Monthly Archives: January 2019

Conservative pundit George Will in WaPo:

When Democrats are done flirting with such insipidity [aka Beto O’Rourke], their wandering attentions can flit to a contrastingly serious candidacy, coming soon from Minnesota. The Land of 10,000 Lakes and four unsuccessful presidential candidates (Harold Stassen, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale) now has someone who could break the state’s losing streak. Sen. Amy Klobuchar is the person perhaps best equipped to send the current president packing.

Really? Hey, I love Amy as our Senator, but there are some Minnesota-specific reasons she blew out her opponent in her re-election last year, and it all starts with her public appearance. She is absolutely reflective of Minnesota introspective/passive-aggressiveness. Hell, we’re the home to a passel of generations of Finnish immigrants, who’s favorite joke is …

How do you know a Finn likes you? He’s staring at your shoes, not his own.

She’s not a polished speaker, much like our termed-out Governor (and former Senator) Dayton, neither of whom could inspire a pack of squirrels to squabble over a bunch of rotten apples, and because of that she connects with most of us Minnesotans at a subconscious level. For us, she’s the one sacrificing herself so the rest of us don’t have to. She appears to acquit herself well, hasn’t stepped in any horseshit, offended any minorities, and appears to be well on her way to a respectable, but not standout, career in the Senate, and that’s no mean thing.

But that doesn’t mean she’s Presidential timber. How is she going to connect with New Yorkers who expect and respect constant aggressiveness? With rural voters who are suspicious of the Congressional crowd because they don’t speak their language? She hasn’t yet presented that campaign-organizing Presidential goal, such as what eventually became the ACA for Obama, or the Wall for Trump, or finishing the Cold War for Reagan. While not necessary, it’s an immense help to a campaign to have that campaign point to discuss, to enlighten supporters and inflame critics.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong. But I don’t think her communications skills are up to the job, at least from what I’ve seen. Maybe she has hidden reserves. Maybe she’s been sand-bagging us all, and soon we’ll learn to fear the might of President Amy.

Nyah. She’s too mild-tempered for that.

Over the last few days there’s been work in Congress on legislation which would eliminate the requirement that Continuing Resolutions be passed by Congress, thus eliminating the entire shutdown crisis scenario. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive outfit, decided to think about it a little bit:

By allowing the government to keep operating without any action by Congress and the President, an automatic CR mechanism would significantly reduce pressure to reach agreement on full-year appropriation bills and thus would tend to prolong budgetary uncertainty. Most important, it likely would significantly increase the instances in which the previous year’s appropriation levels and priorities remain in place for a year or more while pressing, new needs go unattended and areas that no longer need as much funding are overfunded. In addition, by freezing funding at last year’s levels (as an automatic CR would likely do), it would strengthen the hand of those who want to shrink the size of government.

An automatic CR could be particularly problematic in fiscal year 2020. As explained below, it could make it more difficult to secure a sound budget agreement that sets the appropriations caps at levels sufficient to maintain progress made under the last budget agreement in a range of areas and address pressing needs, including the decennial census and the recently enacted veterans’ health legislation known as the Mission Act.

If you’re a conservative, you probably don’t care. If you’re a small-government fanatic, you may be nodding your head and smiling.

But, while I’m no games theorist, I’d like to point out that an auto-CR facility will significantly increase the complexity of the political game in Washington, D.C., and that game is already fairly complex. The danger of unintended consequences will go up, and if my conservative reader is happy today at the thought of using this auto-CR facility to simply suffocate those programs he considers superfluous, overweening, or otherwise undesirable, rest assured that progressives will have their best minds working on how to use such a facility to their advantage.

I’d not be smiling if I were on either side, and as an independent I’m not sure I like it, either.

Look, while I appreciate the deviousness of a surprise pin of a queen in chess, or a particularly deceitful toe touch in fencing, as much as the next competitor, in general I prefer a more straight-ahead approach to life. When it comes to the government, I don’t want to see oily politicians like Mulvaney hiding being some sort of auto-CR legislation in order to, say, not fund his hated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) at what others may consider to be an appropriate level. It’s. Just. Dumb.

But even more importantly, consider this. These shutdown crises are high stress situations for everyone involved, from the Federal employees and contractors who are not getting paid and trying not to be evicted or served with repossession papers, to the elected leaders who may or may not have gotten us into this mess^[1], but sure are responsible for getting us out.

And pressure situations serve to strip away artifice and obscuring tactics. They can reveal to us, the electorate, the real nature of those folks we’ve elected. And that’s important. For those of us who really want to see and understand our representatives, both Executive and Legislative, this is a good opportunity to get a peek under the business suits. During our most recent shutdown, we saw President Trump’s gross incompetency at the governance game; we saw the Congressional Republicans shuffling around impotently, unable to convince themselves to even pass legislation that they had passed in the prior Congress, just because President Trump had been literally manipulated into rejecting it, forcing a shutdown.

Not that any of this was a big surprise to regular watchers, but it’s another opportunity to confirm evaluations.

But seeing Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Schumer (D-NY) go to town on Trump and the Congressional Republicans served to give us a great view of what the Democrats can do, given an opportunity. They have a firm grip on the rules, written and unwritten, that runs American government, they held their side together, and they refused to be buffaloed by the great bully himself.

This example is why I think the auto-CR legislation, as well-meaning as it is, is short-sighted. Yes, it’s very tough on Federal employees and contractors during a shutdown, and that’s not good. But this Republic really needs budgets agreed to, appropriations negotiated, passed, and signed off, all on a regular basis. When these shutdowns occur, they can reveal to us the true nature of those who force these things upon us in a way that other events cannot. We learned that the 116th Congressional Republicans are even more subservient than the 115th Congressional Republicans, but the 116th Democrats can operate as an effective team and enforce their will, all quite lawfully and, in my view, rightfully, on the Executive. We learned Pelosi is not some shrill housewife, but a coldly effective leader with whom it’s frankly dangerous to cross blades.

And, using that information, voters can perhaps improve on their selections when the 117th Congress comes around. We saw who was effective, and who was not. The Republicans have yet another red flag waving in their faces.

¹ The most recent shutdown started during the 115th Congress, which was entirely controlled by the GOP. That Congress terminated and was replaced by the 116th this January, and is, for those hiding underneath a rock, split between the GOP controlling the Senate and the Democrats controlling the House. Therefore, the shutdown started because the 115th Congressional GOP could not nerve itself to override Trump, thus leaving the entire mess for the Democrats to clean up. I suspect this’ll turn out to have been a tactical error in retrospect, as the Democrats have every appearance of being effective, while the GOP sat around on its hands and waited for Trump to do something, and he was incapable.

Continuing the saga of Roger Stone, apparently he left quite a trail behind himself, according to Lawfare:

On Thursday, the Special Counsel’s Office filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in its case against Roger Stone seeking an exception to the Speedy Trial Act due to “voluminous and complex” evidence. According to the filing, Stone’s defense counsel does not oppose the motion.

Just how voluminous is that information? From the motion:

Upon the entry of a protective order, the government intends to begin providing defense counsel with discovery. This discovery in both voluminous and complex. It is composed of multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information consisting of, among other things, FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results (e.g., Apple iCloud accounts and email accounts), bank and financial records, and the contents of numerous physical devices (e.g., cellular phones, computers, and hard drives). The communications contained in the iCloud accounts, email accounts, and physical devices span several years. The government also intends to produce to the defense the contents of physical devices recently seized from his home, apartment, and office. Those devices are currently undergoing a filter review by the FBI for potentially privileged communications.

Is it intimidation through a tsunami of information? Could be. Or it could be that Roger “Drama Queen” Stone really didn’t care about morality and is going to be getting himself quite the case of notoriety, which, given his sartorial tastes, is unsurprising. I suppose his tattoo of Richard Nixon on his backside should be a big clue.

I hope he enjoys “the pen.”

Some folks hate the word irregardless. My current linguistic hatred isn’t over a non-existent word, but rather the misuse of a word. I’ve seen this in many places, so I’m not picking on Senator Scott (R-SC). It’s from a letter to the Wall Street Journal, which Steve Benen helpfully reproduces in part:

I am saddened that in the editorial “Democrats and Racial Division” (Dec. 1) you attempt to deflect the concerns regarding Thomas Farr’s nomination to the federal bench. While you are right that his nomination should be seen through a wider lens, the solution isn’t simply to decry “racial attacks.” Instead, we should stop bringing candidates with questionable track records on race before the full Senate for a vote. […]

We must not seek to sow the seeds of discord, but rather embrace the power of unity. Simply put, if the Senate votes on a candidate that doesn’t move us in that direction, I will not support him or her. Our country deserves better.

Bold mine, to show the key word is deserves. Deserves is a reactive word, a word applied to indicate someone, or something, has performed a task at a level of excellence worthy of recognition and reward.

Mere existence doesn’t cut the butter.

One might argue that our country has achieved great things, but the fact of the matter is that this country has also performed atrocious acts. Another argument is to suggest that, as unexceptional and even guilty of atrocious acts as our country may be, the individuals nominated for the position, in this particular case, are still unworthy, but this is a denigrative act in defense of an entity which has numerous crimes to its own name, regardless of whether it has atoned. In the end, this logic, both formal and emotional, becomes too convoluted for the individual who values direct and accurate communication. In a word, this approaches baroque.

Add in the simple fact that deserves is a word that can also be used by those who feel entitled by birth in a variety of irrelevant attributes, such as sex, gender, color of skin, etc, and its misuse is not only irritating to the precision-inclined individual, but dangerous to society as a whole, since fidelity to reality is a key step in the task of survival and improvement.

I advocate a return to the recognition that country, as a whole, exists, and that its improvement is an honorable goal. If I were Senator Scott, I’d simply state that confirming a nominee who apparently holds racist views, or is willing to suspend his own good judgment to implement the noxious views of his superior, would be deleterious to the country’s moral health, and that the current President should raise his standards, for the good of the country.

For a more positive example, I give you the dubious sentiment that children deserve a good education, a sentiment I’ve seen expressed several times. Well, no, the existence of children, in and of itself, does not result in any such deduction. Reality, in and of itself, does not care. However, if we take to heart the thoroughly reasonable principle that an educated citizenry leads to a prosperous and peaceful state, then advocating that a good education for children is good for the country seems reasonable and convincing – and accurate.

Suggesting anything deserves something purely because it exists is both silly and dangerous, because it comes dangerously close to presupposing the divine, the wildcard of human existence.

My last rep, Senator Klobuchar, is not all that far behind in her answer to my suggestion for ending the shutdown. This time I don’t even get boilerplate concerning the subject, just thanks for your idea. Sort of. Not really.

Thank you for contacting me about the government shutdown. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

As you may know, an agreement has been reached between Congress and the President to reopen the federal government until February 15, which will allow furloughed federal government employees to go back to work, workers to be paid, and services to resume. Please know that I will continue to work toward finding a long-term solution as discussions continue in the Senate.

Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me. I continue to be humbled to be your Senator, and one of the most important parts of my job is listening to the people of Minnesota. I am here in our nation’s capital to do the public’s business. I hope you will contact me again about matters of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Amy Klobuchar
United States Senator

But her punctuality isn’t too bad. I wonder if she’s going to run for President or stick with the legislating job.

Ever wonder if the Endangered Species Act works for marine mammals? OK, I hadn’t thought about it, but NewScientist’s (online only) Michael Le Page has checked into it:

The Guadalupe fur seal via Wikipedia

But no one had done an overall assessment of how well it has worked for the 60-odd marine mammals and turtles listed, including the Antillean manatee, the sei whale and Kemp’s ridley turtle. Now Abel Valdivia of the Center for Biological Diversity in California and colleagues have crunched the numbers for 31 populations of 19 different species.

The team concludes that 24 of these populations are recovering, five are stable and just two continue to decline. The recovering ones include the Guadalupe fur seal, the green sea turtle and the Pacific population of fin whales, which has increased from under 2000 to nearly 10,000. The recovering populations have all been listed as under threat for 20 years or more.

Naturally, if something works, the Trump Administration is ready to set it on fire. But if he can be removed from office in 2020, his replacement should be able to help guide any necessary refurbishments.

In case you’re not a lawyer – I’m not – and you’re wondering about the various maneuverings that go on in Court, here’s one as noted by Lawfare:

The special counsel’s office has filed a memorandum in U.S. v. Concord Management and Consulting, LLC in opposition to Concord’s motion to disclose documents identified as “sensitive” by the Special Counsel to certain Concord officiers and employees. The memo alleges that subsequent investigations into Concord have “revealed that certain non-sensitive discovery materials in the defense’s possession appear to have been altered and disseminated as part of a disinformation campaign” apparently aimed at discrediting the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

And then the memorandum is presented verbatim. Concord is half-owned byYevgeny Prigozhin, and is associated with the Internet Research Agency, indicted nearly a year ago by Mueller.

Altering and disseminating court papers. This is the sort of thing where someone needs their head banged violently against a metal pole, but it’s just not going to happen without a militant President to do it.

Stretching reality into whatever shape is needed.

My Arts Editor insisted I watch Brazil (1985), and, besides the fact that I can’t imagine why it’s entitled Brazil, I have to say it was a fascinating look into how and whether the human mind can compartmentalize its way to sanity, as we watch terrorist attacks ignored, as best they can, by diners in restaurants and cleanup crews in government ministry buildings; men who work in government offices sharing desks through the office wall, and fighting over it, in offices a mouse might find small; and even, in the end, during the death by torture of a man who manages to soar off into a beautiful future in his mind, as even his own life is coming to an end.

If only the latter had happened, then I might have written it off as a mind descending into madness to evade the unacceptable, but as we watch the above as well as entire offices that watch old video dramas such as Casablanca when the boss isn’t watching them, and then madly working when he appears, or consider the behavior of workers who, when confronted with the mere mention of a required government form in order to enter a residence to perform repairs, retreat in terror, there comes a frisson of wonder about our own concern over rules and regulations, which run through this film much like the duct-work which impinges continually on the visuals.

The rogue, the person unimpressed with the government forms and the rules they represent, are the flies in the ointment of this bleeding wound on society, labeled terrorists for, perhaps, good reason, as the occasional wall is blown out with explosives. But then again, the Information Retrieval specialists, who operate in the broadest sense of the term, are, in their own way, government-sponsored terrorists, removing those who may add yeast to a bread that seems a trifle flat.

And on this part of the tour we’ll be inspecting a modern dental station!

But this all works, more or less, from the sordid realities of overweening bureaucracy to the hero’s night-time dreams of defeating its embodiment as a Japanese warrior, because it follows its own logic scrupulously, at least so far as I can make out, both internal to the society and how human beings would react to it, from its embrasure to its rejection. In some ways, it predicts those who would reject democracy because it leaves them naked on the beach, hungry and vulnerable. Nothing is sacred in either reality, but those in power will fight to stay in power.

And, in some ways, it’s a tabula rasa on which an observer might draw his or her own lessons about any of a multitude of subjects.

Should you see it? That depends on your tolerance for whimsy and the utter disregard for the plausibility of a social reality portrayed with one’s tongue firmly in one’s cheek. If you have a high threshold and have never seen this classic, then Recommended.

PS and the computers are utterly charming, a paean to the Art Deco movement of a century ago.

Remember Wisconsin’s hooking of a Foxconn plant? This dormant thread is suddenly interesting again because … it may not happen.

Foxconn is reconsidering plans to make advanced liquid crystal display panels at a $10 billion Wisconsin campus, and said it intends to hire mostly engineers and researchers rather than the manufacturing workforce the project originally promised.

Announced at a White House ceremony in 2017, the 20-million square foot campus marked the largest greenfield investment by a foreign-based company in U.S. history and was praised by President Donald Trump as proof of his ability to revive American manufacturing.

Foxconn, which received controversial state and local incentives for the project, initially planned to manufacture advanced large screen displays for TVs and other consumer and professional products at the facility, which is under construction. It later said it would build smaller LCD screens instead. [NBC News]

Which should be unsurprising. American labor is expensive. This is true in the absence of any other factors which would give Americans an unadulterated advantage, which is to say targeted tariffs are not the answer. Even astronomical taxes on the cheap shipping enabling cheap overseas labor to compete with expensive American labor may not be enough.

And, honestly, I have no idea what will be the answer that preserves high wages for American manufacturing employees, at least in the realm of the reasonable. Heck, even unreasonable is hard. The only one that comes to mind is a plague that kill all the non-American manufacturing employees, and that’s both repulsive and unlikely in the extreme.

So what is Foxconn considering?

“In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.,” he said in an interview. “We can’t compete.”

When it comes to manufacturing advanced screens for TVs, he added: “If a certain size of display has more supply, whether from China or Japan or Taiwan, we have to change, too.”

Rather than a focus on LCD manufacturing, Foxconn wants to create a “technology hub” in Wisconsin that would largely consist of research facilities along with packaging and assembly operations, Woo said. It would also produce specialized tech products for industrial, healthcare, and professional applications, he added.

Hello, knowledge workers. I doubt Foxconn‘ll ever make it to the project 13,000 workers. And that’s the real failure of the Scott Walker bribe. It’s not that it won’t recoup the bribe, because that’s not the goal – it’s great if you do, but Wisconsin’s real goal was to help the manufacturing sector. It appears this will be chalked up as another Walker failure, although he and his successors will kick dirt in the face of manufacturing employees as they wiggle around trying to take credit for getting a research campus, instead.

Joshua Howego of NewScientist (12 January 2019, paywall) reports on what may be a case of picking the wrong metric for measuring progress towards success, a problem I expect to be common as “AI”, or rule production systems, are deployed more and more:

A police force in the UK is using an algorithm to help decide which crimes are solvable and should be investigated by officers. As a result, the force trialling it now investigates roughly half as many reported assaults and public order offences.

This saves time and money, but some have raised concerns that the algorithm could bake in human biases and lead to some solvable cases being ignored. The tool is currently only used for assessing assaults and public order offences, but may be extended to other crimes in the future.

When a crime is reported to police, an officer is normally sent to the scene to find out basic facts. An arrest can be made straight away, but in the majority of cases police officers use their experience to decide whether a case is investigated further. However, due to changes in the way crimes are recorded over the past few years, police are dealing with significantly more cases.

It’s a bit of a relief that they’ve severely limited the scope.

Setting the goals of these algorithms is perhaps the most important part of the development and implementation process, isn’t it? Let’s take the above example: is our goal simply to increase our percentage of solved crimes by discarding the those crimes that are hard to solve?

What if those hard crimes were all the murders in the city?

Residents aren’t counting crimes solved, because while jaywalking, for example, has important consequences for traffic flow, people really don’t care about it as a crime, unless they’re an environmentalist who believes cars have become the illegitimate dominant life form of American cities.

If a series of high-profile murders occurs, this frightens the residents. The fact that they’re hard to solve should not militate against working them.

In the end, this is an scarce resource allocation issue, isn’t it? First we have to understand the goal of the system, which might be best stated as a calm populace. Then we have to understand what alarms residents vs what they can put up with, and we have to understand that may change over time. Only then can an  effective resource allocation system be developed. The system described above sounds a bit half-assed, doesn’t it? Or at least not based in reality.

As a guy with way too many passive interests and too little time, there’s a lot of things that might motivate me to generate a comment that don’t because because of that lack of time, and if I did, my hands might go on strike at all the typing. Into this category I can thrust the Covington Catholic students controversy. I ignored it because its initial presentation just sounded like a lot of other bigotry, and yet the details didn’t jive. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s a report of some Catholic high school students, visiting Washington, DC, for the March of Life, had a confrontation with a tribal elder who was in town for Indigenous Peoples March, and has a notorious picture of a group of the kids, some in red MAGA (Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again) hats, staring or smirking, depending on who you read or how you interpret, at the elder.

Then there were reports that a group of people who call themselves Black Hebrew Israelites might have been involved, an interview with the elder that seemed a little odd, and a couple of days later, one of my favorite writers, Andrew Sullivan, has his own analysis of the incident. He reports on his viewing of the YouTube videos:

What I saw was extraordinary bigotry, threats of violence, hideous misogyny, disgusting racism, foul homophobia, and anti-Catholicism — not by the demonized schoolboys, but by grown men with a bullhorn, a small group of self-styled Black Hebrew Israelites. They’re a fringe sect — but an extremely aggressive one — known for inflammatory bigotry in public. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group: “strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.” They scream abuse at gays, women, white people, Jews, interracial couples, in the crudest of language. In their public display of bigotry, they’re at the same level as the Westboro Baptist sect: shockingly obscene. They were the instigators of the entire affair.

Which I had not noted in any previous reports, but then I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. But then this:

And yet the elite media seemed eager to downplay their role, referring to them only in passing, noting briefly that they were known to be anti-Semitic and anti-gay. After several days, the New York Times ran a news analysis on the group by John Eligon that reads like a press release from the sect: “They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.” He notes that “they group people based on what they call nations, believing that there are 12 tribes among God’s chosen people. White people are not among those tribes, they believe, and will therefore be servants when Christ returns to Earth.” Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bunch of people preaching the enslavement of another race in public on speakers in the most inflammatory language imaginable.

Andrew then gives a number of their somewhat insulting, somewhat incomprehensible examples of racism and misogyny. No doubt my persistent agnosticism leaves me incapable of being properly outraged.

Christine Semba barely mentions the Black Hebrew Israelites in taking this opportunity to discuss the old Japanese movie Rashomon (1950), and how its engagement with the slippery concept of truth is mirrored in this incident.

Did Nathan Phillips, the 64-year-old Omaha elder, spark the confrontation by walking toward the Covington Catholic High School teens? Were those teens — especially 16-year old Nicholas Sandmann, who in videos is seen staring Phillips down, refusing to move — disrespectful, possibly even racist? Was this a case of the “liberal news media” rushing to destroy young people’s reputations, or of conservatives attempting to reframe reprehensible behavior into martyrdom?

“Rashomon on the Mall,” pundits have dubbed it: a far less exalted version, as befitting our far less exalted times. Yet Kurosawa’s film is celebrated for its investigation of deeper questions than most of our Twitter debates have touched on so far.

Erick Erickson of the far-right, Christian site The Resurgent has only pity:

I’ve mentioned how the Republican Party will, and is, ripping itself to pieces through the purification ritual known as RINO, that is, ejecting a member because they are Republican In Name Only. However, that tendency also will increasingly inflict external damage to itself, as we see in this news report from AZ Central:

Kelli Ward, the bomb-throwing [metaphorically speaking! HW] conservative former state senator and loyalist to President Donald Trump, upended the race to lead the Arizona Republican Party by beating the establishment favorite and incumbent GOP chairman, Jonathan Lines.

In doing so, Republicans from across the state on Saturday chose a more right-wing vision headed into the 2020 election cycle where Arizona is poised to reach battleground status.

The election could have far-reaching implications for how the party messages to voters and how it spends money on races.

As the general electorate of Arizona drifts toward the center, as exemplified by the victory of Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in the race for seat of retiring Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) at the mid-terms, the Arizona Republicans, blind to the political landscape, continue flying along to the rightward extremes.

I see this as another step in the trip to rebuilding the GOP – by first self-flooding it with an explosive element (Ward), which will not lead to the victory they may envision. Political extremity and purity in that extremity are not the recipe for turning lead into gold – only for tying that lead weight to the ankle and throwing them into the lake.

On Lawfare Chuck Rosenberg notes that Roger Stone, recently arrested by the FBI and charged with lying to Congress, among other things, and he notes that Stone, who many on the right want to excuse for his boyish enthusiasm, appears to be fairly bloody-minded about his enthusiasm:

Stone was also charged with witness tampering, a crime that strikes at the heart of the judicial process. There are numerous allegations in the indictment of Stone urging others to lie. Those urgings clearly run afoul of the witness tampering statute. And, if that’s all there was to it, a summons might be the way to go.

But there is a more compelling reason to arrest him. The devil is in the details. Read, for instance, page 20 of the indictment, where prosecutors note that Stone emailed one witness and called him a “rat” and a “stoolie” and threatened to take that witness’s dog away from him. In another email that same day to that same witness, according to the indictment, Stone wrote “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive].”

Law enforcement simply does not hand a summons to someone who threatens to kill a witness and trust that person to act responsibly with it.  No conscientious prosecutor would think a summons appropriate there, or think that a threat to kill a witness is simply what targets of grand jury investigations routinely do.

That’s why the FBI showed up at 6am and took him away in handcuffs, like any common alleged criminal threatening violence.

But it’s important to note that Process crimes is a phrase which functions as a smokescreen, an obscure and unintelligible phrase unless you’re one of the initiate – and then, because you’re not a lawyer, but just someone who’s being spoon-fed some info, you get to feel elite while actually misunderstanding the character of the crime.

Rosenberg does not go too far when he states that “… witness tampering strikes at the heart of the judicial process.” Sure, it’s not murder, rape, extortion, or blackmail. Nor is it child-molestation, arson, or fraud.

But it is the crime that enables all those others, isn’t it? Think about it. Our judicial process, at it’s best, and it often is, depends on the testimony of witnesses. They can be wrong, confused, or otherwise limited, but the fact remains that, without a witness, many and even most crimes cannot be prosecuted.

When some right-wing pundit insists Stone’s only been charged with process crimes, that it’s hardly a crime at all, be careful about swallowing the bait. Witness tampering can easily be the attempt to close the gateway to extremely serious crimes, and that makes witness-tampering as serious as the crimes Stone is trying to obscure.

This one could have been entitled “The Woman Of Many Absurd Hats.” It would have been a better title.

If you’re looking for a tidy little sports drama, It Happened In Flatbush (1942) might be up your alley. A retired baseball player, notorious for botching the play that could have won his Brooklyn team the pennant, has been coaching in the minor leagues in obscurity for seven years since, and now he’s being called up to the big leagues in the manager’s role. But if he’s going to help his old Brooklyn team win, he has to romance the team owner into upgrading the team, calm the family waters, and get over his own crisis of self-confidence. It’s one of those tight & tidy dramas emblematic of the era, and if it doesn’t blow your socks off, it also doesn’t disappoint.

Discover lists the weirdest objects in the Universe. #2 is …

The Black Widow Pulsar

Rep McCollum is the second of my three Congressional reps to respond to my suggestion:

Simpatico:

congenial or like-minded; likable:
I find our new neighbor simpatico in every respect. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “‘Chuck and Nancy’ present a united front in challenging Trump on border wall,” Seung Min Kim, WaPo:

No two principals in the shutdown fight have presented a more united front than “Chuck and Nancy,” as Trump has dubbed them. The two leaders have refused to make any key strategic moves in the shutdown fight without consulting each other and have become so simpatico that their staffs regularly joke that the two finish each other’s sentences.

He read it in a Chinese Fortune Cookie:
You will one day become a blue floating head.
And, lo! So it came to be.

When it comes movies with elements of disparate quality, Battle Beyond The Stars (1980) is right up there with the best of them, and it’s all enough to make this audience member’s teeth itch. A quick overview: the planet Akir is menaced by Sador and his minions, who give the peaceful inhabitants two choices: submit to enslavement, or be blown up by Sador’s “stellar converter.” The one warship on the planet, an obsolete boat with an artificial intelligence named Nell, is used by the heroic young man who goes in search of allies to help defend the planet, and he returns with a motley collection of spacefarers, each with their own reason to sign up for certain death. Their sacrifice saves the planet. Sounds familiar? Akir is the clue.

On the bad side: a story that is almost totally awful and stilted. Why are the bad guys mutants who are overly incompetent? Not that it’s wrong to suggest the bad guys’ competing self-interest often leads to their collective self-destruction, but this level of incompetence suggests their very first opponent, no doubt a Valley Girl from some obscure backwater planet, could have destroyed them while painting her fingernails.

The space battles. Not the ships themselves, but the story-tellers did a horrible job portraying these battles in any sort of plausible terms. Remember the battle between the Millennium Falcon and the Tie Fighters in Star Wars (1977), how it took your breath away? Not so much here. The overwhelming odds are not conveyed, there’s little scope for cleverness, and the repetition just makes the visuals look cheap.

Disturbingly biological. I’m guessing it’s based on human female reproductive organs. Since those are guns on the outriggers, I’d guess it’s a snide swipe at feminism.

On the good side? Speaking of the battles, the ships themselves, no doubt plastic models on strings, were actually rather charmingly detailed. I enjoyed them for the most part.

More importantly, though, was the cast. I rarely discuss the cast of movies, but from the A-list comes Robert Vaughn as a hard-edged, yet sad mercenary, George Peppard as  a romantic from another age who finds himself drawn into this fight against his will, and (perhaps debatably not quite A-list) Richard Thomas in the lead role as the dewy-eyed young protector of the planet, tasked with finding more defenders. From the B-list is John Saxon, as the evil, one-armed Sador, leader of the bad guys, and Sybil Danning, playing an enthusiastic and buxom mercenary. All deliver competent performances that try to lift this shambling story out of the pits it falls into; they fail not due to poor acting, but due to the poor script with which they’re stuck.

My new favorite assassination squad.
“We always carry a spare.”
But which one is it?

While I said the story is awful, there were a couple of fun bits to it, of which my favorite was an inventive approach to assassination which, sadly, fails, but amused me. If the story-tellers had set it up better it could have been more effective, but they don’t tell us how the good guys knew Sador would order the arm of a captive to be sawed off and attached to himself.

So this is a weirdo movie. I almost didn’t survive the first couple of minutes, but it improved just enough to hold my attention during meals and whatnot. If you’re an aficionado of any of the actors listed above, then you have to watch this.

It’ll take a bit of teeth-gritting, but you’ll get through it. And marvel that actors of this quality agreed to participate.

Readers continue to react to my analysis of the recently terminated shutdown:

I say we shouldn’t reward 45’s behavior of taking the country hostage til he gets what he wants. What will be next? He shuts everything down til ACA is repealed?

I’ve seen this remark in a number of venues, and I completely agree.

But there’s more: the loss of tethering our government to rationality. The article referenced in this post talked about the slashing and even abolition of research offices in the federal government, and now we’re reaping the wind blowing out of that major mistake. In a sane world in which Rep Newt Gingrich (R-GA), responsible for that slashing, was laughed out of Congress, rather than made (failed) Speaker of the House, Trump’s Wall would have been subjected to an analysis by entities inside and outside of government, an intellectual debate would have ensued, and eventually a conclusion reached. The Wall would have been retired from consideration and we’d be moving quietly onwards towards better solutions to the illegal immigration problem.

I do love my delusions.

Instead, the Republicans killed off the government research centers that came up with “liberal conclusions” (read: answers they didn’t like), and then pursued discredited ideas such as the Laffer Curve. Fortunately, the Republicans have left their fingerprints on all their mistakes, and the voters do have some memory. To take what sounds like an extreme example, but isn’t, if we lose Miami to climate-change induced flooding in the next few years, the Democrats need to pin it on the Republicans. Not for political advantage, but because without that assignation of responsibility to a mode of thought (a word I type with some trepidation), our nation is doomed to ruination and dismemberment.

And I’m quite serious about that.

Another reader:

They [the Democrats – HW] need to respond with their position. No we will never fund a wall, but here is what we will do.

This dick measuring Pelosi is doing with Trump, with her cult cheering her on is just ego, and of course a waste of time.

Trump won’t accept their offer of course, but they at the very least need to do this for optics, because in time the public is going to see the shutdown as the result of both parties, instead of the toddler in the oval office.

The shutdown is, shall we say, in abeyance at the moment, because it was terminated not by the signing of appropriations legislation, but by a continuing resolution. I don’t agree that Pelosi is grandstanding for ego’s sake, but I suppose that’s a judgment to be made by history. To my eye, she’s taking down a dangerous opponent using the tools she’s honed for a decade or so – or possibly when she was raising her five kids.

But I agree with my reader, the Democrats need to put together and message a strong alternative response. Readers know my suggestion from earlier on this thread, which I’ve sent out to my reps.

So all that said, what does the next three weeks hold? I expect the Democrats to work on appropriations legislation sans funds for the wall, but with higher allocations for general border security. In addition, they may work on an alternative solution to illegal immigration and present it to the electorate.

The Republicans will blather about, waiting for Trump to lead them.

And Trump? Supposedly, he carries grudges for years, but this is new territory for him, and he’s an old man. He may decide to quietly sign the appropriations legislation brought to him in the next three weeks and use his “national emergency” powers to move money from the military to border security for building the wall. Democrats will scream, Republicans will reply that Obama did the same.

And in two years, voters will pounce and Senate Majority Leader Senator McConnell (R-KY) will lose his big-title job, and perhaps his other job as well. Years of irrationality will shred the Republican Party, and Trump’s base will feel betrayed by their country.

The dangers of letting irrationality dominate the country comes to the fore.

As the UK spins and spins in the grip of the powerful Brexit vortex, there’s been some interesting things happening, beyond the already observed possible Russian entanglements. For example, businessman James Dyson’s strange move:

The decision by British technology firm Dyson to move its head office to Singapore has prompted a predictable backlash in its home country.

The British press seized upon Tuesday’s announcement as further evidence of hypocrisy on behalf of the firm’s founder, James Dyson, who has been vocal in support of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit), yet – according to some – appears to have hedged his bets when it comes to his own business. Dyson’s latest move follows the firm’s announcement in October that it would use Singapore as its base for its ventures into the electric car market. …

Still, despite Dyson’s denials, there are hints that Brexit and its possible effect on the firm’s supply chain is an accompanying factor behind the shift.

Dyson’s chief executive Jim Rowan has been quoted as saying: “If your supply chain is in Asia, and you are manufacturing in the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia, then obviously you don’t get badly affected with those changes post-Brexit.” [South China Morning Post]

It’s more than a little disturbing that a Brit citizen and business owner who advocated for the exit of the UK from the EU has chosen to move an important part of his business, and necessarily some good jobs, out of the UK, now that his Brexit plan has nearly come to fruition. Presumably, if he was honest in his advocacy, he should believe that benefits, including those of an economic nature, coming from Brexit should be on the horizon, and he should be staying to reap them – or, if he was wrong, to stand strong with his country, to accept responsibility by having his company accept the repercussions.

The fact that he doesn’t, for those of a paranoid nature, suggests one of two possible conclusions. One, he’s been compromised and promoted Brexit at the behest of his handlers. Or, two, he felt that Brexit would improve his company’s position in the world, but only if the company moved out of the UK.

Neither conclusion is acceptable for a man of honor.

But Mr. Dyson isn’t the only interesting development. From the Independent:

Prominent Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg has defended the move by a City firm that he helped to found to establish an investment fund in Ireland ahead of the UK leaving the European Union.

The Conservative MP faced questions when it emerged that Somerset Capital Management (SCM) had launched a new investment vehicle in Dublin amid concerns about being cut off from European investors.

A prospectus for the new business, which was registered in March and will be governed by EU and Irish rules, listed Brexit as one of the risks, as it could cause “considerable uncertainty”.

The disclosure is potentially embarrassing for Mr Rees-Mogg, who has been one of the most vocal advocates of a clean break from the EU through his role as chairman of the European Research Group (ERG), a powerful Eurosceptic group of backbench Tories.

Again, one is left wondering how much his heart is in the UK, and how much it is in profits and more profits. Perhaps he has no control over the firm he founded, as such things often happen, but it’s still very bad form and reflects poorly on him – at best.

Waiting for more to emerge.

The fall of Bitcoin appears to be continuing. Bloomberg reports on the latest sign of impending apocalypse for those who hold Bitcoins:

The production-weighted cash cost to create one Bitcoin averaged around $4,060 globally in the fourth quarter, according to analysts with JPMorgan Chase & Co.

With Bitcoin itself currently trading below $3,600, that doesn’t look like such a good deal. However, there’s a big spread around the average, meaning that there are clear winners and losers.

Low-cost Chinese miners are able to pay much less — the estimate is around $2,400 per Bitcoin — by leveraging direct power purchasing agreements with electricity generators such as aluminum smelters looking to sell excess power generation, JPMorgan analysts led by Natasha Kaneva said in a wide-ranging Jan. 24 report about cryptocurrencies spearheaded by Joyce Chang. Electricity tends to be the biggest cost for miners, needed to run the high-powered computer rigs used to process data blocks to earn Bitcoin.

Of course, if Bitcoins surge in value relative to the dollar, then they become worth mining again, or if power becomes cheaper, yada yada yada.

But I think it’s worth noting that we’re not seeing standard economics here. That is, it’s not competition impacting the Bitcoin mining industry, but rather the external factor of the cost of electricity. While the amount of energy in use to mine Bitcoins is nothing to sneeze at, it’s still not a large enough factor that a few miners dropping out will drop the price of electricity. BTW, here’s the latest chart of estimated Bitcoin energy consumption:

Too bad that chart doesn’t include estimated value of a Bitcoin in dollars vs the cost to mine a single Bitcoin. I would expect that the two would meet right at or before the 30% drop in energy consumption.

So what does it all mean? Depends on what drives the value of a Bitcoin. It’s not an absolute value as recent years have demonstrated, between outright fraud and speculative investments. It doesn’t appear to truly serve any necessity. It’s power consumption is significant in a world which is damaged by each joule consumed.

If I were significantly more risk-prone, I’d short Bitcoins with a big chunk of cash. But I think there are better investments out there, so why indulge in taking advantage of someone else’s failure?

But I’m sure glad I never tried to invest in buy Bitcoins, as I discussed earlier in this thread. I’d have lost most of what I ventured, I suspect.

Earlier in this thread a reader suggested Democrats in Congress should look into my suggestion that they should pitch focused foreign aid as a replacement for the Wall. I sent mail off to Senators Klobuchar and Smith, and Rep. McColllum. Senator Smith is the first one to reply, which I received yesterday, and here’s the text:

Thank you for contacting me about the government shutdown. I appreciate hearing from you regarding this critical situation.

A shutdown isn’t good for anyone. In December, senators on both sides of the aisle came together on a reasonable budget deal that would have kept the government open, but after the President rejected it, it was not passed by the House of Representatives. Now, as a result of the partial government shutdown, Americans are being denied some vital government services and hundreds of thousands of federal employees have had to go without a paycheck. People are suffering, and we must come together to reopen the government and remedy the harmful impacts a shutdown has on workers and their families. We can and should have a debate on border security, but we need to open the government first. Then we can sit down and negotiate over immigration policy and border security more specifically.

We must also do everything we can to support the workers who have been denied pay during the shutdown. I supported legislation to ensure that federal workers are fairly compensated for lapses in their pay due to a government shutdown, and I am very pleased that that bill has now been enacted into law. I have also authored a bill to help another group of workers denied pay during the shutdown — federal contract employees who continue to go without pay. My bill is about helping this group of people who are often invisible — people who work in the cafeterias, who clean offices after everyone else goes home, security guards who keep our buildings safe overnight. These low- and mid-wage federal contract workers have gone without pay for weeks, and in past shutdowns, they haven’t received back pay. That’s wrong and that’s what my bill is trying to fix.

We must come together to open the government and make sure workers receive the back pay they deserve. And we can then work together to help fix our broken immigration system. But we must reopen the government immediately.

Again, thank you for contacting me about this issue. Please do not hesitate to do so again in the future.

Sincerely,

Tina Smith
United States Senator

Clearly boilerplate, but that’s fine. I don’t expect to engage in any sort of back ‘n forth with a US Senator.

According to the media, the shutdown may be coming to an end, if only temporarily:

Negotiators are moving toward an agreement on a deal to re-open the government, but it has not received final sign off from all sides, two sources familiar say.

Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is in direct talks with the White House over finalizing the language.

What’s in it: The deal would be a CR for three weeks, which would include the current level of fencing and wall repair money ($1.3 billion for the year.)

There are still issues over the backpay provisions that any agreement would include, one source says. Once it’s passed, lawmakers would have three weeks to reach an agreement that addresses President Trump’s border wall funding request.

If they don’t reach a deal, Trump is expected to say he’ll invoke a national emergency.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s preference is to voice vote any deal announced today. Senators were told today in an email, but that is not a sure thing until every senator has signed off.  [CNN]

The Democrats claim the President caved. I think it’s exceedingly vacuous of them to make such claims, as it’ll tend to enrage the fellow and shows them to be intemperate as well. Schadenfreude is not an emotion that wears well in Washington, since you end up having to work with the same folks the next week.

Since I’m here, I’d like to note the following bit from yet another Trump family member:

Lara Trump said the issue is that without the shutdown, the president has “no hand to play.” [WaPo]

My problem with this is that the President is the Executive, not a (or “the”) lawmaker. Thus, his hand is restricted to Executive functions and foreign relations.

Yes, I am aware that Obama took a similar role when it came to the Dreamers. The primary difference between Obama’s and Trump’s emergencies? The public agreed with Obama, not with Trump. The Republicans refused to deal with an incipient emergency, and Obama finally moved on it.

Leah Crane covers a fascinating intellectual property question for NewScientist (5 January 2019, paywall):

As artificial intelligence algorithms play an increasing role in media production, questions of ownership are becoming fuzzy.

Creating something with an AI takes three steps. First, someone codes the algorithm itself, then it must be fed masses of data to teach it to recognise and mimic patterns, and finally the AI produces some sort of output.

When it comes to copyright, the big question is who owns that output: the person who built the algorithm, the person who picked the training data or the person who selected the specific output?

In some ways, this isn’t a new conundrum: think of bands arguing over who should own the rights to a particular song when one member wrote the chord sequence and another the solo, says Tom Lingard, an intellectual property and technology lawyer.

Elevating current AI systems to the status of bandmate is probably going too far. Both artists and lawyers say they are more like word-processing programs: if nobody types into one, there can be no essay. The software might check your spelling, but the thing that makes an essay unique is the writer.

This is really all about the definition of Art, isn’t it? That’s a notoriously difficult subject, as exemplified by the American judiciary’s travails in defining the difference between art & porn. The name of that case is Jacobellis v. Ohio, and it’s my impression that the case revolves around the end product, production methods considered irrelevant.

Nor can this article decide if the end product controls, or if the process matters. I ran across this same divide in a BBS debate decades ago, in which a student of guitar (flamenco, if memory serves) was debating with a synthesizer musician concerning the nature of excellence in music, and neither would gave way. The former was fixated on the performance experience, while the latter was concerned about the final product.

So which really defines art?

Is it a product, tangible or intangible, of little appreciable functionality, which expresses an idea? Or is it how the artist creates that product? Or some combination?

I dunno.

I’m tempted to take the mechanical approach. Is an “AI” (insert tirade about how it’s not AI because there’s no independent agency involved, it’s ML or even something less definable) a tool of the artist who’s choosing to create this piece of art, akin to a paintbrush? A super paintbrush? This pushes aside the dubious thought that the “AI” owns it, and pushes it on the agent motivating the actions that create the art. The writer of the algorithm, assuming they are separate from the motivator, also is deprived of ownership rights. This would make sense as the maker of the paintbrush also has no ownership rights to the art made using the paintbrush^[1].

But there’s a problem with this reductionism, as Crane points out:

It is likely that the question of AI copyright will be answered by some future lawsuit that sets a precedent and trickles through the courts. If the ruling is that AI art cannot be copyrighted, it could kill the genre entirely as artists refocus on work that can pay their rent. Yet if the law decides that such art can be protected, it could damage other methods and industries as AIs flood copyright offices with millions of applications and simply wait for someone else to infringe them.

I’ve often said that computers are multipliers while people are merely adders, but I hadn’t envisioned this particular sticky wicket. Although I’m not sure why anyone would wish to sue the typical artist, whose net worth is often negative. On the other hand, would all this art be salable? The economics and legal seem to be twisting before me on this subject, which may, in itself, mark good art.

I suppose one approach is to ask whether a specific piece of art was produced with the knowledge of another piece of art, and, if so, it’s infringement, otherwise not. Another approach is to simply acknowledge that art produced via “AI” is not copyrightable. While Crane suggests that this will kill the industry, I’m not convinced. I think a lot of people buy art because it’s pretty, not because it was done by any particular artist. Oh, I’m not denying the existence of collectors who use authorship as their criterion of collection, but I’m not convinced that they are a majority of the market for art.

But, unless one is willing to create parallel copyright systems for art produced with and without the assistance of “AIs”, this appears to be quite the intellectual puzzle.

And, yet, it pales against the problems that would be brought about by the true AI artist. Keep in mind that, by AI, I mean the entity has self-agency, that is, it prefers to direct itself in its activities. Now, assuming that such a capability does not impair its abilities to create great masses of art, and I think that’s a fairly large and problematic assumption to make, this could really bring hell to the art and copyright markets of the world. Think of someone OCD, with no need to sleep, and practically swimming in its medium.

¹ This reminds me of the odd story I had from the late Jeff Prothero, aka Cynbe ru Taren, concerning a kerfuffle he had with the creator of a computer language, name unremembered, who claimed ownership rights to the programs created by others to be compiled by the compiler for his language. Cynbe claimed he took him to court over the ownership rights and won. Thus, a compiler is a paintbrush.

CNN/Business has a depressing report:

Wednesday served as a harbinger of what’s in store for the industry, with HuffPost’s parent company Verizon announcing a 7% cut to staff in its media division, a portfolio that also includes Yahoo and AOL. Within hours of that news breaking, BuzzFeed confirmed that it will lay off 15% of its staff. And journalists at Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, shared grim stories throughout the day on Wednesday as the company shed dozens of staffers throughout the country.

In all, the media industry lost about 1,000 jobs nationwide this week.

Amidst the wailing of other members of the free press and the sadness for those affected, it occurs to me:

If there’s some billionaire who wants to run a media company, this might be an opportunity. Experienced personnel who want to succeed, geographically distributed, and a chance to start from the ground up. It sounds like a step on the ladder to me.

I just don’t happen to have the sort of cash sitting around. But if I did?

My thanks to my Arts Editor who whipped this right up. She’s also volunteered to revive the position of copy-editor.