’s utterances as utterly self-serving and the sign of a deteriorating mind, even the mark of dementia. And they may be. But they are also the opening salvos in the next 4 years of campaigning.

And keeping that campaigning honest will take the strongest efforts of our free press.

One of the fears of epidemiologists has been that cheap air travel will result in the unstoppable propagation of novel, deadly viruses, which will one day result in far too many of us dropping in our tracks. It hasn’t happened yet, and the reason may not be what you’re expecting, as NewScientist (10 November 2018, paywall) reports:

But new diseases don’t spring from nowhere – they evolve from related strains of viruses or bacteria, says Robin Thompson at the University of Oxford. The new microbe may differ from the old by only a few genetic mutations.

That often means people exposed to the first strain may have some degree of immune resistance to the new, deadlier one. This makes them less likely to catch it or, if they do, to die from it. And, thanks to air travel, that is likely to be the case around the globe. “It’s like a natural vaccination,” says Thompson.

In other words, the continual spreading of microbes around the world through air travel makes it harder for one to evolve in isolation long enough that when it finally breaks out, it kills large numbers in populations with no immunity at all. “We may have been thinking about air travel all wrong,” says Thompson.

To test the idea, he and his colleagues mathematically modelled the factors that affect the spread of a theoretical new and highly virulent microbe in a world with mega-cities and mass air travel.

They found that a crucial variable is the degree of immunity to this strain that has been gained by exposure to similar, less harmful viruses or bacteria (BioRxiv, doi.org/cwm2).

The analogy may not be strong, although recall that the early, pioneering vaccinations for smallpox (variola major and minor) were derived from the closely related, but not nearly as dangerous, disease cowpox.

But while it lowers the odds of a massively deadly outbreak, it doesn’t zero them out. The Spanish Influenza of 1918 would seem to be proof of that. All it requires is an incubation period of a few days combined with a terminal outcome in a high percentage of patients, and the influenza provides the latter.

As I suspected, President Trump’s Approval / Disapproval ratings – at least according to Gallup – have immediately recovered.

I have no real explanation as to why the country seems to recognize the utter incompetence of our President one week and then goes back to sleep the next. Perhaps it’s a reaction to how his opponents are reacting to that incompetence. Perhaps this Internet thing on which you’re reading this has made attention and meditation so fleeting that no one really evaluates anything anymore.

Oh, and tribalism. If you’re in the tribe, the leader can do nothing wrong. (Shame on tribalists. Absolute shame.)

This reader’s observation concerning the Khashoggi murder is cogent:

I suspect this will be old news, in the US at least, by the time we finish the thanksgiving leftovers. We have short memories from, and in, a news cycle that seeks fresh shock and awe headlines daily. “Oh yeah, Khashoggi? Didn’t somebody go to jail for that?”

Just for my own morbid amusement, consider these facts:

• The “caravan” from the South, the one for which we deployed the Army? Remember Trump’s claims that it was full of malevolent characters, bent on our destruction? Well, the Army is withdrawing, most of the immigrants are still marching (a dubious term for these unfortunate people), and nothing like some horrid invasion is occurring. Hope you weren’t frightened, because if you were, you were a sucker.
• Mass shootings continue to occur, despite Trump’s (and the NRA’s) assertion) that everyone carrying guns would obviate the need for gun control. I used to believe that, back, oh, 30 years ago. It’s become blindingly clear that this is bullshit. It’s built on the premise that everyone is rational. As scientists & people with bad neighbors know, rationality is not a core part of many human beings‘ core.
• Trump’s refusal to accept the CIA’s appraisal of the Khashoggi murder as being on Crown Prince Salman’s (MBS) head, and the revelation that Trump has financial interests in Saudi Arabia, not to mention those of personal pride (think his Middle East diplomacy effort through his son-in-law, Kushner), leaves one with the inevitable conclusion that money matters more than lives to this President – and, for a self-proclaimed billionaire, it just makes the immorality of it all that much more pathetic.
• Remember that big ol’ tax cut for the middle class of which Trump announced just before the mid-terms? That’s completely disappeared. Never mind that it would have added to a suddenly ballooning debt, a helium balloon formed under the GOP’s leadership. As one conservative writer (Max Boot, I believe) recently noted, if you consider yourself a financial conservative, you’d better be a Democrat, because financial responsibility is no longer part of the GOP brand. I’d add, the acquisition of power & money is the soul of the GOP brand, and the abortion issue, along with tribalism, is the shears with which they harvest the money and votes of their tribe. (Quick, someone get me a cartoonist!)

Which all leads to the question, how much longer will the religious right continue to ignore the sober teachings of earlier generations, those that forbid the adoration of money, abjure the liar, to stay to their self-proclaimed religious path? Sure, as I’ve said before, redemption is a big part of the American Way, but at some point you do need to move towards it, it’s not thrust upon you. You must admit to error and seek forgiveness.

Otherwise, all anyone can say is that the religious right, the evangelicals, is nothing more than a bunch of money worshipping, liar-loving hypocrites.

And I don’t want to think that a large proportion of my fellow-Americans are in that leaky dinghy.