Monthly Archives: April 2019

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an archaeological finding reported in American Archaeology associated with climate change, but I was waiting for the article to make it to the Web. It still hasn’t made it there, but now Archaeology has a report on the same finding, so here it is:

One surprising effect of European colonization of the Americas was a cooling of the Earth’s climate, researchers at University College London have determined. The team, led by geographer Alexander Koch, estimates the indigenous population of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century to have been around 60 million. Over the next century, this population declined by some 90 percent, largely due to epidemics introduced by Europeans. As a result, around 215,000 square miles of cultivated land, roughly the area of France, was left fallow and reverted to forest. This sucked up enough carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere—to lead to cooling.

How humanity tends to behave results in the emission of climate change gases, so reducing the numbers causes a reduction in those gases.

Right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt’s latest made interesting reading when he stated why he believes Trump is a shoe-in for re-election in WaPo:

Last week’s message from a booming economy should have rocked the Democratic field. Alas, the party seems collectively intent on poring over the Mueller report yet again in the hope that, somehow, someway, there’s something there. But the probe is over. No collusion. No obstruction. Democrats have to campaign on something else besides a great economy, rising values of savings, low unemployment across every demographic, clarity about allies and enemies abroad, and a rebuilding military. It’s a tough needle to thread, condemning everything about Trump except all that he has accomplished that President Barack Obama couldn’t or wouldn’t. Not just tough — it’s practically impossible.

Bold mine. The interest doesn’t come so much in its content, though, as it is in contrast to other evaluations. So what is to be made of Fox News‘ senior judicial analyst, former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano’s analysis of the redacted Mueller Report? Here’s what he has to say, via the Fox News website:

Mueller laid out at least a half-dozen crimes of obstruction committed by Trump — from asking former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland to write an untruthful letter about the reason for Flynn’s chat with Kislyak, to asking Corey Lewandowski and then-former White House Counse lDon McGahn to fire Mueller and McGahn to lie about it, to firing Comey to impede the FBI’s investigations, to dangling a pardon in front of Michael Cohen to stay silent, to ordering his aides to hide and delete records.

The essence of obstruction is deception or diversion — to prevent the government from finding the truth. To Mueller, the issue was not if Trump committed crimes of obstruction. Rather, it was if Trump could be charged successfully with those crimes.

Mueller knew that Barr would block an indictment of Trump because Barr has a personal view of obstruction at odds with the statute itself. Barr’s view requires that the obstructer has done his obstructing in order to impede the investigation or prosecution of a crime that the obstructer himself has committed. Thus, in this narrow view, because Trump did not commit the crime of conspiracy with the Russians, it was legally impossible for Trump to have obstructed the FBI investigation of that crime.

The nearly universal view of law enforcement, however, is that the obstruction statute prohibits all attempted self-serving interference with government investigations or proceedings.

As an independent voter, to my mind it is significant when a prominent partisan personality does not follow the party line on a major issue; it’s even better when such a personality has relevant experience and expertise, and uses it to produce what appears to be an honest evaluation of a document of paramount importance. These are the writings which catch my attention as possibly highly informative. Napolitano is unequivocal in his conclusions, while off-handedly condemning Attorney General Barr for not even reaching the low standard set by former AG Jeff Sessions.

Hewitt? He appears to be writing merely for his right-wing paycheck, keeping his masters happy with whatever pablum is necessary to push the Party line. It’s exceptionally difficult to take seriously the communications of someone who can seriously misread a report from which many observers, partisan or neutral, have found serious evidence for obstruction of justice. Who knows what else he’s misinterpreting to the satisfaction of his masters?

I must admit I rarely read Hewitt, but the title of his article (“The 2020 election isn’t going to be close”) was too good a hook to ignore. Too bad there was nothing to it to take seriously.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of Christian minister Mike Huckabee and White House Press Secretary, puts her foot in it:

Look, I think that the real shame in all of this is that Democrats are perfectly capable of coming together and agreeing on the fact that they’re comfortable ripping babies straight from a mother’s womb or killing a baby after birth, but they have a hard time condemning the type of comments from Congresswoman Omar. I think that is a great shame.

Bold mine.

Brazen lies. But this is the face of the Christian religious right, and not just because Sanders, daughter of a minister and therefore should be considered as having been “raised right.” It’s because there’s no avalanche of disapproval, no disavowal of these statements, by the religious right leaders.

It used to be that people held the truth to be sacred. Now it’s more important to win the battle, no matter what. It’s discouraging that those who think they’re the most moral of the land are, in reality, the least.

Futurism.com reports on the latest threat to our collective sanity:

A Russian company called StartRocket says it’s going to launch a cluster of cubesats into space that will act as an “orbital billboard,” projecting enormous advertisements into the night sky like artificial constellations. And its first client, it says, will be PepsiCo — which will use the system to promote a “campaign against stereotypes and unjustified prejudices against gamers” on behalf of an energy drink called Adrenaline Rush.

Yeah, the project sounds like an elaborate prank. But Russian PepsiCo spokesperson Olga Mangova confirmed to Futurism that the collaboration is real.

“We believe in StartRocket potential,” she wrote in an email. “Orbital billboards are the revolution on the market of communications. That’s why on behalf of Adrenaline Rush — PepsiCo Russia energy non-alcoholic drink, which is brand innovator, and supports everything new, and non-standard — we agreed on this partnership.”

Now it appears that PepsiCo is merely exploring options. But if this, or a related, project is pushed along, it seems to me that sending the lawyers out on an accusation of despoiling the commons – that is, our shared sky – should be a good strategy going forward.

But I have to say, this is a nihilistic statement:

“We are ruled by brands and events,” project leader Vlad Sitnikov told Futurism at the time. “The Super Bowl, Coca Cola, Brexit, the Olympics, Mercedes, FIFA, Supreme and the Mexican wall. The economy is the blood system of society. Entertainment and advertising are at its heart.”

No, not really. We have free will, and so long as we don’t permit ourselves to be mislead by advertising and entertainment, we can live more satisfying lives than if we follow along in the wake of what marketing execs want us to do.

The drive to consume is what drives them.

Ambit:

the range or limits of the influence of something:
They believe that all the outstanding issues should fall within the ambit of the talks. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “The Long Fight For The Freedom To Blaspheme Has Lessons For Today,” Robyn E. Blumner, Free Inquiry (Vol. 39, Number 3):

Comstock also went after freethinkers: people who were calling religion and its rules for private behavior into question. He thought freethinkers, who often held the view that women should be free to control their sexual reproduction in bold defiance of church doctrine, equally immoral as those producing smut. Freethinkers were prosecuted under obscenity law, but the crime was essentially that of impinging on Comstock’s religious sensibilities. And at that time, the crime of obscenity subsumed blasphemy within its ambit.

I had to laugh, as an old guy with a sense of social media history, at this report from LinkedIn on how Twitter wants to change its usage model:

Jack Dorsey wants to shift Twitter from its model of following specific people to one where users would follow topics, in order to improve the quality of conversations on the platform. “That is a huge fundamental shift to bias the entire network away from an accounts bias to a topic and interest bias,” he told the audience at TED 2019 in Vancouver.

The Twitter CEO admitted the platform incentivizes the wrong kind of behavior, consequences he had not imagined when building the platform thirteen years ago. “In the past, it’s incentivized outrage. It’s incentivized a lot of mob behavior. It’s incentivized a lot of group harassment,” he acknowledged. “If I designed the service again, I wouldn’t emphasize the follow count as much. I wouldn’t emphasize the like count as much. I don’t think I would even create likes.”

Sheesh. Just like the old Internet forums, pre-Web, the name of which I sadly cannot remember. Or, off the Internet completely, a number of different species of BBS software, such as the Citadel software I was involved in^[1].

An optimist would say Twitter is evolving from a backward form of communications to a proven form; a pessimist would ask, Why should I use the Twitter I love after it mutates into something else? My exposure to Twitter has been limited to following links and, sometimes, providing a link to a Tweet. My experience is that the thoughts of Twitter authors, even in “Tweet storms”, are fragmentary and more useful for pointing at more developed sources, than for themselves.

But the popularity of Twitter marks me as simply someone unsuited for the experience; many people no doubt love it. And so, for them, will this change to what I hazard to be the very heart of Twitter be such a turnoff that Twitter will become another failed social media experiment? If they change, will they become an object lesson to everyone else about changing the primary hook of your social media offering?

Could this be the death of Twitter as it loses its uniqueness?

¹ Author: the late Jeff Prothero, aka Cynbe ru Taren.

When you see a headline of a NewScientist (6 April 2019, paywall) article like this:

Is religion good or bad for humanity? Epic analysis delivers an answer

You can get a little interested. But I admit I was a little disappointed right from the get-go, because Professor Harvey Whitehouse of Oxford simply ignores the most profound interpretation of the fact that there is persistent, if not consistent, religion, and, instead, gets caught up in the entire weighing of each bit of evidence:

But first, what do we mean by “good” and “bad”? Should religion be considered good if it has inspired magnificent art but enslaved millions? Would it be judged bad if it ensured equality at the price of free expression? Such assessments risk miring us in moral quicksand. Besides, how could these intangibles be weighed against one another? A more empirical approach might tally lives lost or harmed against those saved or enhanced as a result of religion. But any attempt to estimate these numbers would be hopelessly subjective.

But he ignores the question in his own title, ending up in the brush, rather than looking at the forest, and thus forgets the two most important pieces of evidence, which are

1. We still exist after quite a lot of time;
2. Religion, as inconsistent as it is with each instance of itself, still exists.

From these two indisputable facts, and employing evolutionary theory in a sociological context, the inevitable conclusion is this:

Yes, religion has been good.

It has had survival value, in other words. That’s the answer to the question. But Whitehouse’s summary and analysis is not trivia.

But first, I selected the words in my response carefully. I used the past tense very deliberately, because one of the rules that comes out of observing evolution through the biological record is that today’s feature may be tomorrow’s bug. Your cheetah may be evolutionarily adapted to run down and feast on gazelle’s and similar critters, and the cheetahs may do very well while those gazelle’s are around to eat. But when their normal prey disappears, the adaptations which allowed them to take a gazelle down may actually work against them when they find themselves a water buffalo.

So, for those readers of an agnostic or atheistic bent who are wondering about my answer, please bear in mind that past performance is not a predictor of future performance. We may have ridden the horse of religion to success so far, but that horse is flea-ridden, full of false beliefs, easily manipulable by malign personalities, and never tested in an environment where scale has begun to matter, by which I mean a world already deep into overpopulation, where a pro-natalist, all life is sacred attitude is deeply at odds with the goal of keeping civilization going and not having it collapse into a heap of dust.

That’s where the work of Whitehouse and his colleagues does become important. As presented, it appears to be stripped of the overall context of population, carrying capacity, and the entire population dynamics question. That is the important part that, at least in this article, it missed. Just to reiterate, a pro-natalist policy is important when humanity is in separate groups and resources, in proportion to human population, seems unlimited.

That’s not the situation now, and how that interacts with religion seems to be the paramount question.

Steve Benen sums up a critical decision former VP Joe Biden must make now that he’s a declared candidate for the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2020:

For Biden, Trump’s presidency is effectively a fluke. A historical accident. An “aberrant moment in time” that can be corrected with the election of a Democratic president who won’t necessarily turn back the clock to 2016, but who can at least restore a sense of normalcy and maturity to the White House, bringing an abrupt end to a four-year period of madness.

But for many Democrats, each of whom would welcome Trump’s departure, Biden’s assessment is a misdiagnosis.

For them, Trump isn’t the disease, he’s a symptom of a larger sickness. In this model, there’s a systemic rot in our political system, eating away at Republican politics, which made it possible for a racist television personality to rise to power in the first place.

Replacing Trump is an obvious prerequisite to better political health, the argument goes, but it wouldn’t remove the deterioration of our political foundation, without which Trump’s madness would have been impossible.

Source: Gallup

Trump’s approval rating within the Republican Party is sky-high. I think this invalidates the public Biden position, while confirming the position of those Democrats who disagree with him, as well as those independent observers who’ve been noting symptoms of a terminal pathology in the GOP for years now.

But is it wise, or better, politic, of Biden to switch his position? After all, no one wants to be told their political and intellectual positions are not only balderdash, but actually indications of a systemic mental illness. It just doesn’t go over well. If he wants to lure the bulk of the Republican Party back to, well, normality, the first step is not to spit in their faces.

On the other hand, Gallup polls also indicate that roughly 27% of US citizens answering another poll consider themselves to be Republicans (however, another 16% consider themselves “Republican leaners”). Worse for them, they are an aging demographic that, I think, is not attracting a lot of the younger generations, if this Pew Research research finding continues to hold true. Essentially, the current Republicans are part cult members and part cult leaders, and the younger set recognizes there’s something wrong in this dynamic and are avoiding it. Inevitably, the infection, as it were, will die out from old age, if not outright invalidation (which I suggest will happen to End-Timers such as former Rep Bachmann (R-MN) and half-term Governor Palin (R-AK) as their Biblical predictions once again prove wrong).

If Biden and other Democratic candidates choose to label to the Republican Party as being pathologically and systemically ill, independent voters will come to one of two conclusions. First, they just write it off as inter-party warfare and the Democrats get dinged for being bitchy.

Or, two, the voters decide to examine the evidence. In order for the Democrats to get that to happen, they have to get their messaging up to the task of informing the uninformed without alienating them, while keeping in mind that many voters don’t have time to do the research. It’s going to be harder than it sounds, because it’s going to involve absolutist propaganda from the GOP, as we’ve seen from Trump, that appeals to a lot of people, and they won’t want to reject it, no matter how pathological the entity might be. After all, absolutism is easy, nuance is difficult.

But I think, in the end, that Biden should probably change his position. It’s honest, it’s accurate, and it’s good for the future of the nation to practice honesty.

Someone who’s been relieved of the responsibility of differentiating between right and wrong.

Oh, I know that’s not in the dictionary, but that’s effectively it.

… but I happened to have the camera with me, so here’s a tulip to brighten your day.

Bonus! The first dragonfly, we think, of the spring! It was hard to get him into focus, as he was mostly transparent.

Later today I have to dig a new tree out of the dogwoods. This may be the end for the rickety old shovel I so dearly love.

NBC News is reporting on a Federal attempt to stop the supply of opioids:

In a national first in the fight against the opioid crisis, a major drug distribution company, its former chief executive and another top executive have been criminally charged in New York.

Rochester Drug Co-Operative, one of the top 10 largest drug distributors in the United States, was charged Tuesday with conspiracy to violate narcotics laws, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., and willfully failing to file suspicious order reports.

Laurence Doud III, the company’s former chief executive, and William Pietruszewski, the company’s former chief compliance officer, are individually charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Pietruszewski is also charged with willfully failing to file suspicious order reports with the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA.

Both Doud, 75, and Pietruszewski, 53, face life in prison. Doud will appear in court Tuesday, and Pietruszewski pleaded guilty last Friday, Geoffrey S. Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said.

There are two facets to consider.

First, the accused are facing life in prison, and yet they did violate the law in pursuit of profits. This illustrates the lure of money.

Second, diminishing the supply may artificially diminish the rate of addicts, but it does little to diminish demand, and that’s the real problem. So I have to question whether this sort of prosecution will have any sort of true impact on the opioid crisis, even if it’s followed by more.

It’s a little odd.

From NASA’s JPL:

“InSight’s first readings carry on the science that began with NASA’s Apollo missions,” said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “We’ve been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!”

The new seismic event was too small to provide solid data on the Martian interior, which is one of InSight’s main objectives. The Martian surface is extremely quiet, allowing SEIS, InSight’s specially designed seismometer, to pick up faint rumbles. In contrast, Earth’s surface is quivering constantly from seismic noise created by oceans and weather. An event of this size in Southern California would be lost among dozens of tiny crackles that occur every day.

Fascinating. Mars is a smaller planet than Earth, further from our common star, and thus in a weaker gravitational field. Its moons, Deimos & Phobos, are small, so it seems unlikely that the sound was gravitationally triggered. Would a meteorite strike cause that? I’d expect the wave form to have an abrupt beginning and a tail for an end, and that’s not what we see here.

Just a little settling of the planet?

Just a little windy, maybe, to be polite about it?
Image Source: NASA.

For those of us who’ve been following the refusal of former White House official Carl Kline, former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office who overrode findings against awarding security clearances to various Trump progeny and others, I should think there was some tittering over this remark by his lawyer:

In a separate letter Monday, Kline’s attorney, Robert Driscoll, told the panel that his client would adhere to the White House recommendation.

“With two masters from two equal branches of government, we will follow the instructions of the one that employs him,” Driscoll wrote. [WaPo]

And how often does this happen in other areas of the law? Exactly zero. You don’t get to decide not to testify because your employer told you not to; you testify because the law said that this is an appropriate subject on which to testify, and, outside of Second Amendment considerations, you either do it or you end up in the pokey.

Now, the House Oversight Committee may not have the power to jail the dude, but they should make it very clear that he should be testifying because of the danger in which his decisions has potentially placed the United States, and because that’s the honorable thing to do. So President Trump told him not to. Big fucking deal. If the Administration is fucking things up, he should be hastening to give that testimony – not sitting on his ass with staples through his lips.

Politico notes the problems Democrats are having with getting information from the Administration in order to execute their oversight duties:

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings is moving toward a vote to hold former White House personnel security director Carl Kline in contempt after he refused to comply with a subpoena for his appearance before the committee on Tuesday.

Cummings’ statement came after the White House instructed Kline to not answer questions Tuesday as part of the committee’ investigation into the White House security clearance process. It also sets up what could be the most significant clash between the two branches of government since Democrats took over the House. …

“It also appears that the White House believes that it may dictate to Congress — an independent and co-equal branch of government — the scope of its investigations and even the rules by which it conducts them,” Cummings added. “To date, the White House has refused to produce a single piece of paper or a single witness in any of the committee’s investigations this entire year.”

I think the Administration is running a risk, though. At some point, this will start coming up in front of judges, and if they consistently decide for the House Committee chairpeople submitting the requests and subpoenas – and if they do so with a “ya gotta be kidding with that argument, Trump” – there’s a real possibility of a pattern of misbehavior, and that’s something the Judiciary doesn’t like to see.

It could result in unexpected penalties for the Administration, as well as the lawyers advising the Administration to follow this strategy.

This won’t impact the Trump base any, of course, as they’ve sold their souls and are no longer free agents, but the independents will take note of the further bad behavior of the Administration, and vote accordingly.

I see that now the Kansas GOP, dissatisfied with its lesser position now that there’s a Democratic governor, is pushing forward some legislation to at least hold what they have, which appears to my untrained eye an unwarranted intrusion on the Kansas executive branch:

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s power to fill vacancies in some top state posts would be stripped and given to party leadership under new legislation introduced in the House.

Under the state Constitution, the governor holds the power to appoint a replacement if the office of the attorney general or secretary of state becomes vacant. HCR 5013, however, would allow the legislature to move that power to party delegates. The system would work much in the same way legislative vacancies are filled now, Rep. Blake Carpenter, R-Derby, said.

“More or less we’re just modeling the appointment process after how we appoint legislators,” Carpenter said.

The appointment power would fall to the delegates of whichever party last held the executive office. For example, if Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, were to leave, it would be up to to the Republican party to choose a replacement.

It “allows both parties to have a fair shake,” Carpenter said. [The Kansas City Star]

The Democrats disagree, naturally. And, of course, there are some restive Republicans holding those Executive branch positions. This legislation would give them free rein to resign to pursue higher office without damaging their Party’s power.

There’s certainly positives to having office-holders remain in office for their full term, and not skipping out. How this turns out should be interesting.

Fast Company notes the invention of a new material:

A team of Boston University researchers recently stuck a loudspeaker into one end of a PVC pipe. They cranked it up loud. What did they hear? Nothing.

How was this possible? Did they block the other end of the pipe with noise canceling foams or a chunk of concrete? No, nothing of the sort. The pipe was actually left open save for a small, 3D-printed ring placed around the rim. That ring cut 94% of the sound blasting from the speaker, enough to make it inaudible to the human ear.

That sound must have been converted into something, some sort of energy. If it can be harvested, this could be really cool.

Imagine recharging your phone’s battery by shouting at it a few times.

Or putting this material on your roof and harvesting the noise of jets going by overhead. All of a sudden, those houses near the runways become prime real estate.

Snowblowers become silent.

And then lion’s learn about this and become silent, too. It’s amazing what evolution comes up with, so don’t laugh. At least, wait until you’re in a locked room.

I see failed economist Art Laffer is still uttering pronouncements:

On Fox News this morning, Art Laffer blames the 2008 stock market crash on Barack Obama "rising in the polls and doing well in the polls," warning that the market will crash in 2020 "if they see an Obama coming"

Anchor Bill Hemmer: "We're watching the calendar with you" pic.twitter.com/JlBsvXbo7s

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 23, 2019

Steve Benen has a lot of fun with this, but I think he missed a bet.

I see this as a vaccination. No doubt Laffer has been watching the escalating Federal debt, a problem partially his fault as the Laffer Curve is an implicit part of Republican Party Holy Tenets these days, and he’s beginning to wonder if his whole edifice of dubious economics is about to come falling down around his ears.

If it does, President Trump, already a dubious bet to win re-election with the Mueller Report’s apparently damning (I haven’t had a chance to read it) information, which will be followed up by the various House oversight committees, will have his last redoubt, that of “It’s the economy, stupid!” fame, shattered, leaving him vulnerable to the shouts of the outraged villagers voters who used to believe in him.

I expect this will become a “talking point” for Republicans who are afraid of taking on the debate about the future in honest terms. At some point, the Democratic contender who frightens the extremist wing of the Republicans the most will have the label “OBAMA: Horseman of the Apocalypse!” hung around their neck, and that’s all we’ll hear.

Because an honest evaluation of what happened in the Great Recession doesn’t appear to concern Laffer and, presumably, Trump – and his allies will stampede along in their dust.

This may be a wakeup call for the Democrats to begin messaging – HONESTLY – on the real causes of the Great Recession. Bring up subprime loans and all those second- and third- rate financial instruments, the insanely high risks. And the legislation that enabled it, no matter who approved it.

Let the Republicans argue that the appearance of a Democratic candidate who talked sense, and, when elected, successfully guided the resuscitation of the country, caused a market crash. It’s utterly laughable and dishonest.

And such remarks, wielded properly by the supposed victims of the lies, can become great big clubs to use on those spreading the lies.

But this is Laffer trying to inoculate the people currently in favor of Trump against thinking any kind of economic difficulty could possibly be the GOP’s fault. Blame a ghost, that’s what they want to do.

The Democrats had better not let them.

Car, me, or lunch?

The classic To Catch A Thief (1955) has all the pieces: glamour, beautiful landscapes, a flawed hero with a damsel to match, a hot car, and a plot twist or three that emphasizes the theme that one’s crimes will pursue you from the sea floor of Le Havre harbor to the top of the chimney of that palace where you’re partying.

John Robie, former famous cat burglar with an eye for jewels as well as French Resistance hero, is now reformed, owns a small farm on an estate, a hot car or two, an aversion to the police, and an unfortunate reputation. When someone begins using his techniques to lift jewelry from the idle rich, he finds himself eyed with deep suspicion, and so he enlists the help of the insurance man who’s getting the shaft to discover who might be the next victim.

In doing so, he is introduced to an atypical American mother and daughter. Having inherited their wealth from the father, a swindler who lucked into oil and died, mother Jessie simply ensures her jewels are insured and otherwise makes little fuss about the safety of her jewels, while having lots of fun thrusting needles into insurance man and jewel thief alike. Her daughter, Francie, while frustrated by her mother’s attitude, is also doing some sleuthing of her own, eyeing Robie, who is using a fake name, with deep suspicion.

Meanwhile, not only are the police keeping an eye on Robie, but so are his erstwhile and volatile Resistance comrades, who suspect him of living high off the hog on the proceeds of the robberies while they themselves labor in a restaurant.

Eventually, the action winds up at a great party for the rich, where Robie awaits another figure in black. Who has succumbed to the lure of quick wealth among his many acquaintances and friends? And will the wild gunfire from below nail Robie before it hits his double?

Outside of the fact that our leading man, Cary Grant, is far too old for Francie, played by Grace Kelly, this is a charming romp which is nevertheless backed by a somber, if relatively simple theme. And that car is really a piece of art, or so my Arts Editor believes.

Enjoy!

Andrew Sullivan finds former Pope Benedict, still alive and kicking and issuer of semi-papal letters on the state of Church affairs, a frustrating subject. After beating on him for refusing to take responsibility for the travails of the Roman Catholic church (see the second part of his diary entry) ….

… this is especially true because Benedict’s critique is so familiar, evasive, and exhausted that he sounds more like an old neocon re-upping Allan Bloom one last time than a pope emeritus speaking with any kind of restraint or serenity. And it’s all to say one more time that everything went to hell in the 1960s and that every sex scandal in the church since then stems from that, and there was no real abuse before. Seriously. The hippies made us do it! The crisis had nothing do with clericalism, or stunted psychosexual development in some priests, or the corrupting culture of the clerical closet: It was still just those damned students all those years ago.

Andrew then finds his thoughts bizarrely beautiful:

Seeing a former pope reduced to this is just sad. There is no reflection at all on his own culpability in handling all the sex-abuse cases under John Paul II; there is just an easy, knee-jerk attempt to blame his old enemies for them. And then, as so often with Benedict, something happens, and the anger and bitterness and lashing out cedes to a suddenly beautiful statement of the truth of Christianity:

The Lord has initiated a narrative of love with us and wants to subsume all creation in it. The counterforce against evil, which threatens us and the whole world, can ultimately only consist in our entering into this love. It is the real counterforce against evil … A world without God can only be a world without meaning. For where, then, does everything that is come from? In any case, it has no spiritual purpose. It is somehow simply there and has neither any goal nor any sense. Then there are no standards of good or evil. Then only what is stronger than the other can assert itself. Power is then the only principle. Truth does not count, it actually does not exist.

Been boning up on some Nietzsche, I see. But Benedict is and always has been this strange combination: rigid and bitter and petty — while also bearing a gift for cutting through the cant to craft words, often beautiful, that convey the essence of the faith. It makes me want to yell at him and revere him at the same time.

An analysis of Benedict’s strangely worded paragraph will help. Briefly, Benedict is simply saying that, without God (and the cynical might say “the Church”) there is no Right or Wrong, no moral system; only Power will correlate to survival. The first part is a common assertion among the faithful, because that’s how they were brought up, and by the leaders, because that’s one of the defensive stones around their circle of power. The second is a statement that ignores the importance of truth in all interactions between entities. Truth, unaffected by power, brings predictability and dependability, and, in turn, prosperity. Power ascending to the top of the social pyramid, seasoned by human irrationality, turns prosperity into poverty, and monarchies into smoking ruins. See the Romanovs for a graphic example.

If Sullivan wants to resolve this conundrum, he should take seriously the old atheistic contention that morality does not require divinity. Once it is accepted that a successful moral system can be constructed from non-divine foundations, Benedict’s mysteriously beautiful statement loses any perceived majesty, and can be seen for what it really is – a defense of the power ladder Benedict ascended and has forever given his loyalty.

All philosophy starts with some set of basic assumptions, and sometimes some of those assumptions are cracked and unstable. Someday I hope to find the time to start exploring an agnostic morality system, starting from scratch. This is not to say that I reject all other such attempts, for the simple truth is I’ve never studied them. I try to live well, and the Golden Rule seems to be a fine rule-of-thumb. But a formalized system helps explain how one behaves, or should behave – and why.

Cortege:

1. A train of attendants, as of a distinguished person; a retinue.
2. 1. A ceremonial procession.
   2. A funeral procession.

[The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Notre Dame tells a story of quarreling, not unity. That’s why it unites the French.” Robert D. Zaretsky, WaPo:

The medieval cathedral, of course, was not burning. Intact, it instead welcomed Charles de Gaulle on Aug. 26, when the commander of the Free French forces and de facto president of France led a victory march from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame. Greeted along the way by a mass of jubilant Parisians and the occasional sniper, the cortege filed into the cathedral to hear the “Te Deum.” The hymn was first performed at Notre Dame in 1467 to commemorate the eviction of the English from French soil — a celebration repeated every year until 1793, when leaders of the French Revolution decided that a cathedral was no place to praise the nation.

Think of a fine, tasty pastry, filled with a really meh custard. That’s Ralph Wrecks The Internet (2018), a sparkly, animated, name dropping exploration of the Internet that tries to warn about the dangers of growing too comfortable with your rut in life. The animation is gorgeous, the analogies to the entities inhabiting the Internet at least mildly amusing, good voices, inventive.

But not a whole lot in the custard. Sure, there’s a lesson to be learned, but it all seems too labored. Maybe I just didn’t much care for the characters, or the animation. Perhaps it’s aimed at a younger demographic than myself, and I see professional critics liked it – but, for us, it didn’t really click.

Your mileage may vary.

I was struck by this statement of Trump’s inclinations concerning record keeping:

Before becoming president, Trump left the impression with his employees that he did not want them to take too many notes, for fear of a paper trail that could haunt them down the road. Sam Nunberg, one of Trump’s former political advisers, recalled him saying, “I can’t believe what people put in emails.”

In the White House, many aides take notes — sometimes to memorialize strange moments or orders Trump gives that make them uncomfortable, and sometimes simply to remember one’s marching orders or what is agreed to during a meeting.

Trump sometimes warily views note-taking in the Oval Office. He rarely takes copious notes himself, aides said, but occasionally scribbles on the side of papers. During a briefing on cybersecurity hacks, for instance, Trump bragged to officials that he never used email and said companies would be better off without using technology that harbors such records. [WaPo]

If you’re running your businesses beginning with a view that you have to avoid the law, then perhaps you shouldn’t be in business. Does he think any President since Nixon thought it was necessary to avoid keeping records, of leaving a paper trail?

I’m simply appalled.

The people’s business simply shouldn’t be run this way.

Which is the lead member of this choir?

Borders, and the consequences of breaking them, are everywhere in Cold War (2018). The title provides the context, starting in post-World War II Poland, newly Communist Poland, at a farm where the estate owner has been dispossessed, and it’s now to be occupied by a forming corp of peasant singing and dance group. Rumors abound about blonde Zula, who they say shot her father to death. When asked why by her lover, Wiktor, the leader of the group, she replies that her father had been unable to distinguish between herself and her mother, with all that implies about the consequences of forbidden border breaches – and that Wiktor shouldn’t worry, as she hadn’t actually killed him.

The group achieves a certain competency and prominence, and goes on tour. In East Berlin, an opportunity to escape the East Bloc arises, and it’s alluring for Wiktor, as he feels he has little opportunity for artistic growth under the shadow of the corrupt Soviets. Zula is along for the ride, but can’t accompany Wiktor due to a last moment interruption, and so Wiktor alone escapes to experience the angst of starting over as a musician in the West, landing at Paris.

The story jumps from meeting to meeting between our star-crossed pair, from her marrying a Westerner and leaving the East Bloc, to her return, to his following her. Each breaching of that ideological /geographical boundary, and several others, lead to serious disruptions and even degradations of their lives, but the drive of their love keeps them coming back for more.

Until they approach that last and most basic boundary and breach: marriage.

This movie was filmed in a sepia tone which contributes to its ambiance of European nihilism. The characters are almost mysteriously expressionless, and the younger audience might benefit from some research into how the surveillance society of the Soviet Union and its allies in the East Bloc affected those so surveilled, leaving them almost desperately private as to their inner lives, expressed only through furtive sexuality, whispers in hidden places.

I greatly enjoyed, or admired, this story for not beating key points into my brain. A flippant response to a question, for example, communicates to us his exile to Siberia for 15 years. This approach assumes an observant and intelligent audience. Of course, such assumptions can result in stories in which too little is communicated, but this story seems to have caught the proper balancing point.

This is not an uplifting movie; it’s puzzling, frustrating, and requires a lot of thought as you watch. But it’s a reminder that other ways of life have serious consequences for the individual – and, yet, those ways of life may be necessary logical steps, given their historical social contexts.

If you know Polish and French, that will help, but it’s captioned in English. And the music, at least in the early stages, is quite fun, according to my Arts Editor.

I was fascinated by this article on the general nature of how life survives on this Earth, from NewScientist (23 March 2019, paywall) and Bob Holmes, which revisits the Gaia hypothesis of the biosphere as a living organism, and how life keeps going:

As far as we know, Earth is a one-off: there is no population of competing, reproducing planets for natural selection to choose between to form the next generation. And yet, like a superorganism honed by evolution, Earth seems to self-regulate in ways that are essential for life. Oxygen levels have remained relatively constant for hundreds of millions of years, as has the availability of key building blocks of life such as carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Crucially, Earth’s surface temperature has remained within the narrow range that allows liquid water to exist. It is true there have been upheavals: during a “snowball Earth” episode about 700 million years ago, for example, almost the entire surface was frozen. “But the key question is, why does it spend so much time in a stable state and not just flying all over the place?” asks Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, UK.

This question has stumped earth scientists since James Lovelock first proposed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1960s. There is, after all, no obvious way for such self-regulation to evolve. This is particularly true because the processes that underpin Earth’s temperature, oxygen levels and the like – which include things like plate tectonics and erosion – operate over millions of years. That is far too long for the adaptation of individual organisms to their environments through natural selection to make a difference. This conundrum has led most evolutionary biologists to entirely reject any notion of Gaian evolution. “You simply cannot get an adaptation at the planetary level,” says Charles Goodnight at the University of Vermont.

But there might be another way, says Lenton. … he suggests, Earth and the early life on it might have interacted haphazardly at first. Unstable configurations – those, say, with little or no cycling of key elements such as nitrogen – would have failed quickly, requiring life to reboot nearly from scratch. Eventually, though, the system must have stumbled on a stable configuration, with better cycling and tighter regulatory mechanisms. It should be no surprise, then, that the planet of today has strong regulatory systems.

Sure, a sort of evolution of competing processes. Those that don’t make the grade are discarded, taking their dependent species with them, while those that are successful work to make Earth / Gaia a more stable place.

While the idea of evolution was originated to explain the origin of species, to borrow a phrase, there’s little reason to confine it to a biological context, as many before me have pointed out. To see it operate, a critical metric, measuring success, must be identified, and something that can change and affect the current result on that metric must be available in the entity that is evolving. Call that a variability component.

In biology, the metric, as a first stab, is the reproductive success rate of qualified members of a species, and the variability component is the fact that a species is made up of individuals, at least some of which include a reproductive function which includes variability in the next generation, which results from how DNA from contributors forms, and DNA’s vulnerability to mutation from environmental radiation and other contaminants. As the success rate moves towards zero, the species moves towards extinction, while a success rate that is increasing would appear to be moving away from extinction. However, because of the necessary interactions with the environment which feeds the species’ individuals, or the ecological web, to use the terminology of a previous generation, there is necessarily a positive feedback loop. Think of the population dynamics of wolves and deer. The two follow each other in their endless sin waves. This is a feedback loop. A species which is experiencing extreme success runs the risk of exhausting its environment, aka overpopulation.

And so an increasing success rate may simply presage a coming crash and near-extinction level event. See Peter Turchin’s Secular Cycles.

I must say, there’s quite a satisfying click! in my head when reading about these sorts of things, because, for those of us who like to understand this sort of thing, this really enlightens our understanding of how we came to be – and how, if we’re not careful, how rough the ride might become. Processes that are not area-specific make it easier to understand what’s happening in the world, once we get ourselves properly fitted to see them.