Monthly Archives: February 2019

First, we’ll finish the poker hand. Then we’ll go back on set and finish this crummy movie.

Blonde for a Day (1946) is one of a series of murderous whodunits featuring Michael Shayne, PI. Unfortunately, while Hugh Beaumont may have made a great Ward Cleaver, when it came to hard-boiled PIs he had nothing on the originator of the Michael Shayne role, Lloyd Nolan. Without Nolan’s charm as a not-quite competent PI, the plot holes actually matter in this mediocre head-scratcher in which even the name is a trifle dubious.

Obloquy:

1. Strong public condemnation.
   ‘he endured years of contempt and obloquy’
   1. Disgrace, especially that brought about by public condemnation.
      ‘conduct to which no more obloquy could reasonably attach’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

New word to me. Noted in “New Hope and New Danger on the Left,” Andrew Sullivan, New York:

If the Democrats want to fight the next election on the need for a radical rebalancing of the economy in favor of the middle and working class, for massive investment in new green technology, for higher taxes on the superrich, and for health-care security for all Americans, they can win. If they conflate those goals with extremist rhetoric about abolishing everyone’s current health insurance, and starting from scratch, as the Green New Deal advises, not so much. If they insist that men and women are indistinguishable, that girls can have penises and boys can have periods, as transgender ideology now demands, they’ll seem nuts to most fair-minded people.

If they echo the anti-Semitism of the far right, they’ll deserve obloquy. If left ideology seems to be overruling practical good sense — like ruling out nuclear power as an option for tackling the climate crisis in the Green New Deal, they’ll seem unserious purists. If they insist on calling our multicultural and multiracial democracy a manifestation of “white supremacy,” they will empower real white supremacists. If they call a border wall an “immorality” and refuse to fund a way to detain and humanely house the huge surge of migrant families and children now overwhelming the southern border (up 290 percent over the same period in 2018, with a record 1,800 apprehensions on Monday of this week alone!), they will rightly be called in favor of open borders.

Andrew talks a lot of sense, but he seems as short-sighted about the illegal immigrants at the southern border as do most Republicans. Shutting them out rather than investigating root causes merely kicks the can down the road.

And that can may be a helluva lot larger in a couple of decades.

I’d noticed the news report that obscure Congressman Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), age 76, had broken a hip in a fall, gone through surgery, and then been moved to hospice; it turns out he also had ALS. As I grow older, 76 doesn’t seem as old as it once did, so I felt sad for the man and his family on a personal level. A week or two later came the notice of his passing, which of course will bring up questions about his successor. But there was little notice about his qualities.

Thankfully, Andrew Sullivan, who is a conservative who has little use for the Republicans in general, celebrates the man’s life in the third part of his weekly tri-partite column:

But he also had a conscience and an independent streak, and when it became clear that the Iraq War had been based on phony intelligence, he actually changed his mind. More than that: He took moral responsibility for his vote for the war, and rethought a great deal of his previous views. Ashamed of what he had done — and the lives lost because of the war — he went on to write 12,000 letters to family members of service members killed. “In terms of his skepticism of authority and power in Washington, I think part of his wiring changed,” Congressman Mark Sanford, told the Washington Post. “He started looking at leadership’s claims with a skeptical eye, and that’s led to the independence you now see on a regular basis.”

I wonder how many people, such as my reader and myself, would actually take moral responsibility for a mistake of this magnitude, and how many of us would shrug it off and hide. This is the sort of behavior best termed exemplary, and I’m thrilled to see it in a Republican, a member of the party that houses such politically craven creatures as Ryan, Nunes, and Graham.

He was that very rare creature: a true Republican fiscal conservative. Because of this, he voted against the Trump tax cut, which is even now adding exponentially to $22 trillion in debt. Pressured by Tom DeLay to vote for some of the appropriations bills that bankrupted the country under George W. Bush, because “these are Republican bills now,” as DeLay explained, Jones replied, “Yes, Tom, but you’re spending more than the Democrats did.” For being this kind of constitutional and fiscal conservative, Jones was denied any significant committee roles during his 12 consecutive terms in the Congress as a Republican.

I mentioned measurement in the post title. If you have some concerns about a leftist friend, tell them about the late Rep. Jones. Maybe pull out the significant parts of his column and make them read it. If they celebrate his passing because it’s an opportunity for the Democrats to pick up a seat, well, you may have a political cultist on your hands.

Treat with caution.

Arbitrary picture capriciously selected and inserted here, regardless of your wishes.

While perhaps not quite so punctuated, in terms of idiosyncratic language, as the novel, the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) has great fidelity to its source material, with not quite the emphasis on Tralfamadore and its inhabitants as the novel, but better music. If you’re not familiar with the novel, well, it’s a little hard to describe the plot. I could tell you that it follows Billy Pilgrim’s consciousness as he swoops from World War II prisoner to a married, then widowed, optometrist in Ilium, NY, to prisoner of the alien Tralfamadoreans on their planet of Tralfamadore, where he’s to mate with Playboy Playmate Montana Wildhack, for their edification, or perhaps to satisfy their prurient interest. This is linear, yet non-linear: it is what Billy is experiencing in linear fashion, and we’re just along for the ride.

But it all doesn’t really make any sense, and that may be the point of it. In a way, the story is fractal in essence. The Tralfamadoreans, in concordance with (allegedly) thirty or so other worlds, endorse a philosophy which has discarded the idea of causality in favor of viewing the Universe as a random collage of incidents. They embrace the idea that the bad incidents should be ignored, while the good ones enjoyed. Despite their command of time & space, they lay helpless in the hands of the Universe, well-aware that it’ll all end because of a panicked mis-decision by a Tralfamadorean space pilot working with an experimental power source. They’ve viewed the moment a hundred times, and disclaim any ability to actually prevent the outcome: their doom is inevitable.

In Billy’s life as an optometrist in post-World War II Ilium, he has the illusion of control, but when he’s lying in a coma following a plane crash, his wife manages to kill herself through incompetent, panicked driving, and Billy can find no way to stop the incident. His son’s misbehavior, his daughter’s poor selection of husband, and his wife’s chronic obesity, which she eternally proclaims she’ll beat for the husband she loves so much, all come together to emphasize his helplessness in controlling the circumstances of his life. Much like the Tralfamadoreans, he knows how it’ll all end – and can do nothing more than be a puppet to that ending.

And in his life in World War II, he’s a mere leaf, blown hither and yon. Men fall dead from gunfire, disease and malnutrition, yet he persists, clothed in ludicrous garments meant to humiliate him. He’s exposed to the madness of his own countrymen, and his best friend, a schoolteacher, is labeled a looter in the wreckage of Dresden, and shot with little notice. He cannot take control of his own circumstances, and only survives the same way a feather survives, so sensitive to the forces that would destroy it that they cannot catch up with him – but through no will of his own.

Perhaps this is the message: the horrors, the incomprehensible hatred exhibited in World War II, all that mad energy is necessary to rip the bandage off the raw chaos of the Universe, letting us glimpse for a few horrid moments the madness lying just below our veils of illusion that allow us to believe there is such things as Justice, fair play, or any of a host of other concepts which, in reality, are at best vestigial.

There’s little of pleasure in Slaughterhouse-Five, but perhaps a lot to meditate upon.

The rattling of the machine coming apart in the wake of Brexit may be having some positive effects on Brit politics. Consider this report in WaPo of defections from Labour Party ranks, the current opposition and home to Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who wants to return to the 1950s, when government controlled much of industry, and a man accused of anti-Semitism – an accusation of which I have no idea as to its truthfulness.

At a morning news conference, Parliament member Luciana Berger said she had become “embarrassed” and “ashamed” of the Labour Party, which she said was “institutionally anti-Semitic.” Berger, who is Jewish, added she was leaving behind a culture of “bullying, bigotry and intimidation.”

Chris Leslie, another breakaway lawmaker, said the party had been “hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left” and that Labour’s “betrayal on Europe was visible for all to see.” While many Labour party members support a second referendum on whether to leave the European Union, Corbyn has been cold to the idea of a do-over. …

“The pursuit of policies that would threaten our national security through hostility to NATO. The refusal to act when needed to help those when facing humanitarian distress, preferring to believe states hostile to our country rather than believing our police and security services — these are all rooted in the Labour leadership’s obsession with a narrow, outdated ideology,” Leslie said.

Corbyn speaks of the gains his party made in the 2017 elections, but this does not absolve the party of the sins of which it’s accused – and past performance is no guarantee of future gains. He apparently dislikes the idea of a do-over referendum, now that the monster is at the shore and ready to wreak disaster on the nation. He may not like the idea of foreign constraints on his activities if he were to gain the position of Prime Minister. But, perhaps most importantly, is how the article ends:

Vince Cable, leader of the Liberal Democrats, a small center-left party, told the BBC he was keen to work with the new group, which he speculated could grow in coming days.

“We shouldn’t forget the Conservatives are also very badly split and there are quite a few of them who no longer see a future in the Conservative Party,” Cable said. “So I think this is the beginning, rather than the end, of something rather important.”

Have the old majority parties crystalized so much that it’s time for them to shatter? This is not unusual, as the power-brokers, often light on principle but heavy on self-involvement, maneuver themselves into a position in which none can resolve problems, and they simply entrench blindly, never envisioning that the way to break the impasse is through destruction of the machine, rather than adjustment. They never imagine a mass movement away from what they purvey.

Keep an eye on those Brits. The breakup of a major political party across the pond may presage similar incidents in our neck of the woods.

Another dry bit of humor? Or the big reveal?

The House of the Arrow (1953) falls into the category of dry little whodunit. Madame Harlowe, a sickly invalid, has passed away suddenly in the night. The adopted daughter, Betty, stands to inherit the fortune, which galls Madame Barlow’s brother-in-law, Boris. He eventually accuses Betty of murder, thinking he’s seen her paying a visit to the shop of a herbalist suspected of dispensing killer drugs. But when the French detective Hanaud orders an exhumation and examination of the corpse, nothing to support the contention is found.

But Hanaud is not done, because anonymous letters that know more than they should have been circulating. Why is there a necklace missing from a secured room? Why are the ashes in the secured room’s fireplace still warm, despite three days respite? Why is Betty’s friend Anne trying to escape France?

For those who like intellectual puzzles, there are some interesting twists and turns, and there may or may not be enough clues to discover the identity of the murderer, and how they did it. But, while plausible, there’s a certainly failure to connect with these characters. Hanaud may have a playful personality, but he still feels like a stereotype (and he looks like Clouseau’s boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, which is dismaying given the comedic incompetence of Clouseau and Dreyfus of the Pink Panther series). The various suspects are not given enough material to become real people, nor are the supporting characters.

So it’s mildly intriguing, but even as I type this they are fading away before my eyes. It makes for disappointing drama.

The final appeal of Domineque Ray, convicted murder, was rejected by SCOTUS a couple of weeks ago, and he was put to death. He did not dispute the conviction nor the penalty, however, but who might be present. The State of Alabama’s rules of execution permitted only a cleric employed by the State on the “execution team” to be present in the room at the time of execution, and the only such cleric was Christian. Ray desired an imam of his Muslim faith to be present, but was denied by SCOTUS in a 5-4 decision.

Justice Kagan, joined by the balance of the liberal wing of the Court, dissented, arguing that this is a clear violation of the Establishment Clause, and the majority’s brief, unsigned argument that the appeal was filed too late is, well, bullshit. Read it in full here (starts near bottom of first page). David French of the conservative National Review concurred in the dissent as well.

Ian Millhiser at liberal ThinkProgress:

… it’s still hard to read Ray as anything other than a failure of empathy. The Roberts Court tossed out longstanding doctrine to rule in favor of Christian conservatives who object to many forms of birth control in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. And it seems destined to hold that conservative Christians may defy many anti-discrimination laws. It’s hard to imagine that they would have ruled the same way in Ray if the facts of the case were reversed.

If a Christian inmate were told that he could only have a spiritual adviser of a different faith present during his execution, the court’s Christians would have almost certainly been livid.

Nor is Ray an isolated case. To the contrary, the court’s “religious liberty” cases stand as a monument to its conservative members’ lack of empathy. When religious liberty was primarily invoked by minority religions seeking equal footing an a majority Christian society, the court’s conservatives often looked upon these claims with great skepticism. Yet, when religious liberty claims are brought by the Christian right, the court’s right flank views those claims as transcendent.

I’m not sure I’d call it empathy. It’s hard for anyone to step out of their cultural shoes and truly be dispassionate, and perhaps the conservative justices just couldn’t do it, unless you take the argument that the appeal was too late seriously – which their colleagues did not.

Will Baude at conservative The Volokh Conspiracy is also uncertain as to whether or not the suggestion that the appeal was filed too late was true or a fallacious pretext:

But there is another peculiarity. The district court, who is usually the court in charge of making factual determinations, had concluded that the claim was indeed brought too late, that:

Since Ray has been confined at Holman for more than nineteen years, he reasonably should have learned that the State allows only members of the execution team, which previously has included a state-employed chaplain, inside the execution chamber. Indeed, it was the state-employed chaplain who facilitated Ray’s involvement with an imam for spiritual advice regarding his impending execution.

The Eleventh Circuit second-guessed this determination, concluding that the state had “offer[ed] only the barest assertions about common knowledge in the prison.” But still, it was the district court who held a hearing and who usually makes credibility judgments and factual determinations.

So it seems to me that the execution really hangs on a set of factual judgments and procedural rules — should Mr. Ray have known (or did he know) about the prison’s policies earlier, and what is the Supreme Court supposed to do when the district court and a court of appeals disagree on a factual question like that in a case of thin evidence? I am not sure what the legal answer is, and that makes it an easy case in which to indulge one’s own priors about who are the bad actors here. And that is troubling whoever is right.

(Finally, speaking as a departmentalist, not every responsibility should end with the federal courts. Even if the Supreme Court forbids intervention, I think the state ought to try harder to accommodate the religious needs of the condemned.)

His last observation strikes me as a little blindered. If the state is descending into theocracy, wouldn’t this “rule” that only members of an execution team can be present, and then only employed a Christian cleric, be congruent with the hypothesis at hand?

Let’s simply contemplate a Christian cleric as part of an execution team. We can more or less assume that Jesus would spit on such a cleric, no matter how much he averred that he was there to comfort the condemned, and I say that as an agnostic. This only works in a nascent theocracy which is using the moral authority of the predominant religion in its bid for legitimacy.

Ed Whelan at the conservative National Review notes how this could affect officially out-of-favor Christian sects:

It is very lamentable that the prison did not alter this policy when Ray objected to its obvious religious favoritism. (The policy disfavors not only Muslims and other non-Christians but also, given the internal conflicts within Christianity, many Christians. I wonder how a Catholic inmate’s request that the chaplain pray a Hail Mary with him would be received.) The simplest way to abolish the favoritism would have been to bar the chaplain from the execution chamber. Had the prison made that policy change, the execution of Ray could have proceeded exactly as it did, but not under an Establishment Clause cloud.

Which is the pendulum effect: who’s in power today? The English monarchy, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, exhibited this phenomenon to horrifying effect, as I discuss in my Pillars essay. Whelan also notes the imam viewed the execution from a room with a glass window, meaning Ray could see the imam. He tends to believe too much is read into the decision, especially as he believes SCOTUS has given Islamic appeals several victories of late – a statement of great irrelevancy in that we don’t know if those were open and shut cases, which  do make it to the Court from time to time (as I interpret 9-0 decisions). To illustrate through contrariness, suppose a case in which the appellants appealed through the system to SCOTUS for a case which they claim should be resolved through the application of sharia law. When SCOTUS rules against the appellants, do we shake our heads at the injustice of it all and mark one against them? No, the case is prima facie ridiculous. Whelan’s assertion would require, as a disproving assertion, that some SCOTUS decisions result in breaches of the law while enforcing anti-Muslim discrimination. That is unnecessary. Let us ask this question: If a Catholic was told that only a Protestant cleric could attend his execution, and he appealed this rule 5 days after being so informed, would a hypothetical SCOTUS with Catholics in the majority reject the appeal? I find it difficult to take Whelan’s appeal to statistics seriously.

Matt Ford tries to inject another argument into the mix in The New Republic:

The near-unanimity of this criticism is remarkable by the Supreme Court’s recent standards. By letting Alabama execute Ray without equal access to the clergy of his faith, its conservative justices highlighted two disturbing trends in its recent decisions: the unequal treatment of Muslims who have faced religious discrimination, and an unyielding desire to preserve the death penalty. …

Perhaps the main reason the conservative justices rejected Ray’s claims was because they oppose to what Samuel Alito once called the “guerrilla war against the death penalty.” The justices have criticized the abolition movement in the past. In 2015, they upheld Oklahoma’s use of a sedative tied to two botched executions after complaining at oral arguments that the state only used it because an activist-led embargo had cut off other supplies. The majority opinion summarized itself with circular reasoning: “Because capital punishment is constitutional, there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.”

The connection of this case to the abolition movement is tenuous at best, but illustrates how someone can see a broken down jalopy missing a wheel as a Formula-One racer. This is pure speculation, meaning Ford has a political agenda he’s trying to inject into what is properly a debate about the Establishment Clause.

For my part, it’s clear that, subject to security considerations, an imam should have been present, or all clerics should be banned. The law should be blind to the theology of the cleric, but not to any fell intentions. It doesn’t require a great long argument, to and fro, to be convincing. It’s simply disappointing that the conservatives cannot see this and hide behind an argument rejected by their colleagues.

The modern way to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage.

It’s a tidy little superstition vs science horror show. Die, Monster, Die! (1965) is somewhat more sober than its frenetic title. We’re introduced to Stephen Reinhart as he arrives at a small English village in which none of the locals will talk to him or give him directions, once he mentions the Whitley place. This is a little tough on him, as he’s here to ask for the hand of Susan Whitley in marriage, a woman he met and courted in college, where he trained in, ah, science.

The captive audience, don’t you know.

Her father, Nahum, is the lord of the local Whitley manor, and Stephen eventually finds his way to the rundown old estate. Here he finds unhappiness: Mother Letitia won’t leave her bed, but entreats Stephen to take Susan away; father Nahum is confined to a wheelchair and wishes to send Stephen away; servant Merwyn appears to be on his last legs. And where is servant Helga? Is she hiding in the mysteriously glowing greenhouse, locked.

Slowly, all is revealed: that green stone they find buried at the roots of the absurdly large tomato plants is radioactive. Merwyn disappears in a puff of smoke, as it were, while neither Letitia nor Helga meet happy endings. And when Nahum finally faces the truth, that his belief that the stone that fell from the heavens wasn’t the means sent by God to restore the fortunes of the proud Whitley family, but simply a poisonous curse that could have been voided by science, he screws up his own attempt at destroying the stone.

And then his monstrous hunt is on.

Not as horrific as one might wish, and the science is no more than a gesture. But Boris Karloff always brings a certain ambiance to a movie, and the plot is admirably parsimonious with information. It’s a fairly mundane addition to the genre, but kept us mildly, tiredly intrigued from the beginning.

Clade:

A clade (from Ancient Greek: κλάδος, klados, “branch”), also known as monophyletic group, is a group of organisms that consists of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants, and represents a single “branch” on the “tree of life“.^[1]

The common ancestor may be an individual, a population, a species (extinct or extant), and so on right up to a kingdom and further. Clades are nested, one in another, as each branch in turn splits into smaller branches. These splits reflect evolutionary history as populations diverged and evolved independently. Clades are termed monophyletic (Greek: “one clan”) groups. [Wikipedia]

I’ve been hearing about clades for decades, but don’t really know much about the concept. Noted in “Human or hybrid? The big debate over what a species really is,” (sheesh, ending a sentence with “is” seems ugly), Colin Barras, NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall)

Perhaps, instead, the ultimate solution is simply to remove the word “species” from the scientific lexicon. In 2018, [Brent] Mishler [at UCB] and John Wilkins at the University of Melbourne, Australia, set out this argument. They suggested that we should focus on another division of life, the “clade”, a group sharing a common ancestor and so comprising a separate twig on the tree of life. They say we could classify organisms as the Smallest Named and Registered Clade, or SNaRC, rather than as species. So, for example, Neanderthals, Denisovans and living humans would be three distinct SNaRCs. There is nothing intrinsically special about SNaRCs, according to Mishler: they might interbreed or not, and the groups that fit the classification would vary across the tree of life, forcing us to accept that there is no common currency. By abandoning “species” and turning to “SNaRCs”, he argues, biologists would have a blank slate for thinking about biodiversity.

Which leads one to wonder, into just which SNaRC does a snark belong?

And just because it caught me by surprise, in the same article is this:

In the past century, scientists have redefined what a species is time and again, heaping confusion upon confusion (see “Parsing nature”). [Frank Zachos at the Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria] identifies no fewer than 32 competing definitions in his 2016 book on the subject, Species Concepts in Biology, and notes that two more have been added since then.

32?! No, 34!? Sometimes Nature doesn’t cooperate with our categorization schemes.

Fatberg:

THE fatbergs are coming. These huge lumps of cooking oil and wet wipes lurk beneath UK streets, threatening to block sewers and put everyone off their lunch.

And they really are huge. In 2017, a 250-metre-long, 130-tonne monstrosity was found under Whitechapel in east London – a piece of it still resides at the Museum of London. Last year, another rivalling it in size was found south of the river Thames and later analysed on a TV programme called Fatberg Autopsy, while in December, a whopping 800 tonnes of fat were removed from sewers in Cardiff. Even a relatively modest 64-metre blockage in Sidmouth, Devon, made national headlines last month. So is this a new problem, or do Brits just have a new-found love of talking about it? [“All you want to know about fatbergs but are too disgusted to ask,” Kelly Oakes, NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall)]

The romantic interest of the heroic astronaut: the lady with microscopes in her eyes.

Perhaps a bit too earnest, Mutiny in Outer Space (1965) is a chronicle of the discovery of the first hostile pathogen in space – a fungus carried on specimens of ice retrieved from the Moon. It grows rapidly once exposed to the warm atmosphere of a human space station, and soon the crew is fighting for its collective life against a … hairy growth. Throw in a romance, a space station commander afflicted with the “space raptures” which has driven him into the arms of paranoia (rather than Lt. Connie), and who therefore believes the crew of space station is plotting against him, and there’s sort of half a plot here. The special effects are a disaster, but while the science is sometimes dubious, at least it’s not a complete joke.

But outer space horror requires more bang to the buck, and while the space raptures was a nice go, it’s a little abrupt to really work. Think of Alien (1979). The initial horror is the idea of little monster spawn insinuating themselves down your trachea and bursting forth from chest, right? Yet, what really put Alien over the top was the discovery that the owners of the ship, the Company, deliberately sent the crew into danger purely in the pursuit of a bioweapon which will generate more profit for the Company. In fact, the science officer, Ash, is revealed to be a cyborg, controlled by the Company rather than by the crew, and tasked with ensuring a specimen Alien makes it back to the Company labs.

In short, the crew has been abandoned by the Company, leaving them in a desperate situation in which most do not survive. The physical threat is shocking on its own, but the horror comes at the realization that mere profit has motivated the Company to abandon them. And that throws the humanity of the Company itself into question.

We don’t see that in Mutiny In Outer Space. Ground control does all it can to help, ultimately saving the day, but it means that the story is not as horrifying as one might hope. In fact, it turns into a “solve the problem” story, which is not as interesting as other forms of outer space horror have proven to be.

But that’s not to say it’s completely boring. The story has a few moments, and even throws in some cute wordplay. But it’s more of a dated curiosity than anything else.

We had the pleasure today of taking in the 2019 Shen Yun performance at the Ordway in St. Paul.

Full of color, it consists mostly of stories told through dance and music, with two solo singing performances. Full of color, choreography, and Chinese tunes in traditional modes, it also contains more than a bit of Falun Dafa, and some fairly pointed commentary on the current rulers of China.

We had a good time; my Arts Editor was particularly fascinated with the costumes. On top of all that, we were interviewed during intermission by a representative of Epoch Times, which let my Arts Editor gush about the beautiful clothing designs and color choices.

A super Valentine’s Day treat, albeit a day late!

For those readers who loathe Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), they should probably bury their heads in the sand for the next few months, because, with her sweet smile and mastery of American politics, she’s about to rain hellfire down on the Republican Party in the wake of this morning’s declaration of a National Emergency by President Trump. I’ll let Gary Sargent explain:

Republicans have good reason to be deeply nervous. Here’s why: According to one of the country’s leading experts on national emergencies, it appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can trigger a process that could require the GOP-controlled Senate to hold a vote on such a declaration by Trump — which would put Senate Republicans in a horrible political position.

Trump reiterated his threat to declare a national emergency in an interview with CBS News that aired over the weekend. “I don’t take anything off the table,” Trump said, adding in a typically mangled construction that he still retains the “alternative” of “national emergency.”

But Pelosi has recourse against such a declaration — and if she exercises it, Senate Republicans may have to vote on where they stand on it. …

But Pelosi has a much more immediate way to challenge Trump’s declaration. Under the National Emergencies Act, or NEA, both chambers of Congress can pass a resolution terminating any presidentially declared national emergency.

Elizabeth Goitein, who has researched this topic extensively for the Brennan Center for Justice, tells me that if Pelosi exercises this option, it will ultimately require the Senate to vote on it in some form as well. The NEA stipulates that if one chamber (Pelosi’s House) passes such a resolution, which it easily could do, the other (McConnell’s Senate) must act on it within a very short time period — forcing GOP senators to choose whether to support it.

Alternatively, Goitein notes, the Senate could vote not to consider that resolution or change its rules to avoid such a vote. But in those scenarios, the Senate would, in effect, be voting to greenlightTrump’s emergency declaration.

And then there’s the little problem of the future, as the Speaker herself notes:

“I know the Republicans have some unease about it, no matter what they say,” Pelosi told reporters at the Capitol. “Because if the president can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency, an illusion that he wants to convey, just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people.”

Even many Republicans don’t want to see a national emergency declaration, according to polls – although a majority are OK with it.

So it’s time to start popping the popcorn and buying the milk duds. President Trump keeps tapping in the wedges in his efforts to divide the Republican Party satisfy his base, and each of these taps is driving more moderate Republicans away, and disaffecting more and more independents. Although, to be fair, the latest Gallup Poll is disconcerting.

But that is the past. Here comes the future.

Via NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall) I learn something new about the pharma patent wars:

… when a pharmaceutical firm’s patent on a drug expires, it may still hold patents on many of the chemical steps to create it. In other words, rivals that are able to copy a drug after its patent ends often have to pay the original firm to use the still-patented recipes.

So why haven’t the patents on the steps expired? But this is part of a larger article on how this profit-strategy is being obviated by the generics manufacturers:

[AI program Chematica] learned hundreds of patented reactions then devised recipes that avoid them (Chem, doi.org/czs4). “Pharmaceutical companies spend billions making sure there are no loopholes and people think these patents are bulletproof,” says Grzybowski. “But actually it seems quite possible to get around them.”

Chematica caused an earlier stir in 2012, when Grzybowski and his colleagues used it to find ways of making the nerve agent VX from readily available chemicals including water, table salt and sulphuric acid. This earned him an invitation to the Pentagon, he says, where he called for better regulation of chemicals that can be used to make weapons.

So having written the post title before finishing the article, I find out that War is even more apropos than I intended, which makes me a little sad. Nor is it an idle question to ask when a terrorist group will gain access to Chematica or similar program, for after all Chematica isn’t going to have the moral agency to tell them No. So long as Chematica lacks anything resembling moral agency, it’s just like any other tool – it can be used for good or for evil.

But, from a computer science perspective, I can’t help but wonder if this is a brute force approach, or if there’s some real ML (Machine Learning) application going on here, and, if so, what rules it learned on its own. (I’m a zero when it comes to chemistry, though.)

Pretextual:

done or used as a pretext (= a pretended reason for doing something that is used to hide the real reason):
The reasons given by defense counsel were not genuine and were pretextual.
The explanation for her firing was pretextual and influenced instead by a retaliatory motive. [Cambridge English Dictionary]

Noted in “Obama warned us about the Supreme Court we have right now,” Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress:

This reasoning is highly dubious. As Kagan noted, the prison did not deny Ray’s request to be accompanied by his imam until January 23 — so Ray filed his lawsuit just five days after he was officially denied the relief he sought. The brief explanation the Republican majority offered for its decision is so wildly out of touch with the facts of the case that, as I wrote shortly after the decision came down, “it appears very likely that the majority’s claim that Ray waited too long to file his suit is pretextual.”

What is this?!

I suspect there’s plotting against the king!

And I’m right!

A reader comments on the problems of cyber-insurance:

There’s a problem there, even several of them. But if Zurich said Mondelez was covered, then Zurich should pay up — regardless of how hard it is for their actuaries to calculate the risk. Don’t write a policy if you cannot or will not back.

I think that Zurich argued this was an act of war, not covered under the policy.

As for insuring software and/or holding the creators of an application liable — that’s a really tough nut to crack. Software is complex. Even using the very best development and testing methodologies, it’s impossible to prove correct.

And most people are unaware of those methodologies, and many of them cost extra money up front to implement. There’s constant research and change in what is thought to be the best methods, too. I’ve learned more about good software development in the last 10 years of my career than in the first, ah, 30. (good god, I’m old)

That’s just the software. Then there’s implementation, administration, monitoring, etc. Oh, and actually, it’s the systems of software applications which usually lead to security breaches, in my experience. That is to say, not one program/application’s fault, and hence, not one responsible party. Security is all about the layers of the onion, as they say.

I understand my reader’s remark about the complexity of developing software and software development methodologies and how they’ve changed over the years – but I have to wonder if they would have evolved faster, and into a more effective form, if the threats of responsibility had been hanging over the heads of the companies that produced them. Presently, changes (I hesitate to say “improvements,” as we’re going through a change to our processes at my employer) are driven by concerns about profitability, time-to-market, and satisfying the customers’ requirements – and I don’t care to include “security concerns” under “customers’ requirements,” because of the difficulty in evaluating & comparing various products’ security.

And, ideally, that shouldn’t be necessary. How many people think it’s appropriate that, when buying a sofa, the customer should be checking out the safety record of each brand of sofa? While a libertarian would no doubt have their hand up in the air at this juncture, they’re ignoring the concept of irremediable harm and the fact that we know how to build sofas that are safe from collapse, spontaneous combustion, etc.

I’m not claiming that we know how to write perfectly secure software, either – but I’m saying that this very hard thing to do should be our goal. We need to put together a vision of the ideal and then begin modifying the reality of the software world towards it. And if it’s necessary to get the attention of the software industry by hanging a sword over their head, then maybe we should do that because the alternatives, due to our growing dependency on computing, can be fairly horrific, from efficient logistics to nuclear plant meltdowns, from business bankruptcies to compromising information held on politicians.

Ugh. Sometimes the software industry just annoys me.

Forwent:

past tense of FORGO [Merriam-Webster]

Searching for a definition yields fewer than normal hits. Noted in “Democrats pick Friedenberg for special election,” no author specified, The Express:

As Friedenberg was the only candidate to apply, the county parties forwent a nominating convention and recommended him to the Party’s Executive Committee outright.

Not a word I’ve ever heard around here.

Manafort. Paul Manafort. He’s become the emblem of the Trump campaign, hasn’t he? He’s simply full of deceit and lies. Like Gates, and Flynn. Oh, and Trump. And others I’d rather not remember. Will Stone end up in the same boat? From his statements & behaviors, I’d be completely unsurprised.

Manafort’s latest alleged lie breaches his plea agreement, as detailed here. Once again, he’s apparently lied about a Russian contact. And that may land him in prison for the rest of his life.

So let’s think about this for a moment. This is quite a momentous personal mistake for Manafort. He is, after all, walking a very thin line here. He already made one deal with the government, which had to piss off a President who, as a matter of reality, shouldn’t be at all concerned about any deals his former campaign manager might have made if he, himself, is not guilty of anything. But, of course, there are suspicions, given his behavior towards the Russians: an Oval Office conference, huddles with Russian President Putin that go unrecorded, boasting of being the toughest ever on Russia when all the objective evidence tells otherwise.

All these lies that connect with the Russians. Is it possible that it’s not just Trump that’s been compromised, but all the key members of his campaign staff? I can certainly accept that they were simply mendacious, ruthless in their campaign. However, such people, once the rocks they hide under have been removed, find their possessions & prestige, those things they value most, under threat and “roll” for the authorities. It’s a simple enough matter.

Manafort’s broken this pattern. He’s continued to lie even under threat of a life, once so full of possessions and adventure, finishing behind dreary bars. This intrigues. This suggests that the Russians may have such a grip on him that he’ll sacrifice his personal liberty for something else he values even more. The traditional answer to this is family.

Or he’s a pathological liar, he cannot help lying and obfuscating and believing he’s still a free agent.

Or he’s absolutely certain that President Trump will come riding to his rescue with a pardon. If that happens, then the question will become what hold Manafort has on Trump, because the considerable cost to Trump would be considerable

This is going to be one interesting spider-web to examine once all is revealed.

When you need to see around a corner in a corridor, there’s a way to do that, as NewScientist (26 January 2019) reports:

WE MAY soon be able to see what is lurking out of sight, thanks to an algorithm that allows a camera to make out objects hidden from view. This might one day enable autonomous vehicles to spot hazards before they are visible.

The algorithm was created by Vivek Goyal at Boston University in Massachusetts and colleagues. It works by analysing the faint reflections of obscured objects on a surface such as a wall. Specialist equipment isn’t needed to gather the images of reflections – a normal digital camera suffices.

Which, of course, leads to questions concerning actually making this available:

The team thinks that phone cameras may be good enough for the technique and that eventually they will be able to create an app for seeing objects around corners.

“The results are stunning,” says Gordon Wetzstein at Stanford University, California. He says this is the first time that a technique like this has produced full-colour reconstructions.

Eventually? Someone’s probably working on making this fly next week.

This strikes me as a true enhancement to human capabilities, rather than merely replacing humans, as do many robots. I think this is more significant than those human-replacing robots.

Or word processors.

This is fascinating:

Little Kamikatsu was facing a big problem. The rural Japanese town of 1,500 residents didn’t know what it was going to do with its trash. Residents had always burned it, first in front of their homes or on the farms, then in a large community pit, then in an incinerator the government quickly banned out of fear of pollutants. The town didn’t have money for a newer, safer incinerator. It had to find a new way.

“They had to look into zero waste,” said Akira Sakano, chair of the board of directors of the Zero Waste Academy, an educational institution in Kamikatsu, explaining the discussions of those days in the early 2000s.

That research introduced the town to what was then a virtual unknown but has since grown into one of the most widespread and successful recycling efforts in history, bringing cities the world over to the precipice of what once seemed fantastical: the elimination of waste. Today, places in rural Japan to metropolitan Sweden send very little of their trash to the landfill. Many more — including the District — have a “Zero Waste” plan. In the United States, San Francisco leads the way, diverting more than 80 percent of its waste — two and a half times more than the national average. It has become a lifestyle, with millions of images flooding Instagram touting a #zerowaste existence, and generating new businesses. [WaPo]

I’m too tired to delve further into this, beyond finding Going Zero Waste, but it sounds like an important movement. Here’s Minneapolis’ statement on Zero Waste:

In June 2015 the Minneapolis City Council established a goal to recycle and compost 50% of its citywide waste by 2020 and 80% by 2030. The resolution also called to achieve zero-percent growth in the City’s total waste stream from levels set in 2010. In 2015 the city of Minneapolis formed the Zero Waste Project Team to develop a plan to meet those goals and set new ones.

Not moving really fast. St. Paul has a Facebook page here. I’m not quite sure how this particular movement managed to slip under my radar.

Quick, while he’s sleeping, tell me all your secrets!

For an iconic genre example, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001) is very hard to beat. Nearly pitch-perfect, it is a spoof of those science-fiction films from decades ago, locking on to everything from the shaky science they depended on to the unbalanced social roles they promoted, from the bad acting to the nonsensical plots. Speaking of, this plot can only be barely described as a tug of war over a rare and useful new element. Keep an eye out for the strings used to manipulate the skeleton.

There are parts which you may not like, but if spoofs are your reason for existence, then make sure you see this one!

Egypt doesn’t really seem to care much for democracy – at least if they’re an Egyptian leader. Shahira Amin of AL Monitor reports in a posting entitled “Egyptians split as lawmakers pave way for Sisi to be ‘president for life‘”:

Egyptian lawmakers have proposed changes to Egypt’s constitution, including amendments to expand the military’s powers and to allow President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to remain in office following the end of his second term, and potentially until 2034. The amendments have sparked controversy in the country, drawing mixed reactions from members of parliament, analysts and activists.

The suggested alteration to Article 140 of the constitution would extend presidential terms from four to six years, and changes to Article 200 would allow the military to ensure “that the principles of the June 30 Revolution are observed,” which means preventing Islamists from ever rising to power. The amendments are being packaged with progressive changes, to make them more palatable to the public.

Sisi’s supporters praised the amendments, arguing that “four years are not enough” and that the president needs “more time to complete the development plans that he started,” while critics decried the changes as an “Arab Spring in reverse” and “a coup against the Egyptian Constitution.”

If his plans are all that wonderful, then his successors should be more than pleased to complete them. It’s a non-starter of an argument, in my view.

But, more importantly, this will present challenges for other nations in the future. Does the United States want to be associated with an autocratic Egypt? It certainly was when Sadat and then Mubarak ran the country, but then we had the USSR to contend with. How about now? Is Iran a great enough adversary to require the submission of ethics to the challenge? Indeed, perhaps Egypt is only half a step away from being an autocracy right now. Treating the constitution as a bit of jello, to be deformed as necessary to satisfy ambition, feels like the next half-step – and leaves me wondering about his trustability when it comes to international agreements.

Bollards:

Bollards Are Defined as Steel Posts Meant to Stop Vehicles From Passing [Heavy.com]

In case you hear that Congress authorized southern border funds for Bollards Fencing.