Monthly Archives: September 2019

On the return from fencing practice this evening, I was greeted with the announcement that Speaker Pelosi has decided that the timing is right, or perhaps this incident is too important to ignore – an Impeachment Inquiry is now under way in the House of Representatives:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, a dramatic and historic move that comes as the President faces outrage over reports that he pressured a foreign leader in an effort to target a political rival.

The announcement marks the most direct step taken by the House Democratic leader to embrace impeachment proceedings and is a significant escalation in the fight between House Democrats and the President.

“Today, I am announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry,” Pelosi said in a brief speech in the Capitol, adding, “The President must be held accountable. No one is above the law.” [CNN]

This could be a terribly divisive event for the nation, or an opportunity to come together in deciding whether or not President Trump deserves to be booted out of office. It’ll all depend on several things.

First, is President Trump, in the Ukrainian incident, actually guilty of any sort of abuse of power in his dealings with the President of Ukraine? Yes, yes, “guilty” is a loaded term, but I think we can agree that Trump, in terms of how the military aid was sent to Ukraine, and how Trump communicated with the President of Ukraine, has either abused his position for domestic political gain, or he didn’t. These are facts still to be ascertained, at present more or less allegations.

Second, regardless of the outcome of the investigation, the communications of the investigating committees needs to be clear and complete to the entire electorate. If they find insufficient evidence, then that must be communicated to the Democratic base; similarly, if the impeachment motion is actually passed, then the reasons why need to be communicated clearly to the Republican base.

If messaging that suggests this is little more than a political hit job, or that he’s escaped again because of Democratic turncoats, then the nation will be in turmoil, and our adversaries, from Iran to Russia, will be inordinately pleased with themselves.

But if the Democrats can manage it, then the Republicans will have their own moral issues, as Jennifer Rubin (among other) has pointed out. And President Trump will almost certainly fight it^[1]. We’ve already seen his favorite tactic, projection, in use in his accusations against the Bidens. It’s worth noting the supreme importance of not permitting Trump defenders to get away with the what-about defense. This isn’t a comparison with Biden, Obama, Clinton, or anyone else. This is about the measurement of Trump against the responsibilities of the office as laid out in the Constitution and applicable law. Period end of discussion. If the Democrats don’t put out that argument early and often, they may lose the messaging mission completely.

I expect parts of the electorate will be eternally embittered by this. The older evangelical segment, which has nursed Trump at their breast and continually backed him in his darkest moments, have invested too much to throw it all away. The Trumpists who’ve ridden his coattails into power will likewise stick with him. And they’ll never believe he’s guilty of anything more than a peccadillo, because such guilt reflects poorly on their sensibilities, their ethics, and their responsibilities as citizens.

But for those not beholden, the silent Republicans who’ve backed Trump, but with reluctance and embarrassment, they may finally have a reason to step off the runaway freight train that is the Republican Party, to follow the braver Republicans who couldn’t stomach Trump and step onto the train platform and now ride that Republican train into right-wing hell.

But that’s all speculation. Right now we’re on the first step of a path which will infuriate the Trumpists. You’ll know them by their bellowing. They see their investment in the Trump machine threatened, and the hell with good governance or the country’s moral position or its future prosperity. They’re threatened and they’ll fight like hell and deny facts and in general behave in ways most dishonorable, all in defense of their self-interest. If they were honest, they’d say “bring it on, we’re not afraid of an inquiry.” But they’re not honest. We’ve seen that with the Mueller Report, the loud proclamations that it cleared Trump totally when it didn’t, the admissions that nearly none of the Republicans, save Representative Amash, had read it.

Here comes more.

¹ Except a small part of me keeps saying he’ll leave the country soon, and never come back. He’ll get out of extradition range, bellow about his victimization, and lounge about being pampered.

My Arts Editor is disgusted with the Trump children, who are seated at the United Nations:

Me? I figure the United Nations was merely extending a courtesy to a group that really needs it.

I mean, really needs it.

If Little Red Riding Hood was wearing panties that fateful day, surely she must have filled them:

The artist is Thomas Dambo of Copenhagen, Denmark. His website is here, and a delightful cover of his work is available on Healthy Food House.

It appears this guy hasn’t heard about the falling abortion rate:

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers suggested on Saturday that Planned Parenthood supports comprehensive sex education because, he claims, it leads to more abortions and sexually transmitted diseases that help the group’s bottom line.

He described his unfounded conspiracy theory as “the business plan of hell.”

Bowers, a Republican, also called Democratic State Superintendent Kathy Hoffman a “radical” over her support for changing state sex-ed guidelines to promote scientifically accurate instruction in public schools, according to footage of his remarks recorded by the anti-migrant group Patriot Movement AZ. [Phoenix New Times]

Trying to scare the base into line, perhaps? Or just proving his bona fides to the donors? Or maybe Planned Parenthood really is just failing to persuade wannabe-Moms to just have an abortion, just for fun.

He wants to trivialize the entire issue, doesn’t he?

I gotta say, I thought the Bible had something to say about people crying down hatred on those trying to do good, but they all seem to divinity-centered, or so my Arts Editor tells me. Pity.

Just some clouds we saw the other day. That first one looks like a giant bunny coming right over the top of the house:

The uproar over the whistle-blower investigation and its links to a conversation President Trump had with the recently-elected President of Ukraine has been entertaining, but more importantly a moral test for the electorate. If you haven’t heard about it, here’s the conservative Wall Street Journal with an admirable summary:

President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden ’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.

“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” if his lawyer’s assertions that Mr. Biden acted improperly as vice president were true, one of the people said. Mr. Giuliani has suggested Mr. Biden’s pressure on Ukraine to fight corruption had to do with an investigation of a gas company for which his son was a director. A Ukrainian official this year said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son Hunter Biden.

The interactions between the president, Mr. Giuliani and Ukraine have come under scrutiny in recent days in the wake of a whistleblower complaint that a person familiar with the matter said involves the president’s communications with a foreign leader. The complaint, which the Washington Post reported centers on Ukraine, has prompted a new standoff between Congress and the executive branch.

Apologies to theocrats^[1], but morality is a collective agreement about tolerable and intolerable behaviors. Does an overwhelming majority of the electorate agree that pressuring a foreign power to dig up, or even create, dirt concerning the son of one of Trump’s rivals is an intolerable abuse of Presidential power? Keep in mind the pressure isn’t merely verbal, but allegedly the threat to withhold military aid in the face of an aggressive neighbor, Russia, which has transgressed in the recent past.

That is the moral question facing the electorate, and, most importantly, the Trump base.

Moderate conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin believes this may be the rock on which Trump and the Republicans are wrecked:

Given all that, impeachment may look very different. A single article of impeachment based on an incontrovertible abuse of power would make Democrats’ job much easier. The difficultly that at-risk Republicans face in explaining to voters why they countenance such conduct begins to outweigh any downside for Democrats in pursuing impeachment, even if the eventual outcome is acquittal in the Senate.

Imagine Senate races in 2020 for Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) and others outside of deep-red America. So, Sen. Collins, you think it is perfectly fine to go to a foreign power to help sway our election outcome? Sen. Tillis, if your opponent goes to, say, China to dig up dirt on you, is that fair game?

The argument for Democrats — namely that Republicans are spineless lackeys who have violated their oaths of office — is far easier to maintain than the Republicans’ assertion that it’s nuts to remove a president who goes to a foreign power to help reelect him.

If this was a chess problem, I’d call it a pin of the Queen on the King^[2]. But it’s not, because the electorate has to be persuaded, as I noted earlier, and Rubin also alludes to. Still, given enough evidence and an effective messaging campaign by the Democrats, the Republicans would be caught on the exceedingly sharp horns of a dilemma:

1. Keep with team politics. This toxic cloud of a political philosophy would require continued loyalty to President Trump, thus labeling the loyalists as those whose taste for power has exceeded all tolerable pounds. I expect that those Trumpists who rode his shirt-tails to power in 2016 would continue to cling, as they tend to be second-raters with little understanding of the general electorate and proper governance.
2. Turn on President Trump, voting for impeachment or conviction. Then the Trump base turns on them and they run the risk of losing their next election. Some Republicans are capable of this, and, if they have faith in their constituents, might even turn it into an election advantage. I don’t expect many to try, as they have been steeped in team politics for far too long.

Former Governor William Weld (R-MA), a primary opponent of President Trump, goes considerably further than Rubin in an interview on MSNBC, as noted by National Review:

“He’s now acknowledged that in a single phone call, right after he suspended 250 million dollars of military aid to Ukraine, he called up the president of Ukraine and pressed him eight times to investigate Joe Biden, who the president thinks is going to be running against him,” Weld continued. “Talk about pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election. It couldn’t be clearer, and that’s not just undermining democratic institutions. That is treason. It’s treason and pure and simple and the penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death.”

It’s an interesting political gambit for a candidate for the Republican nomination going against an incumbent whose party approval rating is in the 80+% range. On the one hand, I think he’s trying to shock the Republicans into re-evaluating President Trump by being a Republican who has publicly evaluated him and found him wanting.

On the other hand, he runs the risk of permanently alienating himself from the huge majority of the Republican party, as he rejects a man – a Republican President – and suggests may have committed such a horrendous crime that he should be put to death. This may not sit well with the Republican Party.

Conservative David French:

Those words do not mean that Joe and Hunter Biden’s conduct in Ukraine was proper. The Bidens should answer questions about that conduct. And of course Trump could tweet about their conflicts of interest every hour of every day, if he chose. But there is a vast difference between campaigning for office by calling attention to your potential rival’s known controversies and utilizing the official duties and powers of the presidency to push for foreign investigations. How easy would it be for a nation desperate for American aid to make a “finding” of wrongdoing that assists the very man who controls the receipt of vital military aid?

One of the most troubling aspects of the Mueller report was the plain evidence that key members of the Trump team were willing and even eager to receive foreign help — even from a geopolitical rival — in the campaign against Hillary Clinton. The reports so far regarding Ukraine raise the troubling possibility of foreign engagement that’s a step beyond even cooperation. It raises the possibility of foreign engagement based on express or implied coercion.

There’s a double concern here. First — and most obviously — presidential pressure on foreign allies can corrupt the American political process in numerous, obvious ways. But it can also corrupt American diplomacy, conflating the American national interest with the president’s self-interest. Military aid decisions should be made based on America’s geostrategic interests, not on foreign cooperation with a president’s reelection campaign.

The priorities now are clear. The relevant congressional committees should have prompt access to the whistleblower complaint and to the transcript of the call with Zelensky. They should also investigate Giuliani’s contacts with Ukraine. The president should enjoy great latitude in his conversations with foreign leaders, and they should ordinarily enjoy a degree of privilege from public discovery, but here the president’s lawyer and the president himself have raised the possibility that a red line has been crossed.

Former Governor John Kasich (R-OH), a 2016 Republican candidate for the Presidential nomination, via CNN cries out for the law to be followed:

John Kasich calls out GOP for not pressuring President Trump to hand over the whistleblower complaint to the House Intel Committee and says he’s very concerned. “If we don’t deal with this we become like a banana republic and where are the Republicans? "What are they — hiding?” pic.twitter.com/WevF7yXZEk

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) September 23, 2019

And how is the Republican base thinking? Kevin Drum has an informal interview with one of them:

I had an, um, spirited discussion about political matters with a friend this morning, and among other things he disagreed with my considered assessment that Ukrainegate, if true, represented “Nixonian levels of corruption.” In fact, he saw nothing wrong with it at all. It was just ordinary politics and he figured that presidents ask foreign leaders for favors like this all the time. Oh, and why did Joe Biden want to get rid of that prosecutor, anyway?

What’s more, he said, this wasn’t nearly as bad as all the stuff Hillary did. Nor was it as bad as Obama promising “more flexibility” to the Russians on a hot mic. It was just more Democratic witch huntery, like Mueller all over again, who proved that Trump was innocent of obstruction of justice because you can only obstruct criminal investigations, not counterintelligence inquiries.

I wasn’t even really mad about all this. Just depressed. This is what a big chunk of ordinary conservativedom thinks, and nothing is going to change it.

It’s a mistake to allow the what-about-isms to occur, because we’re not here to compare, Hillary was not President, and the oversight functions the Republicans supposedly exercised over the Obama never raised a red flag about the Ukraine situation, probably because there was nothing to flag.

But, most importantly, we do not make judgments based on the alleged actions of political rivals. We make judgments based on the strictures laid down in the Constitution.

In general, I tend to agree with Benjamin Wittes that Congress cannot permit witnesses to thumb their noses at oversight committees, and he discusses some approaches to the problem here. But the real problem is the lack of conscience that appears to be an attribute of many of these people. I don’t know if they were born that way, if they’re so convinced of the evil of the Democrats, or if they’re just so caught up in the game that it doesn’t occur to them that their activities in the service of winning will damage the Nation, perhaps irreparably.

¹ Not really.

² Don’t take the analogy too far, though.

But not from bacon. At least, not Kevin Bacon. My Arts Editor objected to this label on some steak:

I think lion meat should also be labeled in the same way.

A reader writes concerning SF6, the insulating gas used in industrial electrical switchboxes, and of possible concern in climate change, as reported in this BBC story:

One has to wonder if that story was a plant by the hydrocarbon fuel industry.

I suppose it’s possible. This ScienceDaily article may be of interest:

Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is a gas whose molecules consist of one sulfur atom and six fluorine atoms.

It is colorless, odorless, non-toxic, and non-flammable, and is soluble in water and some other liquids.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that it has evaluated, with a global warming potential of 22,200 times that of CO2 over a 100 year period (for countries reporting their emissions to the UNFCCC, a GWP of 23,900 for SF6 is used as it was decreed at the third Conference of the Parties: GWP used in Kyoto protocol).

Its mixing ratio in the atmosphere is lower than that of CO2 (about 4 parts per trillion ppt in 1990 versus 365 ppm of carbon dioxide), its contribution to global warming is accordingly low.

The final remark about its mixing ratio, the ratio of some constituent divided by the total of all constituents in a mixture, being low is probably out of date (1990!), and the BBC story was concern about the future, not today. My inclination is to take the BBC story at face value.

Long, long ago a friend told me that idle computer cycles are the Devil’s playthings. This was in connection with a program of inductive logic that he had written and fed with a bunch of facts and claimed that, at some point, it asked him if a platypus was a mammal or a bird.

So I was a little embarrassed to get home from the store and realize that I had shut off SETI@Home and Einstein@Home this morning, while trying to figure out why my computer isn’t as responsive as usual, and forgotten to reactivate the manager for them. Here’s the resource manager:

I’m sure you can see when I reactivated SETI & Einstein. The other cycle-hog? I recently joined another public computing project, the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime^[1] Search) project. It’s been running since 1996, and yet I hadn’t heard of it until a month or two ago. The GIMPS software is delightfully retro for someone of my age and experience; I can’t imagine computer users who don’t understand, or at least like, a command line, would up with it put^[2]. Here’s a sample from this Linux box:

Maybe their Windows version has a visual interface, I dunno. I didn’t see anything for this X-Windows box.

Twenty minutes later:

Yep, the Devil will walk away disappointed from this computer.

¹ A Mersenne Prime is any prime number which satisfies 2ⁿ – 1, where n is a whole number. From all I’ve read so far, they lack practical significance.

² I once read that Romans liked to put their verbs at the end of sentences as a way to heighten the anticipation of the listener.

A reader writes concerning the falling abortion rate:

Fascinating, or maybe more “I told you so.” I’ll disagree with you and Mr. Drum a bit: I think the liberal position is closer to the truth, especially since the conservative position refers to laws which were only passed in the past few years, yet the decline has been pretty steady since 1981. I also agree with you on population pressures and male fertility.

Emancipation of women is probably helping a lot, too. Just heard a story the other day about a guy with 8 kids being asked how many he was going to have and his answer was something along the lines of “whatever god gives me” — in other words, how many his poor baby mother(s) wanted didn’t figure into his calculation at all! A lot more women won’t stand for that kind of bullshit these days, thankfully.

By the way, I did not mean for the “I” in “I told you so” to indicate myself. More of a society telling antiabortionists to calm the hell down, because the trend is in the right direction — contrary to many of their claims.

Good point about emancipation. Additionally, speaking as an agnostic, if God gave humanity a gift, it wasn’t his effing loins. It was his brain, and it sounds like the dude referenced in these remarks has abandoned the use of it.

Oh, are we playing Twenty Questions? My turn!

This is the pleasure of exploring the corners of the cinematic world: Meet Mr. Callaghan (1954) was a surprisingly good whodunit which we had never heard of, and, in fact, the worst part about it might be the title. Callaghan runs Callaghan Investigative Services, located in London and all but bankrupt, when the beautiful Cynthis Meraulton walks in. The Meraultons are notorious for the wealth of the patriarch, August, as well as his mean temper. There are four nephews, who engage in personal and financial dissolution of various forms, and Cynthis herself, adopted and now engaged to be married to the best of the lot, William. None of them like August. Rumor has it that the patriarch’s Last Will used to divide the fortune equally between the nephews and Cynthis, but that he had written a new Will, which he carried with him in a pocket watch, and that it would increase the anger of the nephews – but all that is frantic speculation, as the fortune would be the salvation of the nephews.

Cynthis, sent by her fiancee to Callaghan on the wings of reputation, says her fiancee worries that the patriarch will be knocked off and she’ll be framed for it. She doesn’t take it seriously herself, but, well, he is the fiancee, so she hires Callaghan to “take care of everything.”

Within minutes of her exit from his office, Callaghan learns August was shot to death a couple of hours earlier, and Cynthis’ timing at his office is, at least, suspicious. But he’s been hired to do a job, and do it he will.

Along the way we run into a smooth but angry police detective, bent on revenge on Callaghan for previous suspected ill-dealing; Callaghan’s double-dealing secretary, who, failing to entice him into marriage, wants him imprisoned; the four nephews, their associates and trespasses; the mercurial but beautiful Cynthis, who is supposed to be hidden away; and the facts of the matter, all of which menace Callaghan’s performance of his job, not to mention his payday. His skating through this minefield of dangerous people, even as low-key as it may be, makes for an interesting and fun little tale of deception, manipulation, and murder, and if the ending is perhaps a little too predictable, it’s still fun to see Callaghan is not clad in impenetrable armor, but must hold a hanky to his gunshot wound.

This isn’t all perfect. While we get to see some of the inner turmoil of the characters, it’s not enough for modern tastes, so it sometimes seems a little flat. As mentioned, the title is virtually nonsensical, although the producers might have been hoping to birth a series out of this. And neither of us much cared for the soundtrack, which was far too sprightly and upbeat for what is basically a dark exploration of sordid greed and deception.

But the complexity, which is grounded in the believable motivations of the various characters, makes the movie come alive, as does the fine acting. While it may not quite rise to the level of recommended, it’s definitely a movie that had us talking about our pleasure and surprise in watching it. If you like whodunit’s, take this one in.

I must admit that I don’t often think about the food supply when I think about cyber-attacks, but, according to this University of Minnesota news release, our food supply is vulnerable:

A new report by University of Minnesota researchers indicates cyberattacks pose a rising threat to food production and safety.

“Adulterating More Than Food: The Cyber Risk to Food Processing and Manufacturing,” released today by the University’s Food Protection and Defense Institute (FPDI), illustrates the mounting cybersecurity risk facing the food industry and provides industry-specific guidance to keep operations safe and secure. The potential consequences of an attack on the industrial control systems used in the food industry include contaminated food that threatens public health, physical harm to workers, destroyed equipment, environmental damage, and massive financial losses for companies.

While cybersecurity is rarely recognized as a food safety issue, the systems companies use for processing and manufacturing food contain many vulnerabilities that experts believe will soon present a more appealing target for cyberattacks than industries that are more commonly affected by, and therefore better prepared for, such attacks.

Domestic attacks are likely to come from juveniles looking for attention and prestige, but those should be relatively minor compared to national adversaries and terrorist organizations.

The cited white paper suggests that the usual suspects, such as poor passwords, hard-coded passwords, and computers no longer up to the increasing processing requirements of today’s security regimes, are joined by less usual attacks:

The case of co-bots, which are robots designed to work alongside human workers, instead of in a physically secured area away from humans, is especially worrisome. A malicious actor exploiting a co-bot’s vulnerabilities could cause grave harm to the workers alongside it. In addition, mobile apps, which are becoming increasingly popular tools for monitoring and managing ICSs [industrial control systems], have become another source of vulnerabilities. For example, a recent study identified nearly 150 vulnerabilities in thirty-four SCADA [Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition] Android apps that could be exploited to cause damage.

I wonder how much longer it’ll be before we hear of a substantive attack. Does anyone ever weigh the advantages of computerized systems against the damage that can by caused by malicious actors gaining access to them? Sometimes, as a software engineer, I wonder if we’ve come to rely on them too much.

You may have to think again. Courtesy my Arts Editor, the BBC has an article on the use of potent climate gas SF6:

Sulphur hexafluoride, or SF6, is widely used in the electrical industry to prevent short circuits and accidents.

But leaks of the little-known gas in the UK and the rest of the EU in 2017 were the equivalent of putting an extra 1.3 million cars on the road.

Levels are rising as an unintended consequence of the green energy boom.

Cheap and non-flammable, SF6 is a colourless, odourless, synthetic gas. It makes a hugely effective insulating material for medium and high-voltage electrical installations. …

However, the significant downside to using the gas is that it has the highest global warming potential of any known substance. It is 23,500 times more warming than carbon dioxide (CO2).

And they claim it takes quite a while to breakdown. Which all goes to prove it’s not as easy as we might wish to switch over to renewable energy sources.

Sigh.

Locum:

The definition of locum tenens, roughly translated from Latin, means “to hold a place.” Locum tenens physicians fill in for other physicians on a temporary basis for a range of a few days to up to six months or more. When a healthcare employer faces temporary staffing shortages due to vacancies, illness, or other causes, they hire locum tenens physicians and other part-time clinicians to fill those vacancies. [Staff Care]

Noted in “Conservative Party leader contenders: Ex-health minister Jeremy Hunt,” Clare Wilson, NewScientist:

After three short strikes in which junior doctors withheld all services bar emergency care for up to two days at a time, they took the extreme option of pulling emergency care too for two days. However, not all junior doctors went on strike, and senior hospital doctors and locums tried to fill gaps in cover.

Yes, this dates from May 2019 – Hunt is no longer in the hunt, as they say, for the premiership. But locum is entirely new to me.

Part of an occasional series examining President Trump’s progress against Candidate Trump’s promises.

The promise: Candidate Trump will release his tax returns:

“We’re working on that now. I have big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time,” the billionaire real estate developer and entertainer said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” [Politico, 1/24/2016]

However, he claimed he was under audit and therefore could not release them.

Results So Far: No recent tax returns have been released, although a decade of tax returns from the 1980s and 1990s were obtained by – not released to – The New York Times. As a voter, I consider this to be little more than an historical curiosity, and not a fulfillment of the obligation he assumed through his promise.

With regards to Candidate Trump’s claim that being under audit prohibits their release, the IRS Commissioner has since corrected Trump’s understanding of the matter:

… the president’s IRS commissioner, Charles Rettig, told lawmakers there are no rules prohibiting taxpayers under audit from releasing their tax information. [ABC News, April 10th, 2019]

And, in an apparent reversal of position, or, for those of us who regard this particular promise to be sacred, the breaking of a sacred vow, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conaway stated there would be no release of tax returns, as noted in this partial transcript of an interview:

After repeatedly promising to release his tax returns, Donald Trump has definitively reneged on that commitment. “He’s not going to release his tax returns,” presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway said in an interview on ABC’s This Week yesterday. “We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care. They voted for him.”

A clamor for those tax returns, in the form of legal actions, have been raised by opponents of the Trump Administration. Steve Benen of Maddowblog provides a recent list of these actions here. For our purposes, we can take this list and break them into three categories.

The first are actions of Congress. Representative Nadler (D-NY), as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has asserted that he has the right to request the Trump tax returns as part of an investigation into violations of the Emoluments Clause. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin declined to honor the request, and the issue is now in court.

The second are new State requirements for Presidential candidates filing to be on the ballot. California has led the way in this category, but, as of this writing, a judge has blocked enforcement of the requirement.

The first two categories are arguably political in nature, meaning partisans will take their positions on the issue according to their predilections, but the third category can not be so easily dismissed. In connection with the alleged payment of hush money to silence certain women for having sex with President Trump, a grand jury has agreed to a request for the Trump tax returns by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. This is a serious matter, as Matt Stieb points out:

Unlike previous subpoenas, this one is in the context of a criminal investigation with a sitting grand jury, making it more difficult for the president’s lawyers to dodge this filing with a lawsuit.

And making it non-political.

The Bigger Picture: Voters will have various reactions to the status of the candidates’ tax returns. In most election years, nearly all of the voters won’t have an interest; most rely on non-partisan third parties to interpret the tax returns, as most of us are not facile with the complex tax code.

But it’s important to note how candidate Trump differed from all of the other viable candidates in the 2016 race. His rivals from both parties were, with a couple of exceptions such as Fiorina, politicians, campaigning on their political accomplishments, imagined or otherwise, their promises, and the connections they managed to create with voters. Candidate Trump also campaigned on promises and his connections with voters, but when it came to accomplishments, he denigrated his rivals’ political accomplishments, which often seem to be less accomplishment and more half-assed failures, thus leaving them with little to offer the voter, at least the voter who cannot accept that sometimes the best accomplishment is the compromise.

As he had no political accomplishment to offer, Trump substituted his business acumen as the accomplishments for voters to evaluate. I do not accept such a substitution for reasons I’ve delved into at length, but for those voters who have, there is a critical question: how much of his claims are true? Voters who’ve kept up with media reports are well aware that many questions have been raised concerning his success as a business leader.

But if he is the success he claims to be, his tax returns should reveal that his talk matches his walk. For the serious, sober voter who worries about the competence of our leaders, if one of them claims to be a great business leader, verification, as with any leader, is a necessity, and so the tax returns become an unexpected key to evaluation of candidate Trump.

Thus, Trump’s failure to fulfill this promise is a great disappointment. Indeed, the article quoting Conaway also provides a timeline of the various comments made by Trump and his representatives on the issue, and it’s hard not to see this as a matter of stringing the voters along until he had the base hooked, until they didn’t care.

But he still has more than a year to fulfill that promise, and if he has been the great business leader he claims, it’ll be a great rebuff to his opponents. But as each day passes, legitimate suspicions grow that his acumen is inferior.

I know I’ve answered this before:

President Trump filed a federal lawsuit against the Manhattan district attorney Thursday, his attorney said, seeking to stop him from subpoenaing Trump’s tax returns in a probe of hush-money payments during the 2016 election.

In the suit, Trump argues that District Attorney Cyrus Vance is conducting a criminal investigation of him, which he contends is not allowed under the Constitution.

That’s because the Constitution prohibits any prosecutor from investigating any sitting president for any criminal wrongdoing, he says.

If that were permitted, Trump says, it could give local authorities too much power to hamstring a president’s actions. “All you need is one prosecutor, one trial judge, the barest amount of probable cause, and a supportive local constituency, and you can shut down a presidency,” Trump’s complaint says, quoting law professor Jed Shugerman, according to a copy of the lawsuit posted online by CNN. [WaPo]

Frivolous lawsuits get thrown out, biased judges get fired, trivialities don’t need his personal attention.

And if there’s something substantive, that’s another reason to have a Vice-President, now isn’t it?

I don’t care if then-Judge Kavanaugh disagrees:

His suit also quoted an article by Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh — written in 2009, when Kavanaugh was an appeals court judge — saying that “a President who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as President.”

Good God, man, the alternative, which supplies the foundation for a dictator, is far, far worse than some morally puny President distracted by the potential punishments for his misdeeds.

A few days ago, a mysterious and even momentous non-event occurred. Or event didn’t occur. To recap, Andrew McCabe is a former deputy director of the FBI, and was responsible for the investigation of the Clinton email server incident. Later, after Director Comey’s firing and Trump’s learning that McCabe’s wife was a Democrat who had run for office, and lost, McCabe was fired days before his retirement. Then federal prosecutors began to investigate him for releases of information concerning the Clinton Foundation, and for possibly lying to FBI investigators about the matter.

On September 12th, an indictment from a grand jury was expected. And … nothing happened. Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare speculate:

It is hard to express what an incredibly rare occurrence a grand jury refusal to return what is called a “true bill” would be, if that is indeed what took place. It may not be quite accurate that, as the saying goes, a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, but the sentiment gets at something real. The Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that between October 2013 and September 2014—the last year these data were publicly available—the department investigated almost 200,000 cases and declined to prosecute roughly 31,500. Of the latter category, just five of those cases were declined because a grand jury returned no true bill—a percentage so small that the Bureau of Justice Statistics declines to actually write it out. Between October 2010 and September 2011, and October 2011 and September 2012, the proportion of declined cases explained by grand juries returning no true bills is a momentous 0.1 percent. …

… that the grand jury actually declined to indict McCabe, instead returning no true bill.

This would be a very big deal—a huge rebuke to the Justice Department’s conduct of this case. Grand juries do not need to be unanimous. They need to have a quorum of their 23 members, and they require only a majority of at least 12—that is, a majority of the full grand jury, no matter how many grand jurors are present—to return an indictment. They also don’t proceed by proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard at trial. Instead, an indictment issues on the lower standard of probable cause. In other words, if this is really what happened, it would mean that the Justice Department couldn’t even persuade a majority of people who have heard from all of the witnesses that there is even probable cause to proceed against McCabe.

Given the vociferousness of McCabe in defense of his conduct and the apparent failure of the grand jury to deliver a true bill, I am beginning to suspect the investigation into McCabe’s conduct was biased, or the results were misinterpreted, deliberately or not, by either AG Barr or President Trump.

As Wittes and Jurecic point out, though, this is all speculative at this point.

Professor Erik Demaine of MIT at work on a piece.

The documentary Between The Folds (2008) is less about the mechanics of origami, the art of folding and warping paper, and more about the philosophy and frontiers of origami. It narrates the history of both the vocation and its leading practicioners of the time (2008), exploring the emotional interstices between audience, artist, and process in one sequence, the aesthetic questions of technique vs art in another, and the potential practical applications of origami in fields as diverse as safety engineering and mathematical research, or, as one mathematician remarked, how a single piece of paper encompasses all of mathematics, from geometry to number theory.

Too damn cute. By Bernard Peyton.

This is a simply presented subject, letting it speak for itself, and this transformational art certainly has a lot to say. From time to time my Arts Editor gasped in wonder as an artist found something new to add, such as color, and how the folds transformed the crude color application into a startling and beautiful contrast; or how the mottled skin of a representational figure left us bemused.

It’s something to say that, afterward, we held a short discussion on the application of origami into research on prime numbers. I doubt we’ll ever get to it, but simply thinking about the topic, the application of living geometry to one of the most mysterious aspects of mathematical systems, is fascinating.

It’s not hard to recommend this documentary, not just for the student origamist, but for the cross-disciplinarian who is looking to expand their mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE4lqYzS2m0

In a sign that I have fallen behind on my reading, I have yet another NewScientist (31 August 2019) reference:

A Chinese government policy allowing all couples to have two children led to an additional 5.4 million births in the first 18 months after it took effect.

China’s universal two-child policy, announced in October 2015, was designed to boost the country’s stagnating population growth. …

Birth rates declined to a low of 1.49 births per woman in 1999. Driven by concerns about an ageing population and shrinking workforce, from November 2013, a selective two-child policy was introduced: couples were allowed to have a second child if either parent was an only child.

Putting more pressure on the environment, the cities, and, in general, human civilization. This strikes me as the malevolent spreading of a morality appropriate to small groups to the biggest group around, and watching it eat everything in sight.

This sounds cool, doesn’t it?

Image source: YouTube

A smartphone app can detect signs of norovirus, the most common cause of gastroenteritis.

Jeong-Yeol Yoon and his colleagues at the University of Arizona in the US built the system using a microscope attachment for a smartphone and a separate light source. Combined they can detect low levels of norovirus in water.

The technique is sensitive enough to detect as little as 10 attograms (10⁻¹⁸ grams) of norovirus per millilitre, which is six orders of magnitude better than other portable detectors, says Yoon. As few as tens of norovirus particles are enough to make people sick, he says. [NewScientist, 31 August 2019]

A mysophobe’s dream, no? But my Arts Editor suggests this might be a nightmare for them, especially if it detects levels so low as to be harmless – or a false reading.

There can be too much information.

There’s been trumpeting of Trump Administration incompetence vis a vis Iran using the Aramco drone strike as evidence, as Business Insider reveals:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday acknowledged that the current crisis with Iran was a “direct result” of actions taken by President Donald Trump.

Since Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, his administration has engaged in a “maximum-pressure” campaign against Tehran, Iran’s capital, in an effort to cripple the Iranian economy with harsh sanctions. The end goal of this is to squeeze Iran into coming back to the negotiation table to agree to a more stringent version of the nuclear deal that prevents Iran from building nuclear weapons. …

The secretary of state was addressing the recent attack on two major Saudi oil facilities and facing questions on how the attack was possible despite Saudi investments in US defense technology, as well as how such incidents could be deterred moving forward.

But I wonder if Trump’s opponents are misunderstanding Trump and the conservative’s objections.

First, from the BI report:

If Iran is indeed responsible for the Saudi oil field attacks, experts and former US officials say Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA opened the door for the attack, as well as the broader tensions surrounding it.

Barbara Slavin, the director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said in an op-ed on Wednesday, “This is what happens when you unilaterally pull out of a nuclear deal and then try to smother another country.”

There’s an implicit selection of metric of success, and it’s the level of tension, and its child, the incidence of violence, in the Mideast.

But what if this liberal approach to Iran is not the conservative approach? What if their metric is quite different?

In other words, and as my second point, what if their goals are different?

My perception is that the liberal approach to the problem of Iran, culminating in the JCPOA, was to reduce the tension and violence incited by Iran in the region. The people of Iran would be left with the problem of governance, and if that involved violence to remove the theocratic elements, so be it.

But the conservatives, offended by a regime that had nationalized Western economic assets during the Iranian Revolution, exiled a friend of the United States in the last Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, and, for many elements of the American conservative movement, is Muslim rather than Christian, this not good enough.

They want regime change.

That’s not implicit in the JCPOA. It might occur, but the conservatives want to see it happen soon, so they can take credit for it happening. That’s why Administration officials appear to be impervious to the facts on the ground, this may be why Secretary of State Pompeo could be entirely truthful when he says:

…”There is this theme that some suggest that the president’s strategy that we allowed isn’t working. I would argue just the converse of that. I would argue that what you are seeing here is a direct result of us reversing the enormous failure of the JCPOA.”

Of course, if he is being truthful, then he misapprehends the purpose of the JCPOA. But, being the amateur that he is, he doesn’t comprehend that fact, and so to him, saying the JCPOA is a failure seems like truth-telling. But, given that regime change is their goal, the incidence of tension and violence in the Mideast isn’t a sign of failure, but a sign to them that Iran is striking out due to increasing pressures at home. They may even believe that regime change is an incipient event.

All that said, I’d like to turn to the theme of paranoia, at least on my part. Who was responsible for the Aramco attacks? I’ve mentioned Iran, Yemen, Israel, and unnamed terrorist organizations. But there is one more, barely plausible, entity in play.

And that is the United States.

I don’t speak from evidence, but only from motivations. An attack pinned, however fallaciously, on the Iranians would help the current Administration achieve a current goal, which my reader can of course guess. An excuse to attack Iran it may not be, but it certainly impacts the reputation of Iran internally and internationally. Achievement of regime change would certainly perk up both the Trump base and those segments of the conservative movement that have their doubts about Trump’s re-election efforts.

And I am certain that President Trump would have no moral qualms about trying to frame Iran. The political leadership of the victim, Saudi Arabia, may have even assented.

But this is all evidence-less speculation. If I had to order my suspects from most to least likely, it’d be unofficial Iranian elements, official Iranian elements, Israel, Yemen, and the United States as least likely.

But perhaps that’s just own moral system at work. I’d rather believe that American operational elements would have screamed rather than hit an ally’s oil facilities.

It strikes me as being akin to the fabled ice dagger, but NewScientist (31 August 2019) doesn’t go there:

Spies and soldiers might soon be able to go behind enemy lines using a parachute or glider made from a polymer that vanishes on exposure to sunlight. …

[Paul Kohl of the Georgia Institute of Technology and his team] began with polymers that have a low ceiling temperature, which is the point at which the key bonds holding the substance together begin to break.

Lots of polymers break down slowly when they reach this temperature because many bonds have to be broken. But Kohl designed his material so that as soon as one bond breaks the whole thing rapidly unzips. …

Sunlight or artificial light can trigger the material to go poof. Or, in true spy style, a small light emitting diode can be placed inside a device to trigger the self-destruct process on demand. All that’s left behind is a residue and a faint smell, which Kohl says are from the additives that control the rigidity of the material.

While this particular material may prove inapplicable in a murder, cousins of it might be stiff enough to function as a knife, and perhaps it’d dissolve in the presence of blood. This team appears to be funded by the military, and so the fixation on battlefield applications. But how about a mystery assassination of an adversary leader?

Or even someone of your own country you don’t like?

The lions are adorable!

Mortal Engines (2017) took a fascinating concept and made it … mundane. In this post-apocalyptic world, mobile cities prey on each other, rolling along on their monstrous treads, looking for anything to feed their mysterious and never explained power source at their hearts. Smaller cities, burgs, and towns are meat and potatoes to the big ones, and London, having crossed the dried up channel after cleaning out England, is now on the prowl, under the guidance of the Lord Mayor and his deputy, Thaddeus Valentine.

While prey are mostly sought for incineration into energy, old tech they may carry is also of interest. We’re on the downside of the technology mountain now, and some of those old-time gizmos can be salvaged and made useful by the inhabitants of these parasitical cities.

Even into useful, but forbidden, quantum energy weapons.

Valentine collects old tech in secret hope of building a weapon that’ll make London the master of the world, but his insatiable lust leads to an assassination attempt by the citizen of a recently ingested town, a knife attack that -ahem- barely phases him. In the subsequent chase, Tom Natsworthy, a young tech salvage worker, nearly catches the assassin, but on the edge of a city precipice, the assassin says something to him, which he mindlessly repeats to Valentine –

And over he goes, out of London and into the outlands, at the hand of Valentine. He awakes to find himself being scavenged by none other than the assassin.

Between Tom’s need to get back to London, and discovering the assassin’s motivations, we’re exposed to the brutal depths to which mankind has sunk. It turns out Municipal Darwinism^[1] doesn’t have a long-term future, as the prey reproduce, if at all, abnormally slowly, and the appetites of the bigger cities are voracious. It would seem these mobile cities are doomed.

But London must go on, and Valentine’s weapon from the old, genocidal times is the one thing that can let London find new hunting grounds, because the wall shielding the land of Shan Gou has been impenetrable for centuries. Indeed, the wreckage of failed assaults by other cities is a theme of the era. But the riches of Shan Gou are legendary, and London is so, so hungry…

And so, as Tom and the assassin scramble to survive the slavers, Shan Gou agents, and the assassin’s murderous stepfather, London closes in on Shan Gou and municipal anarchy.

Even this light plot overview sounds exciting, and yet, it’s not. The problem lies in the characters, none of which are particularly well-developed or even particularly logical. Valentine may be power-hungry, or a super-patriot, or simply insane, but we can’t tell, and he’s a little dull. Another problem is a reliance on national stereotypes. Tom, for example, is almost iconic in his British blundering, while the primary Shan Gou agent, Anna Fang, of Asian heritage, has admirable fighting skills reminiscent of certain Chinese fighting styles. And then there was this Brit slaving crew who just had to have their tea…

A big, gauche monster of a flying city, awaiting its butterfly.

But balancing these negatives are the visual effects. This is classic steampunk, through and through. A mobile city may sound and look like madness, but off it roars, full of grime, people, treads, and spikes used to capture the prey. Then there’s the city in the sky, Airhaven, deliciously beautiful and ugly at the same time, impractical, a doomed flower of the air. The airplanes docked at it, too, creaking, groaning, it’s almost impossible that they can fly, but who cares? They’re gorgeously imaginative, dirty, groaning in their clashes with reality.

But speaking of, what are we to make of this stepfather of the assassin? Those glowing green eyes and creepy need for affection may have a certain ambiance, but in the end he feels like a barnacle stuck on this creaking hulk of a plot. In fact, far too much of this plot’s elements are more like barnacles snatched off the shelf, rather than organic elements that hold hidden meanings.

In the end, perhaps the biggest problem in this movie is the allocation of resources by the producers. The graphics people must have received the gargantuan portion of the funds, while the writers were the mice looking for crumbs in the pantry.

It’s too bad. It could have been so much better.

¹ Municipal Darwinism is a lovely phrase, but I fear it lacks a future, too.

Kevin Drum ruminates on this chart of the rate of abortions:

Drum doesn’t much care for either of the major competing explanations:

The usual answer [for the declining use of abortion] among liberals is that it’s due to better awareness of contraceptive choices. The usual answer among conservatives is that it’s due to restrictive new abortion laws. For various reasons I’m skeptical of both answers, but I don’t have a better one of my own.

Drum’s quite right to doubt both explanations, as do I, although my doubt isn’t based so much on detailed knowledge as it is on the fact that the two assertions are by interested, ideological parties. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to notice that individuals keep on asserting their positions, regardless of the facts on the ground, the longer they’ve been part of the ideological movement. I see it as investment bias, the emotional feeling that if they admit failure and fallacy, they lose prestige and position. Which is true. But leads to disregarding facts in favor of useless political wars.

So let me throw out some other factors. First, we’re (to beat my own drum) overpopulated, and our personal resources are becoming scarcer and scarcer. Having a child may mean choosing to not have something else. You may wonder why that didn’t apply hundreds of years ago, but back then, one, there wasn’t that much stuff to acquire, and, two, children were an asset, not a burden. At a young age, they could be workers on the farm, diggers of coal, and laborers in many other professions.

Now, you’d think that this should push abortion rates up, but not so fast. Scarcity of personal resources can render young males less attractive, and for ladies looking for a mate, that can be a deal-killer. Indeed, looking at US Census Bureau data, in 2018 the median age for marriage for men was just short of 30 years, and for women just show of 28. 1890? 26.1 and 22. And, to illustrate my point, 1947, after an existential war that cost a lot of lives, thus lessening overpopulation and resource usage, 23.7 and 20.4. Keep in mind a woman looking to have children has to be aware that abortion is a medical procedure, and that always carries risk. Add in contraceptives, and we have some bit of an explanation.

And then there’s also the mysterious – at least to me – fertility problem plaguing contemporary male humanity in the developed world. Lowering the odds of a fertilized ovum, lower the abortion rate.

Not all factors controlling our sexual behavior are overt and consciously considered. Simply the idea that a child could put you in poverty can make both sides of the equation decline to meet in the middle.