Monthly Archives: April 2019

Quirky

Shamelessly stolen from NASA:

The wavemaker moon, Daphnis, is featured in this view, taken as NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made one of its ring-grazing passes over the outer edges of Saturn’s rings on Jan. 16, 2017. This is the closest view of the small moon obtained yet. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, exposed as a liar in the Mueller Report, raises her defenses as documented in this Tweet from ABC News:

Pressed repeatedly on her comments on FBI agents, Sarah Sanders tells @GStephanopoulos, "It was the heat of the moment, meaning that it wasn't a scripted talking point. I'm sorry that I wasn't a robot like the Democratic Party" was about Mueller probe. https://t.co/mOQZNKl1wy pic.twitter.com/y3xcNwVYHg

— ABC News (@ABC) April 19, 2019

All I can do is laugh. The Democrats are now robots? We’re moving from mere lying and corruption to full-on surrealism. The GOP house is burning down and its inhabitants are smoking cigarettes in the lounge, discussing how bright it is because of the fire.

Ya gotta wonder if she’ll ever muster the self-respect to quit. Right now she looks like a cultist who’ll claim night is day if Dear Leader proclaims it to be so.

Ethology:

Ethology is the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “It’s not an illusion, you have free will. It’s just not what you think,” Tom Stafford, NewScientist (6 April 2019, paywall):

How Sphex came to be linked with free will is a long story. Charles Darwin was studying this wasp while working on his theory of evolution. We know from his notebooks that its behaviour had a big impact on him. He wasn’t aware that it would ceaselessly check its burrow – that discovery was made decades later by Nikolaas Tinbergen, the founder of ethology, the science of animal behaviour. What interested Darwin was what the wasp does once it has dragged a cricket into its burrow: it lays its eggs in the body of the immobilised but still living prey. When the larvae hatch they eat it from the inside out.

Darwin was so appalled by this behaviour that he cited it as one reason for his loss of faith. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within… living bodies,” he wrote. Meanwhile, his theory wasn’t just undermining God. Some took it as support for the idea that humans are mere animals and that animals are mere machines, fanning the flames of a millennia-old debate about free will.

While I’ve never been religious as Darwin once was, behaviors like these have certainly reinforced my suspicion that there’s either no God, or it’s certainly unworthy of worship.

When it comes to the Mueller Report, everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but not everyone’s opinion is worth listening to. I’ve talked about the problem of the comfortable opinion vs the honest opinion. You can talk to some random dude on the street, you can listen to your favorite ideologue on the left or right, you can listen to lawyers representing those sides, the pundits themselves who do this sort of thing for a living – and therefore have implicit conflict-of-interest problems because of those payments. You can listen to flying nutcases such as the ilk of Alex Jones, and the reason I phrase it that way is that Mr. Jones has retreated behind the defense of having a psychosis to explain his frankly unacceptable behavior. It’s worth wondering about his ilk in the same way. You can even make the absolute pinnacle of mistakes and listen to President Trump’s frantic claims of exoneration, because that’s easier – and faster – than reading the report and forming your own opinion.

You can even listen to me, if you like opinions unleavened with neither money nor specific expertise, hell I haven’t even have the time to read the damn report. I’ll try to get to it this weekend, although I may print it out and use it to beat an invading Martian to death, instead – it’s big enough to do that.

OR … you can go read the folks at Lawfare. They deal with legalese every day, they know how to parse what another national security lawyer (Mr. Mueller) has written, most are lawyers involved in international law or national security law, and they’ve dealt with all sorts of uncomfortable questions when it comes to the painful question of national security. In short, so far as I can tell, they’re paid and trained to write honest opinions concerning the law, the facts, and how it all comes together. So what does the Lawfare mob think the Mueller Report says?

No, Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and no, he did not conclude that President Trump had obstructed justice. But Mueller emphatically did not find that there had been “no collusion” either. Indeed, he described in page after damning page a dramatic pattern of Russian outreach to figures close to the president, including to Trump’s campaign and his business; Mueller described receptivity to this outreach on the part of those figures; he described a positive eagerness on the part of the Trump campaign to benefit from illegal Russian activity and that of its cutouts; he described serial lies about it all. And he describes as well a pattern of behavior on the part of the president in his interactions with law enforcement that is simply incompatible with the president’s duty to “take care” that the laws are “faithfully executed”—a pattern Mueller explicitly declined to conclude did not obstruct justice.

Call it a newer, bigger swamp, much worse than the one he promised to drain. Or retreat from the colorful and dreadfully misleading metaphors and just go with Trump’s sordid, venal reality. But there’s more:

As the report is careful to explain, “collusion” is neither a criminal offense nor a legal term of art with a clear definition, despite its frequent use in discussions of the special counsel’s mandate. Mueller and his team instead examined the relationships between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government through the far narrower lens of criminal conspiracy. To establish a criminal conspiracy, a prosecutor must show, among other elements, that two or more persons agreed to either violate a federal criminal law or defraud the United States. This “meeting of the minds” is ultimately the piece the Mueller team felt it could not prove, leading it not to pursue any conspiracy charges against members of the Trump campaign, even as it pursued them against Russian agents.

This conclusion is far from the full vindication that chants of “no collusion” imply, a fact driven home by the detailed factual record the Mueller report puts forward. In some cases, there was indeed a meeting of the minds between Trump campaign officials and Russia, just not in pursuit of a criminal objective. In others, members of the Trump campaign acted criminally—as evidenced by the guilty pleas and indictments that the Mueller team secured—but did so on their own. At times, these efforts even worked toward the same objective as the Russian government, but on seemingly parallel tracks as opposed to in coordination. None of this amounted to a criminal conspiracy that the Mueller team believed it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But the dense network of interactions, missed opportunities, and shared objectives between the Trump campaign and the Russian government remains profoundly disturbing.

This report shows that the Trump campaign was reasonably aware of the Russian efforts, at least on the hacking side. They were aware the Russians sought to help them win. They welcomed that assistance. Instead of warning the American public, they instead devised a public relations and campaign strategy that sought to capitalize on Russia’s illicit assistance. In other words, the Russians and the Trump campaign shared a common goal, and each side worked to achieve that goal with basic knowledge of the other side’s intention. They just didn’t agree to work together toward that goal together.

And this is dismaying:

The Mueller report lays out in detail a sustained effort to obtain a set of emails which figures associated with the campaign believed hackers might have obtained from Hillary Clinton’s private server before she deleted them. The trouble is that it appears the emails didn’t exist. It has previously been reported that now-deceased Trump supporter Peter Smith went to extreme lengths to try and track down Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails. According to today’s report, after candidate Trump stated in July 2016 that he hoped Russia would “find the 30,000 emails,” future National Security Advisor Michael Flynn reached out to multiple people to try and obtain those emails. One of the individuals he reached out to was Peter Smith. Smith later circulated a document that claimed his “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative” was “‘in coordination’ with the Trump Campaign” specifically naming Flynn, Sam Clovis, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. While the investigation found that Smith communicated with both Flynn and Clovis, it found no evidence that any of the four individuals listed “initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.” So essentially, a bunch of people in Trump’s orbit tried very hard to obtain stolen emails but came up empty. Mueller decided that chasing this particular ghost did not constitute criminal conduct.

At this point, it’s not really about specific crimes. It’s about people who’ve forgotten, or never learned, how to act as an American. They lie to the FBI, they give the appearance of conniving with one of our greatest adversaries, all to win a Presidency, and benefit thereby. Had they ever heard the phrase public service and taken it to mean anything other than time to profit? Such is the conservative movement these days.

Remember Mueller’s responsibility to investigate possible obstruction of justice charges by the President?

All this leads to Mueller’s key conclusion, quoted only in part in Barr’s initial letter: “if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. … Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” This reasoning makes clear the disconnect between Mueller’s approach to the obstruction investigation and that of Barr, who independently chose to evaluate the evidence against Trump and determine that it was not sufficient to establish an obstruction offense.

This is not, in short, a circumstance in which Mueller summed up all the evidence for obstruction and all the evidence against it and just couldn’t make up his mind—or decided to defer to the attorney general for judgment. Mueller’s decision not to reach a traditional prosecutorial judgment in no sense indicates that the evidence of possible obstruction by the president was weak—“No Collusion, No Obstruction,” as the president tweeted. To the contrary, the more time one spends with the obstruction section of the report, the more it suggests that the Mueller team believed the evidence of obstruction to be very strong.

But we knew that already. Mueller merely confirms that this is a President without principle, without moral, without qualm. He’s one of the rarest of people – someone who can lie and lie and lie and not blush about it. He’ll make up ludicrous conspiracy theories to cover his ass, and he’ll never take responsibility for any of his failures – only for his successes. And other folks’ successes.

But that’s just my conclusions, not necessarily Lawfare’s. Give Lawfare’s article a read. It’s a calm dissection, even if a self-admitted first read, of the Mueller Report. It’s grounding, for want of a better word. No hysterics, no spin, just your local lawyer giving you the lowdown on what’s come across her desk.

Even nuclear energy is vulnerable to the plague of the retro – that is, old designs have been pulled up for a once-over, even a twice-over. Consider this summary, from Discover and M. Mitchell Waldrop, of a reactor that has as its fuel not a solid component, but a mixture of molten salts:

… the worldwide nuclear engineering community was beginning to get fired up about unconventional reactor designs — technologies that had been sidelined 40 or 50 years before, but that might have a lot fewer problems than existing reactors. And the beer-and-nuclear group found that one such design, the molten salt reactor, had a simplicity, elegance and, well, weirdness that especially appealed.

The weird bit was that word “molten,” says [Troels] Schönfeldt [of the Niels Bohr Institute]: Every other reactor design in history had used fuel that’s solid, not liquid. This thing was basically a pot of hot nuclear soup. The recipe called for taking a mix of salts — compounds whose molecules are held together electrostatically, the way sodium and chloride ions are in table salt — and heating them up until they melted. This gave you a clear, hot liquid that was about the consistency of water. Then you stirred in a salt such as uranium tetrafluoride, which produced a lovely green tint, and let the uranium undergo nuclear fission right there in the melt — a reaction that would not only keep the salts nice and hot, but could power a city or two besides.

Weird or not, molten salt technology was viable; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee had successfully operated a demonstration reactor back in the 1960s. And more to the point, the beer-and-nuclear group realized, the liquid nature of the fuel meant that they could potentially build molten salt reactors that were cheap enough for poor countries to buy; compact enough to deliver on a flatbed truck; green enough to burn our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste instead of generating more — and safe enough to put in cities and factories. That’s because Fukushima-style meltdowns would be physically impossible in a mix that’s molten already. Better still, these reactors would be proliferation resistant, because their hot, liquid contents would be very hard for rogue states or terrorists to hijack for making nuclear weapons.

It’s fascinating stuff, if this is accurate. In particular, the bit about profitably burning the nuclear waste stockpiles which currently haunt the industry has to be something to get the pulse of an environmentalist pounding; indeed, the whole thing should be exciting environmentalists, at least those who have some knowledge of how nuclear reactors work, and can distinguish between the old-style, high cost reactors, and the reactors discussed in this article. Admittedly, you have to do a lot of learning.

But I, of course, have to be careful. There is a certain hagiographic element to the story, which I notice with its mere a hand wave, a single paragraph, at the problem of the corrosive nature of molten salt. True, it’s an engineering detail, but it may be a detail the size of a mountain. You just don’t know until you put 20 years into solving it. But I worry that Waldrop may be leaving out, or be ignorant of, certain technical objections to the design, whether it be in supplies of necessary materials, corrosion, or pollution / waste peculiar to this sort of reactor.

But Waldrop makes one other point in reaction to the obvious question of why this option, if a demo installation was successfully run for a while, wasn’t pursued.

The nuclear engineering community was just too heavily committed to solid fuels, both financially and intellectually. Practitioners already had decades of experience with experimental and commercial solid-fueled reactors, versus that one molten salt experiment at Oak Ridge. A huge infrastructure existed for processing and producing solid fuel. And, not incidentally, the US research program was committed to a grand vision for the global nuclear future that would expand this infrastructure enormously — and that, viewed with 20-20 hindsight, would lead the nuclear industry into a trap.

When the managers take over, the scientists and engineers get sidelined just when they should have been making the technical evaluations without the pressure of those who had made the investments. If we do assume the molten salt reactors can be built, then we have to acknowledge that there’s a lot of environmental damage caused by that mistaken industry decision, in the form of fossil fuel pollution.

It speaks to the importance of technical evaluations unencumbered by financial and personal considerations.

Image Credit: Lift Up Your Eyes!

Watching the lead-in for The Late Show with Steven Colbert tonight, wherein a bunch of kids use Easter egg dye to color the the redacted parts of the Mueller Report, I thought Colbert really missed the boat. He should have had those kids rip pages out of the Bible, soak them in that Easter egg dye until parts are redacted (some simple chemistry required, I’m sure), and then the kids could make happily pointed comments about how the whole truth is obviously unimportant.

It would have been both hysterically funny, desperately true, and drawn a relevant analogy.

– Your friendly neighborhood agnostic.

The redacted Mueller Report has been released publicly and CNN has made it available here, although I note that it says Vol 1 of 2. The pundits are busy reading and posting interesting pieces way faster than I, working dude, can do, so I’ll take a gander at the report but I don’t expect to find anything before anyone else does.

However, how much will this influence the President’s approval ratings? I expect he’ll drop 3-5 points, but not more; it’s even possible he’ll move up if the anti-Trump pundits lose the propaganda war to the pro-Trump pundits. It’s a sad truth, but it’s unlikely that the general public will read the report, and there are few news media sources that are considered to be unbiased. Even if there were a few more, most folks get tied into their favorite biased source, such as Fox News, and that source goes with what has brought it profit in the past. Oh, I know, WaPo, The New York Times, and many other outlets would love to be seen as unbiased, and even work towards it – but, given this President’s exceptionally poor behavior, it’s hard to honestly report on him without looking biased. That’s how bad he’s become.

I encourage my readers to read the report and make up their own minds. But I doubt most folks will.

A couple of old friends pointed this out on FB. It appears someone’s looking forward to when the Terminators appear and start to snuff us out:

Only $2 million and it’s all yours. Jason Torchinsky on Jalopnik is a trifle nonplussed:

[The New York Auto Show] is the debut of this massive SUV made from, it seems, the finest pureéd wealthy jackass, pressed via advanced manufacturing techniques into body panels that simultaneously evoke a slow child’s drawing of a stealth tank, if that existed, and a tanned heir to some pharma fortune passed out on a chaise lounge with a healthy amount cocaine rimming his nostrils.

Apparently the quality is not there, either, or so Jason says. Perusing the Karlmann web site, I note one of the interior options appears to be, well, Klingon:

An elaborate hoax? A toy for the ultra-rich who can’t decide what else to do with their ill-gotten gains?

Heckuva way to start the day.

Too dull to mock, I fear.

A bunch of cardboard characters wander about in Voodoo Man (1944). The audience has little chance to get to know and care about them, and when Dr. Marlowe needs more lovely young ladies to use in his mystic attempts to recover his dead wife, off they go. But then evil trips over its own slip-shod ways, the law arrives, and, well, that’s it.

Don’t waste your time on this one, even if you’re wasted.

From WaPo, a spokeswoman for the meat industry shoots herself in the foot while responding to accusations that poultry products may be contaminated with fecal matter:

KatieRose McCullough, the North American Meat Institute’s director of regulatory and scientific affairs, said it’s important to distinguish between fecal material that is naked to the human eye and the types of pathogens that cause foodborne illnesses.

“It’s no surprise that the pseudo-medical animal rights group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine doesn’t know the difference between fecal contamination and bacteria on meat products,” McCullough said. “Bacteria like E.coli are naturally present in the environment as numerous studies on all types of items from foods to phones, keyboards and toothbrushes have shown. This does not mean any of those items are contaminated with feces.”

Maybe someone told her that making cheapshot accusations like that is an effective tactic, but it just raises red flags for me. In fact, it more or less discredits her group – they can’t present a reason, rational argument, so let’s just throw around dumb accusations.

Another third-rater, and probably a third-rate organization..

Oh, yes. Tincture of murder makes the medicine go down easier. I’ll have to remember that for the future.

When it comes to it, Tension (1949) has plenty of it, but the one thing it lacks is the sympathetic character who pays the price of the bad decisions of the balance of grasping, unprincipled cads in this wannabe member of film noir.

After all, who’s to like here? Warren Quimby, war vet and now a humble pharmacist, will do anything to keep his wife, Claire, by his side, and I do mean anything, including losing his self-respect.

But Claire has no respect for her husband, who’s working 12 hour nights to provide for her and build a future. No, she wants it all now, in her selfish way, and she’s more than willing to go out on dates with likely looking future husbands if they flash the cash.

But her pick for a successor to Warren, Barney Deager, just beats up Warren when he comes to remonstrate with Claire to respect the sanctity of marriage. Now he’s whipped by her and him. And we don’t like any of them.

Hell, even Warren’s assistant, Freddie, recommends cold-blooded murder when Warren tells him of the beating.  He seemed like a nice guy – up to then…

And now that Warren has everyone convinced that he’s given up on Claire, he concocts a master murder plan involving a new identity: a man who’ll be little more than a ghost; a man who’ll one night murder Barney for the temerity of stealing Warren’s wife, all while Warren is working at his pharmacy. The new identity, named Paul Sothern, will be little more than smoke on the wind, having an imagined career, an apartment, and lots of travel.

And one unanticipated adjunct: Paul Sothern acquires a girlfriend.

When push comes to shove, Quimby cum Sothern stands over the sleeping Deager, and finds himself incapable of the deed. He walks away after some biting remarks concerning relationships with Claire. It may be rhetorical murder, but it’s not the same thing as what comes next: Deager’s death by gunshot.

And then the fun begins. Unfortunately, the girlfriend, despite having a photo of Paul, is not utilized enough to give us better insight into the dark motivations of the other characters, and Quimby’s failure to viciously off the man who has cuckolded him doesn’t make him emblematic of a true noir movie. Still, the plot twists kept our interest, and there’s plenty of tension IF you can find a way to hook into this motley crew. Even the police aren’t real winners, being a little too uninterested in legal niceties.

But it is a lot of fun speculating on just who took the life of the relatively innocent Deager.

A reader reacts to my observation concerning amateurs:

IN all fairness Hue, consider the source., CNN. I think his observation was a logic one , and the Paris Fire Dept gave a reasonable response . Liberal TV as you well know has nothing better to do then criticize any thing the President has to say.

I went back and reviewed the report I cited from CNN, and I think they simply reported what he said sans opinion or slanting.

But I was not commenting on a perceived bias in the media, but on my reaction to a comment by the current occupant of one of the most powerful and influential offices in the world, diminished as it has become over the last two years. He can’t refrain from giving advice to those experts who are on the front lines while he lounges, expertise-free in front of his TV, and thinks he has something to say about it. In that one remark he embodies his arrogance that is so incompatible with his office.

I can’t wait for his comments on how to explore a black hole.

Another reader reacts to the first:

Liberal TV? The vast, vast majority of media companies (print, online, TV, cable, etc.) are owner and run by conservatives and have a conservative bent to most of their reporting.

But if they’re not conservative enough, then they’re liberal, no? We’re seeing a redefinition of conservative and, to a lesser extent, liberals, as those who would return to an imagined Golden Age take control of a Republican Party which would repudiate some of its greatest achievements over the last 100 years if it could – and it can.

The American Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt, was confirmed on April 11. Seeing as today is the 16th, that was five days ago. Yesterday? Why, yesterday, he was placed under investigation for ethics violations.

The Interior Department’s internal watchdog has opened an investigation into ethics complaints against the agency’s newly installed secretary, David Bernhardt.

Mr. Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the oil and agribusiness industries, was confirmed by the Senate last week to head the agency, which oversees the nation’s 500 million acres of public land and vast coastal waters. He has played a central role in writing policies designed to advance President Trump’s policy of “energy dominance” and expanding fossil fuel exploration. He has been dogged by allegations of ethics violations since joining the Trump administration as the Interior Department’s deputy secretary in 2017.

Eight senators, all Democrats, and four government ethics watchdog groups have requested that the Interior Department’s inspector general open formal investigations into various aspects of Mr. Bernhardt’s conduct. Among the chief complaints have been allegations, revealed by three separate New York Times investigations, that Mr. Bernhardt used his position to advance a policy pushed by his former lobbying client; that he continued working as a lobbyist after filing legal paperwork declaring that he had ceased lobbying; and that he intervened to block the release of a scientific report showing the harmful effects of a chemical pesticide on certain endangered species. [The New York Times]

The confirmation vote? All the GOP Senators but Perdue of Georgia, who is listed as not voting, voted for confirmation, along with independent Angus King of Maine; no Democrats voted for him.

This is a basic example of the dangers of team politics. An intellectually incompetent and uninformed leader climbs to the top, and the Party discredits itself by following blindly along in his wake, approving his actions without effective regulation of his behavior. Speaking as an independent, bad systemic behaviors such as this is why the GOP is simply becoming harder and harder to take at all seriously. This is no surprise for long time readers.

But it’s worth contemplating. It’s great if a good leader is in place, but when a venal, corrupt guy like Trump gets there, and literally doesn’t understand why nearly every action he takes is wrong, it should – but won’t – discredit the entirely despicable notion of team politics.

Everybody hold hands, this could be a rough ride.

At the end of The Valdemar Legacy (2010) my Arts Editor and I yelled, “What?!?!?!”, but not in a good way. This story – or beginning of a story, more likely – splits its time between the roughly current era, where a real estate evaluator in a South American country is sent to value a house and its contents for tax purposes has disappeared, assumed to have made off with some sort of treasure. A second, sent to do the work of the first, discovers things that viciously go bump in the attic, rescuers who confine her under the excuse of bad weather destroying the roads, and an overall negative vibe, one might say.

The other half of the movie? Well, Aleister Crowley shows up (and is exceedingly well done in this flick), so call it the start of the 20th century. A young couple, who spend their time matching orphans with childless couples when they’re not on their rather nice estate, is itself childless due to an illness in the mother, Leonor. The husband, Lázaro, and his wife made their money conducting fake séances, and that has attracted the attention of Crowley. He believes that the fake séances have weakened the walls between various realities, and Lázaro will make a perfect link between them.

He entices Lázaro with the idea of curing his wife, but when Crowley and his group gather to run a real séance, events go awry as a monster from the other side climbs through and proceeds to lay waste to the countryside.

And that’s just about where it stops. What the hell?

So be warned. It’s not a badly done movie from a technical standpoint, and I was appropriately creeped out by Crowley. But the reasons for, well, a story within a story approach were not well laid out, and makes it a little frustrating to follow, especially given this abrupt ending. A sequel appears to have been released in 2011, but whether it finishes up the story in a satisfying way is not known to us.

I’ve been annoyed all day since President Trump had the temerity to give advice to the emergency personnel fighting the Notre Dame fire, as CNN notes here:

So horrible to watch the massive fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!

One must assume the Parisian fire-fighting corp knows its business.

But then I realized that Trump MUST stick his finger into all pies, no matter what, because that’s what the overconfident amateur does. He thinks he knows better than the experts, and has to show it. Meddling idiot.

I see the Parisian fire department told him it would risk collapsing the entire structure. I’d also have to wonder if that would risk spreading the fire further.

It’s sad to see an old structure go, but everything has its end. I just hope there are no casualties.

The monster of my id is in there!

Perhaps the worst part of Fear In The Night (1947) is the title. I think it should have been named Why Did I Do It? Why?

We meet Vince in his dreams, and this dream is unpleasant: he enters a mirrored room, meets a man and woman, the former crouched on the floor doing something, fights with the man, and kills him, while the woman escapes. When he awakens, in the bed at the hotel where he rents a room, he’s in the sort of wretched shape you might expect, covered in sweat and vastly unsettled.

But as he dresses for work, he becomes even more unsettled. In the pocket of his pants are a key and a button, neither of which he has ever owned, and – he remembers from his dream.

He goes for help to his brother-in-law, a police detective named Cliff. Cliff’s wife, who is Vince’s sister, has just become pregnant for the first time, and he’s understandably distracted and uninterested in Cliff’s problems, but he warns Vince not to bother his sister with these problems at this delicate time.

A day or two later, they meet up for a picnic at the beach, with Vince’s romantic interest along for the ride. Chased from the beach by a violent storm, they drive around and get lost in the hills, until suddenly Vince is giving directions to a house they can stay at.

And he doesn’t know how he’s doing this.

I shan’t spoil how this ends, except that Vince’s attempt to throw himself from a window doesn’t work. This is not a murder mystery so much as a psychological study of good and evil – and how sometimes good must depend on luck to win.

Despite the awful soundtrack, we enjoyed his story a great deal. Not that there aren’t holes in it, and I thought Vince’s love interest was somewhat superfluous, but that’s an arguable point – others in the audience might dispute it. It’s short, to the point, and worth spending the time if you enjoy mysteries of this sort.

And, for you fans of the original Star Trek, Vince is played, in his debut movie performance, by DeForest Kelley, the actor who portrayed Dr. McCoy to great effect. I found this distracting, as sometimes Vince looked like Kelley, and sometimes not. Compounding the problem is that brother-in-law Cliff bears a certain facial resemblance to William H. Macy of Fargo (1996) fame. So be warned.

And here it is.

From WaPo:

Iancu v. Brunetti is a trademark dispute in which Los Angeles artist Erik Brunetti sued the government, saying it violated the First Amendment by refusing to register the trademark for his “subversive” clothing line: FUCT.

And the government’s position?

The government argues that the appeals court got it wrong. Registering a trademark is a benefit, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco wrote in his brief, not a restriction on speech. Brunetti has called his clothing line FUCT since 1990 and may continue to do so.

Brunetti is not being penalized for his viewpoint, Francisco says. The government’s decision is based on content and evidence that the trademark “would be perceived as equivalent to the vulgar word for which it is a homonym.”

I’m sitting here trying to see what compelling government interest dictates that an application for a trademark on a near-homonym be denied. What damage will be done if this trademark is permitted?

If it’s so offensive, the public won’t buy the trademark owner’s products, and the issue will be closed. If the public doesn’t desert the owner’s products, then it’s clear that the public officials attempting to deny the trademark application are clearly not connected to the public sense of proper decorum.

Either way, the law is superfluous, and while it may not be a violation of the First Amendment, it is damn silly.

In case you don’t keep track of TMORA (The Museum of Russian Art) shows, and you value your little moments of madness, you might want to pay a visit to them soon, as they currently have an exhibit of surrealist sculptor Sergei Isupov. The following two figures are my Arts Editor’s favorites.  We must of necessity present several views of each, for reasons that will become apparent. The AE has worked professionally in pottery, and was absolutely in awe of Isupov’s work.

Here, if memory serves, is Burden, in three views:

The best I can make out is that it’s about a dog taking his human for a walk.

Her other favorite, which I also liked, we present in two opposing views. I regret to say I don’t recall the name of this one:

Each of these spaniel-sized sculptures presents a complete, well-modeled 3-D image.  Superimposed onto the outside surface of the sculptures are beautifully-rendered 2-D images that totally change the perspective of the original shape in weird and mind-bending ways.  I suspect that one needs to be able to hold them in both hands and view them from every possible angle to fully appreciate these works of art.

I’d be hard-pressed to explain the psychology behind the images in this show.  The casual observer may detect flashes of MC Escher as well as  an obvious nod to Hieronymus Bosch.  In every case, the sculptures are impeccably modeled, and the slip-drawn applied figures have detail as fine as the best etchings. Suffice it to say that the show is well worth a special trip if you’re in the mood for some modern surrealism.

And, just for fun, some work from Isupov’s Big Head period:

The heads are done in stoneware with an overlay of colored slip.  The rest of the thirty-odd items in the exhibit were built in fine porcelain and overpainted or stained with colored slip, with a few flashes of judiciously-applied clear, high-gloss glaze used as a textural highlight.

Surreal Promenade is on view at The Minneapolis Museum of Russian Art from February 9^th – June 9^th, 2019 in the Lower Gallery.

(Most of this post written by Deb, our Arts Editor.)

Helios in action. Remind me not to meet him in a dark alley.

In the category of stone-cold stubbornness I must place Galaxy Lords (2018), a motley collection of competence, incompetence, and, really, something else for which I have no word but stubbornness. Multiverse savior Helios, now in self-imposed exile, is whacking away at a log with his axe when his old comrade, Wranthelon, pops in to tell him the entire multiverse is in danger of falling under the sway of the evil Prince Adorastius, and the Champions are assembling to repulse him, despite the disapproval of the King. After some agonizing, Helios agrees. He leads a crew of clones and an apprentice multiverse-saver on a ship equipped with a prototype, super-fast star drive to the planet on which Adorastius, surrounded by henchmen and hench-robots, is installing the complete version of the star-drive on his ship, in an attempt to stop him before he can use this tech to take defeat all of his foes. They infiltrate the castle, find the captive scientist (who subsequently explodes).

But they’re too late. Helios’ ship is ordered to escape, but the evil Prince Adorastius super-ship damages it while flitting about. Then the aforementioned Champions show up, and in their attempts to save Helios’ ship, they’re turned into shredded cheese. The evil Prince escapes, thinking he’s destroyed Helios, but Helios’ old pal Wranthelon sacrifices himself for Helios, and we end with Helios vowing vengeance.

Yeow, a sequel?

First, the competent stuff. The CGI spaceships, and the space station (which actually got an “ooooooh!” from my Arts Editor), were well done, both technically and aesthetically. Into the same category we’ll put some, but not all, of the landscapes and skyscapes. The makeup is OK, and the costumes are, ah, inventive, probably in the absence of a budget of any size. Oh, and I thought Helios’ voice was moderately well-done.

But after that things go downhill. But I’ll give them this: it feels like a student project. All the actors appear to be very young. That is, they don’t shave. And yet they carry on through this with a show of persistence that is applaudable.

So: the dialog is terrible, the acting left tooth marks all over the scenery, the scenery was mostly CGI and terrible, and the plot was a mishmash of so many other plots, with a few buzzwords thrown in. Oh, and the battle scenes! No sense of how to really stage a battle, and when someone was offed, well, at least once even the camera was spattered with the blood ‘n gore. We were actually laughing through these.

And, yet, throughout this toothclencher, we, too, persisted. There was a thread to this mess which was somewhat interesting, and I think it was the sense that sometimes the good pay a dear, dear price for doing good. The self-sacrifice of the Champions was poorly implemented, as it were, yet it was there. There was no magical saving of them – they die doing what they think is right.

So, whoever made this mess either just stumbled over a positive element, or actually had their head on straight when it comes to stories like these.

But if you’re going to watch this, make sure beer is involved. A lot of it.

While organizing photos from a smartphone that we just replaced, I discovered these two fencing related photos from 2014.

Given that the lower one is in a frame, this is almost certainly not the outdoor fencing mural we sighted in southern Minnesota a few years back. That remains a mystery.

And neither of these fencers is displaying good form. The attacker is leaning over quite a ways, and it seems his back foot has rolled up. The defender is quite lackadaisical.

Who’s the dude in the background with the narrowed eyes and menacing mien? He’s fascinating!

Perhaps the least of the problems with Sherlock Gnomes (2018) is that my Arts Editor didn’t much care for the artwork. She pronounces it as being too plastic. It didn’t bother me so much, but then we’re talking about garden gnomes that come to life when humans aren’t paying attention to them – and, yet, shatter when they’ve fallen from a great enough height.

In act, an exploration of the meaning of a gnome’s entire lifecycle would have deepened the story. I mean, are these spirits that inhabit things made by humans? Things that mimic human-made things? Why? And what does it mean when one … dies?

But beyond that, the primary problems with this presentation have to do with the characters, primarily those of the eponymous Sherlock and his buddy, Watson. Beyond their obvious origins, we don’t really know much about the pair. They’re the sworn defenders of garden gnomes in London – but that’s just a statement with little oomph behind it.

So when they pop up, trying to discover why entire families of gnomes are disappearing in the blink of an eye, they feel very shallow, even artificial. Nor is there a proper parallel with the Holmes of Doyle, because, to a strong extent, Holmes was in it for the intellectual stimulation. No doubt he had some dedication to his clients, but they were primarily sources of intellectual mystery, not desperate victims of crime – in his view. Dr. Watson, of course, provided the humanity that Holmes lacked.

But in Sherlock Gnomes, the investigator and his assistant have this mysterious compulsion to safeguard garden gnomes, creatures that, truth be told, are quite strong, at least until they shatter. Sherlock also has a traditional, if charmingly ADHD, nemesis, but his mania is not the same as Holmes’ nemesis, Professor Moriarty, a criminal equal to Holmes’ intellect. In Gnomes’ case, his nemesis is Moriarty’s opposite, all emotion and crazed evil. Why? We don’t really know why. Moriarty was driven by greed and a profound urge to prove himself superior to those who would imprison him. This guy? I suppose he was born this way.

And the investigators’ link to the missing gnomes, Gnomeo and Juliet, are not much better. They’re stereotypes, without the baggage that came with Romeo and Juliet (but perhaps they were better in the prior movie, which either I have not seen or I have forgotten). A couple who is fighting over neglect after a move to a new, desultory garden, they find an echo in Gnomes and Watson. When their friends and family disappear while they’re out of the garden, they cling desperately to the investigator and his appendage, who are grimly following clues while delivering backstory that is never quite satisfying.

Amazingly, this movie improves after the first half hour. Never mind the cute use of other toys and cultural satire, but simply the fact that there are not one, but two twists to this movie made it better than I anticipated. Not that I and my Arts Editor ever stopped squirming, but the intensity of our squirming wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

As it was, though, while the conclusion was clever, the lack of self-sacrifice clearly made this a story in a very minor key. There are costs to being and doing good, and it’s the exploration of those costs which often make for the better stories. We don’t get that here. Think of Bogart’s portrayal of PI Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), most importantly Spade’s agony at turning in the woman he’s fallen in love with for murdering his partner. That’s doing good at a price. And that’s a big part of what makes The Maltese Falcon a legendary movie.

Sherlock Gnomes doesn’t approach that depth of what I’d call analysis. But I think it would be fun for the youngsters.

Out of state readers may or may not have heard Minnesota got socked with a sloppy blizzard yesterday. Here’s a few pictures to pick up the local readers:

I think that’s my favorite shade of orange.

It may cheer the xenophobic, but this contempt for the law can easily extend beyond what you favor, all the way to what you don’t favor:

During President Donald Trump’s visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago, where he told border agents to block asylum seekers from entering the US contrary to US law, the President also told the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, that if he were sent to jail as a result of blocking those migrants from entering the US, the President would grant him a pardon, senior administration officials tell CNN.

Two officials briefed on the exchange say the President told McAleenan, since named the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that he “would pardon him if he ever went to jail for denying US entry to migrants,” as one of the officials paraphrased.

It was not clear if the comment was a joke; the official was not given any further context on the exchange. [CNN]

So today he finds a way to make the way clear to go above the law for denying entry to migrants; tomorrow, he tells his favorite general that he’ll be pardoned for breaking the law with respect to beginning wars with foreign powers. This can get ugly for even Trump’s most single-minded supporters very quickly.

Is President Trump so much a spoiled child that he thinks this is a routine and acceptable thing to do?

Or is it just another sign of his increasingly obvious dementia?

It doesn’t really matter. The GOP should be leading the way for dumping Trump’s sorry ass out on the pavement. Their inability to take their jobs seriously will be a blot on their collective and individual legacies.