Monthly Archives: February 2020

President Trump has issued another pardon:

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order granting a full pardon to former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. related to a decades-old corruption charge, the White House said Tuesday.

DeBartolo, who presided over one of the greatest dynasties in football, pleaded guilty to failing to report a felony when he paid former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards $400,000 to help secure a casino license. DeBartolo had to pay a $1 million fine and was given two years probation in return for his testimony against Edwards, a Democrat. [NBC News]

There are some opinions out there on this. Steve Benen, for instance, notes that a big name said something nice about Trump:

But let’s not overlook the fact that the White House announced the presidential pardon this morning at an event with several NFL legends — including Jerry Rice, Jim Brown, Ronnie Lott, and Charles Haley — in attendance.

In fact, Jerry Rice, the Hall of Fame receiver, told reporters, “I take my hat off to Donald Trump for what he did,” referring to the DeBartolo pardon.

And if I had to guess, that was the principal reason this happened. Trump seems pleased when celebrities say nice things about him, and no one should be surprised when images and quotes from this morning’s event show up in the president’s re-election campaign advertising.

I wonder if Rice will get a nice present in his Christmas stocking – or if he’s so beholden to DeBartolo that he had to say that.

A few others were also pardoned: Blagojevich, imprisoned for corruption, Kerik for corruption. Kevin Drum admits to bewilderment and a bit of anger:

I have no special opinion about whether any of these people deserve a pardon—though Kerik sure as hell seems an unlikely choice. What I do object to is the random pardoning of well-known people who happen to catch Trump’s eye. There are lots and lots of ordinary schlubs who deserve a pardon every bit as much as these more famous folks, but they’ll never get one.

But it’s worth noting a minor note of concordance: bribery. What did President Trump implicitly endorse a few weeks back? Bribery. International bribery.

Listen, conservative readers. Presumably, you’re for the free market. If you approve of Trump, what are you thinking? He doesn’t like the free market, it should be obvious, it’s hurt him too many times. Right now, he’s endorsing crony capitalism of the worst sort: if you’ve got the cash, then, hey, go ahead and bribe that official. Maybe it’ll be the Big T himself, eh?

Better that than some honest competition, yeah? Oh, too bad if you’re a competitor who doesn’t have as deep of pockets.

So that’s what these pardons are really all about – an concerted effort to begin defining corruption out of existence – at least, if the person engaged in the behavior is a conservative.

When it comes to rules, religions are rarely moderate. There’s little wriggle room: Thou shalt not worship other Gods. Period. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Period. Not even a little bit.

Good? Bad? That’s in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, although I have a certain sympathy for some of these positions. But when this attitude leaks into politics, not only does it lead to a no-compromise mindset that results in governmental freeze, it also leads to dangerous policy moves – for the citizenry. Steve Benen has a lovely example:

For much of the last few years, Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to ease rules on mercury pollution from power plants, not simply as part of a general hostility toward environmental safeguards, but specifically to help the coal industry, which the president sees as a political ally.

What I did not expect, however, is for the Republican administration to go further down this road than even the industry expected or wanted. The Washington Post had a striking report on this yesterday.

For more than three years, the Trump administration has prided itself on working with industry to unshackle companies from burdensome environmental regulations. But as the Environmental Protection Agency prepares to finalize the latest in a long line of rollbacks, the nation’s power sector has sent a different message: Thanks, but no thanks.

The article noted that Exelon, one of the nation’s largest utilities, told the EPA that its effort to change a rule that has cut emissions of mercury and other toxins is “an action that is entirely unnecessary, unreasonable, and universally opposed by the power generation sector.”

Coarse fixations on fine-grain issues inevitably results in bad policy. Here we’re seeing it in regulations, as a frequent refrain from the Republicans is Regulation is bad!

It’s not hard to find others. Taxation should leap right to mind, as illustrated by the Kansas debacle I far too frequently reference. Another is the 2017 Federal tax reform bill, which independent economists have waved off as ineffective – and measurements of the economy have confirmed as not reaching its pie-in-the-sky goals.

But I note a party suffused with religion, primarily the evangelicals, married to a set of political positions with an absolutist tenor that is absolutely inappropriate and marks adherents as second-raters. This is what Barry Goldwater warned us about – and, for those of us older than I, doesn’t he look like a moderate these days?

Next time you run into a Republican screaming we’re overregulated, point him at that Post article, and then tell him that, no, he’s not done doing government. Not even close. Government doesn’t guarantee corporate profits; it tries to ensure citizen safety as balanced against freedom, etc.

The Fake (1953) is a nice little whodunit centering around a da Vinci painting that is the target of a gang of art thieves. They’re trying to get around American private detective Paul Mitchell, assigned by the da Vinci owner to watch over it. The thieves are clever, using head fakes to get Mitchell’s attention, and then stealing it when he bites.

It doesn’t help that the Tate Gallery in London, where this is all going on, happens to employ a beautiful young woman who’s smart, writes books on art, and has an eccentric father who happens to paint as well – in fact, very well, indeed. Which all leads up to the question: where do Mitchell’s interests lie, and how deep in is the father?

Unfortunately, this little thriller doesn’t pursue these sorts of questions very deeply, which leads up to a fairly surprising ending. But it’s all fun, unless you’re an Arts type who profoundly objects to how the da Vinci is being displayed at the Tate – ignoring much of the story in the outrage.

So, in the end, it’s more or less fluffy, but fun.

No, I won’t string you along: I doubt AG William Barr will be resigning any time soon. In case you quite sensibly took yourself away from all news sources over the weekend, the response from alumni of the Department of Justice to the interference of the Attorney General in the sentencing phase of the Roger Stone case has been to write a letter  demanding his resignation. It has more than 1100 signatures, all from DoJ alumni. I think this gets to the meat of their grave concerns, although I’m tempted to quote it in its entirety:

And yet, President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle, most recently in connection with the sentencing of President Trump’s close associate, Roger Stone, who was convicted of serious crimes. The Department has a long-standing practice in which political appointees set broad policies that line prosecutors apply to individual cases. That practice exists to animate the constitutional principles regarding the even-handed application of the law. Although there are times when political leadership appropriately weighs in on individual prosecutions, it is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case. It is even more outrageous for the Attorney General to intervene as he did here — after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court.

Such behavior is a grave threat to the fair administration of justice. In this nation, we are all equal before the law. A person should not be given special treatment in a criminal prosecution because they are a close political ally of the President. Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.

This is an important letter, of course, as it includes professionals who have served in both Democratic and Republican. But I doubt Barr will pay any attention to it. Barr, I think, comes from a part of society which is so certain of its own rectitude that it openly loathes other factions:

Among the militant progressives are many so-called ‘progressives’, but where is the progress? We are told we are living in a post-Christian era, but what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system? What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And what is the system of values that can sustain human social life? The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of fulfilling the role of religion.

This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion & traditional values. [ClashDaily]

And, in Barr’s mind, it’ll be those “Secularists” and other representatives of a government required to be secular that are calling for his resignation. When Barr accepted nomination to the Trump Administration, he did so rejecting the traditional Founding Father values upon which the United States was built and to which it aspires – mutual tolerance. He believes he sees destruction of traditional culture, and its replacement with chaos. That justifies any autocratic action necessary to stop.

And he’s the stopcock on the chaos he sees all around. This letter is merely static for him.

As of last night, the Wuhan virus, now known as 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease, has taken more than 1700 lives – 900 since last I mentioned this. Some countries have shut down economic links with China, and I think this incident illustrates a weakness of the free trade concept pushed by libertarians and many Republicans of 20 years ago.

Free trade tends to lead to specialization on a national level, as countries who are better at, or have more appropriate resources, concentrate on doing what they do well for export; but other products that don’t fall into that specialization are neglected – after all, you can use your profits from the specialization to buy all that other stuff. Or, more bluntly, those domestic industries who find they can’t compete with the foreign competitors get wiped out, while you wipe out the foreign competitors who can’t keep up with you. This all works out great for those who are in the right industries, or cut sweet heart deals with the government to get bought out as they find they can’t compete. And everyone important is happy in both the public and private sectors.

Right up until economic links are cut for non-economic reasons. While war is a popular reason for terminating those links, it’s also something that we can, with some effort, control, either through negotiation, or by kicking out the obstreperous individuals.

But when it comes to disease, we’re not nearly as much in control. Sure, we can and do work on it, trying to develop vaccines and cures, but none of this is guaranteed, and, barring unexpected miracles, it takes time. I think most of us understand that in the abstract, but NewScientist (8 February 2020) brings it home with this simple paragraph:

Even if the virus remains largely in China, there would be global consequences. According to Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota and his team, 153 crucial drugs, from blood pressure pills to stroke treatment, are mostly made in China, and there are fears the virus could affect their production and export.

Profits are great, profits are wonderful – right up until we look like a mastodon stuck in the La Brea tarpits. I fear that we may be finding that NAFTA and its ilk have lured us into a situation where our international economic ties, which I generally view favorably as being detrimental to the more war-like inclinations among us, may turn out to have a nasty downside that not many analysts foresaw – or, at least, never mentioned in my hearing way back when the rubber hit the road and Clinton signed NAFTA.

If you’re dependent on medicine to get by, you may want to check where it’s produced. I don’t advocate hoarding – I’d probably hypothetically get in trouble – but it’s always best to be informed so that, if necessary, you can consult with your doc about alternatives before you need them.

And I’d sure like to hear if your doctor has even thought about this aspect.

Sobriquet:

A sobriquet (/ˈsoʊbrɪkeɪ/ SOH-bri-kay) or soubriquet is a nickname, sometimes assumed, but often given by another and being descriptive in nature. Distinct from a pseudonym, it typically is a familiar name used in place of a real name without the need of explanation, often becoming more familiar than the original name. [Wikipedia]

Used in yesterday’s Word Of The Day. How meta.

The 1 February 2020 issue of NewScientist contains a collection (here and here, but behind a paywall, I should imagine) of short articles which, essentially, express the anguish quantum physicists feel as they continue to try to figure out how to connect gravity with quantum mechanics, understand the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, i.e., what the hell does it mean to say that it requires an observer to force the probabilistic wave function to collapse to reveal the exact location of a quantum particle, hell, to even know if there is a reality.

One seldom considered question, however, is how exactly models ought to seek to explain reality. Some, such as general relativity, take some known quantities about nature – the position of a planet, say – and predict what will happen next. Quantum theory takes a different philosophical approach, assigning probabilities to future outcomes we might see. …

Some physicists are now exploring whether a similar approach can help us make headway. For example, constructor theory starts from the idea that the essence of reality is information, and then sets out what kinds of things are possible and impossible. It is early days, but it has already made predictions in circumstances that defeat other theories, such as the behaviour of quantum particles in a gravitational field.

I was awfully darn tired – and a little sick – when I started reading through this one morning, and hazily connected it to my own private theorizing that we are, ourselves, a computer simulation. Then I came across this:

IN OUR quest to understand reality, there is an elephant in the room. How do we know that the reality we are in is real? The suggestion that we could be living in a computer simulation isn’t just a Matrix-style science-fiction idea. It is a hypothesis that has been discussed and debated by philosophers and physicists since Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford floated it in 2002. If its startling but logical conclusion is correct, it renders decades of intellectual endeavour obsolete and, ironically, takes us back to the beginning.

Nice to know that other people harbor weird paranoias like mine. Oh, wait, they take their’s to new extremes:

Bostrom’s simulation argument says that if humans could one day create simulations of the universe populated with conscious beings, then in all likelihood we are living in such a computer-generated universe. The argument assumes that, eventually, enough computing power will exist to create simulations of human history that are detailed enough for the simulated people in it to be conscious. If so, then, statistically speaking, we are more likely to be living in a simulation, because simulated people would vastly outnumber unsimulated ones. That is especially true if simulated people make their own simulations ad infinitum in an endlessly nested reality.

Nice, I’m almost certain a simulated creature! Although I’m not sure our limited experience bears out Bostrom. Think of our attempts to simulate a chemical reaction – get much beyond 3 or 4 atoms and the calculations become too laborious.

Skipping over my trivial objections, I’d like to move on to what my sickly, tired mind came up with that morning. We run simulations for tangible reasons, from weather forecasting to predicting chemical reactions to archaeological modeling to, yes, quasi-entertainment and learning skills, such as flying the latest aircraft.

So, if we are ourselves entities in a quasi-computational simulation of some sort, what is the goal of the entities who created this environment? What are they trying to achieve? (Let’s skip over the quasi-ethical question of whether we should comply with their/its purpose, which makes my head hurt thinking about the number of people who think the answer should automatically be Yes!).

Before burping up my thought, let’s add in one other area of interest, that of the semi-related, poorly labeled field of artificial intelligence, aka machine learning (ML). I gave my ad hoc definition of ML here back in 2018:

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.

One of the largest known stars, Betelgeuse, has recently dimmed and become warped. Will it soon go supernova? Such a thought is still more comforting than wondering if we’re all just a big simulation by someone trying to figure out the nature of their own reality.

So, is it possible that the purpose of our simulation is to discover the nature of reality? Just as we have difficulty understanding reality, is it possible that the creating entity has encoded the observed facts on their ground into our simulation and then manipulated us into trying to figure out how reality really works?

And what if that entity got an observation improperly encoded?

I think I’d better go back to watching Xena: Warrior Princess, because the existential angst these physicists are feeling is as nothing compared to my existential angst at thinking I may be a … bug. Flaw. Miscue. Eeeek.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email, just now read, that caught my eye. I shall reproduce the important part and summarize the balance:

50 Pics That Sum Up The Hell On Earth That Is Taking Place In Australia

One of the prima donna actresses in the big awards show was running her mouth off about this being caused by Climate Change. They never pass up a chance to run their mouth. The last I heard they had arrested 43 arsonists responsible for this carnage. If ever there was a reason for public executions this would be it.

Followed by numerous heart-rending pictures.

Notice how nonchalantly climate change is dismissed. This sleight-of-hand paragraph evokes the natural emotional response to Hell, the loathing the conservative has for those darn Hollywood liberals, associates climate change with that loathing, reinforces it, then provides a replacement, and far more immediate, reason for the wildfires, and then seals the deal with a reference to public executions.

The problem, of course, is that the replacement wildfire origin doesn’t work as a dismissal of climate change, now does it? Sure, arsonists start fires. But do most fires run rampant like this?

No.

They need an environment that is tinder-dry. This paragraph doesn’t provide the context that Australia has been hotter every summer for years, and that drought has been a problem – and it’s quite plausible, if not proven, to conclude that a chronic pattern such as that could be driven by climate change.

It’s interesting how emotion is used to invoked “common sense”, often associated with rationality, in an attempt to discredit a scientifically accepted fact. It really leaves the observer wondering what the author of this missive thinks will be the final result if they are successful – do they really think that this is all a hoax?

Do you enjoy a good rant? Cruising the Cut, Episode 3, had my Arts Editor howling with laughter, as the guy, David Johns, loses it over the cushions on the narrowboat he’s just purchased.

I’ve not had any luck finding the episode online, unfortunately; we watched it on Amazon Prime.

Or, the Law of Unintended Consequences. The best of intentions can be detached and used as a cudgel, as AL Monitor reports:

Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 to punish Russian officials accused of beating to death a whistleblower who publicized government corruption.

A decade later, the law has unwittingly spawned a multimillion-dollar lobbying cottage industry.

The Wikipedia entry for this law is here. The article notes an unusual provision:

But a unique facet of the Magnitsky law and subsequent amendments has created a whole new opening for more creative lobbying. Unlike similar laws blocking sanctioned parties’ US assets and banning travel to the United States, Magnitsky requires that US officials consider information from credible human rights organizations when weighing whether to apply sanctions.

There’s a lot of cockroaches that’ll try to build credible human rights organizations, I’m guessing. But there’s more!

In recent months, lawyers for Kuwaiti private equity firm KGL Investment and its former CEO, Marsha Lazareva, have launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to threaten Kuwait with Magnitsky sanctions if it does not drop embezzlement charges against her.

And it sure sounds like it’s all politics:

Working on the account are big names, including President George H.W. Bush’s son, Neil Bush; former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif.; former FBI Director Louis Freeh; and ex-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, until she joined Trump’s impeachment team. But the Lazareva camp has also consistently sought to portray her defenders as “human rights activists,” notably working with Washington nonprofit In Defense of Christians and former human rights lawyer Cherie Blair, the wife of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in its efforts.

Of course, this is the Middle East, a long ways away and has a dubious reputation for its links with such tawdry concepts as truth, honor, and justice; I have no inclination to comment on the quality of accusations against Lazareva or Kuwait.

But there’s certainly a lot of money being pitched into this metaphorical war, all hinging on the contents of an American law. It’s as if we’re exporting our law to the Middle East, isn’t it? Has anyone notified President Trump of this export, and its apparently high valuation? Only partly in jest, I should like to suggest that he put a price on it.

Of course, if you see the law as a proxy for morality – a concept for which I have an exceedingly wary sympathy – then our foreign policy since World War II has essentially been an export of our views on morality, starting with the Geneva Convention; any international lawyers out there who’d like to go into more detail?

Lokiarchaeota:

Lokiarchaeota is a proposed phylum of the Archaea.^[1] The phylum includes all members of the group previously named Deep Sea Archaeal Group (DSAG), also known as Marine Benthic Group B (MBG-B). A phylogenetic analysis disclosed a monophyletic grouping of the Lokiarchaeota with the eukaryotes. The analysis revealed several genes with cell membrane-related functions. The presence of such genes support the hypothesis of an archaeal host for the emergence of the eukaryotes; the eocyte-like scenarios. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The mysterious microbes shifting humanity’s place in the tree of life,” Colin Barras, NewScientist (1 February 2020, paywall):

The Lokis, more officially known as the Lokiarchaeota, have versions of the genes that help eukaryotes build membrane-enclosed compartments inside their cells. Without those compartments, eukaryotic cells would lack their most dramatic feature, the nucleus.

Jane Gaskell, as a teenager, wrote a novel named Strange Evil, which, upon being published, entered into the annals of legend in the genre of weird fiction. It concerns itself with the question of why gods exist, and, for Gaskell, it came down to belief: the more people believed, the greater the divinity.

As I recall, the novel ends with a giant, diaper-girt baby, chasing someone, presumably the protagonist, in order to wreak some terrible (terribly?) divine punishment, but shrinking as more and more of its believers choose not to believe in such a horror. It had its amusing moments. Sadly, I seem to have mislaid my copy, if in fact I ever had one.

But imagine if her premise were true: would naming an entire phylum of organisms for the old Norse God of mischief possibly bring him, it, back from where ever old, forgotten gods have gone? I don’t suppose that would be a boneyard, the sobriquet of the final storage area for retired planes before they are salvaged, but you never know. Are gods subject to salvage as well?

And would he be fatally insulted at being associated with a bunch of microbes? Or would it appeal to his reportedly macabre sense of humor?

Yep, this is a wandering piece of useless digression. Did you read all the way to the end? Shame on you!

Maybe a little tongue will take your mind off your skinny little dead wife.

Cornered (1945), if I’m to believe the release date, is a slightly prescient story concerning the human debris of war. It follows the vengeance of a Canadian, RAF Lt. Laurence Gerard, who, shot down during the war, met and married a member of the French Resistance, made it back to England, fought some more, and survives to the war’s end.

His wife does not. All he received was a notice of her death and a load of PTSD, a condition scarcely recognized during World War II, which is one reason for my assessment of prescience.

The story opens with him being demobbed^[1] and making his way to France. Right off the bat we get tastes of his drive & style: when told it’ll take a month to get his visa approved to go to France, he finds his own way across Channel, doing the last couple of miles in a rowboat – which he then sinks. Long sought Peace may be upon the land, but this is a man still in fighting mode.

He rapidly finds his father-in-law, and eventually it comes out: his wife, and a number of other members of the Resistance, were taken to a cave, lined up, and shot.

Leaving the question: who did it?

Eventually, he’s in South America, which in reality also turned out to be a haven of runaway Nazis and collaborators, and gives me more reason for the assessment of prescient. Gerard is chasing a ghost: a man listed as dead, but with no other record. His wife is now in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Gerard, driven by his demons, gives chase.

The story has several satisfying twists, an exotic flavoring of those who savagely dance on the fringes of civilization, seeking the naked ugliness of raw political power over those they choose to despise. Against this backdrop, Gerard’s visceral pain and anger is a streak of dark green against the gangrenous putrefaction of the Nazis.

For all that, I thought the performance of the lead was a trifle one note, his PTSD could have played a bigger part in the story, and the antagonists could have used more development. But this story is neither simplistic nor entirely straightforward, and I think its recognition of the wear of modern warfare on the human psyche was ahead of its time.

This movie won’t bowl the audience over, and in today’s world, PTSD is not a revelation, but it’s still a good story with organic twists and turns.

¹ Possibly dated Brit slang: demobilized, usually from emergency military service.

Keeping in mind that Judge Easterbrook was considered a possible successor to the late Justice Scalia, and is a long time leader of The Federalist Society, a highly conservative group with a special interest in the judiciary, no one can mutter Damn liberal judges! at this report:

In a jaw-dropping opinion issued by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago on January 23, Judge Frank Easterbrook—a longtime speaker for the conservative Federalist Society and someone whom the late Justice Antonin Scalia favored to replace him on the U.S. Supreme Court—rebuked Attorney General William Barr for declaring in a letter that the court’s decision in an immigration case was “incorrect” and thus dispensable. Barr’s letter was used as justification by the Board of Immigration Appeals (the federal agency that applies immigration laws) to ignore the court’s ruling not to deport a man who had applied for a visa to remain in the country. [Politico]

Barr sounds like quite the authoritarian, doesn’t he? The report goes on to explain:

“We have never before encountered defiance of a remand order, and we hope never to see it again,” Easterbrook wrote. “Members of the Board must count themselves lucky that Baez-Sanchez has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.”

Given Trump’s record of defiance, Barr’s maneuver is predictable—but it is a shocking break with more than 200 years of constitutional and legal precedent.

Etc. And then author Wehle brings up one of the central problems that sometimes bothers me late at night:

The question looming over the presidency today is not what the law says, but what happens when the executive branch violates established law. As we saw with the impeachment debacle, without consequences, laws lose their force and become optional. In remanding the Baez-Sanchez case for a second time, Easterbrook insisted that the immigration judge’s waiver decision remains “in force,” and that “[t]he Executive Branch must honor that decision.”

What will happen, then, on the inevitable day that Trump’s administration refuses to honor a judicial decision? That scenario beggars belief, too. Courts enforce contempt through the U.S. Marshals Service, a team of federal police officers that is ultimately within the president’s chain of command. Will U.S. Marshals side with the judge over the president or vice versa? And if they get that choice wrong, what branch of government stands ready to hold them accountable to the people?

I suspect we’d see how the Army feels about democracy, and that would leave a bloody, pus-filled gash that wouldn’t heal for a generation or two. Much to Russia and China’s delight.

But this is just the next step in the inevitable Trump legacy. The prior step was the Betrayal of the Evangelicals. That was not betrayal in the traditional sense; rather, it was the enticement of the evangelical movement into a completely compromised position, and done with such delicacy that I suspect most evangelicals don’t even realize they have become one of the most immoral groups in the United States – not only for their use of the mendacious Trump to achieve their goal of pressuring abortion rights, but also for the concomitant corruption of the leadership of evangelicals, and for doing this all in the name of a dubious intellectual position.

This next step is more along the lines of a traditional betrayal, though. There is no doubt the moderate conservatives thought there would be some reasonable line Trump and his minions wouldn’t cross, but now they’re finding out that Trump’s vision of the United States is not the common one of the moderate conservatives, which, as distasteful as a committed progressive might find it, is a reasonable view, committed to long-term American bedrock principles.

I won’t say Trump is a committed authoritarian. I don’t think he has that much consciousness about himself; reports of his behavior paint a mercurial, grasping, obsessive man, whose desire for wealth & prestige has completely submerged any respect he has, or may have had, for democracy. That is, he seems little more than a very crafty child.

And he’s used the conservatives to approach his goals, whether they’re just money, or the prestige of building Trump Tower in Moscow, or he’s being blackmailed. The evangelicals are one peg in the wall he’s climbing, so is the GOP. Barr is one of his latest pegs, who, from the evidence, thinks he’s fighting a quasi-holy war with the supposedly Godless liberals, with Trump as his Holy Emperor; soon enough, unless he’s absolutely committed to toadyism, he’ll be on the ash heap of history – and on the wrong side, too.

Right next to Easterbrook and all the other conservatives who thought Trump was the golden path to conservative dominance over the coming decades, despite demographics being against them. Barrs ridiculous statement show them they don’t know where this path is going, but they’re not going to like it.

A few weeks back, while wandering the hinterlands of Amazon Prime’s Television & Movie Reserve, I ran across a show that seemed sort of oddball, and we started watching it. We became dazed and confused – why were we watching? Why was it so relaxing?

And now it’s done. At least until next time this dude with a camcorder releases episodes. Originally debuting on YouTube, then moving on to other platforms, it’s Travels by Narrowboat. A guy from Kent, England, by the name of Kevin, nearly fifty years old, sells all he has, buys a British narrowboat, and sets off to explore the canal system of Great Britain.

Lots of nice scenery, remarks on people and life, dismissal of the rat race that nearly ate Kevin alive, commentary on safety – it all seems pedestrian, and yet it was the first thing we’d turn to after work in this household.

Here’s his blog.

Recommended? I dunno. I think either you’ll like it or hate it. Just make sure you start at the beginning. And don’t look for any shots of him and his boat going through the rapids.

He’s edited those out.

Long time readers will recognize the name Bruce Bartlett, a Republican member of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, who endorsed Trump in the hopes that, when he lost, the Republican Party would burn down and it could be rebuilt on more rational lines. (There are days I fantasize about using him as a conversational piece with a Trumpist.)

He’s also known for a meta-analysis he performed on a number of studies that concluded that Fox News viewers have, in general, a greatly inferior knowledge base compared to non Fox News viewers.

And now there’s former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, as reported by WaPo:

“The media, in my view, and I feel very strongly about this, is not the enemy of the people,” Kelly said. “We need a free media.” …

“That said, you have to be careful about what you are watching and reading, because the media has taken sides,” he continued. “So if you only watch Fox News because it’s reinforcing what you believe, you are not an informed citizen.”

While accurate, if you believe Bartlett’s analysis was properly done, it won’t have much effect. The Trumpists have been frantically demonizing Kelly almost since he left, notably with White House Press Secretary Grisham utterly discrediting herself in her frantic efforts to ingratiate herself with the new boss; there’s little reason to think Kelly’s statement will have any affect.

But it’s nice to see a Republican Administration ex-official acknowledge the pathology that is Fox News.

A picture is worth a thousand words? For a bookworm like me, it’s often a half dozen words, repeated endlessly: boring. But not this one!

There’s a fire hydrant at the base of that, now wrapped in a frozen embrace with the tree.

I don’t know who took it, but it asks so many questions: what went wrong? What if there’s a fire? Can the tree be saved?

While I sympathize with the relatives of the victims of shootings, it’s more than a little difficult to get behind the actions of the people who held a demonstration at Ramsey County Attorney Mike Freeman’s house, angrily demanding the officers who shot and killed Brian Quinones last September should be put on trial and convicted of murder. Never mind the incongruity of demanding a jury come to a particular conclusion; the simple matter of the evidence made available to the public so far doesn’t make their demands compelling. From MPR:

In a statement, [Freeman] noted that the incident was tragic, but said Quinones threatened several officers with a knife and refused their orders to drop the weapon. Freeman said the officers’ use of deadly force was “necessary, proportional, and objectively reasonable” under Minnesota law.

Quinones’ family members feared the 30-year-old husband and father had been feeling suicidal, and have questioned why police couldn’t subdue him without resorting to lethal force.

Just after 10 p.m. on Sept. 7, Quinones was driving erratically along Normandale Frontage Road near 77th Street, when Edina police officer Nicholas Pedersen tried to pull him over.

As he sped along the street with his music turned up, Quinones held his phone in his hand and livestreamed video on Facebook. Pedersen followed and recorded video simultaneously on his squad car’s dash camera.

Quinones refused to pull over, but eventually stopped after the pursuit entered Richfield. Pedersen got out of his squad, drew his gun and shouted, “He’s got a knife! Drop it. Drop the knife! Get on the ground!”

The question of when a policeman should and should not defend themselves with deadly force is certainly one that should be debated hotly, and perhaps adjusted from current understandings. Whether or not that would have helped with the infamous killing in our community of Philando Castile is a question that can never be answered, and is complicated by allegations that former Officer Yanez was not qualified for his position due to anxiety issues; I do not know if anyone followed up on them.

Edina Police dashcam video shot.
Hennepin County Attorney’s Office

But in the Quinones case, the videos that have been broadcast suggest that he was looking for an ending of suicide by cop, and forced them to it. He is clearly and repeatedly warned. And I have little confidence that, beyond a Taser, which didn’t work in this case, there’s much to be done to merely disable him; human beings can collapse at a flea bite, or tip over cars – predictability of a human under stress is a mug’s bet.

What I fear is that unreasonable demands will contaminate the greater case for policing reform, for deciding if profiling is systemic or isolated, and that will delay necessary reformations.

It’ll be interesting to see how history treats this worry:

A conference in California next week says it aims to make scientific studies more reliable, but critics fear the event is a new tactic used by those who question the reality of climate change.

The event, called Fixing Science, is being run by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a non-profit organisation based in New York.

The conference’s programme focuses on the reproducibility crisis – the claim that science has an increasing problem with poorly performed or even fraudulent studies – with a portion dedicated to how that applies to both economics and climate change. …

… [Philipp Schmid at the University of Erfurt in Germany] says there may be more to the NAS’s conference than that. “They use the findings from these areas to downplay climate change, which kind of shows that they have a specific agenda when writing their reports,” says Schmid.

The NAS has published reports attacking sustainability initiatives, including campaigns seeking to persuade universities to divest their fossil fuel investments. A 2018 NAS report on reproducibility said that climate scientists seek to “demonize carbon dioxide”.

NAS president Peter Wood says the world is warming, but “whether that is caused by human activity is a matter of significant dispute”. In fact, 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that human activity is responsible.

Responding to the accusations about the conference, Wood said: “We have been critics of the sustainability movement, which is not the same thing as climate science by a long stretch. The science and politics can and should be distinguished.” [NewScientist, 1 February 2020]

While it’s appalling to think that we’re going to face another appallingly fraudulent “institution,” much like the Tobacco Institute, in the name of corporate profits, it’s not unimaginable. After all, there’s a signification proportion of the world population which, for religious reasons, cannot accept that human activity is causing global warming^[1].

The conference is causing quite a stir:

Computational biologist Lenny Teytelman is CEO of protocols.io, a company that aims to make experiments more reproducible by standardising how data and methods are shared. Aware of the NAS’s history, “I tweeted a general warning against the conference and then emailed the individual speakers to alert them about the group’s background,” he says. …

“My view is that many of the speakers at this meeting are being played,” Dorothy Bishop at the University of Oxford argued on her blog. By attending, they are lending credibility to fringe views and to an essentially political group, she said.

Bishop is Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. I looked up her blog and found this:

The format of the meeting is cleverly constructed. The conference will be introduced and summed up by David J. Theroux (Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Independent Institute and Publisher of The Independent Review) and Peter Wood, (President, NatAsSchols [Bishop’s acronym for National Association of Scholars, which she uses to distinguish it from the far more prestigious National Academy of Sciences]). Neither man has any scientific background. Theroux delighted the Heartland Institute last summer when he promoted the idea, recently publicised by Donald Trump, that wind turbines are responsible for killing numerous birds (to see this lampooned, click here)

Wood was an anthropologist who has been Provost at a small religious school, The King’s College in New York City (2005-2007), before moving to NatAsSchols. He has, as far as I can tell, no peer-reviewed publications, but he has written pieces deriding climate concerns, e.g. “the fantasies of global warming catastrophe are a kind of substitute religion, replete with a salvation doctrine, rituals of expiation, and a collection of demons to be cast out.”

Another presenter is David Randall, who is Director of Research at NatAsSchols, policy advisor to the Heartland Institute and first author of the report on “The Irreproducibility of Modern Science“. He is an unusual person to be authoring an authoritative report on the state of science. Web of Science turned up seven publications by him, all in politics journals, and none with any citations. His background is in history, library studies and fiction writing.

Corruption caused by commercial interests can usually be stemmed by legal actions. Religious certainty is usually not susceptible to rationality or legal actions, but rather force. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Take it as a warning: the National Association of Scholars will need to be treated very skeptically.

¹ For Twin Cities residents, long-time meteorologist Dave Dahl made exactly that statement many moons ago. On the other end of the spectrum, my favorite meteorologist, Paul Douglas, is Republican, religious, and has no problems acknowledging anthropogenic climate change.

I’ve been meaning to find a time series of Trump mendacity for the last couple of weeks, and a couple of days ago one just fell into my lap – from WaPo, who Trump reportedly hates anyways.

It’s rather a measure of the stress he’s under, isn’t it? The first year of his term, not so much stress. End of 2018, though, saw the mid-term elections, which exploded in a limited disaster for a President who – at least in his own eyes – saw an economy that had never worked so well before. True, in the Senate the table was tilted towards the Republicans anyways, and a couple of weak Democratic seats were won by the Republicans – but the House saw a large GOP advantage evaporate as voters behavior indicated an evolving consciousness of the ongoing disaster of Trump. As Party leader, Trump was responsible for Party performance – and it didn’t go well.

Skeptical readers may wonder about previous Presidents. WaPo didn’t start this database until partway into the Obama Administration, so there’s no apples-to-apples comparison. Worse, the implication is that they didn’t have a well-organized database until Trump came into office, although I could be wrong. However, there is an article in which WaPo documents the Obama mendacity legacy, stating that they fact-checked 250 statements (without summarizing their findings), and giving their list of the top-10 whoppers.

Yeah, Top 10.

Worse, one is not during his Administration, but during the campaign (whether that’s worse or better is debatable), and another one is actually an intellectual error on the part of the Fact Checkers, which I addressed in one of my more popular posts here when Marc Thiessen made it. While it’s disappointing when anyone lies, it appears to be safe to say that Obama, whether or not he actually aspired to any great heights in the field of lying to the public, has fallen short of the Trump heights in mendacity.

All that said, one has to wonder if Trump is delusional, or if he has a clear strategy when he lies. My guess is that he has a strategy, and it depends on the principal of imperfect information. We are all burdened with imperfect information, whether we’re a professor of some distinction, or someone who’s dabbling far from their domain. It’s inevitable.

So Trump can be confident when he asserts that we were in a historical crime surge back in 2016, some people would believe him – especially those who happened to live in an area that was unfortunately experiencing that surge. Or … pick your topic, from Republicans being the original protectors of citizens with pre-existing health conditions to Mexico paying for the wall through redemptions. Whatever that means.

And how many of us deal with inveterate liars? Virtually none of us – we expect a basic honesty from everyone we deal with. When we run into an inveterate liar, it’s so far outside of our experience, most of which we don’t double-check anyways, it’s easy to get suckered in.

Perhaps the most interesting result from the 2016 Presidential Election was this: Trump lost his home county (New York County), home to Manhattan, 87% to 10%.

Yeah, a 77 point loss.

The Vera Coking house in Atlantic City, from which Donald J. Trump tried to evict Coking via eminent domain so he could build a limousine parking lot (photo by Jack Boucher/Historic American Buildings Survey).

Trump is no doubt well known in Manhattan, as that is where he did his building – and not in the least trusted. For independents who are still undecided, this is an important point in your analysis. Most candidates can count on their home state. When Mondale lost to Reagan, he won Minnesota. I don’t think he won any other state.

Trump couldn’t even come close in his home town.

Trump supporters should consider that.

If you’ve been wondering why there’s so much continuing uproar over Attorney General Barr, an attorney who occupied the same position under President Bush (GHW) and, until joining the Trump Administration generally considered an honorable man, today’s contretemps concerning the length of sentence for convicted felon and Nixon-lover Roger Stone is a clue: when the Department of Justice announced it would override the requested length of sentence for Stone that was requested by the prosecutors on the case, they all quit. This came after this tweet appeared:

This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice! https://t.co/rHPfYX6Vbv

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 11, 2020

I daresay the prosecutors, successfully proving Stone engaged in felonious behavior in connection with one of the most important parts of democracy, and when they chose to quit it wasn’t because they have lucrative jobs waiting, but because they recognize they can no longer work in an honorable manner with the Department.

Look, this is all circumstantial evidence, right? But, in combination with all the other evidence – begin with Barr’s misleading summary of the Mueller Report – and the sum total does not leave Barr looking like an independent and competent AG.

If Trump really thought “the crimes were on the other side,” and Barr was doing nothing about them, shouldn’t he be tearing Barr a new one? Yet, nothing happens. Barr is busy keeping him happy.

It’s one thing when an untrained dude like me says it, it’s quite another when someone with the right letters after their name shouts it from the rooftops, like Scott R. Anderson on Lawfare:

But the president is already pushing up against the legal and practical limits on his control over federal employees. While Trump may be able to remove officials from certain political positions with limited repercussions, there are far more constraints on what he can do to career civil servants. And pushing against those limits is likely to place Trump back in the same difficult position he only recently escaped: with his efforts to solicit political favors from Ukraine back under independent scrutiny. As a result, the president may not have much more leeway with which to continue his campaign of vengeance.

It only makes sense, so if Trump tries to take too much revenge – and it hasn’t been much so far – he could find himself in yet another awkward position. His base won’t care – they’ll just take it as persecution, and in fact if he doesn’t engage in public revenge, his base might start questioning him.

But the independents, who might hang around long enough to find out that the whistleblowers are the real persecution victims, may care. So can Trump restrain himself? Can his handlers restrain him? Time will tell.

But this just gets beyond me. The abstract of “Arrow of time and its reversal on the IBM quantum computer“, Lesovik, et al:

Uncovering the origin of the “arrow of time” remains a fundamental scientific challenge. Within the framework of statistical physics, this problem was inextricably associated with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which declares that entropy growth proceeds from the system’s entanglement with the environment. This poses a question of whether it is possible to develop protocols for circumventing the irreversibility of time and if so to practically implement these protocols. Here we show that, while in nature the complex conjugation needed for time reversal may appear exponentially improbable, one can design a quantum algorithm that includes complex conjugation and thus reverses a given quantum state. Using this algorithm on an IBM quantum computer enables us to experimentally demonstrate a backward time dynamics for an electron scattered on a two-level impurity. [Nature: Scientific Reports]

Nature is more than respectable, but reversing time? Or is this just some minor aspect?

Welcome to Bikini Atoll. This is a sonar map of the lagoon where the first submarine nuclear explosion took place in 1946:

The sticks mark the final resting places of the ships used as test targets. These ships were thought be capable of surviving the blast, so, according to this BBC report:

These vessels – old units from the US, Japanese and German navies – were not prepared with the expectation that they would become artificial reefs. If that was the intention, they would have been stripped down.

Instead, the war-game scenario demanded that they should be left in position as if operational. That meant they were fuelled and even had munitions aboard.

“As we were mapping, I could know without looking up when we were near the [US aircraft carrier] Saratoga, because we could smell the bunker fuel; it was so heavy and is still streaking out.

Long time readers may recall that I find the practice of leaving shipwrecks lying around nettlesome, especially those which are a danger not only to the environment, but to local humans who may be caught in a catastrophe when the fuel oil or munitions reach critical. The radioactivity of these ships simply makes it even more difficult to visualize how to raise and properly dispose of these ships.

And the population of Bikini Atoll was mistreated dreadfully.

There’s been the expected bewailings of the punishment for Sondland, the Vindman brothers, and perhaps others still to come. Senator Minority Leader Schumer (D-NY), and presumably just about all the members of Congress, has recognized that whistleblower retaliation is illegal:

On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) requested all 74 inspectors general, including the Defense Department IG, to investigate retaliation against whistleblowers after President Donald Trump got key impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman kicked out of the National Security Council last week.

Would the Democrats consider another impeachment? I think, at the very least, they should make noises about it. After all, this is a violation of law, and it falls well within the House oversight function to investigate and, once again, prepare articles of impeachment.

What’s worse than being impeached but not convicted? Yeah, you got it.

Messaged properly, the Democrats can use such an impeachment inquiry and trial to continue to chip away at the rotten core of the Republican Party – and to affirm the message that the Presidency is not to be treated as a Mob position.