Monthly Archives: March 2019

Ronna Romney McDaniel was appointed RNC chair by President Trump, so this tweet is understandable.

The latest SDNY fishing expedition is another example of blue-state liberal prosecutors carrying out their vendetta against @realDonaldTrump.

Let’s be clear: These are investigations in search of a crime – and their harassment has gone on for far too long.

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) March 12, 2019

But let’s be real clear: all investigations are in search of a crime. Some find them, some don’t.

If you’re not a mushroom eater, it may be time to change your mind. From IOS Press and the National University of Singapore:

Abstract: We examined the cross-sectional association between mushroom intake and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) using data from 663 participants aged 60 and above from the Diet and Healthy Aging (DaHA) study in Singapore. Compared with participants who consumed mushrooms less than once per week, participants who consumed mushrooms >2 portions per week had reduced odds of having MCI (odds ratio = 0.43, 95% CI 0.23–0.78, p = 0.006) and this association was independent of age, gender, education, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, physical activities, and social activities. Our cross-sectional data support the potential role of mushrooms and their bioactive compounds in delaying neurodegeneration.

If you’re wondering if a ‘portion’ is ridiculous, Melissa Breyer has the lowdown:

A portion was defined as around three-quarters of a cup of cooked mushrooms with an average weight of 150 grams (five ounces). Which is pretty remarkable; often times studies like this are using extracts, or the amount to be consumed is unrealistic. Here, they found that even a single small serving of mushrooms weekly may still be beneficial to reduce chances of MCI.

So I suppose there’ll be a stampede to grow and eat mushrooms. For a recent birthday, a nephew gave me a “log” of mushroom spores. Here’s a pic or two, after having been dressed up with some decorative tree bark by my Arts Editor, and quickly fruited:

And, supposing this study is confirmed, will we soon be whistling through our noses about the sudden and dangerous decline in mushroom populations? I shan’t be surprised.

I just had to laugh after reading Gary Sargent’s description of the maneuvering by the GOP to not, not, NOT vote against President Trump when it comes to his self-admitted faux-national emergency:

A few Republicans believe that with this declaration, Trump is abusing his power, so they are threatening to vote to terminate it. They currently have the numbers to succeed. But Trump would then have to veto the measure. This would get him and his voters very, very angry, which is intolerable.

So Republicans have hit on a solution: They may try to pass something designed to create the impression that they care about the general issues raised by Trump’s declaration — while leaving undisturbed the actual abuse that Trump is in the process of committing. …

The Post and the New York Times report that Senate Republicans are negotiating a measure that would limit the power of presidents to declare national emergencies, by requiring a congressional vote every 30 days to keep them going.

This measure would not terminate Trump’s national emergency, and the 30-day provision wouldn’t even retroactively apply to it. As Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) put it, this would allow Republicans to “express their concern” about Trump’s use of the emergency power, while simultaneously giving them a “way to express their support for the president.”

In other words, Republicans are openly and unabashedly stating that the whole point of this exercise is to give the very same senators who profess deep concern about Trump’s national emergency a way to support it, while also appearing to care about the underlying issues it raises. (Republicans must vote on whether to terminate Trump’s emergency, which they will do on Thursday, because the House already voted to terminate it, and under the law the Senate must act as well.)

Yeah? If they’re honest, they’d be talking about simply cashiering this law that lets Trump rearrange the country’s finances. Retroactively. Maybe a new version, but only after responsible, sober, public debate, none of this writing it in private shit. From either side, either.

But, and far more importantly, we’re starting to see the peak toxicity of Team Politics. All it takes is a dim bulb of a leader, and you’re set for a ride you won’t believe. But these poor Senators, they can’t vote against Trump, and it’s not necessarily because of the base.

It’s because if they demonstrate disloyalty, that tells their perhaps reluctant supporters that it’s OK to dissent.

Republican power is built on, among other things, team play. It’s all for one, but don’t complete that quote, because the other half doesn’t always apply, especially if someone up the line from the guy you just voted for makes a decision that doesn’t work for you. You’ve been taught the liberals are evil, and you’d better vote conservative.

It’s a sad and damning commentary on the conservative mindset these days.

I continue to be fascinated by Kevin Drum’s quest to blame extraordinary levels of crime on environmental lead, and he’s found another study to bolster his case:

Brian Guinn of the University of Louisville decided to do his doctoral dissertation on the lead-crime hypothesis. Since lead was fully removed from gasoline more than two decades ago, the main source of lead poisoning today comes from residual lead dust trapped in topsoil. So first he mapped topsoil lead levels in Louisville:

Then he measured violent crime in each area and found a strong relationship with lead levels. As you’d expect, the relationship weakened once he controlled for income, education, race, etc., but the relationship was still there…

Fascinating. I wonder if this sort of study has been done for the Twin Cities area. And I also wonder about the political blowback it might face. Anti-poverty advocates who place the blame for poverty on unfair political power structures might take strong umbrage at a finding of high levels of lead in the topsoil of those communities, with an implicit finding that the community has lead-based neurological disease. After all, their favorite political theory then goes down the toilet, even if it is actually true.

On the other hand, it’s yet another brick in the wall for environmental purity advocates.

Lead in the environment continues to be an interesting area to keep an eye on. Go, Kevin!

Nice restaurant. Don’t get the cod, though.

Calling Paul Temple (1948) is one of those light-hearted British murder mysteries. Temple is a former Scotland Yard inspector, who has married Stevey and moved into detective fiction writing. They’re attending a high-class restaurant with an old colleague of Temple’s, Chief Inspector Forbes, when the restaurant’s singer, having written a note to the Chief Inspector claiming to have knowledge about the ‘Rex’ murders, collapses and dies on stage. She’s founds to have poison in her exotic lipstick. ‘Rex’ is inscribed in her makeup room.

This launches Paul and Stevey into the mystery of why 4 women have been murdered, with the word ‘Rex’ involved in each. We move from the Egyptian Dr. Kohima, to his assistant Mrs Trevellyan, and onwards to half the population of Canterbury, dodging bombs and bullets, and indulging in a casual bit of racism in the form of the surprise return of their stereotyped Burmese servant, Rikki.

Sadly, this all becomes a little too opaque and contrived. The condition of the film didn’t help, as the audio track had been damaged in this print. Paul and Stevey have some chemistry going on, but it’s not really enough to hold it all together, and to tell the truth, in the end I wasn’t really clear who really was the criminal. Nor did I care.

A sad thing to have to say.

A reader writes concerning the notion that going to a one-payer system might have unforeseen consequences for the development of health therapies:

A large amount (most? I’m too lazy to go research it) of pharmaceutical research is paid for by us, the taxpayer, through the government. NIH sponsors a lot of other medical research. So I don’t buy that we wouldn’t have these products, procedures and drugs if the USA didn’t allow private corporations to extort the US populace over health care. I don’t buy that at all. Costs in other nations for procedures done the world over (and most likely not invented here) is a fraction of what they cost here. There is gouging and profiteering on every level of our health care system. Every. Level.

I do not contest my reader’s point concerning basic research – but it’s also incontestable that U.S. companies spend $ billions trying to bring these therapies to market, and often fail. The lure for the businessman, which is often far different than for the researcher, is the immense profits, and those immense profits, if attained, pay for all those failed attempts.

If you can’t point at potential profits to carry the cost of your failures, who invests? It’s an interesting question. Do we then make it all a government operation and let the taxpayers cover them? In some respects, such as vaccinations and anti-venom drugs, as I’ve noted elsewhere, this may actually be a net positive for the system. But for novel therapies for maladies which have proven difficult? That conclusion isn’t nearly as clear. Unlike some, I like the idea of using a methodology of setting medical research priorities through some other method than where the biggest profits might be found – but I could be wrong. Maybe profit-dowsing is more effective.

Unforeseen consequences. It’s worth worrying about.

Today, Steve Benen has published a lovely graph which depicts the beginning of the destruction of one of the Republicans’ favorite idols, the Laffer Curve, as a universal panacea:

Naturally, an argument can be made that an initial blip of bigger deficits will occur, before the magic of the Laffer Curve brings in the riches to the government coffers – but I doubt that’s going to occur, especially given the nature of the tax cut on corporations which is causing these initial deficit increases.

But I would argue that this also illustrative of the basic struggle between the philosophy that greed is good, aka libertarianism, vs collective actions. The activities of the first two years of the Trump Presidency have been little more than unrestrained giveaways to the corporate world, both in terms of corporate tax reductions and in reductions for corporate C-suite personnel, aka the elite, and the corporate world is about the use of greed to accomplish societal goals – a generally successful venture, but one requiring monitoring as it tends to get out of control. In this case, it appears the fox is guarding the hen house.

This unfettered pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige, so reminiscent of the degenerative, and disastrous, phase of the secular demographic cycle discussed in Secular Cycles (Turchin), is the driving force behind the current trend on the graph, above. I do not mean to tar all of the private sector with the brush of all-consuming greed, but the immense financial power of the big companies, when used with greed rather than service at heart, has the power to cause immense damage.

It turns out the descriptive Too Big To Fail, a perennially popular phrase, is profoundly wrong. Too Big To Exist is a far better encapsulation of the dangers of such large, powerful entities – and the further dangers when they are run by greedy and ambitious characters. It also suggests that something needs to be done to eliminate such entities from our society, preferably through monopoly-busting and the like. This may turn out to be one of Obama’s biggest failures.

The up & coming question may be When will our national debt begin to affect our economy in a deleterious manner?

It’s fairly common these days to run across mentions of “anonymized data” while at medical facilities, which is to assure you that your privacy won’t be violated if they’re permitted to use your bodily fluids and parts for research. But is this right? Chelsea Whyte in NewScientist (2 March 2019, paywall) reports not:

Stripping records of information like names, addresses and social security numbers was once enough to keep it from being identifiable, but that changed about 20 years ago.

“There was this notion that was useful for decades, that if you redact certain types of information, it becomes quite hard to trace back records. And it actually worked quite well,” says Erlich. “But as we got into the era of big data and large-scale internet resources, it became true that it’s hard to anonymise any big data.”

The myth of genetic anonymity persists, however, because it is useful. It gives researchers access to a wealth of information without having to seek informed consent.

Research of human subjects in the US is governed by the Common Rule, which applies to all federally funded research. This rule is rewritten periodically to bring it in line with current ethical standards and take into account new technology. This happened in January, but the rulebook still doesn’t count DNA as identifiable information. “Many people wrote opinions saying that DNA is identifiable and that we should treat it this way,” says Erlich. Instead, the new language explicitly says DNA isn’t identifiable.

There are clear benefits to allowing this, because it is a good way of sampling the entire population. For example, if you have blood drawn at the doctor’s office and there is a bit left over after your tests are done, it could be stripped of identifiers and put into a repository where it can be used for research without you ever knowing about it. But increasingly, people want control over the use of their data.

I feel guilty that I don’t get worked up over this sort of thing. Maybe it’s because it didn’t occur to me that this is all true, and I’m a little put out. Certainly, corporations want to avoid health liability issues, and this might allow them to do so.

But, in the end, it’s really about the medical profession asserting something that has become a profound falsehood. The bit about the Common Rule was particularly disappointing, especially in the light of a number of recent prosecutions for crimes that were considered cold cases, but solved through DNA studies and using commercial sites to trace relatives.

I’d advise that the next time you’re reading some sort of statement about your data being anonymized, even if it’s not medical data, beware. Anonymization seems to be going the way of the unicorn, at least so long as we live in a data-rich society.

When it comes to After The Storm (2016), even the titanic forces of a typhoon are not enough to burst the bonds a family can place on its children. A decade ago, Ryota Shinoda won an important award for his first novel, mostly based on his family’s dysfunction, but ever since he’s found himself unable to write anything else. Now he’s working at one of those “private detective” agencies in Tokyo where the standard case is to take pictures of someone cheating on their spouse, and provide them to the spouse for future divorce purposes. He has a son; an ex-wife, Kyoko; unmet child support obligations; a disastrous gambling habit; and an elderly mother.

The movie opens on him raiding his mother’s house for anything he can pawn. His sister reprimands him once again for using the family’s secrets as materials for the book; his ex-wife, now dating another man, controls his access to his son, who her new beau is now shepherding through life. And she’s quite dubious about letting her ex-husband have anything to do with their son.

But he finally gets his afternoon with the kid, and, using money he’s scrounged and a dubious bargaining tactic, gets his son the baseball cleats he thinks he wants. He also introduces him to gambling, much to his ex-wife’s chagrin, but when the typhoon comes rolling in and traps them at his mother’s apartment, this is a chance to strengthen his bond with his son, and perhaps renew the one with his ex-wife.

The former is relatively simple, as boys look to their fathers for guidance, even flawed fathers, but Kyoko has seen too much of his wastrel side, and so he won’t win her back, no matter how desperate he may be. The story is not a typical Western happy-ending, but a commentary on the difficulty of breaking free from the bonds laid upon you in childhood, and how they define one’s place in life.

This is not an exciting, fast-paced adventure. It ambles about, sniffs the roses, makes you wonder if there’s any truly sympathetic characters (I vote for the elderly mother, who has some cutting early lines of dialog that we really enjoyed, and has a secret or two of her own to point fingers at), and refuses to cater to predictable audience members’ desires – at least in America. This is a Japanese movie, however, and thus could be standard fare for the Japanese viewer.

If you’re in the mood for something that requires attention and won’t alarm you with gunshots, then this might be for you. But it takes a little patience.

Killer robots have been bubbling under the radar of late, but Hayley Evans and Natalie Salmanowitz report for Lawfare on an upcoming meeting in March of the U.N.’s Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) to discuss developments in the field of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), as well as give the reader some background.

The August meeting was notable for two final reasons. First, according to commentary on the meeting by Reaching Critical Will (the disarmament division of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and a frequent commentator on CCW meetings), the U.S. and Russia shocked other members of the GGE by doubting the relevance of international human rights law to autonomous weapons systems—even though prior GGE meetings appeared to take the applicability of such law as a given. In response, multiple states—such as Costa Rica, Panama, China and Cuba—pushed back, proposing a variety of solutions ranging from maintaining an explicit reference to international human rights law to mentioning the U.N. Charter. The GGE’s report—per the recommendation of China—“affirmed that international law, in particular the United Nations Charter and [IHL] as well as relevant ethical perspectives, should guide the continued work of the Group.”

When it comes to denying the applicability of international humans right laws, I’m sort of left with two motivations.

1. The applicable laws would interfere with deployments of the weapons systems in question. How this might be, I’m not sure, but I’m more or less completely ignorant of the field.
2. They’re laying the groundwork for the idea that non-human entities, artificial or not, sentient or not, are not bound by human law. I suspect that, in technical terms, there would be some simplification of the task at hand if there’s no need to even pretend to comply with international law.

Second, much of the GGE’s debate centered on broader messaging concerns. Whereas some states, like the U.S., urged the GGE to discuss the benefits of LAWS (such as the capacity for greater targeting precision and less collateral damage), others fervently opposed any mention of such benefits absent an accompanying explanation of the associated risks. Similarly, a handful of states stressed the importance of “avoid[ing] the image that states believe” LAWS “are already in operation”—or “that these systems will be in operation one day.”

My impression is that the risks of advanced weaponry are far less well understood than the benefits – and, sometimes, the one is the obverse, or even the cost, of the other.

But the entire idea of messaging strikes me as a trifle absurd. Public opinion will have little effect on those who are responsible for the deploy / no-deploy decision in the field. The technology is coming available, and, because tools are not moral agents, it’ll continue to be developed for positive social ends – and quietly be co-opted by munitions manufacturers as needed.

Will we end up in another MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) world again? I think, given overpopulation and basic human biological urges, the answer will be yeah.

The story may lay the blame on the Sun in The Hideous Sun Demon (1958), but this is more of a pro-temperance story – or at least it’s more interesting seen through that prism. Dr. Gilbert McKenna is rushed to the hospital with radiation poisoning after a clumsy mistake is made with a new radioactive isotope. While he’s undergoing examination, his assistant and his boss argue over whether the mistake comes from a headache – or a hangover.

Mysteriously, Dr. McKenna seems unharmed, but during hospital observation he’s exposed to the sun’s rays and transforms into a hideous monster. Oh, well, I actually thought he was sort of handsome in that way certain desert lizards can be handsome – makeup did a good job. McKenna recovers when returned to a darkened room, and thus for long-term recovery he’s consigned to a house.

Now comes a series of mistakes by Dr. McKenna, each seemingly proceeded by a good, stiff belt, and every time he’s exposed to the sun, the effects are worse and paranoia comes into evidence. Eventually, he’s running across the oil fields of Santa Monica, and, after offing a few of those horrid mammals, he takes the big plunge off the upper deck of an oil storage facility.

There doesn’t seem to be many useful ways to read this movie beyond temperance, and that one’s fairly blatant. The singing was mediocre, as was the acting, and while I did say the makeup was OK, I was actually shouting to his loving assistant, Quick! Catch him! Oh, he’s drifting right, quick shift with it! Sadly, she failed to make the effort, and the reptile ended up dead.

If a fetus is an “unborn child” that can participate in legal activities, then is it not also … vulnerable to same? From WAAY31, an Alabama ABC affiliate:

The Madison County probate court recognized an aborted fetus as a person with legal rights. According to a local attorney, that’s never happened anywhere in the United States.

The decision allows Baby Roe’s would-be-father and Baby Roe to sue the abortion clinic and others involved in terminating the pregnancy. (Read more here)

“We have already had a victory, and it was the first one of its kind, ever,” Attorney Brent Helms said.

The Madison County probate judge granted Helm’s client Ryan Magers’ request to represent Baby Roe’s estate.

“This is the first estate that I’m aware of that has ever been opened for an aborted baby,” Helms said.

Now that Baby Roe is recognized as a person in Madison County, Magers now legally represents Baby Roe.

“It can further pursue not only me, but other fathers, other future fathers, can pursue it as well,” Magers said.

Magers and Baby Roe are both suing the Alabama Women’s Center and others involved in terminating the pregnancy.

“The only thing that estate has is the right to sue, and so that is what Ryan is doing, is suing on behalf of Baby Roe’s estate,” Helms said.

If a fetus is some sort of legal person at conception, then it must necessarily be susceptible to legal actions holding it responsible for its activities, as are most citizens. The one that leaps right to mind is the fetus, excuse me, baby that kills its mother in child birth. Manslaughter, obviously. (Questions of punishment leave me dizzy with wonder.)

If we’re going to walk the path of surrealism, we must look to the hedges on both sides of the path, no?

A Fish Named Wander?

Replete with endless inventiveness, Rango (2011) is a quasi-Western story concerning how the lives of the citizens of the desert town of Dirt are controlled by the availability of water – whether that citizen is a fox, a chameleon, or a mole.

It’s that chameleon who appears in town and takes up the name of Rango. He’s a frustrated thespian, and leaps into the role of tough guy, and then sheriff. But the immediate challenge of the town isn’t crime so much as a lack of water, and its usual supply has been cut off. But when the water bank is robbed, and the manager killed, Rango comes face to face, even eyeball to eyeball, with the corrupt power structure which is intent on being the top dog as it shapes the future – a future which has little room for ornery creatures such as those who inhabit Dirt.

While the visuals are excellent, as my Arts Editor proclaimed, the facet I found most interesting concerns the transformation from wannabe to embodying the archetype. Rango does an admirable job of fulfilling the role of sheriff, but it’s all built on a foundation of lies and bravado, and when he comes face to face with the irresistible Rattlesnake Jake, he’s not even killed – just humiliated and cast forth. He wanders the desert and somehow survives the human highway, and, once across, he learns what has become of the water supply. But that’s not as important as he’s learned that, without his role, he’s virtually nothing, and now he has a choice – become the archetype and all that entails, or dry up and die in the sun. His choice determines his place in the town and its fate, and stands as one of the leading questions many of us face.

It’s a good, fun story. Recommended.

The stuff that comes across in email… turns out this happened in 2014.

Source: Wikipedia

These are sulfuric in origin. National Geographic has more pics here.

A short while back, I remarked that there’s a class of movies I hesitate to review, those stories which depend on specific cultural facets of a culture with which I’m unfamiliar. This has now happened again, and again with a Japanese movie. However, unlike with the aforementioned Attack of the Mushroom People (1963; in Japan, Matango), with The Third Murder (2017) there is little doubt that this is a quality movie. I was unable to detect any technical flaws beyond the inevitable captioning, the acting was excellent, and the story fed information out in dribs and drabs, backtracks to correct information, until the audience is wondering just exactly what has happened – and why.

The story opens with the murder scene, as one man ambushes another in a river swamp, kills him, and burns the body. Swiftly caught, the man confesses and is assigned legal counsel. Feeling overwhelmed, counsel brings in help in the form of an up and comer with a reputation. We follow along as he and his team sniff after alternative explanations for the horrific crime, his possible motivations for committing the crime, finding ways to transmute the charges into non-capital charges, the victim’s wife and daughter, the killer’s offspring. Film technique is consistently abrupt, jumping from scene to scene, often leaving questions behind. Sometimes perspective is unorthodox, implying certain things about characters. The audience has to keep up, especially when we revisit the crime and now a teenager has been added to the little drama. Is this real?

The dialog delivery is often unhurried, especially when the legal team is interviewing their client in prison. In some ways, it reminded me of Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) in that the characters are internally wrestling with big issues as they interact with each other.

But just what might those issues be? Too often, I was perplexed. Why do the killer, the little girl, and the star defense attorney all swipe at their cheeks at different points in the film? Other questions, too nebulous to remember, came up as well. Why does the killer continually change his story? Is he really sitting in judgment of other people?

Or is he just looking for a final way out of a life that has treated him ill?

It’s a very well done movie, but whether it talks to you is an open question.

I was dismayed to read about “… likely to be the single most important bill of the 116th Congress for the country’s poorest residents,” in Vox today. What is it about?

… if enacted, the bill would slash child poverty in the United States by over a third in a single stroke. Passing it would enact a child allowance in the United States, bringing us in line with our peers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and most of the rich world in guaranteeing a basic payment for the care of children.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? I would certainly think so. So why am I not inclined to support it?

If, like me, you’re convinced that the world is over-populated, and, again like myself, are not inclined to indulge in fruitless mass-murder in an attempt to save it, then it’s necessary to look to more subtle, natural methods. Like economics.

Professor Turchin’s book Secular Cycles happens to mention that the peasant birth rate begins to decline sharply during the degenerative phase of a secular cycle, and pins it squarely on the approach and overrun of the land’s carrying capacity; that is, there are too many people for the land to support. The dearth of food, I suppose, is the leading signal.

I’d modify this slightly to add in the peasants’ perception of carrying capacity. Now let’s apply that modification to this proposal and note how it reduces the importance of carrying capacity in the economic decisions of potential parents. By guaranteeing the potential parents of children that there’ll be some minimum allowance for supporting their offspring, the actual problem of making enough money to purchase the food, etc, becomes less a factor in the actual decision to have children, and thus encourages those potential parents to become actual parents. And thus we just end up with burgeoning over-population, damaging the environment more and more.

Is it fair to the children in the poverty-stricken class? Of course not. They did nothing to earn such a burden. They exist because of misperceptions concerning economic conditions, in many cases enforced by religious precept, all backed up by the primordial life urge to reproduce. Here we’re running into the old scalability problem, wherein morality which works towards survival at one scale is working against us as we near, or exceed as some would argue, our own carrying capacity scale.

In ages past, as Turchin points out, there were solutions to his conundrum. Conquering nearby lands, killing off their peasants, and thus making them available to your own populace would dramatically increase arable lands, which would then lessen the burden on the average carrying capacity of the land, if only temporarily. So was reducing your own population, but that was a bloody mess. The late Professor Hawking urged humanity to make starflight its top priority, with the assumption that if we can’t perform a mass migration to the stars, then at least survivors will still exist after humanity implodes on Earth.

I personally don’t yet see a good solution to this conundrum which doesn’t include mass suffering, but I fear this proposal is adding its little bit to the fire.

Why would a woman’s biggest fear be having sex with a giant caterpillar?

That might be the pivotal question presented in Galaxy of Terror (1981). Crude of script, crude in plot, crude of special effects, crude of characters, and really crude in taste, at one point my Arts Editor cried out, “It’s a walking rectum!”

But I did like the movie poster. There’s nothing like that scene in the movie, thank goodness.

Only watch if you’re sick, like I am.

Along with starring in this movie, the octopodes also had guest appearances on Babylon 5.

There’s a giant octopus in New York Harbor. Or maybe two monstrous octopodes. We’re not sure, but they’re slurping up Russian tourists and members of the Harbor Patrol like baby toes at the buffet in Octopus 2: River of Fear (2001). Little do they know, though, is that this is the appetizer, because it’s July 1, and in 3 days the Independence Day celebration will open as their main course, featuring 20,000 boats floating about like pasties, just waiting to be opened and cleaned out.

But the Harbor Patrol isn’t without its heroes, embodied in Walter. Payton. Wait, they’ve been slurped up, it must be handsome Nick, who is fighting the Captain and the Mayor as they doubt his deductions and observations. Ah, poor Nick. Something troubles him, but I don’t think we ever quite learn what.

But don’t worry, as this shambling wreck of a movie finally brings in the bus load of disadvantaged children, we know what’s going to happen, and Nick rides to the rescue of the kids and their maiden escort.

Oh, yeah. This was bad. Although the teeth on the octopodes were truly marvelous. And you have to wonder who came up with the idea of having one octopus humping the Statue of Liberty. I’d like to shake his hand, if only to get a DNA sample.

I think that this report will swiftly become obsolete as better methods are found for growing meat in a petri dish, but it’s still a bit dismaying. From NewScientist (23 February 2019):

John Lynch and Raymond Pierrehumbert at the University of Oxford compared the emissions from cattle-farming and lab-grown meat, and modelled their climate impact over 1000 years (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, doi.org/c2vs).

Livestock farming produces about 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but lab-grown meat could have a bigger impact, thanks to its high energy requirements, which would mean high carbon dioxide emissions.

It still answers those who cannot abide killing animals for food, but for the environmentalist, so far artificial meat is not acceptable.

And another specimen from the ol’ mailbag. This time, it’s just a picture:

Oh, are we back to the anti-tax meme? Last week, I noticed in a news report on an unexpected decline in revenue from Minnesota state taxes, Republican state House Rep Kurt Daudt immediately blamed the $500 million shortfall on “all the millionaires leaving the state because of taxes.”

That doesn’t pass the sniff test, much less the belly laugh test. What a dirtbag. Water-carrier.

Couldn’t be the economy starting to slow down, could it? Or someone screwed up in forecasting? No, it’s all about the myth of Minnesota being so heavily taxed.

This sort of thing doesn’t depend on any single message, just all of them put together. I often hear, from the older generation, weeping and moaning about a .5% rise in one tax or another. They don’t seem to get that the services rendered from those taxes are what ATTRACTS employers here. And that this isn’t like the American Revolution, the slogan of which was NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. We have plenty of representation.

Sometimes all of us working together accomplish a whole lot more than all of working apart. And I’m tired of Republicans with smoke coming out of their ears every time they can find a way to blame something on supposedly taxes.

Kevin Drum happens to look into opposition to the Green New Deal – from liberals and their allies:

Jimmy Carter’s farm
Clean Technica

San Bernardino County is really big and really sunny. It’s a great place for solar energy farms. But not everyone is thrilled about that:

The county’s Board of Supervisors is slated to vote Thursday on a policy that would prohibit large renewable energy projects on much of the unincorporated private land governed by the county….Renewable energy has been a source of tension in California’s deserts for years, with nearly all large solar and wind projects facing opposition from unhappy local landowners, environmental groups or both.

Hmmm. Environmental groups. Then there’s this:

After signing onto the Green New Deal as an original sponsor, one House Democrat…said he faced harsh criticism from building trade representatives who worried the plan would put their members out of work….Unions, a key constituency, have been less than enthused by — and in some cases, downright hostile to — the ambitious proposal to tackle climate change. Terry O’Sullivan, the general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, or LIUNA, denounced the Green New Deal the day it was introduced.

I think Kevin is, consciously or not, highlighting that so long as we see ourselves as collection of free agents, fighting to see who’ll be winners and who’ll be losers in the decarbonisation of national and international economies, we are going to have a very hard time accomplishing the goal of retaining a world-wide environment in which humanity can continue to flourish. This sort of lack of leadership will inflict unwarranted damage on those unable to defend themselves, and while the rich may think they’ve done well in the end, the truth of the matter is that they are making enemies which will carry not only personal grudges, but systemic grudges: they’ll perceive, rightly or wrongly, that the prevailing economic order is at fault, and that’ll doom the rich and their successors, metaphorically and probably physically.

We need leadership that will try to distribute the pain in equal parts, and communicate that goal to everyone. I’ve talked about this before in terms of the coal industry, where I suggested that everyone involved in this doomed industry be, well, bought out is probably a good term for it. In other words, doomed industries shouldn’t mean doomed families; burdens should be shared. Not set up for life, but given a second chance. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, our leadership in Washington is delusional, fluctuating between chants of Chinese hoaxing and the celebrations of the End Timers. Those who should be leading, at least on the Republican side, can’t be bothered to even admit there’s a problem that can be dealt with.

But the concern about the loss of jobs expressed by the union leader in Kevin’s post can be dealt with while working on the decarbonization problem. Renewable energy fans have been talking this up for years, but Andrew Sullivan touches on it in passing in his support for the semi-despised nuclear energy, present in this first section of his weekly tri-partite diary:

Focus on a non-carbon energy source that is already proven to be technologically feasible, can be quickly scaled up, and can potentially meet all our energy demands. What we need, given how little time we have, is a massive nuclear energy program. Sure, we can keep innovating and investing in renewables, and use as much as we can. But they are not going to save us or the planet in time. We know nuclear works and does so quickly. As argued in Scientific American:

The speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and ‘80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid “dangerous” climate change in the estimation of [respected climate scientist James] Hansen and his co-authors in a recent paper in PLoS One.

What’s the catch? It’s superexpensive. While the price of renewables keeps falling, nuclear remains very costly. The plants take a long time to build, and they’re difficult to site. One estimate is that it would cost $7 trillion to build a thousand nuclear plants, which would allow us to get a quarter of our energy from this non-carbon source. For the U.S. to get half its energy from nuclear would cost around $14 trillion. But if we committed to a huge nuclear investment, and the innovation that comes with it, that cost would come down. Compared with one estimate of $93 trillion for the Green New Deal, it’s a bargain. And remember most of the cost of nuclear power is up-front.

Sullivan’s sources are somewhat older than I’d like, but I suppose the numbers haven’t changed much since they were published. But think about building a thousand nuclear power plants – that’d eat up a lot of construction labor and probably scrabble around, looking for more. In fact, I have to wonder if the price to standup a nuclear power plant would go up simply because of the demand for experienced construction personnel. I have similar concerns about operational and mining personnel as well. The nuclear industry has been withering for decades, and that means a sudden turnaround could put unexpected strains on Human Resources.

But it’s worthwhile noting, as does Sullivan, that leading environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power in the past. He also points at this very recent article in Quillette by Michael Shellenberger, who we’ve puzzled over before:

I used to think that dealing with climate change was going to be expensive. But I could no longer believe this after looking at Germany and France.

Germany’s carbon emissions have been flat since 2009, despite an investment of $580 billion by 2025 in a renewables-heavy electrical grid, a 50 percent rise in electricity cost.

Meanwhile, France produces one-tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as Germany and pays little more than halffor its electricity. How? Through nuclear power.

Then, under pressure from Germany, France spent $33 billionon renewables, over the last decade. What was the result? A rise in the carbon intensity of its electricity supply, and higher electricity prices, too.

What about all the headlines about expensive nuclear and cheap solar and wind? They are largely an illusion resulting from the fact that 70 to 80 percent of the costs of building nuclear plants are up-front, whereas the costs given for solar and wind don’t include the high cost of transmission lines, new dams, or other forms of battery.

Comparing prices can be difficult without controlling for government subsidies, geographical oddities, etc, and it’s not clear if Shellenberger has done so or not. Carbon intensity, on the other hand, is a scientific measure that should be mostly independent of such factors, so it’s a little dismaying to see someone say that carbon intensity is not dropping despite oncoming investment. It’s a good article that is worth a read.

I’ve never been on the anti-nuclear bandwagon, so it’s not hard for me to think of it in positive terms. Of course, cost overruns (here’s a recent debacle) and the potential for disaster if run by corner-cutters is always a concern – but a little easier to swallow if you consider our fossil-fuel energy suppliers have each been disasters that happen to span decades, rather than occurring in a few minutes.

But, if you believe Shellenberger, and I believe that someone with more time on their hands than I could fact-check him and come up with mostly positive results, even “green energy” will impact the environment in ways unacceptable to environmentalists. Nuclear power, properly managed, may have the capacity to save nature; improperly managed, destroy it.

But the alternative may turn out to be a drastic reduction in human population, and that is, to use one of those juiceless words, unpalatable. If you’re solidly anti-nuclear, consider the lack of progress on carbon intensity per unit of energy that he observes, and then try on horrific, terrifying, and appalling. Then go back to looking at nuclear energy. It’s an interesting exercise. You may not change your mind, but you might be a trifle less certain of your rectitude.

I like maps. So does my Arts Editor. After reading this National Geographic article on the North Poles (there’s three of them), I found that Wikipedia has a lovely time series map of the wanderings of the Magnetic North Pole.

This apparently has to do with irregularities in that globe of liquid iron forming the core of our planet. These movements have implications for our navigational aids, of course. One thing not mentioned, but I wonder about, is that the changes in the magnetic field will also have an impact on how cosmic rays impact us: strength and frequencies.

Keep that inner globe spinning.

Oh, and the South Magnetic Pole, of course. It’s not as interesting.

Here it is in package form:

The Lakers appear to be cratering, a fact that has one of its superfans super stressed out. Entertainer Snoop Dogg shared his frustration in an expletive-filled rant on social media in which he offered his Staples Center seats for the low, low one-time-only price of $5 after the Lakers were embarrassed in a loss Saturday to the Phoenix Suns, the last-place team in the Western Conference.

Snoop called everyone not named LeBron James “goofballs” and called for Luke Walton to be fired as coach. And his anger took him way over the line when he asked for a slave ship to move “all them sorry m———— the f— outta here.” [WaPo]

In other words, you’re moored to a dock over which you have absolutely no control. That’s the life of a dedicated cultist, except political cultists can’t even express their rage and disappointment at the behavior of their adorated, because that’s no longer permitted. Just drool every time their God opens its mouth and expends more spittle.

The Atlanta Fed has released its most recent nowcast of next quarter’s GDP growth, and it may be alarming:

This is NOT a metaphor.

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2019 is 0.3 percent on March 4, unchanged from March 1. After this morning’s construction spending release from the U.S. Census Bureau, the nowcast of first-quarter real nonresidential structures investment decreased from -0.8 percent to -2.7 percent and the nowcast of first-quarter real residential investment increased from -13.2 percent to -11.0 percent.

I’m not familiar with this model with respect to its reliability, though, so I’ll turn to Kevin Drum to cover that:

Obviously GDPNow is much more volatile than the actual quarterly estimates from the BEA, but they’re usually in the same ballpark. Sudden spikes up and down are sometimes accurate and sometimes not. On the other hand, the three previous drifts downward to near zero were all missed calls, so maybe this one will be too. Stay tuned.

It doesn’t look all that accurate to my untrained eye. But it’s something worth keeping an eye on.