Monthly Archives: May 2021

Naturalistic fallacy:

But, as that letter to Asa Gray shows, Darwin was not the kind to equate the natural and the good; he saw a wasp’s painfully slow execution of a caterpillar as a product of natural selection yet still thought it was a bad thing. (Letting nature prescribe your values—inferring “ought” from “is”—is so famously fallacious that it has a name: the naturalistic fallacy. Darwin’s friend and loudest defender, Thomas Huxley, argued forcefully, in a lecture that was later published as the book Evolution and Ethics, that nature is too cruel to serve as our moral guide.) [“The Truth about Darwin,” Nonzero Newsletter]

From macrotrends comes the China population and population growth rates, both past and projected:

For those of us concerned about the damage population growth does to the environment, this is at least somewhat encouraging. However, for those official who have other responsibilities, though, this is discouraging – or disastrous. However, this graph does not show demographic data that prompted this policy change:

Happy Memorial Day, folks.

It reflects who considers the Middle East to be important to their national interests.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a member of this guy’s species before.

A lovely link between us and them.

Lord Love A Duck (1966) is a virtually impenetrable satire, according to sources, of California teen culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s. As such, it is a quintessential example of a dated story, a story that depends, to the N^th degree, on the particulars and sensibilities of its era and location; for those of us with no connection to that cultural milieu, it becomes a near-random collection of decisions by characters who bear just enough resemblance to the people of today to leave us reckoning them mad.

Or actors.

And, by the way, Mollymauk.

Ya gotta shake your head at this proposed law:

Members of the PA legislature today voted to fine women who miscarry and force them to fill out this form. This is traumatizing for women experiencing incredible loss. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/AAnB79MGy5

— Val Arkoosh (@ValArkooshPA) May 25, 2021

If you’re evangelical, all you can say is that the PA Legislature is punishing women for God’s Decision. Which hardly sounds faithful to me.

Maybe the PA GOP should try talking to someone else besides themselves.

Surmise:

• a thought or idea based on scanty evidence : CONJECTURE
• to form a notion of from scanty evidence : IMAGINE, INFER [Merriam-Webster]

Learn something new everyday. I thought it meant deduction, but no. Noted in “The Wyoming Death Ship: Truth Be Told,” Joe Nickell, Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2021):

Various words and phrases in the three accounts seem unconvincing as the language of simple outdoorsmen (though not for Gaddis, whose use of the phrase “the vasty deep” shows he knew his Shakespeare [see Henry IV, Part I, act 3, scene 1]). Consider Webber’s “to give vent to,” “assumed the shape of,” “the apparition,” “standing in a circle of close formation,” “covered with hoar-frost which glittered in the rays of the afternoon sun,” and “the Spectral Ship of Death”; Wilson’s “while gazing out upon the swiftly running water,” “the man whom,” “without a sign of animation,” “frost-laden sailcloth,” “what I surmised,” “the frightfully scarred face,” “my supposition is that”; and Heibe’s (as related by Gaddis) “the vapory vessel,” “a scene of horror on the phantom deck,” and so on.

I love the title of the article, and the picture that accompanies it at the link is nice, too.

The field goal attempt is good. The score is now Old Gods, 125, Hebrides Islanders, 2. The referee will be decapitated at end of the game for acknowledging the safety suffered by the Old Gods at the end of the first quarter.
The Old Gods will be penalized for playing an American game on Scottish soil.

The Wicker Man (1973) is a story about the dangers of religion, particularly those that clash. Policeman Neil Howie has to travel to Summerisle, located in the Hebrides, to follow up an investigation of a reported missing young girl. His arrival happens to coincide with an ancient ritual celebrating the Old, or Celtic, Gods, and Howie, a Christian with some strong beliefs of his own, is outraged to discover the islanders are following the Old Gods. Naked children perform rituals, adults are copulating in the fields, and all manner of old-fashioned Christian wickedness seems to be occurring. Even Howie’s position as a policeman seems to draw more amusement than respect.

And that investigation? It’s not going so well. Did the girl exist? Does she now? Is she now in trouble?

Feeling both frustrated at an investigation which runs into dead-ends and jokes at every turn, and a little fraught from the earthiness on display, Howie finally meets with Lord Summerisle in order to arrange an exhumation of a certain grave, a procedure which yields nothing but a dead rabbit. Angry at what he considers a crude joke, Howie learns of the upcoming ritual celebration wherein the islands wear full costumes for the celebration, and becomes certain, from certain remarks he overhears, that the missing girl will appear at the ritual.

And be sacrificed.

And so Howie goes down the rabbit hole, assaulting an islander and taking the man’s costume. Once he’s reached the ritual location, he’s right: little Rowan appears.

She’s not in trouble.

She’s just playing a role.

And Howie finds that, yes, there is a sacrifice to be made.

And the Wicker Man? He’ll be presiding.

It’s Howie’s stiff-necked belief that he’s superior to the islanders because of his Christianity that leads him to disaster. But the islanders themselves have a problem. They had turned back to the Old Gods long before when they had observed their Christian leaders could do nothing to save their crops, and had in fact left in a panic. A sacrifice to the Old Gods that fateful fall, and the next season the crops succeeded.

But now, decades later, the crops had failed; rather than sacrifice one of their own, Howie would fill the role. But Howie has one other important contribution: His shout to Lord Summerisle that he’ll be next when the crops fail again. And Summerisle’s rebuttal No he won’t! is, really, quite impotent.

They might. That is, sacrifice Lord Summerisle.

The Gods, Christian or otherwise, don’t walk among them, demonstrating their power and reassuring the islanders. The islanders can shout into the maelstrom invocations of power, they can try to bribe those inchoate powers which supposedly imbue all with life, with their mad little gifts.

But, in the end, chaos is chaos. Howie may win out, or Summerisle will dominate. But that only speaks to the limitations of humanity, the happenstance that is part of Nature.

And so the movie ends: dark with humanity’s failed vision, so failed that the islanders don’t even realize it. There are no winners, all are losers. All praise Whoever. Because such powers are egotists ….

Effective and surprising, it’s a neat little horror movie, appealing to honest motives and running into humanity’s inherent limitations. The inner animals emerge, to reveal their recognition that to survive, sometimes one must stop at nothing.

And that’s something to gnaw on.

Or something, at least.

I hope readers like close ups.

For those of us who remember the advent of a plethora, a plague even, of malicious websites using the trademark name Viagra illegally to lure the unwary to their financial woes, and don’t know why we’re not still awash in such horrors, Nicholas Weaver of UC-Berkley has a short history:

At the time, it looked almost impossible for foreign law enforcement to combat these operations. These criminals were clearly outside the reach of U.S. law and were sheltered by a Russian government that viewed cybercrime as a profit center as long as the impacts weren’t localized. But the research group I was then a member of showed Pfizer how to eliminate the Viagra spam problem.  …

… Although they drop-shipped products from international locations, they still needed to process credit card payments, and at the time almost all the gangs used just three banks. This revelation, which was highlighted in a New York Times story, resulted in the closure of the gangs’ bank accounts within days of the story. This was the beginning of the end for the spam Viagra industry. One of the major gang operators posted portions of our paper on a Russian cybercrime forum the next day, ending his rant with a gripe that translated to “F***ing scientists, always at it again” and a picture of a mushroom cloud.

Subsequently, any spammer who dared use the “Viagra” trademark would quickly find their ability to accept credit cards irrevocably compromised as someone would perform a test purchase to find the receiving bank and then Pfizer would send the receiving bank a nastygram. In less than a year, the Viagra spam business effectively died, with one Russian cybercriminal remarking, “F***ing Visa is burning us with napalm.” If the criminals’ ability to process payments can be disrupted, so can their ability to operate.

As a society, we also saw the effectiveness of payment interdiction in the first major ransomware epidemic back in 2012 and 2013. Various ransomwares proliferated, including one purporting to involve the FBI. Some of these previous-generation ransomwares would accept either Bitcoin or Green Dot MoneyPaks and targeted retail victims by trying to extort a couple hundred dollars. Fortunately this scheme never metastasized, because Bitcoin was grossly inconvenient (and now can’t even work for small transactions, with each costing nearly $59 as of April 2020). Meanwhile, Green Dot cleaned up its act considerably in response to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and congressional pressure to remedy its role in these criminal efforts. [Lawfare]

And this he connects to the recent use of ransomware and identifies Bitcoin as the financial vector:

Now, a new threat has emerged—“big-game ransomware.” These operations target companies instead of individuals, in an attempt to extort millions rather than hundreds of dollars at a time. The revenues are large enough that some gangs can even specialize and develop zero-day vulnerabilities for specialized software. Even the cryptocurrency community has noted that ransomware is a Bitcoin problem. Multimillion-dollar ransoms, paid in Bitcoin, now seem to be commonplace.

This strongly suggests that the best way to deal with this new era of big-game ransomware will involve not just securing computer systems (after all, you can’t patch against a zero-day vulnerability) or prosecuting (since Russia clearly doesn’t care to either extradite or prosecute these criminals). It will also require disrupting the one payment channel capable of moving millions at a time outside of money laundering laws: Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Currently, there are various methods that can degrade, disrupt or destroy the cryptocurrency space.

“Bitcoin problem.” By the validity of the very nature of that phrase, there is a certain repudiation of one of the foundational piers of Bitcoin, isn’t there? That foundation would be the anti government control of currency. Right now, Bitcoin and its cousins are more or less algorithmically controlled, from generation to ownership, while being geographically insensitive. Only those without Internet access cannot use it, theoretically, although the Chinese will, or are, attempting to limit its use. Servers can exist anywhere and thus appear to be outside of government regulation.

So will this invalidate Bitcoin? As a currency, its popularity is a function of the number and legitimacy of the entities willing to use it for exchanging ownership and consumption of assets; if consumers refuse to use it, or corporations refuse to accept it, it loses value. Consumers can be encouraged or discouraged, as in China, and so can the companies. Without physical destruction of the servers, governments can still cripple it by refusing to permit its use by legit entities.

Although, if they take that tact, what is is to be done if a ransomware incident occurs and the maleficient still demand a Bitcoin ransom? I could see a cyberwar develop in which the goal is to revive the cryptocurrencies themselves. And I could see such a war being successful for those trying to revive the cryptocurrencies, at least so long as Russia remains an adversary with little interest in regulation. The difference between the Viagra incident and the ransomware problem is that the short hairs of the victims are in the grasp of the criminals in the latter scenario, rather than the former, if you’ll permit the my exceedingly crass word play. The Viagra sites were a passive opportunity, and if a consumer chose not to visit then they were safe.

Ransomware is inflicted on its victims and must either be deactivated by the actor or solved by the victim – the latter being very expensive and often a very doubtful exercise, while the former is more or less guaranteed to work – for a price. Weaver draws an analogy with a weakness that he doesn’t address.

Which all leads back to the conclusion that a dependence on computers, monoculture or not, may not be the wise investment that they appear to be. That may be a horrific and contentious conclusion, but it’s one to which I would pay some sober attention.

USA Today seems to have something of an intellectual mess on its hands, as it published a letter from high-schooler Chelsea Mitchell concerning running against transgender athletes – and then edited it to ideological, rather than editorial, requirements. It’s unfortunately behind an expensive paywall, so I can’t verify Limbaugh-replacement Erick Erickson’s statement of facts in the matter:

Last week, Chelsea Mitchell wrote an op-ed in USA Today about the impact to her, as the fastest girl in Connecticut, when biological males were allowed to compete as girls.

One of the things Mitchell wrote was this:

The CIAC allows biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. As a result, two males began racing in girls’ track in 2017. In the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons alone, these males took 15 women’s state track championship titles (titles held in 2016 by nine different girls) and more than 85 opportunities to participate in higher level competitions that belonged to female track athletes.

That’s because males have massive physical advantages. Their bodies are simply bigger and stronger on average than female bodies. It’s obvious to every single girl on the track.

…

USA Today has now edited Mitchell’s piece to remove the word “male” with an editor’s note that the use of the word is “hurtful language.”

Mitchell, of course, was talking about biology and the biological differences between the sexes.

And more than just that, according to Erickson.

A quick survey of the web shows this is mostly a conservative issue, but progressive (or at least so I’d think) site Outsports has coverage:

In a fashion befitting the sponsor of the lawsuit — the Alliance Defending Freedom — Mitchell proceeded to mix in the “transphobe’s playbook” I described in a previous Outsports article. In the race Mitchell cited, she lost to two other high school girls, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood. Both Miller and Yearwood are transgender. Mitchell is cisgender. Mitchell beat both of them to win the state title at 55 meters in 2020.

Throughout the opinion piece she referred to transgender girls and women as “males,” “a male body,” “male runners” and “biological males.” Weaponized misgendering is the first play in the playbook: Immediately sell the point that transgender women are not women.

In every filing by the ADF on this particular case, they engaged in consistent misgendering. They went as far as to try to have the judge in the lawsuit removed because he would not allow the ADF’s lawyers to misgender Miller and Yearwood in court.

Also consider this sentence in Mitchell’s piece: “I am unlikely to succeed, because I’m a woman.” That’s the underlying, and comically false, idea that anti-trans groups also sell: The concept that cisgender women are too inept to compete successfully in sport.

The sport of victimhood is alive and well in the United States. There may be articles that properly address the real and serious questions of cis- vs trans- competition out there, but at least Outsports thinks the question is already settled – and they’re into full cultural warfare mode.

But regardless of whether the word “male” is a hurtful word or just a statement of fact, USA Today should have a commitment to faithfully transmitting the opinions of op-ed writers when they choose to publish them. Words are the primary mode of communications for a newspaper, followed by pictures; one hopes that the authors choose their words with care, hoping to convey the subtle nuances of their thoughts, and thus their precise positions, on the issue at hand. Changing them retroactively, unilaterally or even with permission, distorts those positions and betrays the author.

And the ruination of the code of ethics of editorial publishing.

In 2014/2015 the Northwestern University Wildcats football team attempted to unionize, and was rebuffed by the University and the National Labor Relations Board. This has led to the introduction of a bill in Congress by Senators Booker (D-NJ) and Sanders (D-VT) to permit exactly that.

That has led to this statement by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA):

“College athletes are students and not employees of their college or university. This bill would directly undercut the purpose of college: earning a degree. The NCAA and its member schools support student-athletes through scholarships – many of which cover their full cost of education debt free – and numerous other benefits. NCAA members also are committed to modernizing name, image and likeness rules so student-athletes can benefit from those opportunities but not become employees of their school. We will continue to work with members of Congress to focus on issues that align with our priorities. But turning student-athletes into union employees is not the answer.”

And what strikes me is this: if the athletes aren’t employees, then just where is all this entertainment product coming from? Are they attributing these literally billions of dollars to the color commentators? The random motions of the crowds in the stadiums?

The NCAA’s statement does the author no favors.

Out of Politico:

Just for the orange.

Please visit the orange detoxification institution in your area.

Just to keep readers up to date on the recount in Maricopa County, AZ, now we have this:

The Pennsylvania-based IT company that was in charge of running the hand recount of Maricopa County ballots is no longer involved in the audit.

The contract with Wake Technology Services, Inc. ended May 14, the original completion date for the hand count, and the company chose not to renew its contract, according to Randy Pullen, an audit spokesperson and former state GOP chair.

“They were done,” he said. “They didn’t want to come back.”

Wake TSI was the subcontractor that developed and oversaw the procedures for recounting the county’s nearly 2.1 million ballots, working under Cyber Ninjas, the state Senate’s main contractor performing the overall audit of the county’s general election results. [azcentral]

Just a normal business incident, or more a symptom of a toxic environment? Well, based on this:

Ryan Macias, former acting director of testing and certification at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission who has observed the audit for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, said Tuesday that this represents the “continuation of the mismanagement and constant change which we have been observing since the beginning.”

Smells like the latter, although whether Macias is unbiased or not has some bearing on that conclusion.

It’s probably premature to suggest Wake is getting out before the lawsuits from either side begin to fly, but that’s what I’m expecting. Either those thousands of missing votes will fail to appear and the Republicans will sue Cyber Ninjas and their contractors, or they will magically appear and the Democrats will sue for fraud.

Wake should never have accepted the contract.

A few months ago Drs. James S.J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan in The Space Review tried to summarize space ethics:

So what, then, do space ethicists actually do? At the highest level of generality, we are simply here to ask the ethical questions that, sooner or later, will need to be asked. And it is a feature of the practice of ethics, and not a bug, that it produces productive disagreements about the answers. But more specifically, there are five broad roles that characterize the vast majority of space ethics research. There are no doubt others that will emerge in the future, as space ethics is an evolving discipline. But the following list captures its “settled” roles and responsibilities.

1. Space ethics identifies principles for arriving at rational compromises between different stakeholders in space. …

Unfortunately, their brief review of Why space ethics seems woefully inadequate:

In a sense, this goes to the heart of the matter, and why space ethics matters: it helps us to identify and reconsider assumptions that space advocates as well as space skeptics often fail to realize that they are making. In some cases, these assumptions turn out to be entirely reasonable. In others, they turn out to be highly questionable. If you are expecting space ethics to tell you that space exploration is the greatest thing ever, and that we should plunge ahead at all deliberate speed, then you may be in for a disappointment. You are also in for a disappointment if you are expecting space ethics to validate calls to renounce space exploration and to accept our terrestrial horizons.

I tend to be a bit of a pragmatic barbarian when it comes to philosophy. I wanted to see them motivate (space) ethics as a What goes around comes around deal. Not the sometimes-poetic Karma! approach, but the hard-nosed You screwed over that guy two months ago, so now we’re screwing you over now.

They didn’t go there.

Consequently, it all seems a bit airy and academic, and not imbued with urgency.

The Lincoln Project, despite its own travails, continues on:

This is trolius, if I recall rightly. I bet I misspelled that.

Or even fascinating. An illustrative story:

Allan Creasy, 39, had worked in restaurants and bars for more than two decades, most recently as a bartender at Celtic Crossing, an Irish bar in Memphis, where he was voted the city’s best bartender three times over the years by readers of the city’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Memphis Flyer.

Like others, Creasy saidthe pandemic proved to be the tipping point for him, exacerbating long-standing labor issues in the industry and drawing attention to how low his wages were: $2.13 an hour before tips — the minimum wage for tipped positions in Tennessee and at the federal level.

After three months back at the bar after the initial lockdown, Creasy decided to quit and pursue a career change.

“I didn’t come back to the same job I left previously,” he said. “It was very difficult to constantly have to police people about mask-wearing. It was very difficult to try to bartend and run out to the back parking lot to deliver to-go food, and to deal with Uber Eats drivers and the like, while making significantly less money than I’d been making previously.”

And the pay had gotten worse — with his income dropping from about $60,000 a year around 2011 to less than $40,000 before the pandemic, he said.

“I’ve seen the number of people who are passionate about the restaurant industry slowly ebb away over the last 20 years,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s because the server’s minimum wage hasn’t changed. There is this belief that servers and bartenders are interchangeable.”

Creasy, who has a bachelor’s degree in history, has been doing fundraising and social media work for a local political action committee since. He’s making about the same amount of money he did at the bar but doing something that feels closer to his heart with less risk. [WaPo]

If stories like these are common, this could have quite the impact on American society, as those working sub-minimum jobs finally figure out that they need more – and can make more, if only they start working towards it. These jobs may not disappear, but they may force prices up at all restaurants – and that’ll perturb what we currently see as American society.

Some people won’t like that. I, personally, think it’ll be a great thing, and I look forward to seeing how things change. Robots? Automats? Better wages? More cooking at home?

Remember former President Trump’s fear-mongering campaigning during the 2018 midterm races, the theme being that caravans of rapists were coming from Mexico and further south, and if the Republicans didn’t win big in the mid-terms, well, just let your imagination roam wild?

The Republicans sustained heavy losses in the mid-terms.

But it appears they’re at it again, if the messaging used by the Republican candidate in the special election to replace Rep Haaland (R-NM), who was nominated and confirmed to Interior Secretary, is anything to judge:

Melanie Stansbury, the Democratic candidate in next week’s special congressional election [in New Mexico], spent last weekend touting Joe Biden’s agenda, vowing to strengthen infrastructure and fight climate change, drought and hunger.

Her Republican opponent used the same preelection push to warn that she would be heading to Washington to “defund the police” and back legislation to close all federal prisons within 10 years, releasing infamous criminals out on the street.

“Think about who’s in federal prison right now: El Chapo, the co-founder of al Qaeda, the Oklahoma City bomber, the Unabomber,” state Sen. Mark Moores told a luncheon of three dozen Republican women on Friday. “That is how radical this agenda is, and we have to stop it.” [Politico]

Close all federal prisons within 10 years? Someone with a fervid imagination, I should imagine, has gotten loose. While the article attributes this to the proposed BREATHE Act, I know of no serious movement to close federal prisons.

No, this is pure fear-mongering.

The temptation, the strong temptation, is to attribute this lack of imagination and abuse of voters to the third- and fourth-raters infesting the GOP these days. I’ll even give in to it.

But it’s important for Democrat Stansbury to directly address these claims and refute them. If her messaging team is clever, they’ll roll a clip of the January 6 insurrection and then Stansbury can ask where those who participated in that treason should be incarcerated, if not in federal prisons?

Perhaps she could ask her opponent, Moores, for his advice on the matter.

Chaos and disaster.

Steve Benen seems a bit puzzled over Republican leadership outcry over social media platforms, which are private companies protected by the 1st Amendment, banning certain conservative figures from using those platforms due to policy violations – advocacy of false information, violence, that sort of thing. In the context of a newly signed Florida law which forbids companies from banning users on pain of large fines – yes, that sounds like a DOA law to me, too – he concludes:

With this in mind, lawsuits challenging [Governor DeSantis’ (R-FL)] new measure are inevitable, and the policy is likely to struggle in the courts. That said, the fact that Florida Republicans invested time, energy, and resources into such an initiative says a great deal about the party’s weird preoccupation with conspiracy theories surrounding Big Tech. [Maddowblog]

Except it’s not weird. Sure, I’ll stipulate to this:

Right off the bat, there’s a serious flaw in DeSantis’ premise: As NBC News’ report explained, “Research on social media has frequently shown … that conservative politicians and websites can be so effective on social media that they often dominate measures such as Facebook’s ranking of top links. Facebook has also relaxed its rules so that conservative pages are not penalized for violations.”

But it’s an irrelevancy. The Republicans, who are watching their base shrink through demographic attrition and disgust while refusing to reform their message or themselves, have to continue to dominate those rankings. This is because the social media platforms are the primary means for communicating cheaply and effectively with their base. Sure, email and mass mailings can be used, but neither is as good as a shared social media experience, because they inherently have the network effect: first people learn about the latest liberal outrage, and then they can talk about it among themselves, which gets them even more stirred up.

This is all about keeping the emotions roiling, and social media has no equal when it comes to that.

The Republicans cannot continue to stir the pot if the tech companies providing these platforms keep banning people and organizations who provide the fuel for the fires. DeSantis is trying to cut the herd off at the pass by passing and signing this law, warning Big Social Media to lay off enforcement of their own rules.

And does it have a chance?

DeSantis may think so, not based on sophisticated legal analysis but on the composition of SCOTUS: he may be banking on ideological loyalty saving his bacon.

But while it’s dangerous to bet on SCOTUS – I wouldn’t put any money into a betting pool connected to any particular decision by them – my suspicion is that SCOTUS would reject this law, and probably 9-0.

But let’s hope that the Federal Courts rebuff this law with such snap that the Florida GOP becomes dispirited.

A reader remarks on bitcoin:

I just wish I had bought some Bitcoins back in 2012 – 2016 when I was actually thinking about doing so.

Hindsight and so on – but, to be honest, I’m glad I did not. I prefer my investing theses, as ill-formed as they sometimes can be, to at least have some sort of virtue working for them – a good or a service that makes sense.

Bitcoin has yet to charm me, as readers of this thread know.

So I don’t like the idea of the emotional anguish that might have beset me for being invested in something that still seems to provide a weakly needed service.

Speaking of, it supposedly had a bit of a recovery today. Here’s a trailing nine month chart from Buy Bitcoin Worldwide:

It has a ways to go to reach its previous high, and it’s not at all obvious that such a price is in reach, what with the Chinese affirmation of hating on cryptocurrencies.

WaPo has a new article for masochists.

And, no, I have no real idea where bitcoin is going next.

Jennifer Rubin @ WaPo: