Monthly Archives: November 2021

… perhaps they need to be reminded that, as citizens, graft and corruption are as damaging for them as it is for real citizens. Here’s Margaret Sullivan of WaPo with a graphic example of what we’re losing as local newspapers sink into the sea of insolvency:

I spent some time with Bertram de Souza, the paper’s editorial page editor, who had been at the Vindicator [now shuttered] for 40 years. As a reporter, he helped reveal the corruption of James Traficant, who was expelled from Congress and sent to prison in 2002 after being convicted of racketeering, taking bribes and using his staff to do chores at his home and on his houseboat. Youngstown “is absolutely the kind of place that needs watchdog reporting,” de Souza told me, “and this newspaper was committed to exposing corruption.” The problem, going forward, is that when it comes to revealing malfeasance, you don’t know what you don’t know: If there’s no one to keep public officials honest, citizens might never find out how their faith is being broken and their tax dollars squandered.

Or new business suppressed, or enemies at contemporary businesses attacked from the castle of a corrupt government. As Sullivan points out later in the article, a free press subsisting on government subsidies isn’t a healthy relationship.

Back in the heyday of newspapers, while readers were expected to pay for access to the gathered news, that wasn’t the primary source of income for the newspaper. Advertising paid the bills, advertising mainly paid for by local businesses.

Today, the Web and email permit businesses to bypass the newspaper, and I do not doubt they save scads of money by doing so. But the cost to the community, of which they are a part, puts that community more and more at risk of becoming a toxic swamp rather than a source of profit. Can your local car repair shop, 3M, Cargill, the grocery store, and the local model train club all survive in an environment in which the government is corrupt? Where corporations had better contribute to the reelection fund, or face possible extinction?

I’m not necessarily suggesting that the local business community find a way to support the free press, although I think it’s a strong contender. I cannot help but wonder if it’s possible to extract the job of investigating government into some other entity, again supported by local business, that can investigate, without bias, the local and national government as necessary.

But newspapers do seem to be the natural residence of such investigators. And I think that business, having once had a critical role in funding the investigators, had better consider assuming that role again.

This makes me wonder if the Web is doomed:

We’ve all heard of the Ancient Aliens theory, a pseudoscientific belief that aliens built (among other things) the Egyptian pyramids. This week, however, history buffs on TikTok were confronted with a brand new conspiracy theory: “Ancient Rome isn’t real.”

This idea was put forward by @momllennial_, a history TikToker who often sparks controversy on the app. Previously, she’s theorized that Alexander the Great was a woman, that Jesus Christ’s name can be translated as “clitoris healer,” and that the iconic 18th century painting “The Swing” is full of hidden codes about the French revolution. Over the past few weeks she’s posted a lot about Ancient Rome, including a TikTok claiming that “Hadrian’s Wall can’t be proven to be of Roman construction.” [daily dot]

There’s ruins, ancient documents, history, archaeology, all documenting Rome. But this person, whoever it is, flings out some baseless assertions and gets attention.

Never mind that science is the search for truth. Attention!

This makes me play with the idea that people respected for their hard work in academics may one day pull out of the Web, out of Twitter, Facebook, and their own web sites, leaving it to be the domain of those who, like some narcissists I’ve known, will monopolize anything in order to get attention. People have already announced they’re leaving Twitter, leaving Facebook. Will they take the next step out of the hog’s pen?

And so much for Andreesen’s dream of the Web democratizing information. When information is not prioritized by truth-value, it all becomes swill, swill of uncertain intellectual nutrition value.

And will people walk away from that? Or will someone find a way to make the Web useful again?

In the meantime, it’s a sort of … well … I apologize … a Greek tragedy, now isn’t it?

For the most part though, the response to @momllennial_’s theories came in the form of factual debunk TikToks and history jokes. Right now, HistoryTok is full of academics satirically mourning the end of their careers because Ancient Rome Isn’t Real—and people generally making fun of the drama.

Some Republicans haven’t received the memo just yet, in connection with the report that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is paying some Trump legal bills:

“This is not normal. Nothing about this is normal, especially since he’s not only a former President but a billionaire,” said a former top RNC official.

“What does any of this have to do with assisting Republicans in 2022 or preparing for the 2024 primary?” the official added.

Bill Palatucci, a national committeeman from New Jersey, said the fact that the RNC made the payments to Trump’s attorneys in October was particularly frustrating given his own plea to party officials that same month for additional resources as the New Jersey GOP sought to push Republican Jack Ciattarelli over the finish line in his challenge to incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

“We sure as heck could have used $121,000,” Palatucci told CNN. [CNN/Politics]

They need to understand that, to Trump, money is holy, and he who has lots of it at their death is better in God’s eyes than the losers who didn’t do as well.

That’s all this really comes down to, shameful as it is. The RNC is party to one of the oddest death cults we’ve ever seen.

Yes, I know he’s taller, but I’m better looking!

The Courier (2020) falls into a class of movies in which some obscure but important person finally gets their time in the sun. In this case, it’s British businessman Greville Wynne, a facilitator of business deals, an everyday husband and father, who becomes, in 1960, a reluctant courier for Britain’s MI6 to and from Oleg Penkovsky, a KGB Colonel disenchanted with the USSR.

They perform the usual: information transfers, the ticklish ‘trap dance’ that goes with all such transactions, the methods to evade detection, and their eventual failure.

The charm of a story like this is not in the suspense, because the audience knows what’s coming: it is, after all, a tale derived from reality. In that respect, there will be no surprise at the plot at the highest levels, although minor twists and turns may still titillate the curiosity.

The strengths and weakness of a story like this lies, more heavily than most, on characterization and sensitivity to the costs of the protagonists’ actions. Wynne has been asked to risk liberty, life, and even family to act as a courier, and then to attempt to rescue Penkovsky. How does he react? Is he foolhardy, or living up to the standards of Western Civ? What would be the consequences of not trying?

The Courier’s storytellers do a fairly good job of it, making the audience care for the characters, but for those audience members who’ve seen a number of this sort of movie, the ranks of which include The Imitation Game (2014), there remains a faint ambiance, a commonality with other members of the category which is slightly unpleasant.

Still, that’s not to discourage readers from watching The Courier. If nothing else, it’s an interesting, if chilling, glimpse into autocratic Russia, a look at what it’s like to live in a society in which there were spies under every rock, spies who got ahead by finding things.

A reminder that autocracy’s offerings are accompanied by a price that is far too high.

Circadian:

Circadian rhythms are 24-hour cycles that are part of the body’s internal clock, running in the background to carry out essential functions and processes. One of the most important and well-known circadian rhythms is the sleep-wake cycle.

Different systems of the body follow circadian rhythms that are synchronized with a master clock in the brain. This master clock is directly influenced by environmental cues, especially light, which is why circadian rhythms are tied to the cycle of day and night.

When properly aligned, a circadian rhythm can promote consistent and restorative sleep. But when this circadian rhythm is thrown off, it can create significant sleeping problems, including insomnia. Research is also revealing that circadian rhythms play an integral role in diverse aspects of physical and mental health. [Sleep Foundation]

Noted in “Tiny region of human brain that helps regulate sleep studied at last,” Jason Arunn Murugesu, NewScientist (13 November 2021, paywall):

“I think that the method they’re using has a lot of potential,” says Debra Skene at the University of Surrey in the UK. But she says the researchers used such bright pulses of light to elicit a response from the nucleus that it is unclear if this particular study tells us anything new about circadian clocks.

What causes my Arts Editor to yell OH, COOL!?

About 1,600 blocks of metal movable type from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have been discovered inside an earthenware pot underneath Jongno, one of Seoul’s busiest tourist districts. This is the largest collection of movable type blocks from the period ever discovered in Korea. Six hundred of the pieces use hangul, the Korean alphabet, which was created in 1433 and gradually replaced Chinese characters.

The earliest known examples of hangul metal movable type are 30 pieces held by the National Museum of Korea, dating to 1455, that were used by Korean royalty. Researchers believe the new finds date from around the same time. The blocks were found with other metal objects that commoners would normally not have had access to, including artillery and parts of an astronomical clock and a water clock—both of which are described in royal documents. [“Typing Time,” Hyung-eun Kim, Archaeology (November/December 2021)]

Our past shapes our behavior, and she comes out of a now-former publishing family.

For societies aspiring to be liberal democracies, such as the United States, there are a number of characteristics they must meet, such as form of government, valuing the individual, using debate and reason to determine actions, rather than autocratic or theocratic means, etc. Let’s focus on the requirement to fully and honestly debate proposed changes to society, whether they be changes to the legal system, or to more informal facets of society.

A good example of such an issue and debate is gay marriage. Gay marriage was illegal in the United States until 2001, when it began to be recognized by various states, until the final SCOTUS ruling in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, which neutralized all laws opposing it throughout the United States. I remember the debates over the issue here in Minnesota, sparked by the proposal to add an Amendment to the Minnesota State Constitution to explicitly ban gay marriage in 2012; eventually, the proposal was defeated by 3.5 percentage points at the ballot box, after being both down and up in the polls.

But the point is that there was a debating aspect to it. We talked about it. Some people changed position. And, while many on the losing side proceeded to squeal loudly a number of absurd predictions, none of them have come true, and society has continued on with aplomb. Why? Because the issue’s depths had been plumbed, people had given it thought, and, in the end, we realized that no harm would come of it, while great good probably would. Gay marriages were performed, children were adopted or sometimes had naturally, gay divorces occurred, and suddenly we went from having an irrationally loathed minority to just another minority.

This post isn’t to rehash the gay marriage debate; it’s merely used as an example. Nor is it a shot at a Republican Party which has abandoned its responsibilities under the liberal democracy model of government that the Founding Fathers chose so long ago. It is enough to point at the actions of Republican Party leaders, such as Senator Mitch “No” McConnell (R-KY), and their en masse refusal to even debate certain Democratic legislative proposals, such as legislation concerning regularization of voting laws, or McConnell’s personal pride at having behaved very dishonestly when it comes to SCOTUS nominees and his supposed principles. These, as well as many other responses to problems, have left the Republican Party open to just condemnation on this point.

No, my concern is not the Republicans. It’s the Democrats and their allies.

Remember the Democrats screwing up a sure-fire win as Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) beat former governor Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) in the governor’s race? I suggested this was a gift to the Democrats, because, for the price of a governor’s seat and some seats in the Virginia legislature, it tells them that they have a problem.

But it’s only a gift if they get right down to studying their failure, to deriving and applying lessons from it.

I know there’s been at least some such study performed, although I haven’t seen the final results. But WaPo has just published a preliminary analysis of the demographic shifts in voting in Virginia, which went for Biden by ten points in the 2020 Presidential race, and while there are many factors involved in the race, the part concerning “White women” really caught my eye.

Julie Bowling, who lives in Amherst County, said she used to think of herself as a Democrat, supporting climate issues and social services, but this year felt like she’d started losing touch with the party.

Living in a region of Virginia she called the Bible Belt, the 55-year-old said Youngkin’s education stance — especially on transgender bathrooms — pushed her to vote Republican.

“The Democrats are swinging so far out of what I believe,” Bowling said.

Assuming this is representative – and WaPo knows enough to publish representative remarks – it marks a continued concern about the transgender topic, which can range from bathroom usage to the premature medicalization of the condition in immature humans, which is sometimes not reversible for those that are, as it’s termed, detransitioning.

Let’s focus on the bathroom issue. Remember, during the Obama years, that it was introduced as a civil rights matter, much to the outrage of the conservative side of the political spectrum. I was paying attention to the political scene at the time, if not as much as I do these days, and I do not remember any real debate of the matter from ground zero, by which I mean a conversation that starts with Say, what do you think about … rather than This new government regulation, substantially undebated, is being imposed …

Not a single word.

Granted, maybe I missed it. Maybe it was discussed in a dusty academic journal, settled, and then imposed.

But that would be inappropriate, wouldn’t it? The general public doesn’t know about the debate, and doesn’t get to take part, which is a vital facet of the concept of a liberal democracy.

If this is true, then I have to ask: Are the Democrats and their leftist allies truly committed to the crucial liberal democracy underpinning of the United States? Extend this to the education issue vis á vis racism, and the allegations that white children are being told by teachers that they’re responsible for enslaving black people as an inherent aspect of being white, and it’s not hard to see why the “white women” demographic moved to the right, especially given Youngkin’s distancing of himself from former President Trump.

Not because of the racism issue in education – I don’t even know if that actually occurred or was a Republican lie – but because, in essence, of the abandonment of a key pillar of liberal democracy. Public debate goes a long way to neutralizing allegations of autocratic & arbitrary government actions.

Speaking of Democratic / left of center woes, it’s not entirely clear to me that they’re willing to question themselves just yet. From the same article, I found this passage highly disquieting:

Jatia Wrighten, an assistant political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said Youngkin successfully weaponized education as a dog whistle, and she likened his use of critical race theory to the historical “Southern strategy” of employing White people’s racial fears in political campaigns.

“He activated White women to vote in a very specific way that they feel like is protecting their children,” Wrighten said. “White women felt like this was a way to protect their children from the unknown of critical race theory.”

She said there’s been a shift in recent years to think of White women as more liberal than they are. Although hundreds of thousands of pink hat-wearing women descended on Washington to protest Trump’s presidency at the women’s march in 2017, she noted, 55 percent of White women voters in 2020 supported his reelection bid.

Wrighten said that even in feminist movements, White women have historically worked toward their own progress — initiatives and policies that would help White women, but not necessarily always benefit women overall.

“White women have always had the privilege of being White,” she said.

Notice the deft assumption that it’s the voters that are at fault here, not the Democratic candidates or, worse, their Party. The implication is that this is still the result of racists, even though neither McAuliffe nor Youngkin are black. The “white women” are mislead by the evil conservatives, in essence, rather than following what they consider a rational judgment.

This strikes me as the judgment of the hubris-soaked and arrogant academic, unwilling to analyze their own ideology and methods. That’s exactly what the Democrats need to do, and, at least from Professor Wrighten, there is no sense of a self-consciousness of potential error on their part. The focus is on the enemy, which may turn out to be to the detriment of themselves.

But if they’ve abandoned the experiment of liberal democracy, they may have doomed themselves. After all, the common voter, for all of their flaws, have had the experiment of liberal democracy bred into them; if they feel that transgender bathroom issues skipped the debate portion of the national program, or a perversion of the educational program that, in their opinion, would prop up racism rather than destroy it, is being practiced, they will exercise their ultimate power, the vote, and dismay the Democrats, again.

The Republicans, full of fourth and fifth raters who cling to a mendacious and failed President’s knees, are a terrible and destructive carbuncle on the hide of the United States. Will the Democrats become the same thing, screaming about their virtue, lazily labeling dissents and criticisms as racist, and arrogantly descending into the pit of bewildering defeat because of it?

The United States can ill-afford that disaster. The Democrats and their leftist allies need to ask, Have they broken trust with the American public?

Osteobiography:

So, what is an osteobiography? It’s exactly what you’re probably thinking. An osteobiography is someone’s personal life history as told by their skeleton. Think of a skeleton as a book written in a language osteoarchaeologists can understand (and translate). We’re familiar with every bump, groove, hole, and rough spot there is, from the top of our heads to the tips of our toes. Our skeletons are a blank slate that’s shaped by life experiences. [“What is an osteobiography?” Stephanie Halmhofer, Bone, Stones, and Books]

New enough to not appear in dictionaries, but it seems quite sensible. Noted in “Identifying the Unidentified,” Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology (November/December 2021):

“The suggestion of slavery, punishment, or something nefarious immediately leapt to mind,” says Chinnock. Despite the fetters’ dramatic appearance, they do not definitively prove that the man was enslaved. This type of shackle has rarely been found anywhere in the Roman world, and never in Roman Britain. When Chinnock examined the skeleton to reconstruct the man’s life based on his bones, creating what scholars call an osteobiography, he found some lesions on his ankles and tibias from infections or trauma, but nothing that conclusively linked them to the fetters. He also found a bony spur on the man’s left femur. “The spur is of a type that can occur from a traumatic injury or from the repetitive activities of an active lifestyle, hard labor, or even heavy contact sports,” says Chinnock. “Nothing screams that this person was enslaved.” Furthermore, the man was buried near a thriving Roman town, and there would have been both slaves and laborers in the surrounding fields, farms, and villages.

My childhood comes through. Calculators / converters. Yes, have you ever muttered about Celsius to Fahrenheit conversions? Ever written a converter?

I’ve done it twice. Once was for a commercial product which never saw the light of day. For that, I invented (along with a few thousand other programmers, I later learned) a method by which adding a single conversion to support a new unit in a category resulted in automatic conversions for the rest of the members of the category by repeatedly converting to other units until the desired unit was found. Expensive in terms of computer cycles, but it changed an O(n) task to an O(1) task for the engineer – and engineer cycles are generally considered more important than computer cycles. There’s a name for this approach, but I forget it.

Later, when I was learning Mythryl, it was the basis of my approach (no, I had no connection to the actual project) to eliminating the mistake that destroyed the Mars Climate Orbiter. What was that mistake? From SimScale:

The Mars Climate Orbiter, built at a cost of $125 million, was a 338-kilogram robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998 to study the Martian climate, Martian atmosphere, and surface changes. In addition, its function was to act as the communications relay in the Mars Surveyor ‘98 program for the Mars Polar Lander. The navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet, and pounds. JPL engineers did not take into consideration that the units had been converted, i.e., the acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds^2 for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds^2. In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.

Briefly, Mythryl provides^[1] fine abstraction support. I used it to provide abstract categories from which variables could be defined, such as mass, length, acceleration, and the like, plus intuitive mathematics operators. Mythryl would not compile attempts to add a length and a weight, so it was safe in that matter. Programs would be responsible for initializing variables with the proper unit, and requesting the results in the proper unit, but all math beyond that was handled by the operators – and was theoretically safer, since there was no need to worry about units.

Some of the more abstruse categories lead to some odd problems and interesting conversations with Mythryl project lead Jeff Prothero concerning compiler hooks for handling such problems, but he died before we could pursue them seriously.

And, again, a project which never saw the light of day.

ANYWAYS … the latest in online converters appears to be the Omni Calculator. At first, it appeared fairly mundane. Then, as I searched for a promised conversion to blue whales, I ran across this:

The list of supported currencies is limited, and includes two I’ve not heard of – no surprise there.

This is rather upping the game, isn’t it? It really makes me wonder what else is hidden away in this mathematical / information tool. For example, here’s a Tree Benefits Calculator.

This might be worth a quick traipse through the undergrowth, and qualify as a useful resource.

¹ Or perhaps past tense provided, as I believe that without the late Jeff Prothero’s support, it’s sadly going nowhere.

Cortege:

A cortege is a procession of people who are walking or riding in cars to a funeral. [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “In 1921, the first soldier of the Tomb of the Unknowns was laid to rest. The memorial was caught on film,” Michael E. Ruane, WaPo:

They jammed the avenues to watch the cortege pass, and swarmed into the cemetery to see the burial.

I was reading Jennifer Rubin’s commentary from a couple of weeks ago concerning an upcoming summit on democracy, and I had a weird visual. First, the relevant passage:

It might seem like a cop-out for regimes, especially those that been criticized for backsliding on human rights such as India, to make up their own pledges. But having nations show up and present themselves as democracies is an achievement in and of itself. A gathering of a broad, impressive array of 100 or so countries would provide a contrast with the smaller clutch of illiberal regimes that seek to undermine democratic values and institutions. The event will put pressure on regimes to address domestic critics and reform advocates. And in any event, international commitments that do not have domestic political support would likely be toothless anyway. [WaPo]

Source: The World Factbook

The visual? I’m thinking of a large map of, say, Europe, large enough to be walked on. On each country stands a person representing not the country, but the country’s essential governmental core – the democracies of France and Germany and the UK dressed in a handsome blue, the more deceptive countries, such as Russia and Belarus, are loud, boisterous men and women in an alarming off-red.

And, since I mention Belarus, run by the strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who wins fake elections, let’s note that he’s been making international news lately by his maneuvering at the border of his country with Poland. He’s transported migrants to the border and set them on the Polish border guards, who, in turn, have hit the rock-throwing migrants with water cannon. Thus, Lukashenko’s attempt to manipulate a neighbor is thought to have been turn on its head.

Returning to my visual, I’d see those neighbors who dislike him, Poland, Ukraine, etc, advancing to their borders while Belarus’ representative bellows at them, and then advancing over the border, leaving a beautiful light blue in their wake, while Belarus’ person bellows some more – and then flees to the arms of Russia’s representative.

It’d make a great commercial for the summit.

Rolls-Royce is in the electric airplane business:

Rolls-Royce believes its Spirit of Innovation plane could be the world’s fastest all-electric aircraft.

The firm – whose aerospace headquarters are based in Derby – said the plane reached a top speed of 387.4 mph (623 km/h) during test runs at an experimental aircraft testing site.

It is thought to have set new World Records over three different distances. [BBC]

A reminder that the airline industry won’t be going down without a fight.

The bitterness exhibited by liberals in the finding of Kyle Rittenhouse to be innocent of all charges should, in a just world, be mitigated, even retracted, by the finding against the Nazis who descended upon Charlottesville, VA, back in 2017, resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, as CNN reports yesterday:

A jury has awarded more than $26 million in damages after finding the White nationalists who organized and participated in a violent 2017 rally here liable on a state conspiracy claim and other claims.

But the jury in the federal civil trial said Tuesday it could not reach a verdict on two federal conspiracy claims.

The violence during the Unite the Right rally turned the Virginia city into another battleground in America’s culture wars and highlighted growing polarization. It was also an event that empowered White supremacists and nationalists to demonstrate their beliefs in public rather than just online.Though the jury deadlocked on the two federal conspiracy claims, it slammed the defendants on the other claims with major awards to the plaintiffs, who included town residents and counterprotesters injured in the violence four years ago.

… as well as three guilty verdicts, announced today, in the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial, according to WaPo:

Travis McMichael; his father, Greg McMichael; and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were all convicted of felony murder in the fatal shooting of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man — meaning they committed felonies that caused his death. But Bryan and the elder McMichael were acquitted of malice murder, which involves intent to kill.

By all rights, if the situation were as dire as was noised about in some liberal sectors, those trials would have gone the other way as well, and the corruption of America would be complete and irreversible, if I may indulge in some of the hyperbole I’ve seen and heard.

But it didn’t.

No doubt, the intellectually lazy, as well as those who loathe admission of error^[1], will find an excuse of some sort – it’s Wisconsin, after all or the prosecution was incompetent, or it’s all about the gerrymandering!^[2] – in order to avoid considering the possibility that they, and their methods, are wrong.

I brought this up at the termination of the Rittenhouse trial before, but it seems really worthy of reiteration in the light of the contrast of the Charlottesville and Arbery trials: sometimes the group to which you belong, the cult, is wrong. Look, details matter. They really do. I’ve sat on a couple of juries, and getting the details right leads to conviction, while wrong details do not.

Perhaps, rather than griping about a trial on which everyone commenting didn’t sit on the jury and didn’t review and didn’t have the same opinion as the professional defense lawyers, one should review the facts and these professional defense lawyers analysis and ask oneself if the divergence between the party line on the one hand, and the facts on the other, is an important factor in our own behavior.

Or if it’s more important to automatically oppose “the other side” in everything.

I think I know on which side I stand.

¹ And for those readers who are angry at me for that statement, you can count me among those who are intellectually lazy and/or loathe to admit to being wrong. HOWEVER, as a software engineer, I find that I’m wrong far too much, and admit I’m a better engineer – and person – when I own up to it and try to improve my methods.

² Yes, that’s ridiculous, and that’s the point. Yes, nevermind.

… sometimes there’s no need to remove one’s face from the ground. While I didn’t comment on it, there’s been some outraged buzz out there about the report that the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation had determined that those with an income in excess of $1 million would be seeing lower taxes if President Biden’s Build Back Better package was passed by the Senate as formulated by the House.

Turns out someone must have forgotten to carry a one:

President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better package would raise, not lower, taxes on the wealthiest Americans, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation in a major correction from the group’s original analysis.

The committee an official scorekeeper of tax-related legislation, originally estimated that the $1.7 trillion safety net and climate change bill would give people making over $1 million a year a net tax cut in 2022. The revised estimates released Tuesday suggested that taxes on $1 million in income would go up by 3.2 percentage points next year. [NBC News]

In a highly polarized environment this sort of thing matters, so I have to wonder if this is honest or sabotage. In the end, though, it’s happened, and some partisans will carry it around like a weapon, marinating in the bitterness, regardless of the correction.

As Orwell said, eh? WaPo’s headline could be a lot shorter and more accurate:

80 looters simultaneously broke into a Nordstrom near San Francisco, police say: ‘Clearly a planned event’ in weekend filled with looting incidents

Just call it fucking GANG ACTIVITY and be done with it – but apparently WaPo cannot use that word. But a coordinated attack and theft by multiple members is simply a gang at work, and RICO, which can increase penalties, often applies to illegal gang activities.

Gang gang gang. Is this a problem with the economy, or with state policies, as the article implies?

I see George Will is engaging in empty-headed polemicism rather than analysis in WaPo:

We saw the final a performance (we were told it was the final performance, but the theatre’s website disagrees, and we know who runs the world these days) of a run of Clue at the Zephyr Theatre, in Stillwater, MN, last night.

Clue is a pleasant farce, meant to entertain and delight the senses, and Zephyr’s staging of the play matches well with these ambitions, providing a shape-shifting staging that permits far more than the normal number of viewing angles on the stage, while supplying the audience, which currently lacks stadium seating, an opportunity to see the play at multiple levels and angles. Finished with a rainstorm composed of real water, which we were fortunate enough to inspect post-performance, it was eye-catching and delightful.

The actual performance was also quite good, with no one unsatisfactory; the performances that stood out from the others are that of the Butler, Wadsworth, who carries on at length, and the french maid, Yvette, whose performance, featuring much bouncing movement, bizarrely reminded me of a Russian dance performance^[1]. At an early juncture, the two work together in such a way as to suggest a certain obsessive-compulsive disorder. But it is also fair to say that sometimes the actors had to struggle with the stereotypes provided by the script.

Perhaps the weakest component of the show is the one they have the least control over: the story Clue tells. It is such a strong farce that, for those with a dislike for that art form, it can seem a bit overwhelming. Characters do tend to be superficial, so it won’t haunt you for days afterward.

But if you like farce, or are just looking for a refuge from a world that seems to have gone mad, visit the madness in Stillwater’s Zephyr; it’s ever so much more pleasant. There’s only a few performances left, so don’t hesitate.

¹ Only click on this link if you have tolerance for a low-resolution video of some years age. And, yes, the resemblance is fleeting, but there it is: I tend to be a random connection machine.

Sometimes I just goggle over certain numbers, like this estimate of how much tax cheating will be avoided by increasing funding for the IRS:

On one key question — how much money will be raised by providing $80 billion to increase IRS enforcement on rich tax cheats — the CBO said it would raise $207 billion over 10 years, meaning the net savings would be $127 billion. …

The core dispute is over whether, in the face of IRS enforcement, wealthy tax cheats would find new ways to avoid taxes (as the CBO believes), or whether more would actually pay up. Treasury believes the latter, projecting new revenue will come directly (from people forced to pay what they otherwise wouldn’t), and indirectly (as enforcement convinces rich scofflaws to stay on the straight and narrow).

Giving BBB a big boost, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who has been critical of the Biden administration, argues that the more optimistic scenario is correct, noting that the way CBO calculates gains from enforcement “is conservative to the point of implausibility.” [WaPo]

Those are some amazing numbers, don’t you think? Tax cheats so bold as to cost us multiple billions of dollars?

Makes you wonder how many consider themselves to be good people, too.

Batman and his trust sidekick, Fabio.

Age Of Treason (1993), speaking of cross-genre movies, is another member of this group, and it’s a member of another group, of which there are few members. This story has the odd quality of having virtually no really sympathetic characters – maybe the executive assistant, Niobe, is the exception – and, yet, partway through, my Arts Editor commented she didn’t like the characters, but still wanted to watch the movie.

So what are we crossing here? Think a rather soft version of the Roman corruption movies & TV series, like Rome (2005-2007), without the explicit violence and sex, that more or less being implied, paired with …

A private detective story.

Marcus Didius Falco is a private dick in old, corrupt Rome, up to his eyeballs in debt, and well aware that in this year, the year of four emperors, the attention of members of the higher classes can be deadly to someone like him. Just to remind him, the colossal statuary head of the caesar he hates the most, the late Nero, seems to be following him around, dragged by slaves, and upsetting his concentration even more than the wretched wine he consumes by the bottle.

So it doesn’t help when someone tries to pay for his services by giving him ownership of the gladiator Justus, a deadly monster in the arena, a bit of a naive dude outside of it. Falco has little use for him, but must drag him along as he investigates two new cases: the disappearance of his own nephew, and a case he doesn’t want but must take for the money, the disappearance of Cato, the brother of the wife of assistant to the emperor Vespasian, Pertinax. Her name is Helena.

Falco wonders if his nephew is dead, and goes to the valley of the dead, where all the dead usually end up. You know, being dead and all. He doesn’t find his nephew, but there is a corpse he wasn’t looking for there: Cato’s. Returning it to Helena is a risk he must take, resulting in an entanglement with Pertinax, and soon Falco is flailing about in fine private dick fashion, finding connections between fertility cults, ambitious men and women – and all of it centered on the Emperor Vespasian.

Justus becomes useful, if not quite as anticipated, and soon Vespasian finds himself in desperate straits, with Falco holding the pivot upon which his life balances.

The story’s a bit ponderous, weighted down with Falco narrating the story. On the other hand, there may be anachronisms galore here – including Falco’s Cockney (?) accent – but there’s a sense of authenticity brought on by an attention to detail: the reproduction of the frantic hubbub of a Rome ruled by ambitious men to whom the law is little more than a warning. The simple act of trimming a roof so that a statue in transit can pass, which I noticed out of the corner of my eye, suggested some real thoughtfulness.

And, speaking of statuary, it’s unusual that a monstrous marble head can produce a bit of comic relief in a movie in which bodies, past and future, are piling up so fast, and yet Nero’s sneering head manages to pull it off.

I’m certainly, certainly not going to recommend this movie, and yet I will admit to a certain fondness for it, in retrospect. It made me laugh in a few places, and appreciate the work of actors who I’d never heard of, and may never hear of again. You’re unlikely to just stumble across it, but if you do, give it a gander.

Seigniorage:

Seigniorage /ˈseɪnjərɪdʒ/, also spelled seignorage or seigneurage (from the Old French seigneuriage, “right of the lord (seigneur) to mint money”), is the difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it. The term can be applied in two ways:

• Seigniorage derived from specie (metal coins) is a tax added to the total cost of a coin (metal content and production costs) that a customer of the mint had to pay, and which was sent to the sovereign of the political region.
• Seigniorage derived from notes is more indirect; it is the difference between interest earned on securities acquired in exchange for banknotes and the cost of producing and distributing the notes.

“Monetary seigniorage” is where sovereign-issued securities are exchanged for newly-printed banknotes by a central bank, allowing the sovereign to “borrow” without needing to repay. Monetary seigniorage is sovereign revenue obtained through routine debt monetization, including expansion of the money supply during GDP growth and meeting yearly inflation targets. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the article “Stablecoin,” Wikipedia:

Seigniorage-style coins utilize algorithms to control the stablecoin’s money supply, similar to a central bank’s approach to printing and destroying currency. Seigniorage-based stablecoins are a less popular form of stablecoin.^[9]

Significant features of seigniorage-style stablecoins are:

• Adjustments are made on-chain,
• No collateral is needed to mint coins,
• Value is controlled by supply and demand through algorithms, stabilizing price.

Basis was one example of a seigniorage-style coin.

This, in turn, was noted in “Crypto companies, on defense in Washington, scramble to assemble a lobbying machine,” Tom Newmyer, WaPo:

Financial regulators are not waiting to act. A Treasury Department-led group this month urged lawmakers to give bank regulators new authority to crack down on a type of digital token called stablecoins, arguing that left unchecked, their skyrocketing growth could threaten the broader economy. Separately, the Federal Reserve and other key regulators recently completed a review aimed at coordinating their approach to the industry. The agencies have not produced the findings yet.

I know there’s a lot of bitterness and disbelief concerning Kyle Rittenhouse being found innocent of all charges earlier today. I’m neutral on the matter, as not only did I not sit on the jury, I didn’t even follow the trial.

But I did read this CNN article in which they cite legal experts who were unsurprised by the verdict. That caught my attention, because I’m not an expert, and neither are most of the people – numbering in the millions, I’m sure – who are commenting on it. So what’s going on in the minds of the experts?

Wisconsin law allows the use of deadly force only if “necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.” And because Rittenhouse’s attorneys claimed self-defense, state law meant the burden fell on prosecutors to disprove Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.

And it was an uphill battle to climb from the start, because of the facts in this case, experts said.

“(Prosecutors) weren’t able to show that his response to each of these men, to each of these sets of threats was unreasonable,” criminal defense attorney Sara Azari told CNN’s Pamela Brown.

“When the jury came back a couple days ago and watched the videos… frame by frame, they were looking to see whether Kyle did something to provoke the threat and whether his response to that threat was reasonable in terms of using deadly force and they agreed with the defense that it was,” Azari added.

Putting myself in the shoes of the jury, if what they saw was someone reacting in self-defense to an existential threat, then just maybe he was justified in the moment. I don’t think he should have been there, as I think he betrayed severe immaturity in interfering with local authorities who were dealing with the situation, but he was there.

There’s a larger point inherent in what I’ve written so far, and it’s this: perhaps the left should take a big step backward, make the very-hard-to-swallow assumption that the jury got it right – remember, legal experts were unsurprised by this verdict – and ask themselves: What is wrong with their information-gathering and / or information analysis strategies?

So far, all I’ve seen are bitter claims that this is all about white supremacy, that the judge was prejudiced, that our moral system is wrong. These are all intellectually lazy, unless they come with detailed and persuasive arguments that engage with this specific incident, because they disengage the authors from any personal responsibility for their disappointments. Yes, that’s right – lazy. They point, without supporting evidence, at some terrible power as being responsible for what they perceive to be an injustice, then they shrug their shoulders, incidentally disrespecting a jury that put in something near three weeks of examining evidence and making judgments, and proclaim the system broken.

And then go off and hate their fellow Americans some more.

They may be right, maybe this is a result of a system informed by white supremacy, but to my mind, the jury, unless later proven to be prejudiced, did its duty to its best and found Rittenhouse, within the framework of applicable law, not guilty. If you were surprised at this, or not surprised but certain that it was the wrong verdict, perhaps, if you’re intellectually honest, you should be asking if there’s something wrong in your information sources – I know I was mislead into thinking Rittenhouse shooting at random – or in your analysis.

And maybe society is broken. But, perhaps, not in the way the left would have us believe. Or the right. If we’re so willing to hate each other, maybe that’s the clue to the real source problem.

Dais:

1. a platform raised above the surrounding level to give prominence to the person on it [Vocabulary.com]

Noted in “It wasn’t easy, but House Dems passed their Build Back Better Act,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chaired the proceedings and banged the gavel at 9:46 a.m. eastern. As she exited the dais, the California Democrat was greeted by celebrating colleagues who chanted, “Nancy! Nancy!” as she walked through her assembled colleagues.

Today Professor Richardson and Erick Erickson managed to echo each other in a way that is positively eerie, as if their epistemic bubbles are connected by some hidden tube, perhaps like the hypothesized connection between astronomical black holes and white holes. Richardson is up first, discussing, initially, the censuring of Rep Gosar (R-AZ) for his hacked anime of himself killing Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and assaulting another, before coming to a conclusion:

This is an important moment. It appears that all but two Republican lawmakers are willing to embrace violence against Democrats if it will lead to political power.

There is a subtle difference between their willingness to defend the violence of the January 6 insurrectionists, and today’s stance. When Republicans have defended the insurrectionists, they did so with the argument—false though it was—that the rioters simply wanted to defend the country from a stolen election. Today there was no pretense of an excuse for Gosar’s violent fantasy; it was defended as normal.

The march toward Republicans’ open acceptance of violence has been underway since January 6, as leaders embraced the Big Lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election, and then as leaders have stood against mask and vaccine mandates as tyranny. Those lies have led to a logical outcome: their supporters believe that in order to defend the nation, they should fight back against those they have been told are destroying the country.

When Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, an organization devoted to promoting right-wing values on campuses, spoke in Idaho last month, the audience applauded when a man asked when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” the man said. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk denounced the question not on principle, but because he said it would play into Democratic hands. He agreed that, as he said, “We are living under fascism.”

Erickson, also today, has to go back in history a bit to make a case, before coming to these conclusions:

According to a 2001 report, “Leftist extremists were responsible for three-fourths of the officially designated acts of terrorism in America in the 1980s.” They tend to be younger and better educated than right-wing extremists and they tend to live in urban areas thereby making high population centers more target-rich. (Source)

Most importantly, progressives have now internalized several propositions that make it very likely they are about to re-embrace their historic violence.

First, progressives believe they are now the majority in the United States. Progressives, bolstered by media, cultural, and academic institutions present themselves as the dominant actors, voices, and policy makers in the United States. As much as the right, in the Bush and Obama era, sought to run hardcore conservatives in moderate areas convinced they could win, now progressives are routinely rallying around progressives in moderate areas convinced their victories are inevitable.

Second, progressives view the GOP as a threat to democracy. In so doing, just as some Republicans have internalized 2020 was a stolen election, it has become dogma for Democrats that the GOP is suppressing votes. Voter suppression explains the Democrats’ losses and, again, the progressives believe they’re really dominant. As they internalize both that the GOP is suppressing the vote and that the GOP is a threat to democracy, as a wave election shapes up in 2022, we should expect the left to mobilize more aggressively to stop those they view as a threat to democracy.

Third, progressives have internalized both that we have only a decade to stop the irreversible destruction of the planet and that non-progressive forces are blocking solutions with the help of corporate interests. They truly believe we’re headed towards the end of humanity as we know it unless extreme measures are taken yesterday. They fundamentally, truly, and very literally believe the planet is at a tipping point and the United States must act immediately. But the United States will not act because of Republicans, Joe Manchin, and corporations.

There’s more points, but I’ll stop here. Except to note that his assertion that progressives live in their own little bubble sounds a lot like the right-wing epistemic bubble that has been recognized for twenty years:

Fourth, while only about a quarter of Americans are on Twitter, it is predominated by progressives who increasingly in the real world and online are more prone to self-isolate with likeminded people. It makes them less able to relate, more willing to believe their own narratives and mythologies, and less able to understand or tolerate dissent. It makes it more likely that progressives will both generate and believe online agitation against conservatives and bolster the first point — they think they are the majority. They think Twitter is real life. This is not my opinion. This is the actual data. See also this.

Bold mine – the words that describe the Republican Party stalwarts the best are what he uses for his political opponents.

There are a lot of “it’s worth noting” things in both posts. Erickson mentions the old Weather Underground group, a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, without noting that it was an anti-Vietnam War group. The Vietnam War is best known for the dubiousness of everything connected to it, from how the soldiers were treated by society, to the deceptions practiced by the military, right up to and including the Secretary of Defense, to the barbarity of both sides. He wishes to bring to the fore a supposed lefty tendency to violence, without mentioning the terrible tragedy of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, or the shocking actions of Kirk that Richardson mentions.

And there’s no mention of the admittedly difficult subject of measuring frequency of violence, nor the question of the morality of violence – when is violence considered justified? If someone takes a completely legal action that threatens someone else’s existential future, is violence justified or not in the face of intransigence? How about the suggestion that violence connected to the abortion issue is simply murderous violence would no doubt draw protests that they’re protecting unborn babies – a ridiculous remark to my ears, but justified to him.

Richardson, likewise, ignores her own side in favor of the other. Even today, though, we can see extreme actions by the left, such as this:

Two young women scaled a huge coal handling machine shortly before dawn on Wednesday, disrupting operations at the world’s largest coal port for several hours to protest what they say is Australia’s lack of action on climate change.

“My name is Hannah, and I am here abseiled off the world’s largest coal port,” 21-year-old Hannah Doole declared on a live-streamed video as she hovered high over massive piles of coal bound for export. “I’m here with my friend Zianna, and we’re stopping this coal terminal from loading all coal into ships and stopping all coal trains.” [WaPo]

It’s not precisely violence, but it is an extremism. How many more steps before murder becomes acceptable?

For me, I see this as another example of one of my favorite morbid subjects, the historical demographic shifts described in SECULAR CYCLES (Turchin & Nefedov), in action. There’s no doubt that each of these writers are elite members of society, one a professor on the left, and the other a lawyer and radio host on the right (who, incidentally, disclaims being an intellectual), and one of the observations of Turchin and Nefedov is the tendency of a disintegrating empire’s elite to engage in internecine warfare, once all existential foes have been vanquished and overpopulation has set in. Richardson and Erickson are each attempting to control the narrative by which the “warriors” essential to the power of the elites will be attracted to this or that faction, one by spinning stories that invoke American history, mostly from the American Civil War forward, the other using a religious foundation that preserves an element of irrationality and love of amateurs quite out of proportion to its destructiveness to society.

And which side will win? I remain a rationalist and agnostic, which means I find Erickson’s moral and intellectual foundation at least somewhat dubious. Nor is Erickson’s history particular encouraging. For example, his claim that the passing of Justice Ginsburg and the ascension of Judge Barrett to SCOTUS would result in riots and bloodshed, to the fault of Ginsburg, never came true. Some people turned red in the face, it’s true, but it wasn’t bloodshed. In brief, Erickson’s understanding of how the world acts is not something I’d put money on.

But the left, traditionally the resting place for at least pretending to respect science, has certainly diminished my confidence in the last few years. Between, again, violence, and the apparent dismissal of the liberal democracy under which we’ve lived for so long, in company with the use of debate as a way forward, in favor of near-religious decrees, it’s become hard to see a clear way forward without dismissing this political grab for power. When Erickson or, more credibly, Andrew Sullivan dismisses claims of meritocracy, or punctuality, or any of a number of other qualities as being merely tools of oppression, it is depressing – not because either is wrong, but because they are right, and it’s a self-condemnation of the left and its lack of intellectual rigor.

In the end, we may see violence on both ends, and whether this is a condemnation of political positions or religious institutions or civics education, I don’t know. I deplore it. But it may be inevitable.

I think I saw this guy in a Star Trek episode, too. Maybe he’s a real monster?

Lord Of Illusions (1995) is a fusion movie, an attempt to cross one genre with another. These can sometimes work, usually if each genre works to illuminate, or even add to, the tropes of the other genre – or if the storytellers’ tongues are firmly glued to their cheek.

Lord Of Illusions is unfortunately earnest. Private detective Harry D’Amour, hired to investigate an insurance fraud, stumbles into the murder of a fortune-teller, Quaid, who, prior to messily expiring, warns D’Amour that “The Puritan” is returning. D’Amour is then hired by Dorothea Swann, the wife of the famed illusionist Phillip Swann, who are both obscurely connected to Quaid.

D’Amour is to be Phillip’s bodyguard, but it’s an exceedingly short assignment: Swann dies that night in an accident during his stage show, shish-kebabed by a few swords while he struggles to escape.

D’Amour, annoyed and, perhaps, a bit shaky from a brush with an exorcist in a previous story, investigates the death, including a visit to the repository of true magic at the Magic Castle (a real place) and, amid the growing piles of bodies, discovers Swann could do real magic.

Soon enough, Dorothea is kidnapped by the followers of The Puritan, a narcissist by the name of Nix, and Phillip Swann, previously considered dead and gone, turns up, terrified enough to wet his pants, but feeling an obscure loyalty towards Dorothea, so we’re off and galloping into the desert, returning to the scene of a crime more than a decade go, where people go mad and demons flit about, and a final confrontation with Nix. His followers meet some disgusting ends, we have a final battle, and, well, it’s all rather dull.

The problem is that the supernatural horror side of this story is too dependent on pulling handkerchiefs out of its ear in order to plug plot holes. None of the characters are either interesting or sympathetic, although Nix’ resemblance of certain politicians of today is a bit jarring. Not supernatural-wise – I hope – but in the monstrous personality flaws he exhibits.

D’Amour fails to generate much interest, as he doesn’t seem to be world-weary, like Bogart, or pursuing any kind of character arc – it just seems to be a job. He may be getting more and more horrified as the story goes on, but that’s about it. He’s a bit worn around the edges, but just a bit nappy – nothing actually fun.

So, despite the fine special effects, I want those two hours back. Violent and boring is not a good combination.