Monthly Archives: February 2023

Naturally, the integrity of currencies of all kinds is dependent on the ethics of both users and issuers. It turns out that last month, a would-be rescuing ideology, as it were, announced itself, as Salim Essaid notes in AL-Monitor:

As FTX’s former CEO faces US criminal charges for defrauding investors and stealing billions from customers before filing for bankruptcy in November, new Islamic finance-based coins are being launched by companies claiming that their checks and balances can help reinstate faith in cryptocurrencies.

“Islamic finance can help provide protections with its ethical practices, using the transparency of blockchain technology,” said Mohammed AlKaff AlHashmi, co-founder and chief business officer of Haqq Association, a nonprofit digital financial services company that follows Islamic law.

From my reading of history, corruption is a pan-ideology phenomenon. Anywhere positions of trust are necessary in order to enable a project or institution, there must be safeguards instituted, or those positions become targets for those of a weak moral disposition. Essaid further notes:

Yet community-centric guidance alone cannot replace the role of regulators to hold companies accountable. AlHashmi explained that they do not have the full authority to tell a company that their project is not compliant with Islamic finance, mainly because that defeats the purpose of using decentralized tools such as crypto and blockchain. But the Sharia verification mark will show the label of community trust.

Which is more or less an acknowledgment of my point.

We shall see. I expect that in a few years the project will be shut down for unpopularity, inefficiency, or corruption. Or because crypto has been discarded.

Looking at the Eye of God. Right in the Eye.

Hard To Be A God (1989) examines the problem of subjective, emotion-ridden creatures attempting to assume the guise of objective investigators. Subjectivity refers, in my mind, to the phenomenon of applying our preconceptions and automatic judgments to our observations, often without being cognizant of it, and it tends to skew our observations away from accuracy and proper analysis. Subjectivity can have negative or positive survival value, and as it tends to be much faster than objectivity, it has a certain advantage over objectivity in the great game of survival.

Except when it doesn’t.

Our pawn in the game of observation is Anton, a scientist who has traveled from Earth to an unnamed planet, populated with indigenous folks of a barbaric nature, who happen to strongly resemble humans. This permits Anton to enter the planet’s society as Rumata, an exiled aristocrat from another country, with a convenient reputation.

The society is rife with political factions and personal animosities, all existing within a royalist government framework, sometimes competing with theological forces, and it’s an existential competition up and down the board. Into this welter of emotion, power-chasing, and undisciplined corruption wades Anton as Rumata. Along with his observations, relayed in real time to an orbital space station populated with fellow anthropologists, he’s searching for a missing colleague who has removed himself from communications with the station, and a local who appears to be in the process of inventing the printing press, a potentially planet-changing advance.

And existing power structures hate uncontrolled advances. He’d best watch his step.

For all of the violence and corruption of the society, Anton cannot help but be drawn in. These are, after all, people like himself, but not benefiting from the advances in government and ethics which his people have achieved. That raises the sticky question that faces the colonialist: when is interference ever tolerable? Is it a meaningful question when the balance of power is a teeter-totter with an adult on one end, a child on the other?

But what can one man do? Especially the guy with the nickname, The One Who Does Not Kill?

It’s an interesting story, but there are some jolting problems. For one, it’s not in English, so get ready to do a lot of caption-reading or learn German. Second, the story style is a collage of German and 1980s tropes, which means segues are painfully abrupt, story background is non-existent, and sometimes it seems that characters pop out of nowhere. Oh, and the hair of the indigenous is terrifying.

But it remains an interesting exploration of a plausible question: How do we explore other societies? You may want to explore this story.

Plasmasphere:

The plasmasphere is a lopsided donut of cold plasma inside Earth’s magnetic field. It is created by leakage from the top of Earth’s atmosphere (the ionosphere). The outer surface of the plasmasphere is called “the plasmapause”–and that is where the tides have been found.

“We can think of the plasmapause as the surface of a ‘plasma ocean’ surrounding Earth,” says one of the lead authors Quanqi Shi of Shandong University. “Using a 40-year database of satellite observations, we report the first identification of lunar tides on the surface of this plasma ocean.” [“STRANGE TIDES IN THE PLASMASPHERE,” Dr Tony Phillips, Spaceweather.com]

I’ve been noticing that liberal pundits have observed and been talking about how the federal deficit is only of importance to Republicans when the Democrats are in power, and here it comes:

Our debt is 125% higher than our gross domestic product. That is not sustainable. What is not feasible or practical is trying to reduce the debt through tax increases, which would slow the economy and cause the debt to be an even higher percentage above GDP.

What is possible is freezing the debt.

It is possible for Congress to embrace a pay-go system, much like we had in the first Bush Administration that carried through the Clinton Administration. Freeze spending and require either tax increases or spending cuts thereafter. Couple that with deregulation and other incentives to spur economic growth and the debt becomes a lower and lower percentage of an ever-expanding GDP.

Growing our way out of the problem is a far better solution than taxing our way out of a problem with no propensity to slow down spending. [Erick Erickson, Confessions of a Political Junkie]

The first thing to ask is, You guys had control of the Presidency and both wings of Congress in half, or more than half, of both the Bush and Trump Administrations. Why didn’t you folks fix the problem then?

Filibuster, you say? Please, don’t make me laugh.

Don’t dare raise taxes? I live in Minnesota, long the home of ruinous taxes, if you believe the local Republicans, and we’re just zipping along.

Can’t protect ourselves? The Bush Administration certainly didn’t let it stop them from starting two wars.

The hypocrisy is giving me a headache. Literally.

And it’s another reason to ignore the Republicans until they reform themselves out of their morality-free hole in the ground.

When it comes to the Chinese balloons appearing in American skies, whether they’re meteorological or more menacing in their vital nature, it rather appears to depend on what you want to see as to what anyone wants to see. The liberals – and maybe the American military – sees it as a mistake that happens from time to time:

The top U.S. general responsible for protecting North American skies said Monday that past incursions by Chinese balloons went undetected by the Pentagon, exposing what he characterized as a worrisome deficiency that must be addressed.

The Defense Department has acknowledged that the craft shot down Saturday off the South Carolina coast after a days-long journey across the U.S. mainland marked at least the fifth time in recent years that Beijing has breached the nation’s airspace using such technology. Officials informed lawmakers over the weekend that, dating back to Donald Trump’s presidency, there had been similar breaches near Texas, Florida, Hawaii and Guam. [WaPo]

Erick Erickson doesn’t buy it – but, then, he’s followed right-wing instructions most of the time over the years I’ve read his public blog, and this seems to be a classic example:

The larger issue of the Chinese balloon is a test to see how we would respond. We failed the test. We could have taken action over the Pacific as it wandered into Alaska. We could have taken action as it wandered into very rural northern Idaho and Montana, where the loss of lives would be virtually non-existent. Instead, we waited until it traversed the whole United States, floated over the Atlantic, then shot it down.

Biden ordered the shootdown on Wednesday. It happened on Saturday.

In the run-up to the shootdown, several defense sources said these balloons also happened in prior years, predating Biden. Also, several made clear that they were not sure what was actually on the balloon, so it was better to wait for the ocean in case there were biological or radiological issues, particularly with power. But considering the solar panels, that seems to be excuse-making. And, with a seven-mile debris field possible, the damage of impact on the land would not have been much different.

Culminating in …

That Joe Biden’s gut still tells him to go with the advisors who keep leading him astray is a problem with Joe Biden, not with his advisors. He looks weak.

Erickson’s problems? You mean, besides the report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that the US blew by professional estimates for employment gains … “Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 517,000 in January, and the unemployment rate changed little at 3.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.“?^[1]

Yeah, this analysis from CNN:

As the new year got underway in China, hopes appeared to be running high that an easing of tensions with the United States could unfold in the months ahead.

China’s Foreign Ministry expressed as much late last month when it said China would “welcome” a visit from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken – an expected visit that analysts say Beijing viewed as an opportunity to help strengthen its economy and repair fraught diplomatic ties.

So when a high-altitude balloon from China carrying a payload the size of three coach buses equipped with what American officials have described as surveillance equipment was spotted over the continental US, visibly hovering above a state with key military assets and ultimately sparking an international incident – it naturally raised critical questions about just what had happened, and why.

China maintains the vessel, which was shot down by the US over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, was a weather balloon thrown off course. And it has shown signs of both being caught off guard by the incident and wanting to stem the potential damage, analysts say, not only framing the situation as the result of factors beyond its control, but also offering a rare expression of “regret” over it in a statement Friday.

Indeed, if China’s government is having internal problems stemming from its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and exacerbated by its inferior CoronaVac vaccine and a national pride that prevented its use of Western-developed vaccines, then this analysis makes a great deal of sense. Needing to cool a heated relationship that might otherwise result in sanctions could easily be at the top of Chinese priorities – at least for top leader President Xi Jinping. Autocracies are stable right up until they fly apart, and so for all I know Xi is trying very hard to hold together China, and doesn’t need the USA making things worse.

But his rivals might risk it. Just like this.

Finally, Professor Richardson, a professional historian and a liberal, has a bit of scorn to serve up:

It’s Saturday night, so I will be a bit snarky: [right wing critics] need to get a grip. A key aspect of any country’s national security is spying, and of course China and the U.S. are spying on each other. Shooting the balloon down as soon as it was spotted would have endangered Americans and made learning anything from it more difficult.

That being said, it’s not at all clear to me what this balloon was designed to accomplish politically. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his planned visit to Beijing over it, giving the U.S. a reason to back out of a visit that certainly seemed likely to bolster President Xi Jinping’s government. Scholar of international relations Daniel Drezner notes in his Drezner’s World it appears to have been a screw-up at a level below that of President Xi. China has been trying to cool tensions with America, not heat them up.

That being said, the visible spy balloon predictably sparked Republican attacks on President Biden, so the incident has the potential to weaken the administration’s strong steps to counter the growing power of China.

For those who think the balloons are of a sinister nature, it’s worth noting that analysis of their remains will yield useful information for the USA, and monitoring their communications prior to their elimination may yield even more information. The Chinese had to know that, eventually, they’d be detected and knocked down, so why would they send high value surveillance technology into American airspace. Out of context, that is a puzzle.

So what’s the context? These balloons are flying at around 60,000 ft and moving fast. They may actually be above the North American jet stream, or they may spend time in it. And here’s the final piece that I’ve yet to see mentioned anywhere:

What if this really is an accident brought on by weather that’s slowly becoming more and more extreme?

Yes, all this squalling could be the result of climate change. Sure, right-wingers like Erickson will squawk and laugh and ignore such an idea because it doesn’t fit with their tenets of how reality works, but I think it’s worth considering in all this learned analysis. Accidents do happen, and that’s what we may be seeing here.

¹ Naturally, one should not trust the first cut numbers of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, given its history of issuing revisions. Still, half a million new jobs is a bit of a gob smack when the projection was short of 200,000 jobs, enough so that I wonder if someone screwed up the count. And … it certainly weakens Erickson’s sniping at Biden’s advisors, doesn’t it?

Oh, damn, forgot the grocery list! Oh, damn, the reflux!

Predators (2010) is, as an older reader might expect, one of the sequels to the Arnold Schwarzenegger paean to the grandparents’ sage advice of Never give up!, Predator (1987), in which overly-weaponized aliens use our planet as an individual hunting preserve, alien on humans. Speaking of aliens, Predator has spawned a couple of sequels involving the nightmarish creatures of the Alien franchise, such as this.  These were rather cheesy. Finally, reading a one sentence summary of Predators will lead the jaded reader to, sadly, expect more of the same, an attempt to cash in on an old and burned out franchise that will inevitably disappoint the hopeful.

Reset your expectations, dear reader.

We started Predators in precisely the aforementioned frame of mind, expecting to shut it off five minutes in, groaning in disbelief that a studio would release such a failure of a movie. At five minutes in, though, we were still puzzling – a good thing – over the beginning, as a group of people, all military or former, professional warriors as it were, parachute into a tropical forest.

An hour later we were still watching, nearly on the edges of our seats, disentangling the complex lines of the plot. Questions abound: Why does one guy have only a knife, while others come with fully automatic weapons? Just which planet is this? What is whispering in English in the jungle? WTF is going on?

Why is my heart racing?

I kid you not. Shortly after the movie ended, we were off to the ER, where I was diagnosed with tachycardia and treated with adenosine. Problem solved. But I cannot promise that the movie had nothing to do with the tachycardia, even if the docs didn’t take my suggestion to that effect seriously. I was into it.

And what’s not to like? The Predators come in multiple versions, there’s individualism vs cooperation, betrayal and loyalty, innovative solutions to impossible situations, drugs, claustrophobia and agoraphobia, hot guns and little knives, little guy vs nasty aliens.

And so much violence.

If you’re a fan of the original, this is not a bad followup at all. The acting is good, special effects quite good, and the extensions to the original make some sort of sense. The tension is palpable.

And it’s a good popcorn movie. Well done.

Elvers:

SO WHAT ARE ELVERS?

Elvers look more like clear noodles than fish, but in reality they are baby eels that migrate at night from the Atlantic Ocean to freshwater lakes and ponds.

And the Chinese and South Korean’s [sic] eat up Elvers like we eat up hot dogs… except of course our American hot dogs cost a fraction of what a pound of elvers costs… but at any rate, Asians consider these tiny eels much more of a delicacy than we do. [“YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT FISH IS SELLING FOR $2,500 PER POUND!” Joseph Simonds, SaltStrong]

Noted in “How we finally tracked European eels all the way to the Sargasso Sea,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (21 January 2023, paywall):

For the next few months, glass eels wash in and out of estuaries, feeding and growing and gradually transforming into elvers, which are dark brown and about 12 cm long. At this point they are ready to swap the sea for freshwater and make their way up rivers and streams to find a place to grow up. Once settled in a lake or river, they transform again, into yellow eels. “This life stage can be decades long,” says Wootton. “And this is usually what we see when we see eels within our rivers and lakes and lochs.”

I’ll be trying to work that word into dinnertime conversation, I will.

Megan McArdle speaks a little sanity out in the whirling vortex of madness that is the transgenderism wars:

Friend-zone:

a friendship in which one person, typically male, is romantically or sexually attracted to the other, but the attraction is not mutual:
He’s obviously in love with her but she keeps him in the friend zone. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “She friend-zoned him. He’s suing her for $2.3 million over it.” Bryan Pietsch, WaPo:

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. MANY SPOILERS.

Nothing occurring to me is up to par, so you’ll have to supply your own snark.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) is an almost too obvious of a parable concerning the Irish and the common aphorisms concerning them: obstinate, deceivingly prideful. In 1923 or thereabout, on the fictional island of Inisherin, separated from Ireland by a slender strait, is located a village, presumably of the same name. Isolated, yet connected to Ireland, the Irish Civil War afflicting the big island has little effect on Inisherin, although occasionally the village inhabitants’ eyes are drawn to the bells of hell of a people torn apart: gunshots, cannon bellowing, and the usual announcements of bellicose barbarism.

But on Inisherin a new hell is beginning to form. Colm Doherty, a man in his late middle years, as we so politely like to put it, is feeling the weight of history on his shoulders, which is to say he fears that, in twenty years, if his ghost returns and asks a random inhabitant Who was Colm Doherty?, the answer will be What is that name now?, followed by a head shake. No wife, no children, we must assume, only his faithful dog inhabits his hut with him, the dog and his artistic efforts.

To the end of avoiding such an ignominious fate, Colm now focuses on composing an intangible, perhaps since the intangible fight the rot of time more effectively than the tangible, and the composition is a new fiddle tune. In Colm’s eye glints the fear of finality, of being forgotten.

His buddy, Pádraic Súilleabháin, is younger than Colm, a peaceful, humble shepherd. He cares for his cows and their milk, and, perhaps too much, donkeys, and when they’ve been cared for, he calls on favorite donkey Jenny to escort him to Colm’s, and then the pub for a pint or three, all without a wife; Pádraic lives with his sister, Siobhán, who quietly despairs as she keeps house for him. Day in; day out. Thus are timeless rhythms of life established, carrying society onward.

And that’s not good enough for Colm, who one day begins to ignore Pádraic. Pádraic, who wonders how he’s offended, how he’s become inadequate, how everyone thinks he’s dull. Pádraic, who becomes deeply confused when he learns the local policeman’s son, a late teener or early twenties, is beaten on a regular basis by his father, and sexually molested, too.

Pádraic, who doesn’t fight back when, upon revealing his knowledge of the policeman’s brutality, is himself beaten senseless by the policeman. And all the villagers, who hear and witness, shake their heads at his interference.

In the meantime, said son, Dominic Kearney, with his bruises, unfiltered mouth, and unfortunate manners, would like to court Siobhán.

But I’m getting ahead a bit. Pádraic is stubborn, believing Colm merely needs to have Pádraic interfering in his life in order to be reminded that he’s missing something. Colm disagrees and tells Pádraic that if he interferes again, Colm will start cutting off his own fingers. Colm’s, that is.

Surely a rhetorical device, a more sophisticated person, such as his own sister, might opine. Shortly thereafter, though, Colm calmly deposits a finger on Pádraic’s doorstep. All to the fell melody of the Civil War, which now yields up its own crop of fingers in the form of prisoners up for execution. That cop? He doesn’t even know which side is executing the other, he just knows there’s a cash offer for executioners, and he couldn’t possibly turn it down.

It’ll be fun. Such is the morality of officialdom, eh?

And then another crop of fingers comes to decorate Pádraic’s doorstep, and now events turn serious, because Jenny the donkey mistakenly ate two or three, and choked to death on them. Would that I knew Irish history in some detail. Regardless, Pádraic is heartbroken, for the next best thing to a wife is dead, a loyal donkey, and must be repaid.

The message from Pádraic to Colm? Well, he’s a civilized person, so he tells Colm to keep the dog out of the house tomorrow, because Pádraic intends to burn Colm’s house down, and Colm can be in it or not as he sees fit.

Meanwhile, Pádraic’s sister Siobhán receives an offer to work at a library over in Ireland, a dream job, and as the Irish insanity surges around her, she decides to be off, leaving Pádraic and Colm to their shared madness. Again, Irish history would be useful.

Far be it from me to attempt to detail the parable here, as my knowledge of Irish history – if my reader hasn’t guessed – is no better than the average American’s. The Irish have been persecuted by the Brits, who took and colonized Dublin, while indulging religious hatreds; the Famine years; the eventual hard-won independence, followed by the Troubles, eventually brought to an end by a treaty, which these days occasionally threatens to come unraveled; the Irish Catholic Church tragedy; and even today there’s apparently “recreational rioting” in Dublin.

But the personifications of various facets of Irish society are apparent, from obstinacy to official corruption, the face of morality behind which base grasping and urges reign supreme, all for which Ireland, to various extents, is known – as if no other nation has suffered them. This parable is pointed. Perhaps too pointed.

But this is not the only way to read it, for I actually thought of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) as a comparable approach to storytelling first. In this story, three men, hating each other, yet dependent on each other, are searching for a hidden treasure. During this search for a little temporary wealth, the American Civil War is booming around them, with battles to be dodged and survived, the implicit morality of freeing the American slave population a condemnatory note concerning their banal search for gold.

There are similar notes struck in The Banshees of Inisherin. The Irish Civil War suggests that some sort of moral struggle is going on, although closer examination might falsify the assumption. The Inisherin struggle is certainly that of the trivial, and the reaction overwrought, almost as if a proportional reaction is just too boring for words. And the ending?

Well, that would be telling.

All that said, it’s a well told tale, although if you find Irish accents difficult, then this will be a struggle. But the story raises the hair on the back of the neck when the audience isn’t laughing. And the Civil War is ending, is it? No, it’ll go on forever and forever, so long as the subtle arrogance of the Irish goes on.

Thus are the Banshees known to be present.

Excellent.

Educator Sal Khan and Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center brought together a bunch of law professors to talk about what-ifs:

Political polarization, the conventional wisdom goes, has made our Constitution unamendable. The supermajorities required to propose and ratify constitutional amendments — two-thirds in both houses of Congress plus three-fourths of the states — are now unobtainable. As a result, as Jill Lepore reported in the New Yorker, the United States has one of the lowest amendment rates in the world. …

• The 28th Amendment would eliminate the natural-born citizenship requirement for the presidency. If the amendment passed, Henry Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for president.
• The 29th Amendment would allow for legislative vetoes of executive and regulatory actions. [WaPo]

And on through a 32nd amendment. Band-aids on a 20 inch gash through the femoral artery, I fear. The law professors, regardless of persuasion, are trying to fix a problem through minor adjustments to the Constitutional foundation without paying attention to political forces, right and left, that are desperate for power, whether its gaining it or protecting it, and operate regardless of facts on the ground, truth, and reality.

That goes for left & right.

It’s what their training dictates, of course, but it would seem to have little relevance to the problems of what amounts to political arrogance and lust for power.