Monthly Archives: November 2019

The actions of the House Republicans who have access to the impeachment inquiry depositions seem a bit unfocused:

Republicans have complained for weeks about the secret House impeachment inquiry, accusing Democrats of rigging the process and interviewing witnesses behind closed doors — at one point storming the hearing room and chanting, “Let us in!”

But inside the secure room in the Capitol basement where the proceedings are taking place, Republicans have used their time to complain that testimony has become public, going after their colleagues who were quoted in media reports commenting on witness appearances, and quizzing witnesses themselves on how their statements had been released. …

At one point, GOP lawmakers held up the questioning of McKinley to complain about a fellow lawmaker, Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who had made a public comment about witness testimony the day before.

GOP lawmakers during those two days touched not only on Ukraine’s ties to the Bidens but also on potential connections to Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. One line of questioning appeared to suggest, without any evidence, that Yovanovitch might have improperly dealt in classified information, including a question about whether she ever sought to “unmask” the identity of individuals protected in government reports. The term echoed Republican complaints from three years ago that Trump aides’ identities had been unfairly revealed as part of the FBI’s Russia investigation.

It appears the House Republicans are not taking this opportunity to investigate a President who has a number of alleged offenses to his credit, not to mention offensive behavior patterns. They, in fact, appear to be indulging in ineffective behaviors. But why? Here’s some possibilities, keeping in mind that not all the members of a group has the same motivations.

1. They’re foxes. The House GOP are no one’s fools. They know the President is probably not going to survive an impeachment trial, but they also know the zealous Trump base will forgive no one that participates in the process. So? Do the obvious: make great noises, shake your fists and voice your faux-outrage, denounce and denounce, and make sure Fox News gets hold of it. The hell with leadership and moral integrity, because, as Senator Graham (R-SC) has observed, it’s all about being re-elected.
2. They’re frantic. The House GOP knows the President, his and their shared ideology, and their futures will take a big, and perhaps fatal, hit as an unstoppable impeachment occurs, and the trial in the Senate, where antipathy for the President by his GOP allies is more palpable, has a less certain than outcome than they wish. Being a pack of second and third-raters, they’ve been flailing at the levers of power, hoping to delay and even derail the process, but failing. Being who they are, they’ll keep doing it, hoping to play to hometown constituents who are their ultimate audience.
3. They’re irretrievably partisan. Party over country, even theology over country. We’re already seeing this with the Evangelicals. The House GOP has it in spades, and it doesn’t matter if President Trump were to shoot even one of them in the middle of a busy city street, they’d still defend him as the leader of the Party, even proclaiming him immune to prosecution. Here, let me get on my hobby horse and adjust the stirrups. Yep, this would fit right in with Turchin’s disintegrative phase from Secular Cycles, in which the nation’s political elite engages in internecine warfare, literally murder and warfare in many cases, until a generation or two has passed, and the children of the survivors decree Enough, we don’t care who is responsible, the fighting is finished!

So which is it? I’m not sure, and the group may even be split into substantial groups corresponding to the categories. My guess is that it’s #3, as they just don’t seem to be that bright of bulbs, but they do seem power-hungry and ideologically driven. That may be their doom, all wrapped up, as the constituents who’ll suffer at their hands, should eventually figure out what’s going on and dump them in the gutter of history.

No doubt this is a metaphor. Or a simile. Or maybe a silly. Your view, your call.

It was about time for another semi-serious alien invasion movie, and Annihilation (2018), for lack of a more plausible interpretation, will have to fill the bill. Told in a non-linear fashion, and admirably parsimonious with critical information, Earth is being invaded – for lack of a better word – by something called the Shimmer, at an undescribed part of coastal America where a piece of space rock has impacted a lighthouse. The area has been evacuated, optics are a little screwy, and anyone who goes in does not come out.

Until Sgt Kane, effectively lobotomized, pops up literally out of nowhere at his own house, frightening his wife, Lena.

Soon Lena is at the forward security post of the Shimmer, examining the phenomenon from afar. It’s growing in area, which alarms everyone. She falls in with a psychologist, a physicist, a geomorphologist, and a paramedic, all women, and Lena herself is ex-military and a PhD biologist. They are all members of the group selected for the next expedition into the mystery. Within days they’re off.

Where they immediately lose a couple of days without noticing it. Why?

And are attacked by a giant mutant alligator. Amazed by giant mutant flowers. Bemused by giant mutant lichen –

Oh, sorry. But it’s true.

Soon they discover gruesome evidence of previous military missions into the Shimmer, body parts and memory sticks and, well, less common articles. But things start coming together when the giant mutant bear kills one of the women and begins screaming for help … in her voice.

Soon, the difference between invader and defender is blurring, and whether that person on the medical gurney is a person or not is problematic.

But there are problems with this story. Why send in a woman-only team? Must they all have some burden to bear? I mean, I understand this makes them expendable, but it also may damage their will to survive and reach their goal, no? And where the hell is the military, anyways? They hardly show their faces, and yet national security is their primary responsibility. The presentation doesn’t make sense.

Worse yet, these women are supposedly strong, highly educated and trained women, but that education, with the exception of Lena, is not a big part of the story; indeed, their screaming has a bigger part than their training. Their leader, the psychologist, is more like a pro-forma chaperone at a hormone laden school dance, off with her own agenda concerning the cute science teacher, rather than keeping the teenagers from getting into trouble. Why would the military assign such an uninterested leader?

In the end, while this should feel like an intense exploration of an utterly alien race akin to the exploration in Arrival (2017), of the difficulties of understanding the motivations of a species which lack even a common ancestor, it looked more like someone had come up with a lot of really cool CGI effects, hired Natalie Portman to emote all over the place, put it on film and called it a movie. Many of the visuals border on the fantastic, some of the bones of this story are good, such as letting information out slowly and teasingly, but others are little more than the fragile flowers that litter the sets, and consequently Annihilation tends to tilt at the worst of times.

No camouflage here, no sir:

Photographed through a window screen, in case you wondered.

It looks like the Minnesota GOP is running scared, because they have decided not to acknowledge there might be challengers to the great and hallowed leader:

President Donald Trump will be the only choice on the ballot in Minnesota’s Republican presidential primary, even though he’s not the only candidate.

The state Republican Party has decided voters won’t have any alternatives.

Its chairwoman, Jennifer Carnahan, sent a letter to the Minnesota Secretary of State on Oct. 24 outlining the party’s “determination of candidates” for the March 3 Republican primary ballot. Trump is the only name listed.

Absent are three other Republicans who, while long shots, are prominent political names running active campaigns: former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and former U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois.

“The idea that we’re taking our cues from North Korea or the Soviet Union in terms of voter access and voter participation just seems weird to me,” Sanford said in an interview Thursday. Minnesota voters are the biggest losers in the party decision, he said, adding that he suspects that state party leaders are worried a contested primary would show Trump isn’t as popular as he claims. [StarTribune]

I think Sanford’s comments are particularly stinging. For a party which ostensibly champions personal freedoms and liberty, this eviction of Trump intra-party rivals from the primary ballot as if they don’t exist suggests worry, even panic by local Party leaders that, given a choice, the local base may not be so rabidly pro-Trump as they’d like.

Of course, given how Trump has chosen to treat entities which aren’t rabidly pro-Trump, such as, say, California, they may be justified, particularly if they’re the sort who desperately seek the approval of authority figures. And I’m not just being snarky here: the entire toxic culture of team politics does encourage such a mind-set. If the local higher muckety-mucks are predisposed to such an authoritarian atmosphere, they may – probably did – have jumped as high as possible when a Trump campaign minion squawked at them to clear the primary table for Trump.

It’s a pity they don’t understand the advantages of an open competition, particularly seeing as they’re the party of free enterprise. See, now that’s just snark.

Still …

In 2016, Trump finished third in Minnesota’s Republican presidential caucus, trailing Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. In the general election, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson — a former Republican governor of New Mexico who had Weld as his running mate — got 4% of the vote. Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by less than 2%.

A third place finish again would make Trump look awful, wouldn’t it? And chill the chances of advancement by local officials. Tsk.

But as Minnesota farmers reel not only from the trade wars, but from Ag Secretary Perdue running around advising them that the future is Big Ag, I suspect, if Trump even runs again, the Democratic margin of victory will be closer to 15 points. Minnesotans have seen an amateur at work in the national arena, and by and large I suspect they’ll either vote Democratic or stay home – and lie to pollsters who call about the 2016 election. OK, so I’m optimistic – still, closer to 10 points.

The Hill’s headline says it all:

Trump says Republicans should release their own transcripts in impeachment probe

President Trump suggested Sunday that Republicans should release their own versions of transcripts of interviews in the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry.

In a tweet, Trump claimed House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes.” His tweet came as Schiff said Democrats were planning to release transcripts of the interviews held in the probe so far.

I think Steve Benen misses an important point in his analysis, as true as it may be:

It’s unlikely that anyone in the West Wing has reviewed the deposition transcripts, but dozens of House Republicans have participated in the behind-closed-doors process – claims to the contrary notwithstanding – and they’ve had an opportunity to let the president know how the developments have unfolded.

And given the weekend’s presidential tweets, Trump has apparently been told to expect some discouraging news.

There’s also a degree of irony hanging overhead: for weeks, the White House and its GOP allies have condemned the private nature of the impeachment inquiry and demanded more transparency. But now that transcripts are poised to be released, Trump appears to be scrambling to undermine public confidence in the materials – which Republicans used to be eager for us to see.

During the assorted depositions, some House Democrats told reporters that Republicans were actually lucky that that the discussions were unfolding in private. In light of Trump’s stress-tweeting, the president is starting to realize those Dems were right.

But in order for public perceptions of President Trump to change to be in accordance with the transcripts and their interpretations, there must be trust in the transcripts.

But this goes deeper than casting doubt on the transcripts. Over the years, I’ve occasionally taken mass emails from the conservative side of the political spectrum and turned them inside out to show an anti-government thread that runs through them. Whether or not they’re reflective of American authors writing them, or the result of a studied assault on American society by a foreign power, they function as a divisive wedge separating Americans from the government by blinding us to the fact that it’s not THE government, but OUR government, and we can and should participate in it.

By casting doubt on the transcripts, which are supposed to be faithful reproductions of the statements of witnesses, we see the sowing of doubt concerning the trustworthiness of the Republic’s elected lawmakers. Whether this is purely the result of Trump’s morality-free way of life, or if he’s doing so at the direction of foreign masters, I have no idea; all I know is that either hypothesis is consistent with what little we know.

But I do know that if the Republicans endorse this defense mechanism, then they’re directly contributing to the potential dissolution of the United States.

Trevor Paglen is a geographer and artist who works with what is still called artificial intelligence in his latter capacity, and so I found his viewpoint on AI, recently expressed in a review of his recent work in NewScientist (12 October 2019, paywall), to be interesting:

Paglen fears the way the word intelligence implies some kind of superhuman agency and infallibility to what are in essence giant statistical engines. “This is terribly dangerous,” he says, “and also very convenient for people trying to raise money to build all sorts of shoddy, ill-advised applications with it.”

“You’re STAFF,” she used to say.

Long time readers know that I’ve often expressed strong skepticism about the use of the term artificial intelligence in connection with what passes under that rubric. Intelligence is not an easy thing to define, and it’s become more and more clear that there is a wide spectrum of behaviors which may be defined as intelligence, such as recognition of self in a mirror, a capability which extends beyond humans to certain cetaceans and others. Anyone with a dog or cat, or an alpaca, knows there’s some intelligence in the critter.

But it seems to me that the use of the phrase artificial intelligence is, in itself, somewhat specious. Is there really a point to distinguishing the substrate of the intelligence? Does this accomplish anything beyond noting that it’s not biological, and thus possibly inferior? That would certainly be congruent with my sneaking hunch that people and corporations would still prefer to work with enslaved creatures that can hardly fight back, and that AI fills the bill.

I once touched in passing on an observation concerning when something is or is not the advanced form of programming in the context of ranked choice voting in Maine, and I’ll reiterate it:

When a programmer is given a task to solve, typically the steps that we’re encoding for the computer to follow are either well-known at the time of the assignment, or they can be deduced through simple inspection, or they can be collected out in the real world. An example of the last choice comes from the world of medicine, where early attempts at creating a diagnosis AI began with collecting information from doctors on how to map symptomology to disease diagnosis.

These steps may be laborious or tricky to code, either due to their nature or the limitations of the computers they will be run on, but at their heart they’re well-known and describable.

My observations of ML, on the other hand, is that ML installations are coded in such a way as to not assume that the recipe is known. At its heart, ML must discover the recipe that leads to the solution through observation and feedback from an authority entity. To take this back to the deferment I requested a moment ago, the encoding of the discovered recipe is often opaque and difficult to understand, as the algorithms are often statistical in nature.

I think that digital historians (and this dude claims he’s working on digital archaeology, so don’t laugh) will eventually classify algorithms based on whether the rules directing the program were concocted and encoded by the programmers or users, or if the program itself must deduce the rules based on behaviors and feedback from humans or entities that can validate the deduced rules. Note that the colloquial definitions of artificial intelligence, which require an approach to self-agency, even if it’s not achieved, are not really even relevant to this definition.

And this is important, as Paglen notes, because true self-agency isn’t just a game-changer, if it ever occurs, it’ll be a positive feedback loop. Engineers know that such loops amplify initially small effects in ways that are often out of control and destructive, while negative feedback loops damp down undesirable behaviors through detection and suppression.

An angry self-aware computer isn’t something we want to face, I suspect. Not only are there strong ethical conundrums to worry about, but, if it has access to weaponry, the concerns become existential.

Back to Paglen for another choice observation:

Asked what concerns him more, intelligent machines or the people who use them, Paglen answers: “I worry about the people who make money from them. Artificial intelligence is not about making computers smart. It’s about extracting value from data, from images, from patterns of life. The point is not seeing. The point is to make money or to amplify power.”

And they’re not concerned about ethics, I suspect, although occasionally a bit of noise about ethics leaks through. There’s gold up in those hills to be collected, and the slow poke gets nothing. Ethics, shmethics.

Just getting back to an old love – stuff in space. Here’s a pic of Mercury:

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Arid and lonely, and so so close to our primary. A certain ennui associates with it.

I was a little startled to read this bit from coverage of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent speech to coal mining interests:

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison railed against environmental protesters in a lunchtime speech on Friday, warning of a “new breed of radical activism” that was “apocalyptic in tone” and pledging to outlaw boycott campaigns that he argued could hurt the country’s mining industry.

The remarks were made to an audience at the Queensland Resources Council, an organization that represents peak mining interests in the northeastern Australian state. …

And appalls my Arts Editor, who comes from a publishing family.

More at Hellvetica.com.

In reference to a Trump anti-Witch Hunt party,

Supporters who showed up to the witch hunt hunt were gifted with orange caps featuring jack-o’-lanterns on the front, and “Keep America Great!” on the back. The crowd listed toward retirement age; instead of candy, there were tables of fruit and crudities, and a cash bar. There were plenty of MAGA hats and Trump T-shirts, but few actual Halloween costumes. [WaPo]

I can’t quite decide if they really meant crudities, or just typoed crudites. They both really work.

I present to you the chance to work on a desktop version of the Cray-1, by Craig Fenton:

As part two (see previous attempt) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking for a Cray emulator and came up dry, so I decided to do something about it. Luckily, the Cray-1 hardware reference manual turned out to be useful enough that implementing most of this was pretty straightforward. The Cray-1 is one of those iconic machines that just makes you say “Now that‘s a super computer!” Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?

Not really, but Wow. There’s software emulation, but this guy’s doing it in hardware using a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). They permit customized computer platform to be built in the field. I briefly looked at FPGAs for implementing some work project, of which I’ve mostly forgotten, but that work environment was too unstable to accomplish anything. A pity about that.

This was from the era when computers had presence. Here’s the old Cray-1A from Computing History:

They note:

In 1975 the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced. Excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was Cray Research’s first official customer in July 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) [or roughly $38 million in 2018 dollars]. The NCAR machine was decommissioned in January 1979.

And here’s Fenton’s Civil War re-enactment piece:

Geek on!

[H/T Kevin M]

Twitter has decided to ban political ads, rather than wade into the quagmire of evaluating the truthfulness of such ads, as noted by NBC News:

Twitter announced Wednesday that it will no longer take political ads, a major step as tech companies work to deal with misinformation ahead of the 2020 election.

The ban will go into place in November.

In a series of tweets, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey laid out the company’s reasoning, focusing on the downside of political advertising when combined with digital advertising.

“While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions,” Dorsey tweeted.

“Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale,” Dorsey added.

I suppose I should be embarrassed that I didn’t even know that Twitter had advertising at all, but I’ll skip the pretense. I do not see much utility to Twitter as a societal entity, and so I don’t care. Rival Facebook’s policy?

Facebook is currently embroiled in a debate over its decision to allow political campaigns to push ads containing misinformation. The company has said it does not think it should be the arbiter of political speech, though it does stop companies and political committees from using false information in ads.

This all reminds me that I treated a topic I’d consider a close cousin of this one back in early 2018 as part of a conversation with a conservative friend of mine. The last post of that thread is here, but I’ll summarize because the posts are long. He argued that there really is no such thing as a free press dedicated to facts, but rather always-biased actors; to suggest that some news sources were worse than others, even those sponsored by national adversaries, was an error, and to suggest an audience cannot discern truth vs manipulation was an insult to the audience. I disagreed. If you want more, follow the above link and find your way to the beginning.

My point here, though, is that Dorsey has acknowledged two things:

1. The difficulties of policing paid political ads. Issues of facts vs partial facts vs lies, presentations, and even timing (think of Comey’s announcement concerning Clinton near the end of the last Presidential campaign) makes the task of policing such ads Herculean.
2. The influence of social media on the national discourse. Some folks may dismiss it, but it’s become apparent that social media can be used to polarize American society.

Social media hosted on the Internet is, unless special preparations are taken, naturally an international phenomenon. This means that, politically, both domestic and foreign powers can access them and use them for their own ends.

A domestic political power, although sometimes malignant, is usually acting in what it sees as the best interests of the nation.

As I noted in my conversation with my friend, no such assumptions can be made about a foreign power. Given that no one can be required to reveal their associations in the arena of social media, and the difficulty both technical and non-technical individuals to track down this obscured yet critical information, all the messages one receives on social media from people you don’t know are suspect. (Contrast this to the services offered, present and past tense, by traditional news media, the best of which considered it a requirement that they track down and report such associations to reader. The loss of such traditional new sources will continue to prove to be one of the most under-reported, yet important losses to American culture as the years pass.)

Now, as I understand it, Twitter’s ban is on paid advertising; non-commercial accounts can still spew as they wish. Non-commercial accounts only communicate with those that have signed up for such communications, and they lack, for the most part, impressive names to attract the unwary; an important exception is someone like President Trump. However, this should still put quite a dent in the reach of malevolent entities. And there’s tentative proof of this, as a certain Matthew Dowd has observed (I know nothing about Mr. Dowd, so I’m merely tentative so far as proof goes, but I assume it’s not hard to track down confirmations for the Twitter pro):

The two main entities attacking Twitter for its banning of political ads are: Brad Parscale/Trump campaign and Russian state television. Hmmm…..

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) October 31, 2019

So Putin’s pissed, eh? Given Special Counsel Mueller’s report on the Internet Research Agency (here’s a nice link sympatico with this post), this comes as no surprise.