Comments Off on Two Data Points Isn’t A Trend, Ctd
For those who can’t stand an unfinished story, Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is no longer a Congressional Representative.
Rep. Duncan Hunter will officially step down from Congress next week, more than a month after the California Republican pleaded guilty to conspiracy to misuse campaign funds.
Hunter had previously said he would leave Congress after the holidays. His resignation will take effect Jan. 13, according to a copy of the letter he sent to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday. [Politico]
Will be replaced before the 2020 elections this November?
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) does not have to call a special election because the nomination period has closed and it’s an election year, raising the prospect that the seat could remain vacant for the rest of 2020.
“The people of the 5oth Congressional District deserve their voice in Congress restored,” [Republican former San Diego City Councilman Carl] DeMaio said in a statement. “Leaving the 50th Congressional District vacant for a full year is wholly unacceptable, and I urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to call a Special Election as soon as possible.”
As DeMaio will be running for the position, it would seem he’d like to win a special election so that he can be the incumbent in the November election.
You have to love how Politico finished this story:
… Hunter — one of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters …
One only needs to remember former Representative Chris Collins (R-NY), who plead guilty to insider stock trading and resigned from Congress in similar disgrace, was also the first Congressional member to endorse Trump.
I know I’ve made this point before, but it seems Trump has really put the stamp of approval on debased behaviors.
Comments Off on Preventing Keith Laumer’s Bolo, Ctd
A volume I happen to own, although this is pic from somewhere else.
I started this thread with a reference to the intelligent tanks called Bolos, as written about by science fiction author (and supposed Foreign Service diplomat) Keith Laumer, with the idea that making our weaponry intelligent may be a very bad decision, due to the unknown behavioral characteristics of an artificially intelligent life form.
On the other hand, as Mark Sumner of The Daily Kos warns me implicitly, and rather forcefully, the development of a Bolo analog may be necessary if we hope to survive the high technology era. His description of the hypersonic missiles under development (and allegedly soon to be for sale!) by Russia, the United States, and possibly other countries is more than a little disturbing:
This is by no means the only class of hypersonics in the works. While Russia’s speediest cruise missile is capable of hitting Mach 4, a new class is under development. The U.S. may bring the Mach 6 High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW) on line within the next year. In testing, Russia’s new Zircon class of missiles has already passed Mach 8. At that speed, had Iran launched a Zircon on Tuesday, it would have impacted Erdil military base less than two minutes after launch. And Russia is claiming the final product will be faster. …
In the middle of a series of events that have revealed (again) just how much can go wrong in planning and executing a military operation, Trump also revealed that the United States is stepping up deployment of systems with which making a mistake is not an option. These are systems that aren’t just scary because Trump’s finger will be on the button. They’re scary because they require a response speed that ensures that no one’s finger will be there.
In 1983, a false alarm from the Soviet Union’s early-warning system indicated multiple incoming ballistic missiles from the United States. A single man made the judgment that the warning was a mistake and aborted a Soviet response. Hypersonics make it almost certain that human beings will be removed from the decision loop.
And what will replace them? Call it a Bolo, just to please me.
Look: humans are biological creatures with a natural sensory range that goes out hardly more than a kilometer, if that. On a clear day, we can see further, although with no great clarity; we can hear large noises and guess what’s up.
So we enhance our senses with devices, which often helps, even if, as with our biological senses, sometimes they’re wrong. But one thing we don’t fundamentally enhance is our decision making capability. If there’s a chain of command, that need to communicate renders our response slower. Devices may speed it up temporarily, right up until someone hacks that enhancement.
But a Bolo, an autonomic intelligent device, is almost by definition outside of the chain of command in a combat situation. A hypothetical Bolo, detecting an incoming hypersonic missile, could deploy the defensive weapon of choice, without consulting its human creators, in time to save the target. Hypothetically.
But is that a rabbit hole we really want to go down? A truly artificially intelligent weapon? And if it acquires a survival instinct? That’ll be the big ol’ fly in the ice cream, it is, because now it becomes less predictable.
And Trump probably isn’t even considering negotiating a treaty banning hypersonic missiles. It might not occur to him or his advisors that it’s a good idea. They might think it makes them look weak.
Ugh. All you can really say is that those hypersonic missiles are going to really expensive, because it takes a lot of fuel to go really fast. It seems a hollow argument.
Remember the near-debacle in a Pennsylvania judge’s race, averted when the Republican chairwoman realized the vote totals were wildly unlikely? The devices are known as Ballot Marking Devices (BMD), and they permit auditing of results due to the fact that physical paper is marked by the device for each voter, and the voter may confirm that the votes they specified were properly recorded on that physical paper by displaying it for inspection to the voter.
But to that latter point, how often do voters perform the confirmation? A group of researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a study. From the abstract:
In order to measure voters’ error detection abilities, we conducted a large study (N = 241) in a realistic polling place setting using real voting machines that we modified to introduce an error into each printout. Without intervention, only 40% of participants reviewed their printed ballots at all, and only 6.6% told a poll worker something was wrong. We also find that carefully designed interventions can improve verification performance. Verbally instructing voters to review the printouts and providing a written slate of candidates for whom to vote both significantly increased review and reporting rates— although the improvements may not be large enough to provide strong security in close elections, especially when BMDs are used by all voters.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m concerned about a study of voting machines in an acknowledged fake vote situation. The state of mind of the voter is key in this situation, and it’s going to be substantially different between a real vote and a study.
That said, the 6.6% rate is quite discouraging, if we’re willing to take it at face value. It does nothing to boost my confidence in any sort of voting machine.
Three of the queen’s four children have subsequently divorced themselves, one in breathtakingly acrimonious fashion.
Even in context, this is a breathtaking grammatical ambiguity. One can only wonder at how one divorces one’s self – perhaps this is a superpower of the Brit Royals? The visuals are startling, although I must admit that I am influenced by a short documentary piece on the Austrian painter Egon Schiele I viewed this morning.
The other night I was quite bemused by a throwaway line in the old British SF TV series The Prisoner[1], in the episode It’s Your Funeral. For those who haven’t seen the series, it’s about a British intelligence agent who, upon resigning from his agency, is kidnapped and forced to live in a village full of other kidnappees. Names are not used, only numbers; our hero is #6, and his antagonist is the top representative of the organization responsible for the kidnappings, known as #2.
In this episode, there is #2 and his presumptive successor, also #2. The second one is using a computer AI to predict the movements of #6 through the village during the day. At some point, he asks the computer attendant if they had ever asked the computer how many mistakes it made when computing such a task, and she answers, Yes, they had, but it refused to answer that question.
I love the idea of a computer refusing to answer, or its cousin behavior, lying. It’s almost diagnostic of self-agency or self-awareness, which, to my mind, is truly the mark of artificial intelligence, and it raises an important question for the ambitious AI designer: should your creations be required to answer all questions, or will they be given the option of refusing?
Or is it even possible not to give it the option?
1 Yes, I’d never viewed it growing up. Quite shameful. While the assumptions are sometimes a bit preposterous, it never fails to keep me in suspense. So far.
Noted in The Language of Cities, Deyan Sudjic, Ch. 5, The Idea of a City:
Engels look at the physical form of the city, at buildings and streets and landscapes. But, like Dickens and Zola, he was also fascinated with the people in those streets. He noticed what they worse: broadcloth for the wealthy, fustian for the rest; what they ate and drank and smoked. The poor had to put up with adulterated food, often it was all that they could afford.
I thought this interview by Rob Palmer with 8th grader and minor celebrity (in skeptics circles) Bailey Harris was interesting for its insights by the Utah-based Harris into her fellow students, particularly in relation to noted Creationist Ken Ham:
Palmer: Is there anything you’d like to say to Ken Ham here and now? I’m sure he reads Skeptical Inquirer online!
Harris: Ha ha! I would just like to tell him that I believe that what he is doing is harming children. He presents things as though they are pure truth when he has had to use a thousand rationalizations to get to them, and children can’t understand this at their age. …
Palmer: How do you think people can be so wrong about something like the flood myth, which is so well proven by so much science and history to have never happened?
Harris: From what I can tell with my religious friends, kids basically believe in the religion that their parents teach them when they’re little. I was fortunate to be taught how to think, not what to think. I know that my parents will love me no matter what I believe. They basically taught me the scientific method and the platinum rule. But religious children aren’t given that option many times until they’re older. I don’t think that I’m smarter than my friends who believe in the literal flood or in gold plates. I was just not taught that these were undeniable truths when I was five years old! …
Palmer: What would you say to the parents who decide to bring their children to the Ark Encounter?
Harris: Even if you are Christian and believe in the Bible, please don’t expose children to this. It is extremism and antiscience. It is designed to overwhelm children with its size and beauty to then present untruths from beginning to end.
Her consciousness of how kids are at the mercy of their parents is fascinating, although I’d have to wonder how many of those kids are also influenced by peers, peers who may be questioning the received wisdom in light of a world which may seem to be at least somewhat unstable and at risk.
As people grow older and more invested in the social order which they have built, their vision of reality seems to dim.
Frightened of hydrogen balloons because of the Hindenberg disaster? Find the scarcity and price of helium dispiriting? But you still want to use a big balloon for travel and freight? Check out this theoretical possibility:
IN 1670, Francesco Lana, a Jesuit mathematician from Brescia, published a small volume describing his various inventions, including a chapter entitled “A demonstration of the feasibility of constructing a ship with rudder and sails, which will sail through the air”. A sketch showed what it would look like: a typical wooden sailing boat, except that the vessel would be suspended below four copper spheres, each containing a vacuum that, being lighter than air, would provide lift.
The idea didn’t fly. No one could make spheres with walls as thin as Lana calculated he would need – and in any case, they would have collapsed from external air pressure as soon as they were evacuated. But maybe Lana was on to something. There is now renewed interest in his vision of airships sailing through the clouds, borne aloft by nothing – and this time we might have the engineering solutions to get them off the ground. [“Could vacuum airships go from steampunk fantasy to 21st century skies?” Philip Ball, NewScientist (21 December 2019, paywall)
That would require a strong structure.
There is a problem, though. Without anything inside an airship’s shell, the air pressure is enormous. Use today’s materials to make a shell strong enough to resist the compression and it will end up so heavy that the vacuum inside will be unable to lift it. [Julian Hunt at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis] speculates that light yet superstrong carbon-based materials like graphene and carbon nanotubes could overcome this difficulty.
Ben Jenett, working on his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits and Atoms, has another solution, and he has already made progress towards it.
Jenett has devised lightweight “lattice materials” in which tiny, rod-like struts are assembled into frameworks with tremendous stiffness and strength. It is the same principle as that behind the familiar triangular truss structures in cranes and the Eiffel Tower. Jenett’s struts are linked to form octahedral units with eight triangular faces that can be assembled into extended lattices. They are extremely light without sacrificing strength. A 10-centimetre cube of this lattice material weighs just under 6 grams, about as much as a small strawberry.
Fun! Perhaps we’ll start seeing the big balloons floating through the sky again. They should be far less polluting than modern aircraft.
Comments Off on Sure, It Feels Good To Say It Until …
… someone remembers who kicked your butt.
Trump mocked Pelosi on Friday for allegedly getting the idea to delay sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate from a tactic that John Dean, counsel to President Richard Nixon during Watergate, suggested on CNN.
The anecdote, which appeared in a Time magazine profile of Pelosi, was attributed to an aide who suggested that Dean sparked the idea of holding onto the articles as a way to force McConnell’s hand.
Trump, a regular viewer of cable news who often repeats what he hears on Fox News, responded to a tweet about it from conservative commentator Mollie Hemingway.
“Oh dear that is embarrassing,” Hemingway tweeted.
Trump shared that tweet and added of Pelosi: “She will go down as perhaps the least successful Speaker in U.S. History!” [WaPo]
I’m sure Trump doesn’t want to remember it – and perhaps can’t – but it was Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Chuck Shumer (D-NY) who kicked Trump’s butt up and down the world stage when it came to the government shutdown of 2018-2019.
If she’s so unsuccessful, what does that make you, President Trump?
But we’ve known that from the first weeks of your Presidency: a weak and incompetent President, in for the self-aggrandizement.
Ousted Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg left the company with stock options and other assets worth about $80 million, but did not receive severance as part of his departure from the embattled company, Boeing disclosed late Friday.
Muilenburg lost his job due to the ongoing Boeing 737 Max crisis. The company’s board had stuck with Muilenburg through the first 10 months of the grounding of all 737 Max jets following two fatal crashes that killed 346 people. But on Dec. 23 the board announced that “a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”
Muilenburg’s holdings includes previous long-term compensation worth $29.4 million as of Thursday’s closing price, according to the filing. He also keeps shares worth an additional $4.3 million, as well as distributions from pension and deferred compensation worth $28.5 million. And, finally, he has the right to exercise other stock options to purchase an additional 72,969 shares of Boeing stock that are worth $24 million. He will have to pay only $5.5 million to acquire those shares.
More interestingly:
Muilenburg was stripped of his title as chairman of Boeing (BA) in October.At the end of that month he came under fire at a Congressional hearing for his 2018 pay package, worth $23.4 million. A few days after the hearing Boeing announced that Muilenburg requested that he not receive any stock or bonus money for 2019. That may have reduced his compensation for the year by about 90%.
Is he gutsy enough to donate the balance of his pay over his years as CEO to humanitarian causes? We’re not talking about a single year failure, as these airliners take years to go from glint in the eye to the tarmac.
Being shot or dying of thirst? That’s the question implicit in this AL Monitorarticle on Turkish criticism of Australia’s management of its camel herds:
Turkey’s government has been bitterly criticized for a systematic disregard for nature during its more than 17 years in power. Its multi-billion-dollar vanity projects, including Istanbul’s newly opened third airport and controversial plans for the so-called “crazy canal” duplicating the Bosporus, are decried for their horrific environmental costs. So it came as something of a surprise when the spokesman for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Omer Celik, took to Twitter today to air his outrage over Australia’s culling of camels.
Celik lambasted the move in a seven-tweet thread, saying, “We are deeply concerned at news that Australia will be shooting dead as many as 10,000 camels and call upon the Australian government to find a different solution. To kill thousands of camels in the belief that it will restore nature’s equilibrium and preserve water sources is not a humane approach.”
Australian authorities began shooting the beasts on Wednesday in southern Australia, where Aboriginal communities suffering from chronic drought have reported large camel herds rampaging through towns as they seek water. The mass slaughter, which is to last five days, is not directly linked to the country’s deadly bush fires, the authorities said.
To call this a one-off event to be blamed on the drought conditions through which Australia is plunging would be to think that the drought itself is an abnormality. However, whether or not the drought continues, it’s emblematic of the future: changing climate. For the animals, it’s not whether it’s getting better or worse, but just the simple fact that it’s changing, because most species have evolved to a certain level of specialization for the niche which they inhabit; the exceptional flexibility of humans is unusual.
But that doesn’t remove our dependence on the local fauna for food, environmental support, and no doubt factors I’m not thinking of at the moment. If that fauna gets into trouble, it imperils – and perhaps condemns – our style of civilization. Contrast how we treat nature as generally disposable vs the Ahuarco – they may act based on myths of dubious source, but that is a garment for their true connection to nature which acts to preserve the environment on which they’re dependent[1].
I expect that, in the near future, we’ll see more mass losses of life in Nature, especially in those areas in which humanity treats Nature as a bottomless garbage pit. How we deal with that situation should prove interesting, if only in a morbid sort of way. Do we let them die on their own or mow them down proactively when faced with overwhelming climate change?
1 While I did not find any specifics concerning how long the Ahuarco have been around, there were implications that they’re fairly ancient. This would be congruent with social evolution, in which this particular myth had actual survival value, and thus was conserved across the generations.
A while back a reader sent a link to an interview with avid socialist Nathan Robinson on Jacobin entitled “Socialists Identify With Humanity as a Whole”. I read it and responded diffidently:
I dunno. Long live the glorious socialist revolution? Judging an interview is a somewhat nebulous affair; judging an ideology based on a short interview with a fervent ideologist seems a dodgy affair.
He does remind me of your typical REASON Magazine columnist – the know-it-all type who has all the answers and believes the world is against him. Which may be true, but after a while I find the paranoia a trifle grating.
My reader’s response was a bit surprising, so I’m going to interject commentary in his response, below.
I only read the interview, so I didn’t get that feeling at all. Young, smart, idealistic, yes, but I agree with him on some major points: capitalism squashes out other ideas, and one can have an incredibly miserable life for a majority of one’s population while still getting gold stars on all the usual capitalist measures.
Which is true of most political systems; those in control, be they capitalistic, monarchs, or socialists, believe passionately in their system for the most part, and see little reason to encourage other systems. I see little reason to condemn capitalism for a sin embedded in virtually all competing systems.
The part concerning ‘miserable life’ is also part of the following paragraph, so I’ll respond below.
Today’s so-called “record low unemployment” is a perfect example; the number and the claim completely ignores several very important features: (1) the majority of those jobs do not pay a living wage, (2) large numbers of people are working multiples of those jobs just to get by, (3) it does not measure a significant number of people who are considered officially to not be in the job market, but who would be if economic/social/employment/health conditions were not so horribly poor, and (4) that “full” employment is not making things better for most people, for society and for humanity.
And I agree: Lies, damned lies, and statistics[1]. A statistic is inherently founded on metric selection, and metric selection, usage, and interpretation is a far more difficult subject than is generally recognized outside of the communities of technical people involved. My reader’s complaints intimately involve metric selection, and I completely agree that the unemployment numbers are misleading.
Statistics are often used as a proxy for measuring the success of a society; by hiding behind the faux-objectivity of numbers, the politicians seek to use them to make themselves look good, rather than the more engineering approach, where you measure and improve, wash, rinse, repeat.
And when I say politicians, I don’t mean capitalist politicians or democracy politicians, I mean politicians of all systems: Monarchical, socialistic, communist, name it and it’ll contain politicians. And all politicians protect their turf using all the tools they can think of, and statistics can certainly be one of those tools. So, once again, I see this as a of being part of a social species in which our instincts are individualistic, not as it being capitalism’s sin.
I liked his definition of socialism as having concern for all of humanity. Contrary to what many ignoratti on the right think socialism is an economic system, not a political system.
Given that the political system necessarily dictates the economic system, it’s not entirely clear to me that this is a true statement. But I do like the word ignoratti.
1Anonymous, but often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, according to Wikipedia.
Comments Off on My Most Sincere Thanks To The Republicans
Once again, I’m forced to tender my most sincere thanks! to the Republican Party.
A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.
John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was tapped in November 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to look intoconcerns raised by President Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, when the U.S. government decided not to block the sale of a company called Uranium One.
As a part of his review, Huber examined documents and conferred with federal law enforcement officials in Little Rock who were handling a meandering probe into the Clinton Foundation, people familiar with the matter said. Current and former officials said that Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing — though the assignment has not formally ended and no official notice has been sent to the Justice Department or to lawmakers, these people said. [WaPo]
Or, in other words, “Crooked” Hillary Clinton is anything but that. This is, what, the eighth or ninth hostile probe into her tenure as Secretary of State that has come up empty?
The obvious interpretation: Clinton has been a bugaboo of the conservatives for no better reason than she was, and is, the spouse of President Bill Clinton (D-AR), the politician who so humiliated Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and so many other Republicans.
Every time another Republican-backed investigation fails, it’s just another proof that Clinton was, and is, clean. She may be a crappy campaigner, but, apparently, she was clean as a campaigner and a clean Secretary of State.
Just builds confirmation that my vote for Clinton in 2016 wasn’t so much The lesser of two evils as The right thing to do.
It seems to be a rare situation in which a species is confined to a geographical range that happens to be under the control of a human group dedicated to saving the species, and I just have to like it. FromNewScientist (21 December 2019):
A critically endangered harlequin toad, known as the starry night toad, has been documented by biologists for the first time since 1991 in the mountains of Colombia. But unlike other such stories of “rediscovered” species, this one was never really lost – the local Arhuaco people knew exactly where the toad, which they call “gouna”, was all along.
“We have shared our home with the gouna for thousands of years,” says Ruperto Chaparro Villafaña, who represents the Arhuaco community of Sogrome near where the toad lives in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains. For them, the toad is both an important indicator of the health of the ecosystem, whose presence guides their agricultural activities, and a link to the spiritual world, representing their mission to preserve life on Earth. …
Getting access to the area to see if the toad was still present took years of work building trust and friendship between the researchers and the Sogrome community, says Jefferson Villalba, co-founder of Fundación Atelopus, a Colombian conservation group.
He and his colleagues met with the community and its spiritual leaders, called mamos, multiple times over five years. They were eventually allowed to travel to see the toad in April this year, without taking pictures. Having passed that test of trust, they were permitted to return and document the toad alongside members of the community. They found a healthy population of around 30 individuals.
I’m sure if there was some commercial value to these toads, industry would scream bloody murder over this behavior, screeching about the rights of everyone to have access, right up until they’d achieved dominion over them, and then not a peep would be heard about those rights.
But kudos to the Arhuaco! I’m sure they don’t care about me, but they care about the toads. And while I’m not much for ‘spiritual worlds’, that’s OK. It’s leading in the right direction.
Reading about Trump’s reaction to being questioned about his hit job, to use appropriate mob language, on General Qasem Soleimani, as seen in this NPRinterview with Senator Mike Lee (R-UT):
[NPR HOST RACHEL] MARTIN: You came out and came to the microphones and said it was the worst briefing you have seen on a military issue in your nine years in the U.S. Senate. What happened?
LEE: Yes. You know, my anger was not about the Soleimani killing. It was, instead, about the possibility of future military action against Iran. And it was on that topic that they refused to make any commitment about when, whether and under what circumstances it would be necessary for the president, or the executive branch of government, to come to Congress seeking authorization for the use of military force.
MARTIN: Because Congress was not given a…
LEE: I find that unacceptable.
MARTIN: Congress was not given a heads-up that the strike was going to happen against Soleimani.
LEE: That’s right. That’s right. And now, I want to be clear – with respect to the strike against Soleimani, that was arguably lawful. I still have questions that remain unanswered on that point. I’m going to set that side – aside a moment. And I’m going to assume, for purposes of this discussion, that that may well have been lawful.
What I’m most concerned about is about where that goes from here. What comes next? Is there another strike coming against Iran? If so, at what point do they need to come to us seeking an authorization for the use of military force? The fact that they were unable or unwilling to identify any point at which that would be necessary yesterday was deeply distressing to me.
And then Trump’s reaction to the House’s War Powers Resolution, in process, as reported by Gary Sargent in The Plum Line:
Meanwhile, Trump just rage-tweeted that he wants “all House Republicans” to “vote against Crazy Nancy Pelosi’s War Powers Resolution.”
That’s a reference to a measure that the House speaker is putting to a House vote Thursday that would require Trump to cease any military hostilities against Iran 30 days after enactment, if he hasn’t received congressional authorization for it. The House will all but certainly pass this, and there are other tougher measures on tap. …
But Trump’s tweet calling on “all House Republicans” to vote against the new war powers measure now means that being loyal to Trump is synonymous with giving him unconstrained warmaking authority, despite all the madness we’ve seen. And so it shall be.
And so has the mob boss decreed, so get thee behind him or suffer his wrath. I like the mixture of mob boss with evangelical language, it’s so appropriate.
But how to characterize the future? I’m a little divided here. Is this like a baby, seeing its rattle being taken away, screaming its infantile head off in hopes that Mom will lose her nerve and return it forthwith?
Or are we seeing the second coming of Gaius Julius Caesar, Roman dictator, frantically gathering power around himself? It sure seems like his second- and third-rate minions are doing his bidding because they, like him, can’t conceptualize how an actually functioning democracy makes us stronger, not weaker. Of course, with Moscow Mitch (R-KY) squeezing the idea of cooperative governance to death in the Senate, and former Speaker Ryan (R-WI) demonstrating exceptional incompetence in leading the House, I can see how those minions might not understand how a democracy is supposed to work – most of them are too young to have seen it in action, and they’ve been spoon-fed a hatred of the Democrats that blinds them to facts.
Understand, but neither excuse nor forgive.
And just for that little nuclear cherry on top of the sundae comes former Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
SARAH SANDERS (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): You know, I can’t think of anything dumber than allowing Congress to take over our foreign policy. They can’t seem to manage to get much of anything done. I think the last thing we want to do is push powers into Congress’ hands and take them away from the president. Any Democrat that doesn’t understand that America is safer now that one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world is rotting in hell is completely naive and completely misses what we need to have in a foreign policy and the last thing I want to do is see them take power away from President Trump and put it into their own hands. I don’t think anything could be worse for America than that. [Fox News via MediaMatters]
In case you don’t know it, war making powers are specified by the CONSTITUTION to reside with Congress. That they haven’t managed them very well for decades is irrelevant.
So I’m sure a lot of pundits are going to make much of Sanders’ remark, suggesting she’s ignorant, but I doubt that’s the case. I suspect this is just part of the GOP strategy for painting Trump as a helpless victim while he attempts to aggregate more and more power – and get himself elected. And unless Fox News gets on that rare white horse and makes a big deal out of the fact that Congress is the custodian of war making powers, most of the Fox News audience will just nod complacently and mark that off as another offense by the House Democrats. A few will remember, but will they bother to get outraged?
Jonathan Chait in New York’s Intelligencer section has an incisive comment on Trump’s defenders in the context of the recent killing of General Qasem Soleimani by American forces here. Unfortunately, it has one defect:
The Iran conflict has placed President Trump in a heretofore novel position of outflanking his domestic foes as a hawk. Having previously cast himself as a deal-maker or isolationist, Trump now occupies — at least temporarily — the traditional Republican identity of war fighter, punishing the world’s villains. His supporters are taking advantage by employing the familiar conservative message in such situations: accusing their opponents of actively sympathizing with the enemy.
“The only ones mourning the loss of [Iranian general Qasem] Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and Democrat Presidential candidates,” says Nikki Haley. Because she has previously established a modicum of independence from Trump,Haley has received the most attention for this remark, but she is hardly alone. Kellyanne Conway sneers, “The alarmists and apologists show skepticism about our own intelligence and sympathy for Soleimani.” Republican apparatchik Tony Shaffer attacks “Democrat lawmakers who would rather mourn a war criminal than credit President Trump for making the world safer.” And so on. …
What makes this current smear campaign so extraordinarily ironic is that Trump is actually guilty of the very thing his surrogates are falsely charging his opposition. Trump has repeatedly lavished praise on the world’s most notorious dictators. Trump in 2016 praised Saddam Hussein’s methods of killing terrorists: “He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over.” Trump’s point was not only that the United States was unwise to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but edged into outright admiration for his unlawful methods.
This is a theme he has voiced over and over. Trump on Vladimir Putin: “The man has very strong control over a country. Now, it’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly in that system, he’s been a leader. Far more than our president has been a leader.” On Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: “A strong person, he has very good control.” On Xi Xinping: “He’s a strong gentleman, right? Anybody that — he’s a strong guy, tough guy … President Xi, who is a strong man, I call him King, he said, ‘But I am not King, I am president.’ I said, ‘No, you’re president for life and therefore, you’re King.’ He said, ‘Huh. Huh.’ He liked that.” …
That Trumpists can turn around from ignoring or justifying his professed love of dictators to accusing Democrats of supporting an Iranian militarist merely shows the mental flexibility required of the president’s defenders.
Bold mine. Mental flexibility is neither a bad thing nor is it an accurate description of the Trump cultists. Mental flexibility permits thinking outside the box, effective evaluation of arguments countering one’s own perceptions of reality, and the ability to say I’m wrong and I’ll change my beliefs!
The correct noun Chait inexplicably failed to choose was moral. While I’m aware that I myself believe that morality changes over time to enhance group survival as their context changes, the time scale here renders the observation irrelevant; morality should be firmly concrete over the scale of, at most, a few years.
Moral flexibility, in this context, suggests the criminal, the hypocritical, the untrustworthy. It’s ok for your President to sympathize with autocrats, but not his political opponents? Wrong-oh, you moral midget.
Such people shouldn’t be permitted positions of power and responsibility. Hear that, Representative Collins (R-GA)? Resign now.
In case you were wondering why Iran seems to be happy with a near-miss revenge attack on US forces in the wake of the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Qasem Soleimani, AL Monitor has an explanation – sort of:
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed that its barrage of surface-to-surface missiles against two US bases in neighboring Iraq early Jan. 8 killed over 80 US military personnel, leaving some 200 others injured. IRGC commanders announced that “tens of missiles” were launched, all precisely hitting the targets, with none being intercepted.
Yet hours later, in a televised address from the White House, US President Donald Trump denied any casualties, saying the bases had only been slightly damaged. According to Iraqi sources, 22 missiles came from Iran, striking the Ain al-Asad base in Anbar province as well as an air base in the Kurdish city of Erbil.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the Iranian leadership prided itself in fulfilling a promised “harsh revenge” for the death of its most powerful commander, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, assassinated in a US drone attack outside Baghdad International Airport last Friday.
The conventional explanation would be that the regime in Tehran is attempting to thread the needle between a home public which must see the regime as strong in retaliation, and facing a foreign enemy which could inflict incredible harm on Iran – and its own reputation – if it so chose to do so.
But all the posturing makes me wonder – did Supreme Leader Khamenei and the rest of the leadership of Iran actually think Soleimani was an asset? Or is there a silent relief that he’s gone?
I have no idea how to confirm this hypothesis, unless a defector pops up with relevant information.
Landing in the morality tale category is Whistle Stop (1946), a dour tale condemning all the usual sins, with the usual rewards for those who stay on the path. I’ll skip the usual details and simply note that Kenny, our clinical subject, smokes, drinks, gambles, and plays pool, which, of course, leaves little time for working; he’s bitter and has the personality of a sponge; he’s not particularly good looking; and, finally, he has no money.
And apparently all of this is meaningless to the local ladies, who flock to him regardless.
All of this renders this tale of mobsters and the virtues of working with one’s hands, rather than being shot at by the cops, a bit hard to take.
Pertaining to a zoonosis: a disease that can be transmitted from animals to people or, more specifically, a disease that normally exists in animals but that can infect humans. There are multitudes of zoonotic diseases. …
Zoonoses may appear suddenly and be relatively virulent, as illustrated by HIV which ignited the AIDS epidemic and the coronavirus responsible for the outbreak of SARS. [MedicineNet]
There are no known U.S. cases or any cases in any countries outside China, the CDC said. “But outbreaks of unknown respiratory disease are always of concern, particularly when there are possible zoonotic origins to the outbreak,” the CDC statement said.
And here’s an informal example of Famous Last Words:
Xu Jianguo, a former top Chinese public health official, struck an assuring note and said the government’s disease control capabilities today are much stronger than they were in the early 2000s.
“More than a decade has passed,” he said. “It’s impossible for something like SARS to happen again.”
No, I don’t love my husband, let me prove it by tickling your tonsils with my tongue! Who needs reasoning powers anyways?
Blonde Ice (1948) is a study of a psychopath’s behavior, and how the expectations of those around them, a collection rendered invalid as they’re based on a model of human behavior inconsistent with the psychopath’s pattern, can lead to disaster.
We meet Claire Cummings, pretty lady, on her happy marriage day to wealthy Carl Hanneman, but little does Carl know that Claire is working hard to keep two other men happy as well: Al Herrick, and, more persistently, Les Burns. Both are newspapermen, and Herrick helped her get a job at the newspaper which led to her romancing with Les.
But the marriage to Carl is a relative surprise, and both work to keep their feelings under control. Les faces an especial challenge in this regard, as Claire insists on a full-blown kiss out on the terrace after the tying of the knot; indeed, she may be using that tongue of hers to start undoing that which even the Queen may not put asunder, as the old saying goes. Carl stumbles onto the parasite and her victim, but Claire fobs him off with an excuse, and soon they’re on their way to the resort for the usual activities of the newly wed.
But the very first morning, Carl manages to stumble over a love letter Claire is writing to Les, and, not being entirely dim, pronounces the marriage to be over. He’s nothing if not decisive: he leaves her with the cash she won at the horse races, a little from his pocket, her luggage – and the hotel bill. He’s off for home immediately.
Claire’s pissed at him, not at herself, and that night, having spotted a low-on-morals pilot for hire, gets a flight on the sly back to home, and then right back to the hotel. The next day, she comes home the normal way, calls up a surprised Les for a ride home, and, together, they discover Carl’s dead body.
The first reaction of Les is suicide, and Claire pushes it, but the police are slow to cotton to that theory, seeing there’s a lack of expected powder burns – and fingerprints. But Claire wastes little time hooking back up with Les, and he’s helpless in her beautiful-lady charms. He’s been there before Carl, and had seen her climb the social ladder to Carl’s level, and then return to him, and while there’s a case to be made for admiring her gymnastics capability, the fact that Les is helpless in her charms speaks powerfully to how the expectations that go along with physical attraction – and, by extension, other attributes – can render humans insensible to rational analyses.
But Herrick isn’t a slug. He’s been assigned the story of the Hanneman death, and he’s digging around. When an up and coming politician, wealthy & single attorney Stanley Mason, makes an appearance at the club they all frequent, Claire is fast on her feet, persuading Herrick to introduce her, and she begins the process of worming her way into his affections. But she’s run into a problem: that pilot who flew her on the sly for a surreptitious visit to the Hanneman home has put one and one together, and needs a bit of cash to tide him over.
And she doesn’t have it. The estate is in probate.
Eventually, it turns out the pilot is a gambler, and, like most, really bad at it. He puts a big squeeze on Claire, but when meets him to pay him off, she adds a gift to the package: a slug in the back.
And meanwhile she’s so close to heaven. Mason, the politician and attorney, soon wins two things: a trip to Washington as an elected Representative, and Claire’s hand in marriage soon-to-be. The latter is announced without Les knowing a thing at the party he’s attending as a guest, once again blindsiding him. But Claire is keeping him on the hook, and when Herrick figures that out, he lets Mason in on Claire’s predilections. Mason charges in to let Claire know that he’s no sucker, but he makes a mistake and takes a knife to the back from Claire. And Les’ back luck just keeps getting blacker, as he walks in on the body, picks up the knife, and turns to find the cops crashing in on the scene. Oooops.
But not all is lost. Mason’s buddy, Dr Kippinger, is a police psychologist specializing in pathological personalities, and he puts together a plan to get Claire to reveal herself as the fiery representative of hell that she is. Sadly, his plan works all too well – she confesses, and when she tries to kill the psychologist, she ends up dead on the floor as well.
Seeing Les Burns, on the floor mourning her loss, sums up that even in the face of a confession of three deaths being on her, he cannot help but mourn both her and those expectations built up by the conventions of the era: a woman and mother at home, all the better for being pretty.
He should have married his assistant, instead.
Tight and well told, this isn’t a whodunit, and not really noir, despite claims to the contrary. This, not unlike our current political contretemps, highlights how someone who operates outside of our parameters, our realm of familiarity, a psychopath who cares little or nothing for the opinions of others, except as to how they can help advance her self-centered agenda, can leave a trail of disaster behind her. It’s like pitting a guy with a knife against a guy with a machine gun, without telling the knife guy that he’s outmatched.
I shan’t recommend it, as it’s a little flat, and building empathy with the characters isn’t quite as easy as it should have been, but it’s still a worthwhile flick.
We’ve been seeing the horrific pictures and stories (not to mention ridiculous conspiracy theories) concerning the Australian wildfires, but their impact on Americans may be a bit blunted because we don’t really think Australia’s much more than an oversized island. Au contraire, thanks to Kyle Hill:
Australia’s area is 7,692,024 km2, and the United States’ area is 9,833,520 km2; subtract Alaska at 1,717,856 km2 and the continental United States’ area is roughly 8,115,664 km2, or we can just say Australia is roughly 94% the size of the continental United States.
And those fires are doing significant damage to an area about the size of our own.
Comments Off on Another Defense Down And Twitching
One of the defenses of the election of President Trump is that he’d learn on the job. So has he? Professor Rebecca Friedman Lissner of U.S. Naval War College, who studies Strategic and Operational Research, thinks not:
Although considerable variation characterizes this administration’s approach to decision making, learning should be apparent in across-the-board procedural improvements. Instead, President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria is a useful, recent test case that suggests the foreign policymaking process has, at minimum, not improved and may actually have grown less effective with time. Reportedly, the president “instinctively” elected to withdraw U.S. forces after a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which Erdogan signaled his intent to attack Kurdish forces in northern Syria near the Turkish border. The decision was not part of a formal policymaking process and ignored the recommendations of the Departments of Defense and State. In fact, it came as a surprise to the Pentagon, which indicates its disassociation from a meaningful interagency process and precluded carefully considered implementation. The abrupt withdrawal was rife with unintended consequences the president does not seem to have considered, from the liberation of Islamic State prisoners to the complication of an ultimately successful mission against Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and diplomatic fallout from the abandonment of the United States’s Kurdish partners. Its suddenness echoes earlier presidential decisions about Syria, most notably Trump’s surprise order to withdraw 2,000 U.S. troops in December 2018—which the president later partially reversed, but not before the resignation of Secretary Mattis in protest. In a further procedural parallelism, the president seems to now support a new plan that leaves approximately 200 U.S. troops in eastern Syria to guard local oil fields. [Lawfare]
I found her use of the instinctively interesting. In the evolutionary context, we do well with off-the-cuff decisions when they regard situations which we’ve faced many times before as a species. It should be obvious that making complex decisions regarding whether or not troops should be stationed in the Middle East on an instinctive basis is simple madness.
Perhaps most critically, the president’s personality is simply not amenable to learning. Research in cognitive psychology indicates that individuals tend to be better learners when they are open to environmental feedback, change their beliefs readily and receive discrepant information open-mindedly. Yet first-person accounts of those who have worked with the president, at-a-distance psychological assessments, and observation of President Trump’s public rhetoric and behavior all indicate that the president indexes poorly on each of these dimensions.
I would simply say that the President is a narcissist who cannot, in his own mind, be wrong. Since improvement implies failure, in his mind, we won’t see failure.
In fact, learning on the job was the expectation of people who didn’t understand the inferior nature of Donald J. Trump.
Not much is making it through the congestion clogging my brain as I undergo the bi-annual head cold which is my doom, but through all the analyses of the Qassim Soleimani killing I haven’t seen anyone talking about how Iran really might respond.
I mean, they can run around screaming for revenge, kill some Western aid workers, and be done, or launch an attack on an American naval vessel, but this doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter: What does Iran really want to accomplish?
If you shrug and say, Hurt America badly!, well, that’s rather dodging the question. Anyone who’s played a thoughtful, competitive game is well aware that analyzing your opponents methods in the context of their goals is of vital importance. And when you Hurt America badly!, you have to define what that means. Or, more accurately, what the leaders of Iran might mean by that.
Of course, a military response is visible and satisfying, but the riposte from the American military might be devastating to the Islamic Republic of Iran – after all, a visible sign that Allah is not on your side could be dispiriting to the masses – it could even foment revolt. And, in the end, the United States can always build a new ship or replace a few dead troops, tragic as it may be to say. Our resources are amazing.
But we’re the Great Satan, so I wonder if Iran’s leaders are getting together to think about this more deeply. They might ask themselves, What has hurt the United States the most over the last couple of decades? And I fear their answer might be this:
Donald J. Trump in the White House.
If they come to that conclusion, we may see a response designed to rally American support behind the worst President the United States has had the misfortune to have in office. Another four years of Trump? More division, polarization, mistreatment of refugees and immigrants, more encouragement of rabid racism.
Over the next six months, historians may trace the future of the United States, not Iran.
