Monthly Archives: February 2019

Another WaPo columnist, Henry Olsen, has joined the pro-Klobuchar crowd:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s campaign kickoff Sunday was far from the dream-start to her presidential candidacy, given the blustery weather that coated her with snow over the course of her speech. Still, the event makes the Minnesota Democrat President Trump’s worst nightmare.

Forget all those recent allegations that she may have been mean to her staff. Unless there’s something more, such as tolerating or hushing up sexual or racial harassment, all this shows is that Ms. “Minnesota Nice” might just have the touch of steel a real leader needs. After all, no one ever accused Margaret Thatcher of being Miss Congeniality.

Focus instead on what she brings to the race: her record as a strong liberal without progressive zaniness; the example of keeping her head during the Kavanaugh hearings while all others were losing theirs; eight years as the chief prosecutor for Hennepin County, Minn.; a stable, more than 25-year marriage; a daughter. Lawyer, mom, senator, president?

All good points. On paper, Senator Klobuchar does come across favorably. She has a good history of public service (Hennepin County DA, 2+ terms as US Senator from Minnesota), and a family history that includes teaching, mining unions, and journalists. She’s mature but not old at age 58, which in races that may or will include elderly leaders whose health must be kept in mind will give her an automatic advantage.

While I’m typing this, I’m listening to her initial Presidential speech out on Boom Island from last Sunday. This video includes all the warm-up speeches (which I skipped) as well as her’s – ah, “because we believe in science!” OK, so that’s just a personal thing for me. Her speech starts at about 1:49:30 or so:

Listening to her speech, I’d still say she’s a little lacking in the speechifying department – she’s certainly no Barack Obama, who I would say has been the standard against all other Presidential contenders have to be compared. Obama knew when to accelerate the pace, or opt for a slower delivery. This ability sharpened the impression that there was good intellect pushing out those words. Senator Klobuchar tends to just chug along.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why I harp on her communications skills and not her policies, keep in mind that Presidents have to be communicators. They don’t make laws, except through veto and rhetorical influence, but as the focus of the Executive Branch, they have to communicate not only policies, but the shared morality by which we can live together.

Furthermore, that’s how Presidential contenders entice voters, who, in turn, will use all sorts of clues to try to make sense of someone they’ll almost certainly not meet – and they probably won’t read their campaign materials, either. Communicating effectively will go a long ways towards winning the hearts of non-Minnesota voters.

How’s her competition, declared and not, doing? Briefly:

Senator Harris of California struck me as charming and quick on her feet. A former Attorney General, one must presume she’s done some good work.

Senator Gillibrand, when she was on The Late Show, seemed to be giving a stump speech rather than conversing with host Colbert.

Biden’s old. Sanders is old.

Julian Castro impressed me, in my lone exposure to him, as being articulate and thoughtful.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has had an effective Senatorial career, but I fear she’s already stepped in a couple of gopher holes. She has a tall hill to climb, and, if we believe Olsen, above, she may be too liberal to win the Democratic nomination.

So Senator Klobuchar is off and running. We’ll see how liberal without zaniness plays with the Democratic membership.

WaPo has a report on another hunter bagging a rare creature:

The photograph, published last week in Pakistani newspapers, was stunning. It showed a magnificent mountain goat, with huge, symmetrically spiral horns, nestled on a rock and surrounded by breathtaking snowy mountains, with a man kneeling and smiling behind it.

It took a few seconds to realize that the animal, a wild Astore markhor, was dead. The caption described the man as an American hunter who had paid a record $110,000 to shoot it on a tourist expedition to Pakistan’s northern Himalayan region of Gilgit-Baltistan.

Outraged? Here’s the defense:

Lovely horns.

But there is another, more benign, rationale behind allowing Harlan, along with two other Americans, to pay enormous sums to kill three long-horned markhors in northern Pakistan in the past month. According to Pakistani officials and conservation groups, the practice has actually helped save a rare and endangered species from potential extinction.

How about this: you pays your $110,000, and when one of these impressive animals dies of natural causes, you can have the head. Or the entire body.

Or maybe you can hunt them, but you can only shoot one that would never reproduce again. Although making that work seems a bit difficult. Not to mention the utility of animals lying exclusively in their gonads is an unwarranted assumption. I don’t know for markhors, but among elephants the leadership of the matriarchs is an important element in their long-term survival strategy.

Looking a little thick in the backyard.

On the other hand, that was yesterday before last night’s snow came in. It’s a mite thicker on that table now.

Ariel E. Levite and Wyatt Hoffman have been surveying the state of relations between the insurance industry and software they are asked to insure. Here is a summary, published on Lawfare:

For many businesses, cyber risk was once either an amorphous threat or an occasional nuisance. But with reliance on all things digital skyrocketing, cyber threats now pose grave, even existential, dangers to corporations as well as the entire digital economy. In response, companies have begun to develop a cyber insurance market, offering corporations a mechanism to manage their exposure to these risks. Yet the prospects for this market now seem uncertain in light of a major court battle. Mondelez International is reportedly suing Zurich Insurance in Illinois state court for refusing to pay its $100 million claim for damages caused by the 2017 NotPetya attack.

They make explicit the risks insurers face:

Many hurdles stand in the way of insurance providing a more robust solution. Data on cyber risks are scarce, and the threat is evolving constantly, often rendering data obsolete before they can be used. That means actuaries lack a credible repository of information to accurately price cyber risk. Moreover, NotPetya and other attacks with cascading effects have reinforced fears of aggregation risk, meaning the potential for a single incident to cause simultaneous losses across multiple policyholders. If Zurich had underwritten even a handful of the major corporations disrupted by the attack, it could have faced catastrophic losses from just one incident. This is a particularly acute concern for reinsurers—companies that provide stop-loss coverage, or protection against unsustainably costly claims, to other insurers—making both reinsurers and primary cyber insurance providers naturally hesitant to support more extensive cyber underwriting. The lack of adequate reinsurance backing means that carriers may become overwhelmed with claims if a systemic cyber incident causes simultaneous losses across many policyholders.

And they have some recommendations, which appear to have one glaring hole:

In a recent Carnegie Endowment paper, we proposed a series of practical measures for insurers, corporations and governments to take—some separately, others together—to unlock the potential benefits of cyber insurance. These steps include upgrading the underwriting process, collaborating with cybersecurity services, and introducing specialized underwriting methodologies to better assess and price cyber risk. Governments, for their part, could help by developing common metrics for cyber-risk management, by encouraging companies to share information on cyber risks and security practices, and by standardizing corporate reporting requirements for cyber risk and data breaches. Sovereign wealth funds, holding companies and other major investors can also encourage responsible conduct by making regular, thorough cyber-risk assessments part of their due diligence.

Not all “cyber” risks are the result of poor programming, but most such risks can be traced back to such. Yet, I don’t really see any attempts in the above to get the software suppliers to share in the risk. It’d take just one major supplier going bankrupt after losing a lawsuit over the security of their software, such as PegaSystems, to finally bring questions of software security to the foreground. Make the people who make real money off of software sweat. They’re not sweating right now.

For example, I recently was required to use a web site by my employer and decided to read the Terms of Use. It had two admirable characteristics: it was succinct and devoid of legalese. After that?

It contained a phrase that took me back. Way back. And now I cannot access their terms of use. Hah! However, this one comes close:

EXCEPT AS OTHERWISE EXPRESSLY SET FORTH IN THIS AGREEMENT, NEITHER PARTY HERETO MAKES ANY REPRESENTATION AND EXTENDS NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, WITH RESPECT TO THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THIS AGREEMENT, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING OUT OF PRIOR COURSE OF DEALING AND USAGE OF TRADE.

Bold mine.

I recall seeing bullshit like this 30 years ago, but I’m shocked that it’s still around. No fitness for a particular purpose? I recognize they’re distinguishing intended use from warranted use, but come on – this is ridiculous.

And who the hell buys such software? Would you want to roll the dice on your toaster not exploding?

Have these guys heard of the related legal phrase, irremediable harm? Because that’s what we’re coming to. I used to work for a supplier of software for energy systems, and I have no idea if they used this phrase in their license agreement – but imagine, as is rumored, that some foreign party penetrates such a system and achieves a position where they could knock down the American electrical grid. And then does it.

We’ll get the grid back up, but in the meantime many businesses will be badly harmed – and some will go out of business. Not those businesses’ fault. Who is responsible?

Now, maybe it’s still accepted practice that software gets a free pass on this sort of thing. But this enablement, if you will, of poor software practices will defeat all the good intentions of the insurance industry. Right now they’re treating symptoms, so far as I can see in Levite and Hoffman’s summary (I trust their summary is complete, so I shan’t spend time I don’t have on reading the paper), not the source of the problem. Free marketeers might argue that the market sorts these things out by customer evaluation, but this is the argument of the zealot. The truth of the matter is that the entire facet is occult^[1], as we’re not measuring functionality or performance or scalability, but the insecurity of the product. We barely even have measuring sticks, much less know how to apply them in a forward thinking manner.

An agency to do this sort of thing has been suggested before. I still think it’s a good idea.

Just stick “S” for Software in the middle. Although it would also stand for “Shitload of Work.”

¹ “to block or shut off (an object) from view; hide.” If you prefer, occlude. Not the religious bullshit definition.

Tranche:

• a division or portion of a pool or whole
  specifically : an issue of bonds derived from a pooling of like obligations (such as securitized mortgage debt) that is differentiated from other issues especially by maturity or rate of return [Merriam-Webster]

Ran across this word today in some company mail. In terms of its sound, it’s really an ugly word, isn’t it? All glottal. If I understand glottal properly.

Behind its technological magic, Rememory (2017) is a whodunit murder mystery, but rather than collecting physical clues and speculating on the motives of the potential criminals, professional model builder Sam Bloom is pursuing their very memories. He once met famous psychologist / neurologist Gordon Dunn at a hotel, on a very dark night of his soul, and Dunn had helped him get through that night. Now Dunn lies dead in Dunn’s office on the eve of the product launch of a machine which can harvest and display memories, unredacted by time, from people, with bullet-holes in the wall behind him, and the only working production model missing. The company he founded wants it because they cannot produce more of the machines without seeing this production model.

Sam needs it to solve the murder and repay Dunn’s kindness. Perhaps the widow could gain him access, so he visits the widow, expecting to find the wake, but instead, just her. He tells her parts of his story, and steals the key to the house. When he returns, he finds the machine, and a pile of memories – and he’s off to the races.

This is well-constructed, for the most part. Characters who appear to be one thing are another, everyone has a motive, yet doesn’t do it. The role memory plays in our lives is simplified, and then that simplification vilified, but this perhaps could have been better emphasized if the corporation, or corporate officers, had played a bigger role in the story.

That leads to one of the weaknesses of the movie: the corporation. There are hints that the corporate officers are desperate to bring their product to market, but they are never fleshed out, nor is that desperation illustrated in any meaningful way. Why not? Properly utilized, they could have brought even more pressure to bear on Sam Bloom, a man who bears a resemblance to the detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Spade becomes emotionally involved in his work to an extent that he’s endangering his case and himself, and that made him, and the audience, blind to critical clues. Bloom’s involvement isn’t just as a posthumous thank you for help he once received, but becomes something far more devious. The additional pressure the corporate officers could have brought to bear would have increased the tension, and perhaps led to even stronger revelations in the plot twist at the end. As it is, the ending feels like it was dragged out too long. Yes, it’s a surprise, yet it could have been more.

I think this is a sober, serious work, and we were hooked from the beginning. It’s not an action movie, nor any of the trends of the moment, really. If you’re in the mood, there’s a lot to like in this story. I just wish they’d taken it a step further.

I must admit I’ve been a little confused, even dismayed, by the reaction by some liberal organizations to the recent decision by SCOTUS to deny Louisiana the right to enforce their anti-abortion law while the various appeals wend their way through the federal court system, or, more precisely, Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent from that decision. Here’s a report in WaPo on liberal groups intent on pinning his dissent on Senator Collins (R-ME), as she was thought to be a possibility to vote against him in the confirmation process, but, instead, voted for him.:

Democrats and liberal groups on Friday pointed to a Supreme Court ruling in an abortion case to argue that Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, focusing their ire on Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who supported Kavanaugh’s nomination last year and faces a tough 2020 reelection. …

While Democrats hailed the decision, they pointed to Kavanaugh’s dissent as a sign that he is poised to side with conservatives in future rulings on abortion rights.

In his dissent, Kavanaugh said there was a dispute about whether the physicians in the Louisiana case could obtain admitting privileges, and that a 45-day grace period would have provided time to settle that question.

I haven’t been following the abortion debate for a long time. I’m pro-choice, as long time readers can probably guess. One of the reasons for not following the debate can be seen at the conservative, and apparently pro-life site, The Resurgent, as half the posts seemed to include the word ‘infanticide.’ As writers, they do know – or are intellectual frauds – that utterly misusing words in an argument means your side of the argument is losing, either logically or emotionally. It’s this sort of intellectual crap that has turned me away from following the debate. (And now I revisited The Resurgent and those posts seem to have disappeared, or more likely rolled out.)

So this remark in the above report was interesting, but I have no idea if it’s an effective rebuttal or merely a head-feint by Senator Collins’ office:

Collins’s office countered such criticism Friday by noting that Democrats responded with “near total silence” after Kavanaugh provided the decisive vote in Planned Parenthood’s favor in a December Supreme Court ruling.

“During his confirmation process, Planned Parenthood was Justice Kavanaugh’s number one opponent,” Clark said in a statement. “They went after him with everything that they had. And yet, when it came to a case involving them, he was able to put that aside and rule impartially and independently.”

The net effect, though, is that someone is sounding the war drums and heading off to the prairie to fight the dread enemy.

And then there’s law Professor Leah Litman, also writing in WaPo, who is sounding the horn of doom:

It is easy to see how this kind of analysis will make safe, accessible abortions a thing of the past in many parts of the United States. If a law does not amount to an unconstitutional burden unless it does something as dramatic as close 20 clinics in a geographic area as large as Texas, almost every law would be constitutional. And if a law does not amount to an unconstitutional burden if courts can invent a justification for it, then laws would be upheld even when there is no evidence that they would help any woman, ever.

That is how Roe v. Wade will die. Not with a bang, but with a million little distinctions that judges will draw to limit the impact of any cases that invalidate restrictions on abortion. By voting to allow the Louisiana law to go into effect, four justices gave the okay to states and lower courts to limit Roe by whatever means necessary.

Again, I don’t know enough to know if this is an earnest opinion of what the future holds – or an attempt to keep the pro-choice forces in a frenzy of fear.

And it does matter. One side has turned this into a quasi-religious drive for purity, while the other casts this as a fundamental attack on their health and freedom. As a pro-choicer, I have more sympathy for the latter side. As an American, though, I see this as the sort of issue which tears us apart, makes us distrustful of each other – makes us weak.

And I worry that the pro-life folks have transitioned from any sort of reasonable approach to the issue to simply using it as an emotional trigger of their own. I haven’t glanced at a Bible since I was a kid, but from what little I’ve been told, the issue is only addressed once, as something worthy of a minor (?) fine but nothing more. Further, some pop-history accounts, meaning I have no idea if it’s accurate or not, suggests abortion was an accepted part of life in the United States during the 19th century. If so, well, again the entire ‘infanticide’ thing makes my gorge rise.

Now that I’ve spoken my piece, I can stop thinking about it. Again.

I see Elizabeth Warren is making the same tactical error as did the many Republicans who were mowed down by Trump in the GOP presidential nomination contest, as CNN is reporting:

President Donald Trump might be in jail by the time Election Day comes around, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on her first full day of campaigning as a declared presidential candidate.

“By the time we get to 2020, Donald Trump may not even be President,” Warren said to voters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, gathered at the Veterans Memorial Building. “In fact, he may not even be a free person.”

The moment marked a notable shift in tone for Warren, who has been reluctant to take on Trump directly by name since she announced her exploratory campaign on New Year’s Eve.

This is an unsettling echo of the “Lock her up!” chants prevalent at Trump campaign rallies, hell even his campaign rallies that he’s held since the election. Trump has a proven history of excelling when he can dictate the terms of the engagement, as so many Republicans tried to play his game and lost. Warren fell for it – again. Her other time was the whole DNA history thing to “prove” she has some Indian ancestry. She fell into Trump’s trap then, and I think she fell into one this time without Trump even trying.

I have no idea whether she’ll win the Democratic nomination, but if she does, every time she appears she’ll stir up the Trump base. That may not be enough to rob her of a victory, but it’ll make it that much harder.

The Dems need to pay attention to the Pelosi / Schumer strategy during the shutdown drama. Treat the office with respect, treat the man with the respect due to being the occupant, don’t let your hair catch fire, and dictate where the battle will be fought.

This will be harder for Senator Warren as a campaigner than for Pelosi and Schumer as sitting officials with good poker hands. The easiest is the respect thing, because by reinforcing the idea that there are certain standards he’s expected to meet, every time he fails, it’ll be a reminder to the independents and wavering conservatives of the fact of Trump’s kakistocracy.

But I think Warren is playing Trump’s game right now.

Who would have guessed dropping a single letter would lead us into divine territory? This is from a recent email I received, and thus will remain anonymous:

I could not happen without your commitment to our high school fencing league.

I am visualizing some monstrous fencing God, complete with mask…. or would she need it?

Hey! Can I wear your crown? Huh? Huh?

It’s hard to beat Missile to the Moon (1958) for sheer luridness, especially if you’re watching the colorized version, as we did. A private citizen, Dirk Green, with the help of a rocket specialist, Steve, constructs a rocket he’s convinced will reach the Moon, but the Army is moving in to take over. When a local prison loses containment on a couple of prisoners named Gary and Lon, though, Dirk finds them hiding in his rocket and coerces them into being crew. As he attempts to slip the surly bonds of Earth before the Army can take over, Steve and his wife, June, also slip on board as they investigate why the missile has become active.

Lift-off is a success, but during the flight Gary proves to be full of hormones and is quite aggressive with everyone. This, of course, marks him for death later on – keep an eye out for it, especially when he bursts into flame on the airless surface of the Moon. But, more importantly, during a run-in with a meteorite field, Dirk is clunked on the head and dies, leaving the ship more or less on automatics.

Once on the moon, we encounter the ‘rock-men,’ subsisting on sunlight and hostile to anything that breathes oxygen, giant cave-spiders, and the women in the Moon, who it just so happens sent Dirk, who it turns out was a Moon-man, to visit the Earth and bring back information as to its viability as a refuge for the Moon-race. Now, there are no more Moon-men (wait, what? Why did you send Dirk?), just a few women, and just for giggles there’s a power struggle on between the old Moon race leader and the psycho ‘Alpha’ who was supposed to marry Dirk – a childhood betrothal, don’t you know.

Diamonds, mind-to-mind battles, cross-species romances, a lame story, unbelievable science, and awful special effects combine to really make this one stink. The only thing I can say is that I liked the dancing.

And purple ladies in the colorized version! Captain Kirk would have slept with one of them in a heart-beat!

Last night,
   When we broke out of prison,
Deep in the backwoods of Michigan,
   Plunging so awkwardly through the snowbanks,
You pointed and laughed
   So uproariously
At My Gooseflesh;

But in the end,
   I owned the revenge
For my mortification.
   They'll find you dead,
Flesh mortified, snowbank-bound
   Offed by hypo- hypo- hypo-
While I huddled in that
   Overwintering flock of geese
And
   Became a Goose.

It's lovely up here.

Tonight my Arts Editor and I stepped out and saw Underneath The Lintel, a one man play written by Glen Berger, and performed for this three show run by Pat O’Brien. It’s showing at the Zephyr Theatre in Stillwater, MN.

This is a play that addresses the eternal tension between fire and food, temporary safety versus permanent peril, playing it safe and putting it out there, to move on – or risk that sword-thrust to the belly when assisting the needy. Who suffered more, the Christ on the Cross, who, for a short eternity, bore the agony of torture and death, or the Wandering Jew, who, for not assisting Christ at his moment of need, was rewarded with eternal life – eternal restlessness, namelessness – Godlessness.

The story told by our narrator is as much about his own failure to step forward when offered the opportunity, his failure to put his own emotional self-regard at risk when a reward was dangled in front of him. Twenty years later, his failure haunts him, in the what might have beens, in his obstinate embrace of his own behavior, proud of documenting the receipt of books returned to the library – at first, it seems a joke, but near the end it’s more an element of horror, a man so wrapped up in such trivial, mundane work that, upon breaking free of it, its absence drives him to, and over, the precipice.

And so we get to travel this mad, frantic path with the narrator, first taking him to be a clown, but wondering, later, at his failure – and, by proxy, ours’.

It’s a good play, and Mr. O’Brien seems inspired in the role. It’s worth a see, if you can find time to do so this weekend.

We would’ve enjoyed the performance more if it hadn’t been for some audience members who seemed convinced they were attending a comedy, and laughed at roughly 85% of the monologue, even as the narrator moves closer and closer to dark madness. Sure, there’s some good funny lines, and not every noir work – and I do consider this to be a cousin of noir – lacks in humor. Laughter can point at the essential absurdity of our individual existence. But that doesn’t make for a comedy, and so, for us, the out of place laughter made for a tide against which Mr. O’Brien had to struggle. I can only say that he was a consummate professional, not letting the improper response provoke him.

Disclosure: One of the members of the Zephyr has been a good friend for more than 30 years.

I was fascinated by this post from Ilya Somin on The Volokh Conspiracy concerning the role of foreign political misinformation on the 2016 Elections. In particular was this:

What is true of Canada is even more true for the United States: The fake news generated by Russian and other foreign plants is trivial compared to that produced by our own political parties and their homegrown partisan and activist allies. John Sides, Michael Tesler, Lynn Vavreck’s new book Identity Crisis, the most thorough social science analysis of the 2016 election, concludes that the impact of Russian-generated fake news was virtually undetectable in the data, and certainly trivial compared to that of homegrown misinformation, xenophobic attitudes and partisan polarization, which helped Trump eke out a narrow victory.

I haven’t read the cited work, so what do I know? Still, I was intensely disappointed that Somin didn’t address questions of linear vs. non-linear responses to misinformation in the electorate. Consider the simple tactic of encouraging the continuing disbelief in science, on which I tend to blame a plethora of today’s ills. It might not show up in the collected data at all, particularly if there are American proxies to carry the foreign agents’ water, because it only takes a little bit of a nudge to keep unthinking hostility going. Simply prop up a particularly zealous opponent of evolutionary theory, or vaccinations, or pick your position. This applies to the elections because it fosters a disbelief in science, which in turn has been an overriding theme of those who controlled Congress until recently – and has appealed to a citizenry already ridden with anti-science positions on both sides of the political spectrum.

Still, this is all speculation on my part.

But it’s also worth cogitating on his failure to differentiate sources of political misinformation in terms of motivations. An American politician or political group using misinformation to gain power is certainly not a desirable behavior, and dumping them on their collective asses, or even in jail, is certainly a good source of satisfaction. However, there is little reason to think that such activity has, as a base motivation, the goal of destroying or degrading the United States.

But misinformation distributed by foreign actors should be placed in a far more dire categorization, because their goal isn’t to guide the United States to a positive goal, but to open opportunities for their own country at the expense of the United States. They are agents of a foreign government, whether or not they’re on American soil, making statements while digitally disguised as American citizens.

We can at least hope that an American politician will operate with American interests at heart, even if she or he lied their way into the job. We can have no such hopes when a foreign agent tries to manipulate us into electing a politician of their own selection. And I think the idea that we’re supposed to assume that those statements didn’t have as much effect as those of American political groups discards the differences in desired outcomes.

All that said, I take, and have made in the past, Somin’s points about the ignorance that the electorate sometimes displays concerning governance. Our distraction from the important job of self-government can be quite distressing.

But his conclusion bothered me in an odd way:

Keeping an eye on Chief Justice Roberts, I see he’s sided with the liberal wing of the Court in connection with an abortion case, as CNN/Politics reports:

The Supreme Court Thursday blocked a Louisiana abortion access law from going into effect for now, dealing a victory to opponents of the law who argued it could decimate “safe and legal” abortions in the state.

The order was 5-4 with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s four liberals voting for the stay. New conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a dissent.

This follows a Federal court putting the law on hold. The SCOTUS decision is not as significant as it might sound:

The Center for Reproductive Rights — representing patients, clinics and doctors in the state — had asked the justices to put the law on hold before it was slated to go into effect on Friday.

Thursday night’s ruling would not prevent the court from eventually agreeing to take up the case and uphold the law in the future. Supporters of abortion rights fear that the court’s conservative majority — solidified by the addition of Donald Trump’s nominees Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — will move to chip away at abortion rights if not eventually all but overturn the landmark Supreme Court opinions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

But it still constitutes an interesting deviation from what might be termed conservative orthodoxy. A Roberts deviance in a final decision would be far more interesting, of course, and might constitute evidence that Roberts is refusing to bow to conservative pressures – or even that he’s finding more convincing arguments in liberal interpretations than in hard-right interpretations.

This may hold true on social issues, but less so in corporate issues. Remember that Roberts led the effort to make it acceptable to replace our Constitutional right to the Justice system with privately run arbitration systems.

An update on the Epstein / Acosta affair, in which billionaire Epstein was accused of multitudinous rapes against underage girls, and got off with 18 months in jail, cut short to 13 months – and most of the time he was still able to attend to business affairs on work-release. Current Secretary of Labor Acosta was the US Attorney who cut him the deal. Here’s NBC News with a report of an investigation:

The Justice Department has launched an investigation into how federal government lawyers handled the case of a wealthy Florida man accused of having sex with underage girls, a DOJ official confirmed Thursday.

One of those lawyers, Alex Acosta, is now President Donald Trump’s labor secretary. But he was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida when key decisions about the case of Jeffrey Epstein were made. Prosecutors looked into allegations that Epstein abused dozens of teenage girls in his West Palm Beach mansion in the early 2000s. He eventually pleaded guilty to state charges involving a single victim in 2008.

But according to a civil lawsuit filed by other women who said they were among Epstein’s victims, one of the conditions of that deal was that a much larger federal investigation into Epstein and the people who helped him in his scheme would be dropped. Epstein, 66, served 13 months in jail and was allowed to leave almost every day through a work release program.

Which is both sad and alarming. We often speak of how the wealthy avoid justice through their gold, and in this case it may turn out to be true.

But I have a question: Aren’t these deals subject to approval by the presiding judge? Why isn’t the judge under investigation as well? Or are they assuming Acosta mislead the judge?

Many years ago, in my first year of fencing, my coach told me that learning fencing would take time, to which I retorted, “I’m part of the instant gratification generation!”

He thought that was funny.

Evidently, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy thinks the entire country embodies the Instant Gratification Generation central tenet:

“Look, we will never give up our oversight role, but this country is too great for a small vision of just investigations,” McCarthy said at a press conference. “There are challenges out there that we have to get done. And to be fair, we have been investigating for the last two years.

“I think it should come to a close. I think the country wants to be able to solve the problems going forward,” McCarthy said. “They want to see the challenges that we have, but actually rise to the occasion of — that the generations of Americans have done before us.” [The Hill]

Of course, this comes from a leader of the party which still wants to investigate former Secretary of State Clinton over the Benghazi matter – never mind that the first seven investigations found nothing. Can anyone say hypocrisy?

So this leads to the question of the century – how do we encourage our elected representatives to stop putting Party over Country? This is what McCarthy is doing, and I think about half our country is tired of it.

I’d like to suggest that we turn it into a quasi-ritual, and that ritual is this: when someone achieves electoral victory to some seat, they should discard their ties of loyalty to their party. This, of course, is beyond government to enforce, so it must be enforced by the voters. I think the best way is to simply ask them during the campaign: Will you disregard your ties to your party when it comes to matters of your country?

I’m sure there will be a lot of sputtering, but given how frantic the Republicans have been to safeguard President Trump from investigation, from Nunes to McCarthy to, well, there’s been a whole bunch of Republicans who think their personal loyalty to Trump is what makes them statesmen, ANYWAYS this does not seem like an outrageous question to ask a candidate. If the answer is not an outright Yes, then tell them they’ll not be getting your vote. And if they don’t act in conformance with their answer during their term in office, that becomes a point to be brought up during the next campaign. It’ll point up the hypocrisy that many members – and, throughout history, I’m sure of all parties – have been practicing of late.

Devin Nunes’ second career as famous toady Grima Wormtongue.

Think of it as a graduation ceremony: moving from one phase of being a citizen to another requires many changes – that’s the point of the ceremony and rituals. In this case, we’re talking about the transferal of matters of allegiance from the Party to the country. It’ll bring home the importance of being a mature member of Congress – and not a Presidential toady.

Just saw last night’s Late Night With Stephen Colbert, which included a visit from Steve Buscemi, which leads to two questions:

Now that Buscemi is playing God, does this place him above Charlton Heston in the Hollywood pantheon?

And how often is an actor of Buscemi’s stature upstaged by a piece of toast?

This is a dude who likes his tools. Hell, his coffin is spring-loaded with an ejector seat!
Or maybe it’s an ejector seat to hell?

Premature Burial (1962) is typical of the 1960s horror pieces, full of period dress, manners, and dry horror around every corner, although perhaps not that envisioned by the storytellers. Guy Carrell lives in a big, big house with his sister, Kate, his butler, and his fears. His means of support? Unclear. What does he do? He paints, and he sweats over his belief that, like his forefathers, he’s doomed to catalepsy: a disease in which doctors cannot differentiate death from paralysis.

Doomed to being buried alive.

So what attracts the beautiful Emily Gault, owner of a thousand bizarre hair styles, to Guy? He may be tall and courtly, but he’s a real maintenance-gig as well. Guy holds her at arm’s length for a while, but who can resist the multitudinous hair-buns and big, big dresses? So soon they’re married, with a whirlwind trip to Venice planned – but they never go.

Because Guy is suffering from delusions. His friend Dr. Judson cannot help, which is a shame since he’s so earnest and sure of himself. But Guy is not a complete victim. He exerts himself to build his own mausoleum, complete with various escape mechanisms, not to mention a bit of music & wine for a moment of lounging following one’s faux-burial.

Following a nightmare that he has been buried alive and the mausoleum stripped of his escape mechanisms, Judson and Emily combine forces to assure Guy that this is another symptom of his illness, and soon enough the mausoleum is used for dynamite practice, which Guy had obtained for the rather impractical purpose of blowing a hole in the side of the wee building. Another delusion, involving a whistling gravedigger, motivates Guy to prove to his family and friends that his father was really buried alive, and the resultant shock kills him.

Or does it?

Nope, and off to the burial ground we go. Too bad for Guy.

But he’s not entirely luckless, as Dr. Gault, Emily’s Dad, happens to enjoy performing autopsies, so he sends his minions to retrieve his late son-in-law’s body for a bout of midnight madness, but Guy has recovered from his seizure, destroys the gravediggers, and has a lovely bit of vengeance on the doctor. The rampage continues, and in the final act we discover this has been a contrivance of Emily’s.

It’s a mildly creepy story, but the plot holes vitiate it. For example, we never know Emily’s motivation. She’s just a wide-eyed innocent lass who has no apparent grudge against Guy, nor an appetite for ill-got gains. That’s a head scratcher. And Kate, Guy’s sister, claimed to have known all along what was going on, but “I couldn’t tell Guy, he’d never believe me,” she weeps at the murder scene, after shooting him herself. All very wishy-washy. If she knew, why didn’t she plan to foil Emily – or just blow her up with one of those sticks of dynamite?

And Guy just isn’t that sympathetic a character, nor repellent. He needed more depth so we could feel a tug of horror when he’s buried – or when we witness what he, in the end, becomes.

It’s sort of fun, sort of not. If you’re a Ray Milland completist, yada yada yada. Or does “yada yada yada” qualify as an anachronism when reviewing a play set in the 1800s? That’s a head-scratcher, too.

While I fear this proposal from Senators Schumer (D-NY) and Sanders (D-VT), published in The New York Times, concerning stock buyback and dividend behavior by public corporations, will not pass muster with the Republican Party nor SCOTUS, it has a lot of interesting elements which bear discussion:

From the mid-20th century until the 1970s, American corporations shared a belief that they had a duty not only to their shareholders but to their workers, their communities and the country that created the economic conditions and legal protections for them to thrive. It created an extremely prosperous America for working people and the broad middle of the country.

But over the past several decades, corporate boardrooms have become obsessed with maximizing only shareholder earnings to the detriment of workers and the long-term strength of their companies, helping to create the worst level of income inequality in decades.

One way in which this pervasive corporate ethos manifests itself is the explosion of stock buybacks.

So focused on shareholder value, companies, rather than investing in ways to make their businesses more resilient or their workers more productive, have been dedicating ever larger shares of their profits to dividends and corporate share repurchases. When a company purchases its own stock back, it reduces the number of publicly traded shares, boosting the value of the stock to the benefit of shareholders and corporate leadership.

I think one of the practical problems of the concentration on shareholder returns is that we’ll get, and are in fact getting, a society which is wildly out of balance with regard to wealth distribution. There are practical consequences to this.

For the people who are not invested in corporations, there’s the obvious: poverty.

For those who see themselves on the upside, the results will be a bit more in the future: an economy, based on consumption, in which the great mass of consumers are lacking the financial means to buy the goods with which the rich maintain their incomes. They may find their returns originally generous, but less so as the years pass.

This result can be blunted by the rich if they limit their astronomical consumption (such as owning your own supersonic jet) and live off their stored wealth with some decorum.

Most don’t, though. That requires the ability to ignore the competitive instinct that drove many of them to become the top 5% of society in the first place. So when their income falls, they may find themselves in danger of losing their lifestyles. Then they’ll demand lower taxes, express shock at higher taxes (such as a bunch of billionaires recently, including this guy, who are too young to remember a 90% marginal income tax), and continue to “amass wealth.”

This behavior will have the capacity to drive society into an oscillation which may prove disastrous.

I don’t know how Schumer and Sanders’ proposal to enforce societal stabilization (aka, ethical) strategies will play out, but it’s worth considering that our fascination with wealth, with money, rather than with a healthier society, is the unspoken core of this proposal. Think of it this way: our metric for measuring ourselves is flawed. If I had a billion dollars, made through lucky investments or starting up some retail Web shop, would that make me better than the social worker who barely pays the rent but is helping people directly?

Some would say yes.

I don’t think so.

And, yet, resources, or wealth, is required to help drive improvement, but we seem to have forgotten all the other parts.

As I was typing this up, it occurred to me that the Democrats, for all their raucousness and flaws, are the party of grown-ups. It’s too bad they haven’t found a way to make their better urges more coherent and communicable.

Later note: the Democratic debacle in Virginia sorta renders my comment irrelevant, doesn’t it?

Hustings:

A husting originally referred to a native Germanic governing assembly, the thing. By metonymy, the term may now refer to any event, such as debates or speeches, during an election campaign where one or more of the representative candidates are present. The term is used synonymously with stump in the United States. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “This is the best person to beat Trump. And the 14 next-best.” WaPo:

Few of the potential contenders have been tested on the hustings or a national debate stage; nor have they shown us their organizing or fundraising chops.

A bit repetitive.

I thought about live-blogging this, but based on what fragments I’ve seen, the speech was self-serving and worthless.

The unliving wind howls,
But the trees, so quietly alive,
Shriek but little at their dismemberment.

Poster throwback, I’d say.

Lifeforce (1985) is annoying unless you’re a horror connoisseur, because there are good parts, awful parts, and a painful lack of theme. ESA and NASA have combined to send a probe, the Churchill, to Halley’s Comet, for the usual friendly scientific visit. I’d say that, for purposes of poetic license, the size of Halley’s has been somewhat overblown, but unfortunately suggesting that there’s some poetry in this movie might strain credulity.

As they approach, they realize there’s a ship sheltering in the comet’s coma. A big ship. It’s monstrous, and a mess, so it’s time to go investigate. (Don’t these chaps ever watch science-fiction horror movies? Ever?) Inside, they find the survivors, dead or alive or caught up in suspended animation, who can tell? They’re human, consist of one woman and two men, and are, ah, naked. Of course, they’re conveyed back to the ship.

Next thing we know, Churchill is re-entering orbit around Earth, tumbling randomly. A rescue mission finds the grotesquely damaged bodies of the crew – and the three naked humanoids, who they must, of course, convey immediately down to Earth.

Once down, the rampage begins, as guards die in gruesome manners, only to return to life as zombies, then die yet again. Ugh. Colonel Carlsen of the Churchill appears, surviving in an escape pod, and tells of how their prizes had telepathically sucked the life out of the crew, and he had only barely escaped himself. He teams up with British Colonel Caine, who is in charge of clean up, at which he finds himself failing miserably – not that he’s incompetent, but overmatched. But Carlsen has a telepathic link to the leader of the humanoids, and he uses that to track her down.

As London burns and its inhabitants’ life force is sucked up by the giant vacuum cleaner from the stars, Carlsen and Caine fight to stop the zombies, the humanoids, and the imminent catastrophe. And then the ending drivels off into incomprehensibility. Or perhaps it’s realistic – should we even expect the motives of aliens to be comprehensible? Well, actually, yes, since they’ll be subject to the forces of evolution as well.

The special effects range from excellent, at least for the era, to downright silly. Don’t miss the burning of London and the space scenes with the ships. Ignore the comet, and try not to laugh too hard at the zombies.

The acting ranges from not awful, in the person of Patrick Stewart (yes, Shakespearean-trained Stewart – what the hell is he doing in this bit of tripe?), to, yes, awful. I know some people really liked this movie, but really really the acting was terrible.

When surgery goes oh so very wrong.

And the story is of little help. The characters are given little dimension or likability. Lacking any sort of theme beyond making the expansion to the stars more scary than it already will be (like my tense confusion much, grammar proctors?), it is often unrealistic concerning how procedures might have actually taken place in a real world scenario. This may not seem important, but as a story drifts away from realistic moorings while still attempting to seem realistic, we lose the impact that comes with believing our best efforts are but lace waved in the face of the oncoming Minotaur. Godzilla may eat nuclear weapon blasts for lunch, and that terrifies us even as we giggle, but when the best of our best can’t seem to mount a plausible watch on the captured aliens, well, we might as well hand them a pass to the nearest lunch buffet. “We taste like chicken.” It’s the shock of realizing that, despite our best effort, we’re still vulnerable to the monster in the bush that makes horror into horror.

Or maybe not. I’m not much of a horror fan.

If you’re a Patrick Stewart completist, then you’ll need to see this. He’s not in the best scenes, but that just means more of the movie is at least a little palatable. But if you’re not in that category of audience member, you can probably give this one a skip.

While there’s a delicious schadenfreude in this post on The Plum Line by Gary Sargent:

Senate Republicans appear to be in a panic about President Trump’s threat to declare a national emergency to realize his unquenchable fantasy of a big, beautiful wall on the southern border. Republicans are reportedly worried that such a move could divide them, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has delivered that warning to Trump in private conversations.

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.

Really, really, the entire legislation, called the National Emergencies Act, that might enable Trump to make funding decisions without the participation of Congress should be retracted by Congress. I don’t care who proposed it, who passed it, and who opposed it. It’s clearly a transgression against the original intent of the Constitution, and it should be obviated by Congress, or, perhaps as good, voided by SCOTUS.

Call me a stickler for good design if you want. The weakness exhibited by Congress in its determination to delegate responsibilities and powers while at least part of it is cravenly deferential to the Presidency is becoming a dreadful reminder of what happened to the Senators of Rome. They became weaker and weaker until they were little more than a mark of success – and then they became nothing at all.

And halfway makes me wish the USSR was still around, because it’d make us shape up and stop this stupid ideological feuding.