My Arts Editor came up, willy-nilly, with an idea for a superhero’s nick:

The Phantom Itch.

I think it’s a good one for the universe of The Tick. We happen to catch that from time to time.

From Amber Philips in WaPo comes a headline I’d never though I’d see for any President:

The 6 most potentially damaging congressional investigations for Trump, ranked

It really says something when we can talk about multiple investigations of a sitting President, based on so much objective evidence.

NBC News reports on some Attorney General Barr’s testimony to Congress:

Attorney General William Barr, defending his decision to order a review of the Trump-Russia probe’s origins, told a Senate panel Wednesday that he thinks “spying did occur” by the U.S. government on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“For the same reason we’re worried about foreign influence in elections … I think spying on a political campaign — it’s a big deal, it’s a big deal,” Barr said in response to a question from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee, who had asked why he is looking into the origins of the investigation.

Shaheen then asked, “You’re not suggesting that spying occurred?”

Barr paused for several seconds and replied, “I think spying did occur,” though he didn’t elaborate.

Keeping in mind that it’s a crime to lie to Congress, I think it’s a shame none of the Senators thought to ask Barr a simple but pointed question:

Did President Trump, or any of his subordinates, instruct you to mention spying during this or any other public hearing?

Sure, Barr may have something, and, if so, I’d love to see that evidence. But right now, all signs point to politics. It’d be good to dump a threat right in Barr’s lap – no playing politics, or you could end up doing Federal time.

I’m sure my readers have already read about this latest astronomical achievement, but just because I’ve always loved astronomy’s pretty pictures, here’s the latest from JPL/NASA:

Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Politico has a remark on why non-economist Herman Cain may have been put in the pipeline to be nominated to the Fed Reserve Board by President Trump:

Some GOP senators said that Cain’s difficult path might have eased Stephen Moore’s confirmation to the Fed, despite Moore’s own problems with unpaid taxes and his partisan reputation. After all, Republicans might be hard-pressed to revolt against both of Trump’s nominees.

Fed Reserve Board nominee and non-economist Stephen Moore has also been a startling announced to-be-nominee. Steve Benen provides a summary:

To say it’s difficult to know where to start with Moore’s c.v. is to be quite literal. It matters, obviously, that he’s not an economist and knows very little about what the Federal Reserve does. But it also matters that Moore has been wrong about practically everything for many years. It matters that he appears to be a Trump sycophant. It matters that Moore has had a hand in some spectacular economic failures. It matters that Moore’s economic opinions tend to echo Republican talking points while “flying in the face of economic theory.”

It matters that Moore has a reputation for misstating basic factual details. It matters that his economic views tend to vary based on the party of the president at the time. It matters that the White House has made the finance industry nervous with this nomination. It matters that actual economists have been apoplectic about Trump’s selection of Moore, (One scholar argued, “This is truly an appalling appointment. An ideologue, charlatan, and hack. Frankly so bad the putatively serious economists in Trump administration should resign as matter of honor.”)

And Jon Chait at New York Magazine:

Faced with the prospect of attempting to confirm two absurdly unqualified cranks for esteemed Fed positions, the conservative movement has undertaken a triage operation, focusing its defenses on Moore and leaving Cain to twist in the wind. The decision to save Moore at Cain’s expense makes some sense: Of the two, Cain’s kookery was on more colorful display through his slapstick 2012 presidential campaign. Cain’s treatment of women (numerous sexual-harassment lawsuits) is harder to defend than Moore’s(open adultery followed by failure to pay child support.)

Still, the defenses of Moore have a distinctly weary undertone. The Wall Street Journal endorses its former staffer, gamely notes that “as an individual Fed governor, Mr. Moore wouldn’t likely wield much influence.” Yes, “the alleged rap” on him is that “he has on occasion been wrong about monetary policy,” the editorial allows with considerable understatement.

Damned with exceedingly faint praise by WSJ, I’d say. Someone who subscribes to the WSJ should call them up and tell them to grow a pair, because this is a President who needs to be reprimanded, and hard enough to break fingers.

In the meanwhile, I hope that the Congressional press corps gets together and decides to ask every Senator who says they like Moore in comparison to Cain whether or not they enjoy being gamed by the most incompetent President in the history of the Nation. Which is to say, made to look like fools.

And, finally, what is going on here? Trump’s other nominee to the board is now the chairman, and he’s worked out quite well in my opinion. Has Trump received orders to try to wreck the economy from his handlers? Or does he think he can goose the economy into such a high gear that enough voters who otherwise despise him will vote for him after all? Moore apparently thinks so. But he’s only a single vote.

Perhaps it’s the continuing drain of ‘adults’ from this Administration…

Ali Alkhatib, a PhD student in computers at Stanford, points out that computer engineers are no different from any other part of Western Civ these days – they go where the money tells them to go. For him, that’s a problem:

[Professor James Landay] goes on to write about Engelbart’s “mother of all demos” in 1968, the introduction of something like half a dozen features of modern computing that we use every day: text editing (including the ability to copy/paste), a computer mouse, a graphical user interface, dynamic reorganizations of data, hyperlinks, real-time group editing (think Google Docs), video conferencing, the forerunner to the internet, the list goes on. What he doesn’t write about – what few of us talk about – is the funding the Stanford Research Institute got from the Department of Defense, the role the DoD played in the development of the internet and of Silicon Valley itself, and the uncomfortable readiness with which we collaborate with power. We’re shaping our work toward the interests of organizations – interests that are at best neutral and at worst in opposition toward the interests of the public.

John Gledhill wrote about the work of political anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s in Power and its Disguises, arguing that “the subject matter … seemed relatively easy to define,” outlining that the ultimate motivation of government-sponsored political anthropology like EE Pritchard’s study of the Nuer people was that “… authority was to be mediated through indigenous leaders and the rule of Western law was to legitimate itself through a degree of accommodation to local ‘customs’” (Gledhill 2000). The danger of aligning our work with existing power is the further subjugation and marginalization of the communities we ostensibly seek to understand. …

Today the government isn’t the main director of research agendas and funding so much as private corporations are. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and others offer substantial funding for people who conform to their ethics – one which fundamentally has to account to shareholders but not necessarily to people whose lives are wrapped up in these systems; numerous laws on the regular disclosure of the financial state of publicly traded companies carefully ensure that publicly traded companies are responsibly pursuing the best business decisions, but still in the United States almost no laws concerning the handling of data about us, the ethical commission of research on or about us, or even the negligent handling of private data.

The conflicts of interest are almost innumerable and mostly obvious; that organizations discussing the ethical applications of AI should not be mostly comprised of venture capitalists, AI researchers, and corporate executives whose businesses are built on the unregulated (or least-regulated) deployment of AI should be blindingly obvious. And yet, here we are. Somehow.

Certainly, we need to find some way to talk about the development of AI in a way that takes into account the interests of greater society, because it appears that it’s impact will be tremendous. It’s almost frustratingly tempting to say that government should be part of that discussion. It’s tempting because, ideally speaking, the role of government is to take the overall view of the well-being of society. They are best situated to regulate as necessary.

But it’s frustrating because the track record of government, as its various agencies are ‘captured’ to lesser or greater extents, is poor. Even worse, its embodiment of cultural arrogance makes it, again, a poor candidate for such regulation.

Ali’s written an interesting blog post, with few obvious solutions to what, for many, is not an obvious problem. It’s worth meditating on.

h/t C.J.

Three eyes? Bad acne? Halitosis?
Oh, she’s the one with the halitosis!

Blood And Black Lace (1964) reminded me that different nations have different acting styles. I’ve commented a few times about the Japanese style, and this movie reminds me that the Italians have – or had – their own style as well.

Perhaps I’m biased, or impatient, or something, but I don’t like their style, either. I shan’t go much into it, except the emotions seem exaggerated, as if we must be bottlefed the reactions of the characters.

But beyond that, this is a very early slasher film, or giallo, in which there are many female victims of some mad killer. In this one, the victims work at a fashion salon, putting on shows, until one is beaten to death. We’re not sure why, but her secret diary is found, and that leads to another death. And then another. A few more. The police, who thought they had the killer wrapped up, are forced to admit they’ve been fooled.

Eventually, the mysterious killer is revealed, but now the killer is in some serious straits, as the killer’s lover is not entirely happy. However, a fall from a height would seem to take care of the situation, and now the lover makes plans to enjoy the wealth of the killer.

It’s not quite noir, as most of the victims are more or less innocent of any serious crimes; they merely have unhappy luck. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see a real theme in this, and so my interest is mostly kept in discovering who will be the crazed murderer – and whether or not any of the victims, who try to be combative, will actually inflict real damage on their attacker. I hate it when the bad guy is invulnerable. (I also liked Daredevil (2003) because the hero was quite a mess just from his common-criminal suppression activities.)

Do they succeed? I’ll leave you in suspense.

NewScientist (23 March 2019, paywall) has some estimates to pass on about the siblings of ‘Oumuamua:

Parts of Earth may originally be from another part of the galaxy, having crossed light years to form the ground beneath our feet. That is the conclusion of a study suggesting that the Milky Way should be full of free-floating rocks like ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar asteroid that visited our solar system in October 2017, and they may act as seeds to form planets in nascent planetary systems.

Our traditional picture is that planets form out of discs of gas and fine dust around a star, but some observations seem to show them being born much faster than that model predicts. Interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua may be the solution to this discrepancy.

Researchers have estimated that there should be about 29 trillion ‘Oumuamua-like objects per cubic light year in our galaxy, floating free after having been thrown out of orbit around their home stars. They are likely to be relatively small, dark, and fast-moving, which is why we have only seen one so far.

My question, as you may have guessed, is how are they distributed in that cubic light year? Is ‘Oumuamua just a random traveler, or are we about to see a horde of its siblings descend on the Solar System?

An artist’s concept of interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua) as it passed through the solar system after its discovery in October 2017. Observations of ‘Oumuamua indicate that it must be very elongated because of its dramatic variations in brightness as it tumbled through space. Image credit: European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser

Remember Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), former chair of the DNC, who I suggested should shoulder a large part of the blame if Trump won the Presidency?

It appears that her behavior may have even longer repercussions than I had anticipated, based on this AP report:

Pichone voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016 and said she may vote for a third party again if Sanders doesn’t clinch the nomination.

She’s emblematic of a persistent group of Sanders supporters who won’t let go of the slights — real and perceived — from the last campaign. The frustration is notable now that Sanders is a 2020 front-runner, raking in $18.2 million in the first quarter, downplaying concerns about DNC bias and highlighting his success in bringing the party around on liberal policies it once resisted.

Some establishment-aligned Democrats worry the party could lose in 2020 if lingering concerns about the last primary aren’t put to bed.

“It has the potential to escalate, and it has the potential to help re-elect Donald Trump,” said Mo Elleithee, a former spokesman for Clinton and the DNC.

If the disaffection with the Democrats is so strong that it could cost them two Presidential elections against the weakest GOP nominee in modern history, Donald J.Trump, then it suggests that the Democrats are nearly as rotten at their core as the Republicans. It doesn’t show up in their policies, which do not feature self-enrichment as a career goal, but the apparent manipulation of the nomination process without regard to the importance of fairness is appalling, which is another way to say the voice of the generic Democratic Party member has receded into nothingness in the conduct of Democratic Party business.

Of course, the fact that Sanders is (I-VT) rather than (D-VT) does throw a bit of fishing line into the cookie batter, doesn’t it? You want that nomination, Bernie, you should join the Party.

But Sanders adherents will take little note of that nicety, and honestly I don’t think they should take note of it. The Democrats should have either treated Sanders as even-handedly as Clinton and the others, OR it should have said, right up front, that Sanders didn’t qualify for the nomination. That would have been respectable and understandable.

Understand, I think Sanders is too old for the Presidency, as is Biden. Call me ageist if you will, but the Presidency isn’t just about who’s got the best policies and promises on offer. It’s also about competency. We don’t need another Reagan falling asleep during meetings.

But if Trump beats a non-Sanders Democratic nominee again, the basic operations of the Democratic Party should be carefully examined by the Party, because otherwise it’ll continue to lose winnable elections. How are they looking these days? The latest from Gallup:

Not so good. The independents are gaining ground while the Republicans continue to sink from the rocks in their pants, and the Democrats are merely treading water. If you’re a Democrat, you should be taking alarm right now.

We use analogy as a supplement to reasoning because sometimes the required reasoning is simply too difficult. There may be too many variables, or the causal links from one state to another are too poorly understood to confidently employ. This is when analogy comes into play. We find a system that seems to look and operate like the system upon which we’re trying to settle some predictions, and about which we have some known conclusions, and then we try to map those conclusions back to our system of interest. It’s a crude style of reasoning, but, if nothing else, the other system can offer insights into our system of interest.

In this spirit, let me offer an analogy. It occurred to me while reading about the queasiness some banking experts, as well as ex-officials, are feeling about the banking sector right now:

Actions by federal regulators and Republicans in Congress over the past two years have paved the way for banks and other financial companies to issue more than $1 trillion in risky corporate loans, sparking fears that Washington and Wall Street are repeating the mistakes made before the financial crisis [of a decade ago].

The moves undercut policies put in place by banking regulators six years ago that aimed to prevent high-risk lending from once again damaging the economy.

Now, regulators and even White House officials are struggling to comprehend the scope and potential dangers of the massive pool of credits, known as leveraged loans, they helped create.

Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and other financial companies have originated these loans to hundreds of cash-strapped companies, many of which could be unable to repay if the economy slows or interest rates rise. [WaPo]

These officials are drawing very credible analogies with the banking system’s behavior prior to the Great Recession and how today’s seems similar in many respects. This seems very credible to me, as the arena and many of the particulars seem to correspond. As a member of the economy and working dude, this of course interests me – as it should my reader.

But I’m more interested in an more outré analogy, and that’s to cancer. Cancer is characterized as a corruption of a part of the body which is experiencing an abnormally high mutation rate of the DNA of the cells in question. Cell death is delayed or not permitted, resulting in rapid growth and monopolization of resources to the detriment of the host organism; the termination of the host organism is calamitous both to the host and to the cancer.

My analogy is to how investors relate to the companies in which they invest. A company whose profits and revenues are static is considered to be a company that is in trouble; only those that shoot for the moon, continually increasing profits, or have the potential to generate sudden and immense profits (think Little Pharma, or Apple), are considered to be healthy companies.

This is, from an evolutionary perspective, evolutionary pressure. We know, from biological evolution, that an evolutionary pressure results in one of two things: termination of the species, or the evolution of a survival mechanism to counter that pressure. One thing we do not see is a non-response, a static organism. The probability the organism does not change and survives is zero.

What does this mean in business? The pressure is for more and more profits. Companies respond, first beneficially (if you’re an economist; if you’re some other –ist, such as an environmentalist, then it may be neutral or even disastrously negative), by finding more efficient processes, replacement materials, and the like. But at some point, the gains dry up – they cannot go on forever.

I suspect the banking sector has reached its limits and is now dancing on the line of disaster. My Arts Editor saw this when she was a Wells Fargo employee and they were using an internal program called Eight is Great to encourage more selling of financial products to customers, without regard to the customers’ needs. The company culture, such as it was, was to simply make money. This has resulted in a number of scandals over the last several years.

Sector wide, we saw the termination of the Glass-Steagall legislation in 1999, which removed regulation of banking behavior and permitted ownership of investment services that contained inherent conflict-of-interest. This was motivated by the banking sector, which, like most regulated segments of the private sector, continually seeks to ‘capture’ its regulatory agencies, as well as influence Congress. With the accession of President Trump, much progress has been made by the banking sector on this front, as can be seen by the strongly bally-hooed deregulation, the subsequent Great Recession, and the continued pressure of the banking sector to remove the Glass-Steagall successor, the Dodd-Frank legislation. The banking sector players, which are all run by human beings susceptible to the usual human emotions of fear, pride, and the like, are pressured to continue to increase profits.

Think about that, and add in the time element.

It’s rather akin to the Malthusian conundrum: a population will continually expand until it runs out of resources. There are only so many profits to be made, yet the thirst for them is unquenchable, once that becomes the focus of investors. I say that as an investor myself.

So let me get to my point: in the future, we may have to accept that a company that is merely static in the profits and revenue results may be more desirable than those companies that are driven to continually increase profits. This would be a monstrous sea-change in the attitude of all investors but those in the low-risk category; indeed, I wonder if the entire stock-exchange concept has been entirely healthy for society as a whole, because it focuses on money rather than service. Remember, the oil of the economic machinery, which we call money, was not the original goal of capitalism. The original aim was to escape the evils of the the enforced status quo. If you weren’t born into the dominant banking family, the system would damn well make sure you would never be a significant competitor to it, either, and that applied to all other sectors. In a sense, the private sector hardly existed. The concept of money was a necessary but not sufficient part of making capitalists happier than the downtrodden of the status quo.

Today? Too many worship money. Look at who’s President.

I think it’s worth considering the behavior of economic actors, especially corporations, through the lens of cancer. Cancer’s dynamically changing DNA leads to it becoming immune to treatments which had formerly shut it down (remission). Similarly, for a while the banking sector was kept under control, but through its lobbying, agency capture, and other efforts, it’s gradually becoming immune to efforts to control its behavior.

And, like cancer, there’s little reason to believe its out of control behavior is good for the society within which it exists. The last time the corruption exploded, we had a Great Recession which scared the shit out of us. But now it’s shrugging off its restraints again, and it’s entirely possible that the next explosion will lead to even worse results than before. Don’t forget: the institutions that were Too Big To Fail are now even bigger. The financial craters may turn out to be even larger.

How they made cocktails before World War II. The guy on the right screwed up once and lost his eyebrows.

The Shadow Returns (1946) is part of a long-neglected set of stories^[1], published in magazines and told in radio shows, about private detective Lamont Cranston. He has an alter-ego, The Shadow, who wears a mask and is almost never seen but as a shadow against the wall, with which he uses extra-legal means to extract information from criminals and their associates while solving crimes. In this particular episode, he’s the nephew of the Commissioner of Police^[2], which lets him hang around the investigation of a man who mysteriously commits suicide from the balcony of his mansion after a set of diamonds disappears from his mansion. In the company of his fiancee, Margot, and his minion, Shrevvy, they pursue lead after lead, twice more seeing men mysteriously leap to their deaths.

Soon, they discover the secret of the stones, a formula of immense value, and how a man’s fetish for a particular ranch tool is used to effect the many murders. As the bodies pile up, Lamont and Margot maintain their rather carefree approach to the case, until one of the several suspects, each less memorable than the next, is finally fingered, and the case is closed.

Now the only question is how to bundle The Shadow out of the mansion before the Inspector finally fingers him.

It’s ok. The humorous bits with Shrevvy are mostly off the mark, but Lamont and Margot have an easy chemistry that helps move this story along. This is definitely a pre-Bogart crime movie, as Bogart seems to mark the point where we get deep looks into the characters, whether they are protagonists or antagonists, and that’s why The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca stand head and shoulders above most of their predecessors.

Unfortunately, the print we saw had some damaged audio, but it was nothing we couldn’t tolerate. We mostly stuck around just to see why these guys kept leaping from balconies.

And here is the YT version (we saw the version on Amazon Prime). The YT preview looks terrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLuGtk_f0Kg

¹ Or perhaps not. I just know I’ve never seen any new stories in this series since I became a conscious human being. And I don’t care enough to do the necessary research.

² Perhaps this is always true. I am unfamiliar with this series of stories.

Not all elephants end up poached. Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas has a blog post up concerning the last days of an elderly queen elephant, and they are very impressive. Rather than poaching those photos themselves, I’ll just recommend you visit his blog.

It may be sad that the queen has passed on since those photos were taken, but I’d prefer to think of it as the passing of a successful queen elephant, and as such a thing to be considered, oh, satisfying. There’s not really a word for the emotion in question.

As you view the photos, notice the signs of age, and think of how little we see such signs in wildlife photography. I found it moving.

Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!

Sordid. I think that’s a good adjective for Forbidden World (1982; aka Mutant), an exploration of the horrors of unrestrained scientific research. Troubleshooter Colby, whose usual tool is a laser gun, and his trusty killer robot, Sam, has been assigned to a mysterious problem on Xarbia, an uninhabited planet hosting a research station. An interlude with a pointless space battle occurs, which incidentally utilizes footage from Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), after which Mike reaches the station.

He finds three or four scientists specializing in various fields of genetics, a couple of assistants, and a mutant something-or-other imprisoned in a science lab isolation chamber. With movable panels. And all the other research animals ripped to pieces, and blood all over the walls. But never mind that, because it’s time for dinner!

During their meal of syrup dripped on tofu, Mike discovers the scientists are remarkably close-mouthed about their work, as well as a missing scientist, Annie. In the meantime, one of the assistants, Jeff, who has been assigned to clean up the lab, turns out to be remarkably slow-witted: He sticks his head into the lab isolation chamber, and becomes the horrified host to whatever that damn mutant thing might be.

This is what earning a Ph.D. gets you.

Well, there’s cleaning up the liquifying Jeff (don’t ask), there’s the sleeping with the beautiful lady scientist, there’s another mutant, now looking like a giant spider, who goes gallumphing about out in the inhospitable outer world and manages to trap the science team lead and eat him up (yum!) with some of the most unbrushed teeth I’ve ever seen in a movie, all with Mike and Sam running around shooting their laser guns with little effect. And don’t forget the nudity.

Finally, the crime comes to the fore: the mutant, singular or plural, are actually the result of crossing a human cell with something called “Proto B,” a synthetic DNA that results in … the mutants? But then there’s the liquifaction of the bodies, which the mutants are eating. Maybe it’s something the mutants excrete. Yeah, that’s it. Sure. And missing Annie? She was the host mother for this mess. It didn’t end well for her.

Anyways, the scientist who has cancer (and the fakest coughs in the world) comes up with the solution for killing the mutant: feed his own cancer cells to the mutant. With the rest of the scientists gone in various horrific ways, Mike ends up as the ad hoc surgeon who must cut out the tumor and then feed it to the oncoming mutant, who doesn’t appear to want to ingest it, but a little ingenuity and soon all that is left is Mike and the surviving assistant. And, ah, a foaming monster. With teeth.

So, what’s the point? There’s no real sincerity in the “science is evil” theme, no palpable You shouldn’t do that! Not like Frankenstein’s Monster, anyways. The science team lead is vigorous in attempting to forestall Mike’s mission from successful completion, but exactly his motivations in defending the mutant, which eventually lunches on him, are completely unclear.

No, this is mostly about the visceralities of life: pursued by monsters, getting it on with the beautiful ladies, cleaning up messes, and a lack of sleep. If you’re feeling like you need a bit of a dip into a crass exploration of, ummmm, whatever this is, have at it.

A random addition to the evidence that North Carolina’s GOP breeds some really dubious characters, provided by a reader:

A Russian bank owned by former North Carolina Congressman Charles Taylor has been accused of money laundering and lost its license, according to Bloomberg News.

The Commercial Bank of Ivanovo “failed on multiple occasions to comply with Bank of Russia regulations” on money laundering “of criminally obtained incomes and the financing of terrorism,” the Bank of Russia said in a press release.

The bank lied about its assets and reserves, the central bank said, “in order to improve its financial indicators and conceal its actual financial standing.” The bank also artificially inflated its capital to make it look like it was in line with Russian regulations, the press release said. [Charlotte Observer]

Furthermore …

The AP reports, “Taylor bought CBI in 2003 alongside his business partner Boris Bolshakov, a former KGB agent and Supreme Soviet deputy who is listed as the bank’s second-largest shareholder.”

That same year, two people tied to Taylor testified that he “knew about fraudulent loans made by Asheville-based Blue Ridge Savings Bank, which he owned at the time, to a political supporter,” according to the AP. The then-congressman said at the time he did not know anything about the loans.

Sigh. I may be amused by Republican sleaze, but it’s in a painful way. I have to wonder if they’re conscious that their activities are not honorable, or if they lie to themselves as well.

Glycome:

The glycome is the entire complement of sugars, whether free or present in more complex molecules, of an organism. An alternative definition is the entirety of carbohydrates in a cell. The glycome may in fact be one of the most complex entities in nature. “Glycomics, analogous to genomics and proteomics, is the systematic study of all glycan structures of a given cell type or organism” and is a subset of glycobiology. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Move over, DNA. Life’s other code is more subtle and far more powerful,” Hayley Bennett, NewScientist (29 March 2019, paywall):

The genetic code has just four biochemical letters strung together in lines. But the sugar code, known as the glycome, contains tens of different sugars that fit together in branched strings called glycans (see Diagram). Reading the sugar code isn’t just a case of decoding it letter by letter, but recognising the shape of each sugar and understanding what it means. That is hard. “It was so much easier to build on the DNA code, to develop tools for genomics,” says Godula.

I suppose I should be appalled, but instead I cheer on the winning side. Here’s the CNN headline:

Suspected rhino poacher killed by an elephant then eaten by lions in South Africa

Given the cruel manner in which poachers treat their prey, I just don’t have a lot of sympathy, even if the article expressed dismay at the sight of the poacher’s daughters mourning their loss.

Inaugurating a new UMB feature, these reviews will be of targeted messages to consumers by industrial groups, or even specific companies, in defense of their activities. This post might be considered a ragged, unfocused predecessor of this series.

So I received this one in email, but here it is online:

In the wake of the Green New Deal, which supposedly endangers the beef industry, this defends the beef industry by examining its many uses. I appreciated that the makers of this video, made (apparently) by Tech Insider, supplied references for their claims. I spot checked the bovine insulin claim and it appears to be accurate, although perhaps a little strongly put.

Clearly, though, the film makers are amateurs. Gelatin’s important in the making of … Gummi Bears? Collagen is important for … smoothing wrinkles out of faces? The selection of examples should exemplify the indispensability of cattle in the manufacture of products important in our everyday lives – not superfluous little shit that we would never miss if it had never been made.

All that said, perhaps its strongest defect is in what it doesn’t address. Speaking globally, there are often alternative solutions, sometimes environmentally or even economically superior, to the world’s problems. Suggesting that the utility of cattle makes it indispensable is intellectually deceptive so long as they don’t supply arguments to suggest why the cattle-associated solutions are far preferable to alternative solutions, especially on balance against the amount of feed (or just call it food) consumed by the beef vs how many people that food would support if eaten directly, as well as the climate change gases associated with cattle. That omission is disappointing.

In the end, its unintended message is, oddly enough, simply too many people.

As a working dude, I don’t always have time to do the sort of in-depth research I’d like to be doing on political figures, especially those who may be up-and-coming, but not yet here. When I can read what appears to be a positive report on them from a member, or former member, of the opposition party, or at least someone of a political philosophy differing from the reportee, I take an interest. Reports from the same side can be a whitewash; reports from someone with little or no reason to conceal flaws are more likely to be honest.

With that in mind, Jennifer Rubin, ex-Republican, comments on Democratic Presidential wanna-be nominees Stacy Abrams, who just missed out on being governor of Georgia, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana:

Stacey Abrams is an African American woman, of “sturdy build” she says, from the South who barely lost the Georgia governor’s race, has made voting rights her passion and knocked it out of the ballpark in her response to this year’s State of the Union. Pete Buttigieg is a white, gay man of slight build from the Midwest who’s spent eight years as mayor of South Bend, Ind., a mid-sized city, served in the military and is a genuine intellectual. They couldn’t be more different, right?

Not exactly. Both are quite progressive but do well in red states and both have made a giant impression on the media and among those voters who know who they are. What’s the secret of their success? I’d argue they have important ingredients rarely found in a single politician.

First, both are crazy-smart. She’s a Yale Law School grad, he’s a Harvard grad and Rhodes scholar. They don’t simply have credentials, however. They have nimble, curious minds and are voracious readers. That makes them interesting to listen to and makes them sound somehow different, more serious than traditional politicians who rely on buzzwords and catchphrases. [WaPo]

That they value knowledge is, of course, important to me, and should be to any voter. Rubin has lots more. My takeaway from this? To watch the other Democratic nominees with this in mind: are they trying to distract me with their body language, or are they talking to me. Do they seem chronically curious about the world, or do they think they know all the answers already?

That was part of Obama’s attraction for me: forever reading, always searching for a viewpoint that gave insight into problems he was, or might, face.

But more important is Rubin’s throwaway line:

Both are quite progressive but do well in red states …

In this line may well lie the winning Democratic Presidential strategy for 2020: to nominate someone from a red state. Buttigieg, of course, is not holding a state-wide office, but his last victory in South Bend was with 80% of the vote in a city in a red state. Abrams lost deep South Georgia by a whisker.

I wonder just how much they’d rupture the red states if one of them won the race for Democratic nominee and picked the other as running mate.

My exposure to both is confined to their appearances on The Late Show. Buttigieg came through as having a sense of humor, but of serious purpose as well. Abrams, which was just a night or two ago, seemed to have quite the nimble sense of humor, had just the right touch of embarrassment concerning her career as a romance novelist, undertaken to put food on the table, and was at least as impressive as Buttigieg and other The Late Show guests Harris, and moreso than Gillibrand.

Yes, they’re singing a song! But why?

Let’s say you’re in the mood for some psychoactive drugs, but you’re lacking any, whether it’s a dearth of cash on your part, or all the shops have closed up for the night. What to do?

Friends, I can heartily recommended Forbidden Zone (1980) to fill that gap in your life. It left us with mouths agape and eyes aswim with tears, as Frenchy’s family wanders into the Sixth Dimension in search of their kidnapped relative. Meanwhile, King Fausto lusts after her (she’s French, and therefore perfect), Queen Doris continually sends assassins after her, her family seems to be having, well, intimate relations with anything that’ll sit still for it, and Chicken Man. Yes, Chicken Man. Who needs complete sentences for this review?

Yes, you, too, can partake of surrealistic juvenilia. Just don’t ask me why anyone made this.

The lobbying update from AL-Monitor has more details on the attempted transfer of nuclear tech to Saudi Arabia:

In response to news that Tesla is making more games available on the drivers’ panel of their iconic electric cars, Lloyd Alter of Treehugger pines for a more apropros offering:

Classic movies would be good too, like Death Race 2000.

For those not in the know, Death Race 2000 (1975) wasn’t a classic race, but instead consisted of finding ways to kill people with the hopped up cars. The most points, the win.

Just a joke. Yet … if you can come up with 3 whole numbers a, b, c such that

42 = a³ + b³ + c³

Then these folks might want to have a chat with you.

A reader remarks on the imminent infidelity of cameras to reality:

The latest pro camera from Olympus has an AI that’s been trained (by feeding it thousands of images) to recognize a number of things (planes, trains, automobiles) and choose optimal focus points, shutter/aperture and image enhancement. They also are using AI in their endoscopes to recognize and help physicians diagnose cancer. The resulting images are perhaps not “true” but certainly useful.

Amazing stuff. But at some point there’s a change from “better focal selection” to “enhancements that renders the camera’s work a possible work of fiction,” as the authors of the article argue. I think the reader’s examples don’t step over the line. But what happens when examples are offered, in court, that do? And then court case after that, when maybe a cop beats up someone who’s been arrested, and then claims in court that the camera used to record the beating “just made it up”?

Reality is becoming more and more distant.

Often in rhetoric, the implicit logic of a position is followed into absurdities, thus, the argument goes, illustrating the folly of the position. Going in the other direction is a little less popular, but can be used to argue that some cultural position is, if not absurd, at least flawed.

In this spirit, I present the subject of an e-mail from known lefty organization MoveOn.org:

Join us tomorrow: We deserve the full Mueller report NOW

Stop and think about that: what have they done to deserve access to the full report? Are they such worthy creatures, by virtue of being American citizens – perhaps – that all such reports should be automatically bestowed on them? Have they attributes of Gods and must therefore have every whim satisfied? Is it true –

This line of reasoning ridicule can go on for quite some time, once you take their wording seriously.

If pressed, I suggest they’d shrug and suggest it’s merely a figure of speech. My reply is that reflects the basic absurdity of some facet of their philosophy of extreme individualism, and the >ahem< apparent divinity which goes along with it.

Naturally, as chronic readers of this blog know or can guess, I’m in favor of the full release of the Mueller report. Not because I’m a God^[1][2], or need to satisfy some intellectual / prurient interest, or some other self-interested, self-aggrandizing, or even grandiose reason.

But because I think the more information we have on the character of our President, shrouded as it is in lies and deliberate metaphorical fog, the better our country, as a whole, can make proper decisions about whether to cut his Presidency short – or to permit it to move on to a second term.

This may all seem akin to counting angels on the head of a pin, but let me draw a lesson from engineering: way too many times I’ve seem some subtle assumption or implementation decision that looked right, seemed right – and was wrong. And correcting that mistake rippled through the system like the waves of a pebble in a still pond, troubling the waters far out of proportion to the apparent size of the decision.

Operating from proper assumptions and philosophical underpinnings is far less likely to lead one astray. The self-entitlement mind-set evident in the subject of that email speaks volumes about the half-baked philosophy of those who wrote it.

¹ Which would be a funny thing to claim for an agnostic.

² Nonetheless, I’ve been proclaimed one an uncomfortable number of times, decaded ago. No kidding. Even in fun, it’s disturbing.