Monthly Archives: October 2019

In the wake of the shocking The New York Times report on the increase of reports of child pornography,

Pictures of child sexual abuse have long been produced and shared to satisfy twisted adult obsessions. But it has never been like this: Technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of the abuse last year.

More than a decade ago, when the reported number was less than a million, the proliferation of the explicit imagery had already reached a crisis point.

Skipping questions of the reliability of using these reports as a proxy for the actual size of the problem, let’s move on to where Ben Thompson of Stratecherry inches, if only implicitly, towards a less definite position on the question of the encryption of communications:

This report about child sexual abuse makes the point much more meaningful, and leads me to reframe the questions I originally raised in that piece: might it be the case that Facebook’s decision to encrypt conversations is not both good for consumers and good for itself, but rather good for itself and actively bad for society?

It’s worth taking this question apart in order to understand the clash taking place.

First, good is a relative word, and it can be defined for our purposes as the satisfaction of the immediate desire of the entity using it. If a person deems it good to catch a criminal, such as a viewer of pornography, then the act of catching and imprisoning them is good, and if insecure communications increases the probability of success, then that is good. The fact that there may be non-immediate reasons to not permit insecure communications isn’t relevant, since good is defined as satisfying the immediate desire.

Contrariwise, a viewer of child pornography will consider it good if they are not caught and imprisoned. If secure communications lessens the risk, then that facility is good.

When Thompson wonders “… not both good for consumers and good for itself, but rather good for itself and actively bad for society?” he is not inaccurate in his description: consumers, regardless of their goals, prefer private communications.

But immediate desires, I hear my reader mutter, are rarely a good way to run society, and, despite the blandishments of innumerable commercial entities, I agree. The momentary satisfaction of desires such as child pornography appears to lead to indisputable crimes, and thus Thompson’s last observation is also accurate: … actively bad for society. Yes, period. They are.

Despite the quasi-admissions of the secure communications advocates that secure communications can enable many bad actors, they don’t want to admit to being part of the problem, and that’s because they, themselves, really aren’t. They worry about governmental abuse, for the most part, with some concerns about private monitoring of their communications.

And they think they’ve found the perfect solution, a malady of us computer-folk^[1], in algorithms. Certainly computers have been used to improve – we think – many aspects of life, and here’s one more.

But I think, in a position that is almost certainly irrelevant given the nature of the maths involved, it’s a mistake to attempt to replace monitoring of human governance with algorithms. In an already demonstrated result, it will abolish the importance of human judgment by making the scenario itself less and less likely to happen.

Algorithms continue to be relatively inflexible, which means they don’t adjust to the situation very well. As we continue to move towards truly intelligent computer entities, this will change, but in the area of deciphering communications, the algorithms are more or less context free.

This means we’ve abandoned our responsibility to police ourselves, leaving it to computer systems little better than hammers to do that work for us. And, in the process, are losing the opportunity to learn wisdom and to grow beyond our petty little desires and live with each other again^[2].

I should also observe that the secure communications absolutists are also the extremists in this discussion. I’m well aware that the math is considered by many to be impenetrable, although a group of smart colleagues of mine actually think secure communications will become a dream in the world of quantum computers, but that’s a matter still in the future. But the other side, asking, technologically naively as it may be, for a backdoor in order to catch the bad guys, have not asked for abolishment. I don’t see them as non-compromising extremists; that would be the secure communications group.

The relative ignorance and out-right stupidity of many criminals is irrelevant to the discussion, as we’ve seen non-hackers use hacking packages to harass many entities on the Web for money. I have no idea what to suggest at this juncture, because there is a variable that almost no one is tracking:

Why does it matter more and more?

As resources become more and more precious, whether directly through their possession, or indirectly through having the financial resources to afford to obtain them, these communications become more and targets by the have-nots (or, at any rate, the have-not-enoughs, which may be an entirely different group). That last variable is the hardest to change, and the most controversial of all. But it may be the key to this mess.

¹ I’m starting to regard myself as a former computer geek. Although I never was much of one anyways.

² Cliff Stoll said it first, essentially. Maybe he’s right after all.

Watch out! There’s a ten ton statue sneaking up behind you!
Oh, ouch. That’ll teach you to be competent at your job.

If your cup of tea is watching cheap knock-offs of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), then Ba’al: The Storm God (2008) might be right up your alley. We start off with a murderous robbery of an archaeology museum, which, despite being slightly clever, did make me laugh out loud. Why did that damn statue fall over and kill the security guard?

It seemed unjust after him being quite competent and all.

Anyways, a bunch of Dead Sea Scrolls are stolen – it’s not entirely clear why the digital versions available online couldn’t be used – and, the dead left behind to rot, the local cops are left to figure out who pulled the robbery.

Just about everyone here is a PhD, mostly of the archaeology variety, although we do get a meteorologist as well. Anyways, the oldest of the bunch, highly respected Stanford, has been frantically digging in Inuit territory (that would be the Arctic Circle), and in the midst of a requested visit by Helm, your generic and doctrinaire archaeologist and Brendan Frazier lookalike – except tubbier – and Carol (I can’t find her last name), a Sumerian cuneiform expert who, thank goodness, doesn’t get engaged in some horrific romantic subplot, and who’s mystified that she’s been requested to visit the Arctic when her specialty should take her to Iraq, virtually the antipodes of the Arctic Circle.

But even as they arrive and meet guards with rifles and bad tempers, an amulet covered in, insert your guess here, is discovered, comes to life, and zaps Stanford, who has an epileptic fit. But while he survives, a monstrous, and do I mean monstrous, storm roars in and wipes out the encampment. But, of course, the archaeologists escape.

Stanford is running things, and now they’re flying somewhere else. Why? Well, that damn amulet has some companion amulets, and, well, Stanford has cancer and thinks the amulets will cure it.

What?

Meanwhile, the American military has been watching as these absolutely monstrous storms pop up at each amulet site, even if they don’t know about supernatural storms. They bring in an independent meteorologist with expertise in upper atmosphere storms, and she thinks the storms are hooked into the Van Allen radiation belts (a real thing) and will draw infinite power (not a real thing) from them and soon we’ll be just like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter (a real thing, although shrinking recently), enveloped in one hellish storm.

She should have gone with a Venusian analogy, instead.

Anyways, deities appear, they have fights, a nuclear bomb plays a part, the cops get sucked into a vortex, and it’s all very silly.

The problems start with the story. It’s a fantasy, a genre which must explore the foibles of mankind, and necessarily their consequences. In Raiders, we see the Nazis in their arrogance, the mercenary French archaeologist Belloq who values his prizes and power over human life, Jones’ preoccupation with getting the treasure, and the general inclination for various assistants to go for the money.

Here? Stanford is weakly motivated, since there’s no obvious connection between Ba’al and curing Stanford’s cancer. Nor do Helm or Carol have much in the way of foibles. The meteorologist, Pena, has just a little bit of backstory, as she has been banned from the military base for misdeeds involving high tech, but it really goes nowhere.

And the actors are more or less sleep-walking through their roles, with the exception of the commanding officer, Kittrick, who properly projects military command presence throughout, even when admitting he ordered a plane into one of the storms, and lost it and the crew. But, honestly, these actors didn’t have much to work with.

Don’t waste your time on this one. It’s just good enough to tickle you along, but, in the end, it’s not in the least memorable, and you’ll want your time back.

Go see Raiders again, instead.

The ankle tag was annoying, but the camera to watch your smooch with your honey? Nuh-uh:

When you try to get some 'hidden camera' footage but your Burrowing Owls immediately find your camera… pic.twitter.com/ZnHmr0sNhD

— Hawk Conservancy (@HawkConservancy) August 2, 2019

You just have to love it: the screaming hairy armadillo.

It’s not as cute as I might hope, but that’s OK.

In case you were wondering if private militias are a thing, Professor Mary B. McCord of Georgetown will set you straight in Lawfare:

Although it is widely believed that the Second Amendment protects the right to form private militias, it does no such thing. The Supreme Court made this clear in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, explicitly reaffirming its own 1886 holding that “the Second Amendment … does not prevent the prohibition of private paramilitary organizations.” Indeed, they are prohibited by state constitutional provisions or statutes in all 50 states.

The constitutions of 48 states include provisions that require the military to be at all times subordinate to the civil authority. That means that private, unregulated and unauthorized militias—operating wholly outside of the civilian governmental authority and public accountability—are prohibited by state law. There is good reason for this. As prominent historian and scholar A.E. Dick Howard wrote in 1974 in “Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia,” the Virginia constitution’s ban on private militias “ensures the right of all citizens … to live free from the fear of an alien soldiery commanded by men who are not responsible to law and the political process.”

So if someone shows up at your door proclaiming some sort of authority as a private militia, tell them to get out of town and that they’re under surveillance at that very moment. Even if they’re not.

This is on Facebook, but the owls are adorable.

Part of an occasional series.

The promise: Candidate Trump promises the national debt will disappear rapidly under a President Trump’s leadership.

[Caption: Trump Tells O’Reilly Tackling $21T Nat’l Debt Will Be ‘Easy’]

An annual deficit (it can be monthly, or generally any time period) is simply outgo – incoming over the given time period.

The debt, on the other hand, is the cumulative deficits plus any interest incurred by financing (borrowing) against that debt. If the debt ever becomes negative (that is, a surplus) then one may also subtract any interest earned on that surplus.

Results So Far: This chart from the St. Louis Fed tells the story, with larger deficits towards the bottom of the graph:

I was unable to determine if these are raw dollars or are adjusted for inflation or any other relevant factor, which would explain why the numbers of the last thirty years are much greater in magnitude than previous years. But this caveat is immaterial for our purposes: the size of the annual deficits has been increasing dramatically under President Trump’s leadership, the direct opposite of his promise. For those who wish to point at Democratic President Obama’s first two years, when Congress was controlled by the Democrats, a second glance at the chart should remind them that this was the response to the Great Recession, initiated (through Quantitative Easing) by President Bush’s Administration; President Trump has had no such economic challenge against which to struggle. Indeed, our economy at the time of his election was chugging along nicely.

It must be remembered that President Trump is only, as of this writing, roughly 2.5 years into his four year term, and perhaps he’ll find a way to reduce the Federal Deficit before the end of this four year term, or a hypothetical second term.

The Bigger Picture: It cannot be emphasized enough: Congress has the power of the purse. That said, Republican President Trump had a Republican-controlled Congress for the first two years of his Administration, and during that time the much-ballyhooed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was introduced into and passed by Congress, and signed by President Trump.

President Trump, along with the Republican members of Congress, were enthusiastic supporters of the bill, proclaiming that the economy would expand at a greater rate than before, and that the Laffer Curve would help reduce deficits; critics, which included most Democrats, liberal pundits, and independent economists, rejected such claims.

The results? The chart above suggests the enacted tax cuts decreased government revenues substantially, as the critics suggested they would. Long-time readers and those who followed the Laffer Curve link, above, know that I do not believe the Laffer Curve has universal application, but instead only in very limited circumstances. The example of the failure of the Tax Cuts bill and, earlier, the smoking debacle of Kansas, where it was also confidently deployed under the leadership of former Governor Brownback (R-KA), confirms that conclusion.

Democratic control of the House, gained in 2019, may seem to be a good point to raise for conservative-minded readers who wish to suggest that an agreeable Congress would lead to smaller deficits, but I do not agree. First, general Republican economic policy has become deregulate, lower taxes, and all will be well. There is little empirical evidence in favor of this policy, and much against it (see Kansas, above). Second, President Trump, perhaps because of the Democratic control of the House, has concentrated on casting the blame for a potentially slowing economy on his own Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, for not lowering the prime rate as far as he wishes.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my own observations on the Federal budget, and, consequently, deficits. While deficit hawks have often deployed the analogy of the family budget as an argument for balanced budgets, I do not find the argument convincing. A family has relatively few resources to meet its obligations, while governments may offer bonds and raise taxes, as well as provide services. The fact that the government has run deficits for years has not yet led to doom and disaster.

Economics is the dismal science, however. Would we be in a better place if our Federal Debt was smaller? Is the recent phenomenon of near-zero% prime rate a result of the huge deficits, as some have suggested? These are hard questions which do not yet have answers.

Updated 25 Oct 2019: WaPo is reporting on the 2019 Federal Deficit under President Trump’s leadership continues to grow:

The U.S. government’s budget deficit ballooned to nearly $1 trillion in 2019, the Treasury Department announced Friday, as the United States’ fiscal imbalance widened for a fourth consecutive year despite a sustained run of economic growth. The deficit grew $205 billion, or 26 percent, in the past year.

While President Trump did suggest he’d need all eight years to destroy the entire debt, this report does not give one hope that he’ll actually succeed in even reducing the Federal annual deficit, much less the Federal Debt, even if he wins reelection.

Some think there’s a new ethical dilemma for docs these days, as Laura Spinney notes in NewScientist (31 August 2019, paywall):

At issue is how to define a patient in an era of genetic testing. If a test shows that I carry a disease-causing gene, that may be relevant to other members of my family. If I refuse to tell them, should my doctor?

That is the nub of a trial coming up at the High Court in London in November, in which a woman is suing the hospital that diagnosed her father with Huntington’s disease for not informing her. Huntington’s is a fatal, incurable neurodegenerative disorder caused by a mutation in a single gene. Every child of an affected parent has a 50 per cent chance of inheriting the mutation.

The woman argues that, had she known her father’s diagnosis, she wouldn’t have given birth to her daughter, who is now herself at risk of Huntington’s. Currently, in the UK as in many other countries, doctors are legally obliged to respect the confidentiality of patients unless they consent to their information being shared. …

That could bring some much needed clarity to the area, but also create new problems. What if I test positive for a disease-causing gene variant and my family members, who didn’t consent to be tested themselves, don’t want to know they are at risk?

This question was raised by a German case in which a woman sued a doctor for telling her that her ex-husband had Huntington’s, meaning that their two children were at risk. The doctor acted with the consent of his patient, the ex-husband, but the woman’s lawyers argued that the information was useless to her because the condition can’t be cured and the children were too young to be tested anyway. Knowing her ex-husband’s diagnosis without being able to act on it, the woman claimed, had sent her into a reactive depression and left her unable to work.

In the latter case, the doctor eventually won. In information-happy Western Civilization, I think informing those at risk is an ethically compelling argument, because the counter-argument that the condition is incurable is contingent, which is to say that what’s true today may not be true tomorrow. But if you don’t inform those who may be at risk, they may be forgotten when, at a later date, an effective treatment is formulated. Typically, treatments are cheaper and more effective the earlier they are implemented in a disease life cycle.

And while, in the German case, it may be argued that the woman has no use for that information herself, I might note that ex-spouses getting back together is not unheard of. Now, you’d expect the husband to reveal the fact that he has Huntington’s to her, but that’s assuming rational and ethical behavior on his part.

In the end, I don’t really consider this to be a real head-scratcher. The rock-in-the-throat is the emotional distress of the woman, and, honestly, is that more important than understanding the risks to her children? And, then, the risks to her children’s children?

Tell them.

Brittany Howard. My Arts Editor said she has a very nice voice.

A lesson to the ladies on how to treat your man.

Well-plotted. Carefully thought out. Superbly acted. Subtle, crafty humor. Beautiful photography.

And, oh yeah, violent as hell.

I’d been told it was good, but Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is the fourth in the Mad Max series, so how could it possibly be good?

But it turned out to be damn good.

Don’t be a cheesy smartass with this guy.

Max, deprived of family, community, and maybe even sanity, has been wandering the Outback of post-apocalyptic Australia, a land mostly barren of water, life, and even fertility. As we open as he’s taken prisoner by the War Boys, a quasi-religious group that has more or less given up personal autonomy in submission to its leader, Immortan Joe, who controls the water and the women who are still fertile. The most militant of the War Boys function as a military unit, willing and even eager to sacrifice themselves, because they are terminally ill with some unnamed sickness.

But lives can be lengthened through the use of untainted blood. War Boy Nux, eager to retain his standing in the War Boys, takes Mad Max as his “blood bag,” resuscitating himself while linked via IV tubing to an annoyed Max.

In the midst of this, one of Immortan Joe’s subcommanders, the fierce woman Imperator Furiosa, is leading a flying column of vehicles to Bullet Town to collect supplies. Much to her men’s surprise, she takes an unscheduled detour, driving the big rig herself while her escorts bang along behind, trusting in her leadership. Little do they know that four of Immortan Joe’s breeders are hiding out in the big rig, trusting in Furiosa’s promises to be smuggled out of the jurisdiction of the War Boys. When Immortan Joe discovers his women are missing and Furiosa is off-course, the War Boys are let loose, and Nux won’t be left behind: Max is strapped to the front of Nux’s war buggy for the chase after Furiosa.

What follows is a very long handoff of lead roles as Mad Max, still active and vital, slowly cedes the primal role to Furiosa. Her left arm is half gone and she has more tricks up her non-existent sleeve than you’d believe, but between keeping an eye on Max, keeping the breeders safe, and eventually having to ride herd on Nux, who providentially is an engine mechanic along with being a nut-case, her goal, the Green Place, reputed to be verdant and filled with good people and to be found via territory held by hostiles, weather, and disasterized landscape, seems further and further away.

Until the vicious grandmas on motorcycles show up.

This story delineates the role of rationality and sanity in any culture bent on long-term survival by demonstrating that crazed violence, as we saw in the earlier chapters of this saga, doesn’t lead to cultural survival; chaos is not a long term survival characteristic. A structure for helping ensure stability and survival, a military unit, and a purpose greater than themselves motivates both the War Boys and those who represent the Green Place, and reminds us of the importance of same in our culture of fierce individualism.

And, of course, it celebrates stubbornness, a refusal to quit in the face of overwhelming odds. No matter how mythic it may sound, this story tells us there’s always a chance that last knife cast will hit its mark, no matter how many times you’ve missed before.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve wondering what happened to Mad Max since he played in the Thunderdome; hell, I don’t even recall how that movie went, even vaguely. Mad Max: Fury Road will make you care for Max all over again.

And, at the same time, for Furiosa.

If you like action movies, then this is Strongly Recommended.

Trump appointees such as Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, AG Barr, and others may be facing an awful quandary as subpoenas are raining down on them. So far, they’ve been mostly ignored and resisted. But will they be litigated? Jennifer Rubin relays the opinion of Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe:

“I think the Intelligence Committee is doing exactly what the situation calls for by treating the refusals by [Attorney General William P.] Barr and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo to let people testify as obstruction of Congress plain and simple,” he says. “If the Trump cabinet members or other officials want to go down the path of the third Article of Impeachment against Richard Nixon, that’s a choice the Democratic committee chairs are sensibly leaving to them. The chairs would play into the hands of the stonewalling Trump administration by taking Trump officials to court to seek orders compelling testimony or document production or to enforce subpoenas.” He concludes, “The days for those litigation strategies are now long since behind us.” [WaPo]

And I see CNN is running a headline:

White House subpoenaed

No information will be shared by the Trump Administration in response, if recent history is any teacher. Given how Trump flaps his lips in front of microphones, I’m not even sure that a subpoena is required to secure the information necessary to impeach and possibly convict Trump of abuse and even treason.

But officials connected with Trump need to think about this: What if Trump is impeached and convicted? Depending on the articles of impeachment, there could be a great deal of collateral damage for officials in violation of subpoenas and laws. Consider Secretary Mnuchin, who refused a subpoena for Trump’s tax returns in the face of a statute stating

Upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Committee on Finance of the Senate, or the chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request, except that any return or return information which can be associated with, or otherwise identify, directly or indirectly, a particular taxpayer shall be furnished to such committee only when sitting in closed executive session unless such taxpayer otherwise consents in writing to such disclosure.

He assumed a level of discretion not authorized by this or any other statute, saying the request served no legislative purpose. Now, suppose Trump is thrust unceremoniously out of office, and then Trump’s tax returns are substantially different than advertised by Trump. Does a vengeful Congress dump his damp ass in jail? Can they?

They can certainly censure him, making it clear that he behaved in a dishonorable fashion. Rational people, concerned for the nation, will snub him at dinner parties.

But this is the question that should be burning in the heads of many of the officials who have, or may, receive a subpoena which they’ve been instructed to ignore. Obeying the unlawful orders of their superiors could end poorly for them.

There’s a lot of corruption out there, since top political positions command power, prestige, and $money$, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised in the lead-off item in AL Monitor’s email reporting on lobbying:

US lobbying emerges as key issue in Tunisian presidential election

Revelations first published Wednesday by Al-Monitor have caused an uproar in the upcoming Tunisian presidential election. Al-Monitor reported that an emissary for Tunisian presidential candidate Nabil Karoui had signed a $1 million lobbying contract for US and international help getting elected. Rivals of the media mogul, who is already in jail on unrelated money laundering charges, are demanding that he be disqualified from the Oct. 13 presidential runoff between him and conservative lawyer Kais Saied. One rival, the Democratic Current party, filed a criminal complaint Thursday, calling the contract with Canadian firm Dickens & Madson (Canada) a criminal act. A spokeswoman for the Tunis Court of First Instance today announced the opening of an investigation.

Karoui denies any knowledge of the Aug. 19 contract or the person who signed it, one Mohamed Bouderbala. The contract calls on firm President Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence operative and arms dealer, to lobby the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations in view of “attaining the presidency of the Republic of Tunisia.” Ben-Menashe is tasked with striving to “arrange meetings” with US President Donald Trump and other senior US officials ahead of the Tunisian election. The contract also calls on the firm to seek a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to obtain “material support for the push for the presidency.” In a filing with the Justice Department this week, the firm said it received an initial payment of $250,000 around Sept. 25 from Karoui.

AL Monitor has an article with more information. This I found particularly interesting:

The complaint also mentions Ennahda party, which has retained Burson-Marsteller (now BCW) for public affairs work in the United States since 2014, as well as parliamentary candidate Olfa Terras-Rambourg, who retained Washington firm America to Africa Consulting in early September.

Jaouhar Ben Mbarek, a Tunisian constitutional law professor, concurred in a post on Facebook. “This can be considered foreign support and funding for Karoui’s election campaign, which is in breach of Tunisia’s electoral law,” he wrote. “This should lead to the disqualification of the candidate and of his party’s lists.”

A list appears to be the list of party-approved candidates, provided to make party-line voting an easier task. It’s fascinating that Professor Mbarek suggests that not only should candidate Karoui be disqualified, but so should all listed candidates. It’s sort of a death penalty, if only temporary.

But it’s really part of the age-old story: the lust for gold and power, and the hell with the effect of the outcome on society. I wonder if they took the page directly out of Trump’s book.

Dissembled:

to hide your real intentions and feelings or the facts:
He accused the government of dissembling. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in a letter written by Members of the Intelligence, Oversight and Reform, and Foreign Affairs Committees to their colleagues in Congress:

For example, Secretary of State Pompeo has now admitted that he was on the call when President Trump explicitly pressed the Ukrainian President to investigate the Bidens – but failed to report this to the FBI or other law enforcement authorities. You will recall, FBI Directory Christopher Wray urged individuals to report efforts to seek or receive help from a foreign power that may intervene in a U.S. presidential election.

This obligation is not diminished when the instigator of that foreign intervention is the President of the United States; it is all the more crucial to the security of our elections. Instead, when asked by the media about his own knowledge or participation in the call, Secretary Pompeo dissembled.

In WaPo, John Feinstein celebrates the passage of a California law:

There’s a good reason athletic administrators are running around screaming that the sky is falling over a new California law that will allow college athletes in the state to be paid for the use of their names and images beginning in 2023.

For them, the sky is falling. The Fair Pay to Play Act, signed into law Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), is the beginning of the end for the NCAA’s archaic and patently unfair rules on “amateurism.”

For years, it has been against NCAA rules for a student on an athletic scholarship to be paid by anyone beyond the value of his or her scholarship: not by the school and not by anyone outside the school — whether it be a company that wants help pitching a product, someone who wants to pay for autographs or an appearance, or a company that aims to sell a jersey with a star player’s name on it.

For all the yelling, in the electoral world the rubber hits the road when the people vote. That’s when the real measurements of their temperament occurs, and it’s the little votes leading up to the big one in November 2020 that lets partisans calibrate their campaigns, politicians make plans based on public popularity of the goals of those plans, and pundits measure the accuracy of their predictions.

Hah. Just kidding on that last one.

Three states are holding gubernatorial elections this year, in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Kentucky, none of which may be characterized as bastions of liberal Democrats, even if John Bel Edwards, the defending incumbent in Louisiana, is a Democrat. This makes them possible bellwethers of the country, not only for the big 2020 Election, but also for the future of the Impeachment Inquiry and potential actual impeachment and conviction.

And what I find interesting is that President Trump is beginning to take an interest in these races. Consider this:

….a Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer Democrat (John Bel Edwards), who does nothing but stymie all of the things we are doing to Make America Great Again. Don’t be fooled, John Bel Edwards will NEVER be for us. Early voting has already started! @LAGOP

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019

By tweet, he’s made himself a direct part of the Louisiana contest, and associated himself with the two named Republicans, whether they like it or not (judging from their web sites, they did).

He’s also endorsing in the Mississippi contest:

….He loves our Military and supports our Vets! Democrat Jim Hood will never give us his vote, is anti-Trump and pro-Crooked Hillary. Get Out and Vote for Tate Reeves on November 5th. He has my Complete & Total Endorsement!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2019

Trump has actually visited Kentucky to campaign in support of defending incumbent Governor Matt Bevin, who I recall winning a vastly improbable victory four years ago. Trump’s visit may have been in response to polls showing substantial disapproval of Bevin’s performance back in May.

Will these endorsements work for Trump, or backfire? Does he realize that even a close loss for the Democrats in these three contests would signal that his popularity is fading?

And it would also signal the loss of patience by the American people for the Republican ideology, which has sounded so good (cut taxes, cut taxes!), yet been so disappointing in practice.

These contests may end up deciding how Democrats approach the question of impeachment as well as the 2020 elections. Keep an eye on them and how the Democrats react. The first one is in just a few days, the other two are in November.

The bedrock principles on which we build our lives are how we determine our actions, and, on a national basis, we mostly share those principles. But what if they’re wrong for a situation?  Graham Lawton goes there in NewScientist (14 September 2019, paywall):

Contemplating the Brexit struggle, I was reminded of conversations I had with scientists and policy-makers after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its 2018 report about the radical and rapid changes required to stop warming from exceeding 1.5°C. Some openly questioned whether the scale of the challenge was compatible with democracy.

At this point, it helps to bring in a bit of cognitive science. For many people in the UK, Brexit appears to have become what is called a “sacred value”: something so central to their identity and worldview that it trumps all else. As the name implies, such values are often religious, but not always. Nationalism, freedom and democracy are sacred for some people, too.

Environmentalism can also be a sacred value. When the climate crisis bites harder, we will face a similar reckoning. Now I’m on the side of parliamentary democracy, but when the shit truly hits the fan, I’m not so sure that I would take to the streets to defend it. [NewScientist (14 September 2019)]

This is one of the most important and sober realities about how people will react as the climate crisis worsens – what they’ll hold so dear that they’d rather see human civilization in ruins rather than give it up. Whether it’s because of perceived divinity or the mistaken belief that it’ll save civilization, such things as traditional religion^[1], democracy, medicine, capitalism, and high technology may well prove to be impossible to renounce.

And they, or perhaps more accurately WE, may be right. Perhaps those institutions will save us. But let’s stipulate, for the moment, that they won’t. Then here’s the problem: the human creature is not structured to perceive the problems that come with changes in scale, which is to say as we overpopulate. But these institutions may not, as software engineers are wont to say, scale well. That is, the activities they encourage may, in fact almost certainly do, have positive group survival value at low population densities, however you want to define the latter, but negative group survival value at high population densities.

But we don’t generally understand that. We learn the principles of the institutions, absorb those which we believe will lead to a prosperous life either here or in the alleged hereafter, and off we go. Rare is the person who contemplates changing principles.

Or, more bluffly in the context of the institution of religion, morality is relative. You won’t find a cleric who teaches that; for them, morality is absolute and unchanging, because God told them. Right up until it does change. Similarly, such concepts as democracy and capitalism, because their characteristics are inevitably tied up in both the cold laws of population dynamics and the hot data of humanity’s variable devotion to the principles of those institutions, must also have flexible principles – or they’ll perish as institutions.

Possibly right along with their adherents and their opponents.

But some principles are foundational or definitional, and some are not. If those foundations are not group survival positive in conditions radically different from their origination context, well, as beloved as they may be, those institutions may be inevitably doomed with no responsibility imputed to the behavior of their adherents.

But this is difficult to predict, as I’m sure Lawton would acknowledge.

Professor Turchin points out that humanity goes through long cycles of prosperity and tragic distress, and perhaps that’ll be our fate, especially if the stars remain out of our reach. Democracy’s project has been to smooth the waters, snuffing out those regimes which are rapacious, but democracy itself may contain its own seeds of destruction, as do other forms of government.

The future should be fascinating, but possibly not in a good way. Better hope the scientists figure out how to reach the stars.

¹ Non-traditional religions tend to dissolve and disappear as their tautological negative survival characteristics in their native contexts destroy them. Or, if you prefer, they “… disappear in a puff of logic.” – Douglas Adams. I need the laugh while writing this post.

A reader remarks on the report of a whistleblower complaint concerning the President’s tax returns:

The best thing that could happen is if those 6 years of tax returns were released to the press. Even if his base didn’t care what those forms said, they’d provide endless opportunities and resources for journalists to investigate other related things, and just keep those “hits” coming. Eventually some of the public will be swayed.

Unfortunately, the longer it takes, the more it looks like a political hit job rather than legitimate critical concerns regarding his activities and how they violate the Constitution.

This is not actually ours. I saw it at a little pop up garden store at Rosedale on a rare Fall trip to add to the garden. I loved the orange and the sun interacting.

I’m a little puzzled by Megan McArdle’s plea to Democrats:

“Don’t make it hard to be good.”

By this, he meant that a repentant scofflaw should be offered kindness, not your residual anger. If you want kids to do the right thing, make being good more pleasant than the alternative. Corollary: Democrats, you should impeach only if yougenuinely want to remove the president from office, not just to position yourselves for 2020. And because you’ll need 20 Republican senators to accomplish that, you should make it as easy as possible for conservatives to join the effort.

Don’t shower invective on conservatives; if anyone must be denounced, let it be Trump and Trump alone. Greet each new convert to Team Impeachment with a warm “Welcome, brothers and sisters!” rather than a grudging “What took you so long?”

Trump is not the problem. Trump is the symptom, the symptom of a soul-destroying rot at the center of the Republican soul. The tendency of Republicans to talk to themselves, thus confirming their positive biases towards themselves, is a key part of the problem.

If the Democrats, in the name of expediency, refuse to put the blame on unrepentant Republicans, then what have they gained beyond one convicted President and a new President Pence? Is there any gain worth having?

Going back over the last, oh, 25 years, it’s not hard to point at numerous individual Republican activities that were not caused by Trump, but presaged him.

• Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) urging the Republicans to give up cooperative, responsible governance in preference to making the Republicans “win”.
• Impeaching a President over a blow-job.
• The gross financial irresponsibility of the three Republican-controlled Congresses of the aught-years, which served to put on display Republican hypocrisy concerning budgetary responsibility.
• Mismanagement of the economy in the belief it’d be self-regulating, i.e., Glass-Steagall repeal.
• Refusal to work on the children of immigrants problem, which resulted in Obama’s “Dreamers” solution.
• The embarrassment and humiliation of the letter written to Iran by most of the Republican Senators during JCPOA debates.
• The utter mendacity surrounding the passing of Justice Scalia and the refusal to consider a candidate recommended by Republicans, Judge Garland Merrick. While Senator McConnell (R-KY) may have been the leader of that particular emission of bald-faced lies, it wasn’t just him, nor was it then-candidate Trump, but instead it took the concerted effort of all the Republican Senators to deny the nation the wisdom of a Justice for more than a year, break the Constitution by not fulfilling their duties, and then laughing about it later.

Welcome them within open arms if they disown someone they palpably haven’t like for his entire Presidency, their little pawn that has been so satisfactory when it came to judicial selections, regulatory actions, and tax reform (which has been such a disaster)?

No, it’s a systemic problem in the heart of what passes for American conservatism these days, and ignoring it by patting on the head disaffected Republicans who’ve finally admitted that Trump has abused his position at this late date will do a greater disservice to the Nation. Only by making our dissatisfaction and disappointment with their behavior, ideology, and even theology (think: craven Evangelical behavior) apparent can we hope for necessary improvements.

A little salty sandpaper on their open wounds is only appropriate. Otherwise, it’ll just keep on happening.

I see Bloomberg has some anonymously sourced news concerning the tax returns of President Trump:

A key House Democrat said he’s consulting lawyers about whether to make public a complaint by a federal employee about possible misconduct in the Internal Revenue Service’s auditing of President Donald Trump.

The complaint raises allegations about “inappropriate efforts to influence” the audit process, House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal said in a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in August. Neal told reporters on Friday that a decision on releasing the complaint depends on advice he receives from lawyers for the House of Representatives.

The release of such a complaint could bolster Neal’s lawsuit seeking to obtain six years of Trump’s tax returns, which he filed in July after the Treasury Department rejected the committee’s request. Neal has said he needs the returns to ensure the IRS is following its policy of annually examining the president’s returns.

Assuming this is true, will Trump’s base care? For most issues, I’d say not. However, in line with the Revolutionary War’s antecedents, it’s a long and hallowed tradition for Americans to bitch & whine about their taxes – and be utterly resentful of the elite who take advantage of loopholes seemingly written just for them.

If, indeed, there’s a whistleblower complaint alleging Trump tried to use the Presidential office to interfere with an audit to his advantage, that might put a stake in the heart of his cult. It doesn’t need to become part of the impeachment inquiry and/or proceedings, but it simply becomes a very important chunk of concrete tied to Trump’s neck, and possibly the piece that breaks him.

And, again if this is true, this is all self-inflicted damage.

Those are the big dinosaurs, the herbivores who wandered about on four legs, didn’t have holes in their bones, and didn’t turn into chickens. But didn’t you ever wonder if they stepped on their fellow denizens of the primordial Earth?

The answer appears to be Yes! From the paleorXiv server, the abstract of Under the feet of sauropods: A trampled coastal marine turtle from the Late Jurassic of Switzerland? 
by Christian Püntener, Jean-Paul Billon-Bruyat, Daniel Marty, and Géraldine Paratte:

Recent excavations from the “Paléontologie A16” project brought to light thousands of dinosaur footprints and numer-ous turtle remains from the Late Jurassic of Porrentruy (Swiss Jura Mountains). While most fossil turtles (Thalassochelydia) were found in marly layers that were deposited in a coastal marine paleoenvironment, the dinosaur (theropods and sauropods) tracks were found in laminites that were deposited in a tidal flat environment. Despite extensive exploration, very few fossils were found in these dinosaur track-bearing laminites. On one occasion, a sub-complete turtle shell (Plesiochelys bigleri) was discovered within the laminites, embedded just beneath an important sauropod track level. The state of preservation of this specimen suggests that the turtle died on the tidal flat and was quickly buried. This is the first evidence that these turtles occasionally visited tidal flat paleoenvironments. Moreover, the particular configuration of the fossil turtle suggests that the shell was possibly trodden on by a large sauropod dinosaur.

The actual paper is here. They suggest the turtle was already dead when trampled, and I do hope so. Not so much intellectually interesting as morbidly fascinating, I know. However, given the size of a sauropod foot and how the turtle compares to it, that was a large turtle.

President Trump appears to be defiant in the face of the Impeachment Inquiry:

pic.twitter.com/dOta1Z9gtZ

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019

Chris Cillizza of CNN objects:

“Try to impeach this” is obviously a dare based on the image, which purports to show just how much support this President had in 2016. But impeachment has zero to do with how popular (or not) a President is or was.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution sets this bar for impeachment:

“The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Nowhere in that is the word “popular” mentioned. Nor is “won a lot more counties in 2016” referenced.ce greatest Economy in the history of our Country, entirely rebuilt our Military into the most powerful it has ever been, Cut Record Taxes & Regulations, fixed the VA & gotten Choice for our Vets (after 45 years), & so much more?“

It’s also worth noting that the Executive, aka Trump, must work WITH Congress to achieve many of these objectives, and by and large has failed to do so; his most noteworthy achievements; the Tax Reform of 2017, which has resulted in immense Federal deficits, and the filling of many federal judiciary seats, both required cooperation from parts of the legislature. While the latter is merely dubious in its uplifting of right-wing zealots to the judiciary, virtually regardless of qualification, the former has already begun to show its ill-advised nature in terms of the aforementioned deficits.

Cillizza also addressed the population density question with a map, but I like this map from World Map better:

Note the concordance between density and Democratic victories in Trump’s map. But this one from Mark Newman of the University of Michigan is even better, as it depicts how the country voted in 2016 and manipulates the geography to fit the voting patterns:

It removes the distortion introduced by our wildly changing population density. But, even more importantly, the fact that it’s from 2016 should be important:

The country has had experience with Trump as President, and given his chronically low approval ratings, it’s becoming clear that impeaching the President isn’t an overwhelming project for the Democrats. Steve Benen provides a useful graph Quinnipiac polls:

As for Quinnipiac, just last week, it found 37% of Americans endorsing Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, while 57% disagreed. The results are quite different now.

American voters are divided on impeaching and removing President Trump from office, 47 – 47 percent – closing a 20-point gap from less than a week ago, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released today. In the poll released on September 25th, voters said that the president should not be impeached and removed 57 – 37 percent. […]

While voters are split on impeaching and removing President Trump from office, a slim majority of registered voters do approve of the impeachment inquiry opened by the U.S. House of Representatives 52 – 45 percent. Approval includes half of independents, who are split 50 – 45 percent on the inquiry.

Given the speed at which voters’ attitudes are changing, President Trump may be spitting into the wind.

Pundits and experts have suggested the impeachment inquiry may take months. I think may see the end of this far more quickly, depending on how loose Trump’s lips become, how much fortitude he wants to display in the face of self-inflicted disaster, and whether or not the Republican Party finally regains its sanity. Indeed, it may occur so quickly it blows the clothing off of his allies in the punditry and Congress. What will tomorrow bring?

No, you did it!

The Inner Circle (1946) gets off to a quick start, introducing us to private detective Johnny Strange. He’s looking for a secretary, but as he’s dictating an ad to the local newspaper, a woman walks in and takes the job, and she’s a woman who matches his somewhat chauvinistic requirements in just about every way. Moments later, she’s answered the phone and has a job for him, so off he charges to meet a mysterious client with a mystery job.

The client, clad all in black, takes him to a house and shows him the body of her husband, shot and gone. Please get rid of it, she asks, but Strange isn’t stupid, so when turns to call the cops, she clunks him upside the head and makes her own arrangements. But as she sheds her black clothes, a witness notes what’s happening.

When Strange awakens, the police are just walking in, the wife is nowhere to be seen, and conclusions are being drawn and quartered before Strange can keep up. It doesn’t help that the victim is a radio personality and gossip-monger who didn’t have a wife. But two days later, the coroner’s jury has bought the story, concocted and sworn to by his secretary, that it was self-defense. Strange is free.

Even if Strange doesn’t remember it that way.

He’s curiosity-driven, and, picking up a clue or two at the Fitch mansion, he begins to put the story together. Meanwhile, that aforementioned witness makes contact with the faux-widow, looking for a penny or two, as he didn’t much care for Mr. Fitch, either. But now the faux-widow is getting a little worried.

Eventually, it’s a radio version of the gathering of the suspects as they broadcast, in admirable fidelity, four scenes from recent days, from which Strange claims he can deduce the identity of Fitch’s killer. Is it the high-society girl? How about the other one? The mobster? The singer with the voice of an angel and the attitude of the devil?

And how will Strange prove it?

The head feints come in a hurry in this short little mystery, but unfortunately little effort is made to make any of them believable, and that’s too bad. A little time, some thinking about it, and that school of red herrings could have been baked into a compelling whodunit (and, no, Wikipedia, this is not noir).

As it is, it’s pleasant and fun, but not serious enough to be memorable.