Author Archives: Hue White

Professor Marvin Minsky was one of the most prominent early researchers into artificial intelligence, and, if memory serves, was one of those who predicted the imminent development of real AI.

Still waiting on that. But I see Kevin Drum is busy channeling the good Professor:

When I talk to people about artificial intelligence, the most common pushback has to do with emotion and sociability. Sure, maybe robots will be better than us at driving cars or doing taxes, but they’ll never replace a conversation with friends or provide any kind of emotional support. A robot brain just can’t do this.

I couldn’t agree less. As far as I’m concerned, the human brain is a proof of concept that a human brain can exist. And if a human brain can exist on a substrate of CHON-based mush,¹ why can’t it exist on a substrate of silicon and trace metals? Do we really think that CHON-based mush is all that special?

Of course not. But that’s the easy part to knock down. The real criticism of our alleged robot future is that humans are just too smart, too evolved, too well developed. There’s no way that a computer algorithm can even simulate human emotions, let alone truly feel them. But I am a cynic: not only do I think algorithms can do this, I think they can do it pretty easily. The truth is that we humans aren’t really all that smart. We’re basically overclocked apes with a few extra cognitive tricks tossed in, and those tricks aren’t especially sophisticated. Not only are we easily fooled, we practically beg to be fooled. It’s why we get conned so easily, it’s why racism is so widespread, and it’s why we trust a pretty face more than an ugly one. We’re suckers for crude heuristics that probably served some useful purpose on the savannah but often do more harm than good in 21st century society.

So far, history is not on Kevin’s side – but what do I know? I took a course in AI back in the early ’80s, and I remain an interested audience, but that’s it. I think there’s a long ways to go before we have a functioning, self-aware, angst-ridden (or gods-worshipping) artificial intelligence.

But Kevin’s final paragraph, which he may have thought as a throwaway, is probably the most important part of this post:

And another ten years after that we’ll have human robots who can worm their way into our hearts and con us out of our life’s savings. Our robot future is looking better all the time, isn’t it?

Replace “human robots” with just “humans,” and what are we describing?

Psychopaths.

Look, the emotional reactions we exhibit in everyday situations are the signals by which others classify us. If^[1] a robot can be programmed to exhibit typical human emotional reactions that lead to a conclusion that the “entity” is trustworthy, and then the robot is programmed to rob us of our life savings, then it’s a psychopath. Let that happen a time or twenty, word gets out that “human robots” are not trustworthy, which is to say that we cannot make good judgments about them, and then only folks who are not paying attention will get ripped off. Or worse.

Hey, people get killed by sheep. It doesn’t mean that sheep are horribly dangerous or hunt people. It just means that some folks are unlucky, or not exercising good judgment.

Same with these psychopathic robots. A little experience and it becomes just another hazard on the landscape.

¹ “If” is merely rhetorical – certainly the robots can be programmed to be psychopaths. In fact, it may be harder to connect a believable emotional display with an ethical system than it will be to leave the two disconnected.

Congress is not entirely irresponsible. WaPo notes they’re trying to handle the impending government funding shortfall with a minimum of fuss:

The Senate on Tuesday passed a short-term spending bill that would keep the government running through Dec. 7, aiming to avert a government shutdown and put off a fight over funding for President Trump’s border wall until after the midterm elections.

The short-term bill came attached to a massive budget package containing full-year 2019 funding for the Pentagon as well as for the Labor, Education and Health and Human Services departments. GOP leaders designed the package to combine key Republican and Democratic priorities in an attempt to garner overwhelming bipartisan support. The package also aims to satisfy Trump’s desire for more military spending.

The 93-to-7 vote came less than two weeks ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline when government funding will expire unless Congress and Trump intervene. …

The House is expected to take up the bill next week, but it remains uncertain whether Trump would sign the measure.

The fact that the Republicans voted for it, unless that was a strategic “make us look good” vote, suggests that, if push comes to shove, the Senate Republicans will vote to override a veto.

So let’s suppose the House votes in a similar fashion for this bill. How will President Trump react? He’s already stuck his neck out wth this tweet:

[tweet https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1042740913968164864]

He wants his Wall, and he wants it now. He has two audiences, his base, and the independents who still waffle over him.

If he signs the bill, his base will potentially see him as weak and that may put a crack in that all-important base. His base is important not only because of the political power it gives him, but also the emotional validation they give him. However, the all-important independents will see this as a positive and pragmatic move on the President’s part.

If he vetoes the bill, he looks strong to his base – unless Congress overrides his veto. The independents, whose attitudes towards the wall are all over the place, will, to a large degree, dislike him even more.

But there’s one more factor to consider: the President is a former Reality TV star. Drama plays into his view of life and his ego. Shutting down the government may strike him as being a dramatic, powerful move.

My conservative guess is that he’ll sign the bill, all the while trying to play it up as a powerful move by himself. Done properly, his base will suck the pablum down and believe it.

My adventurous guess is that his love of drama will entice him into the veto, and he’ll b overridden by a Republican Party terrified of getting even more mud on their brand. If they don’t, the Democrats would have one more shell to put in their artillery.

When it comes to robots replacing human workers, the World Economic Forum thinks that, with a little re-education, we’re going to be OK:

A net positive outlook for jobs: However this finding is tempered by optimistic estimates around emerging tasks and growing jobs which are expected to offset declining jobs. Across all industries, by 2022, growth in emerging professions is set to increase their share of employment from 16% to 27% (11% growth) of the total employee base of company respondents, whereas the employment share of declining roles is set to decrease from currently 31% to 21% (10% decline). About half of today’s core jobs—making up the bulk of employment across industries—will remain stable in the period up to 2022. Within the set of companies surveyed, representing over 15 million workers in total, current estimates would suggest a decline of 0.98 million jobs and a gain of 1.74 million jobs. Extrapolating these trends across those employed by large firms in the global (nonagricultural) workforce, we generate a range of estimates for job churn in the period up to 2022. One set of estimates indicates that 75 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 133 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms. While these estimates and the assumptions behind them should be treated with caution, not least because they represent a subset of employment globally, they are useful in highlighting the types of adaptation strategies that must be put in place to facilitate the transition of the workforce to the new world of work. They represent two parallel and interconnected fronts of change in workforce transformations: 1) large-scale decline in some roles as tasks within these roles become automated or redundant, and 2) large-scale growth in new products and services—and associated new tasks and jobs—generated by the adoption of new technologies and other socio-economic developments such as the rise of middle classes in emerging economies and demographic shifts.

This is contra several pundits. The trick is to find those new tasks, not within the reach of robots and/or AI systems, that humans can do. I look forward to reading about them.

Or about how they never materialized. Here’s a few new roles WEC is anticipating:

… Data Analysts and Scientists, Software and Applications Developers, and Ecommerce and Social Media Specialists …

Would you want to be a Social Media Specialist? Not I. It sounds too much like a paid manipulator.

Time to visit the ear doc, Godzy my boy.

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000) features the Japanese in a guise which desires not to be victims, but exterminators of the great lizard. They’ve concocted a weapon which spits black holes, but after its first test run, ancient flying creatures named Meganula appear (think 10 ft long dragonflies), plucking up juicy morsels to eat and eventually flooding Tokyo, probably because their molted skins clogged a sewer drain.

Meanwhile, Godzilla is on his way towards Tokyo, for reasons unknown – which give the Japanese a chance to eliminate him. But their attempt fails, and while waiting for the weapon to recharge, the Meganula arrive. The Japanese haven’t been able to do much with them, but Godzilla’s advanced halitosis weapon proves effective, and the battered Meganula survivors return to flooded Tokyo, where they fire up their mother / father / avenging god, Megaguirus. Yep, a giant dragonfly.

While the humans flit about ineffectively, Godzilla and Megaguirus have a traditional monster grudge match, and after a setback or three, Godzilla manages to burn Megaguirus to a crisp. At this point, the satellite housing the black hole gun is caught in a decaying orbit, and they only just manage to fire it at Godzilla, who then disappears. Some big wig goes to jail for concealing a banned plasma energy research facility in Tokyo, which is what attracted Godzilla to same.

And, speaking of, is he really gone?

Packed full of the usual ineffectual Japanese characters, the high point of this film is Godzilla himself, who looks suitably crabby about the entire thing. Megaguirus, on the other hand, is just a boring plastic model, and the Meganula aren’t much better.

Yeah, don’t bother, unless you’re a completist. Then do it with a case of beer.

The remark on tofu and soy and PETA brought out some remarks from a reader. First up:

Then there’s this:https://www.scientificamerican.com/…/soybean-fertility…/

A Scientific American article from 2009. sourced from Environmental Health News, on the possible effect ingesting large amounts of soy products may have on human fertility. No human studies cited, just animal studies. Coincidentally, it references the upcoming concerns concerning Bisphenol A, which was replaced in plastics by other compounds. Treehugger recently ran an article suggesting that those replacements are no better than Bisphenol A:

Twenty years ago, scientists made the accidental discovery that mice housed in damaged plastic cages were contaminated with bisphenol A (BPA). They had been studying female eggs from young females and saw a sudden rise in scrambled chromosomes. Subsequent studies showed that BPA does indeed have a serious effect on the developing brain, heart, lung, prostate, mammary gland, sperm and eggs. This spurred a widespread rejection of BPA in many consumer products, which is why it’s now common to see ‘BPA-free’ labels on certain plastics.

Now the same research team is back with more disturbing news, just published in the journal Current Biology: BPA replacement chemicals aren’t safe either. Study co-author Patricia Hunt from Washington State University calls it “a strange déjà vu experience for our laboratory.” Once again, the researchers noticed changes in control animals that were traced to exposure to damaged cages and subsequent contamination. That’s when Hunt and her colleagues realized that the mice were exposed to chemicals from the bisphenol family that are used to replace BPA.

It might be wise for families to go with glass and ceramics.

Another:

And this:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21175082

A cautionary remark. Another:

And if you have more time, a more complete and balanced look at just a few factors:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1480510/

Even older, 2006. It suggests caution as well:

The dominant isoflavone in soy is genistein, with daidzein and glycitein composing the remainder. Within soy, isoflavones are almost entirely bound to sugars, producing the respective compounds genistin, daidzin, and glycitin. Soy isoflavones have been linked with numerous health effects, but the strength of the relationships and whether the effects are beneficial are strongly debated.

We’ve stopped using soybean oil, which is the primary ingredient in most “vegetable oils.” So far, I haven’t regained the stamina of my youth.

Funicular:

adjective

• (of a railway, especially one on a mountainside) operating by cable with ascending and descending cars counterbalanced.
• Relating to a rope or its tension.

noun

• A funicular railway.

[Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in conversation with a colleague today.

On Lawfare Dr. Megan Reiss remarks on the latest Executive Order:

President Trump issued Executive Order 13848 on Sept. 12 declaring election interference a national emergency. The order also sets up a protocol for applying sanctions to persons who conduct cyberattacks against the electoral system or engage in disinformation. You can find comprehensive analysis of the order by Ed Stein here.

While this latest directive is a welcome addition to the United States’ arsenal of responses to further election interference, are the sanctions it contains capable of deterring adversaries?

The administration deserves praise for issuing this order; it places the administration on the side of protecting the United States over appeasing our adversaries. And while the document restates Trump’s frequent critique of the focus on election interference—that “there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election”—it also seems to recognize that whether or not an attack is successful, it still deserves a response.  Given Trump’s equivocation this summer at the Helsinki summit — where he seemed to side with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial of interference over the findings of the U.S. intelligence community—this Order stands in contrast to any squishiness by taking a clear stand against our adversaries.

Does Trump really deserve congratulations? In order to assemble an authentic congratulatory message, one must have a good idea as to the motivations of the President, and I do not think Trump would have issued this Order without the unrelenting pressure from Congressional hawks on both sides of the aisle.

That observation leads to the concern of whether or not the Russians will find a loophole in this order – or if Trump is simply going to ignore his own order if push comes to shove.

While any research on soybean oil’s effects on humans hasn’t reached my eyeballs, given its effects on mice found in this research, I can’t help but wonder if the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) might have gotten it wrong:

[tweet https://twitter.com/peta/status/1041373529684434946]

Andrew Sullivan’s remark on the rise of the right wing extremists in the second part of his weekly tri-partite column:

The well-intentioned fantasies that all of Europe could have one currency, that the rise of liberal democracy was unstoppable, and that mass immigration, with precious little integration, was an unalloyed good, have come crashing down to earth. As the pressure of mass migration from the South continues, if only because of the demographic explosion in Africa and the Middle East, we may end up with rabidly anti-immigrant parties dominating the entire European landscape. Sweden was a breathing space, opening the possibility that moderate liberal and conservative parties can co-opt the far-right resurgence and tame it. But the oxygen levels behind liberal democracy still keep falling across the continent.

I tend to agree. He doesn’t really have a recommendation, so I suggest that the liberal democracies – including most especially the United States – take a close look at their own actions in the world to see what they are doing which may be causing immigration, legal or not, to occur. Food exports? Interfering with the governments of other countries? Climate change? These are all activities which could easily be upsetting the status quo, causing violence, and motivating people to get out.

It’s not enough to have better border security. We need to look at our own responsibilities, whatever they may be, in that clusterfuck, and figure out what to do about it.

All the while ignoring the demographic monster in the room.

From an article on American government debt in WaPo:

Yep, that’s quite a per capita climb there, isn’t it? Reflective of our mania to overspend when we spend. I’m sure both sides will holler it’s the other side’s fault, but what comes immediately to my mind are the Bush tax cuts paired with the immense increases in spending required to fight two wars.

I’m just about ready to scream. I see this everywhere I look.

Kavanaugh denies the allegation; Christine Blasey Ford, a professor in California, stands by her story and has taken a polygraph test and shared therapy notes to corroborate it. Powerful Republicans have lined up behind Kavanaugh, including President Trump, but they also expressed some openness to pausing the nomination to look into Ford’s claims. [Amber Phillips, The Fix]

THE POLYGRAPH IS NOT SCIENCE.

It’s even worse than random chance, according to folks who’ve run studies. It can be gamed. American courts do not permit its findings as evidence.

There. Thank you. I feel so much better.

I am terribly sorry to have to be the first to tell you that our poor Miss Brennan died. We have her head here in the office, at the top of the stairs, where she was always to be found, smiling right and left and drinking water out of her own little paper cup. She shot herself in the back with the aid of a small handmirror at the foot of the main altar in St. Patrick’s cathedral one Shrove Tuesday. Frank O’Connor was where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving a penance to some old woman and he heard the shot and he ran out and saw our poor late author stretched out flat and he picked her up and slipped her in the poor box. She was very small. He said she went in easy. Imagine the feelings of the young curate who unlocked the box that same evening and found the deceased curled up in what appeared to be and later turned out truly to be her final slumber. It took six strong parish priests to get her out of the box and then they called us and we all went and got her and carried her back here on the door of her office. . . We will never know why she did what she did (shooting herself) but we think it was because she was drunk and heartsick. She was a very fine person, a very real person, two feet, hands, everything. But it is too late to do much about that. [Maeve Brennan of The New Yorker, 1959]

In response to a letter from a reader requesting “… for more of the Irish hired-helps.” Via Joanne O’Leary in London Review of Books.

See, doc, I brushed every single tooth! How about a little flossing now?

The Land That Time Forgot (1975) is a lurid World War II movie in which the remnants of the crew of a merchant vessel sunk by a German U-Boat, led by Bowen Tyler, submarine maker, and biologist Lisa Clayton, manage to ambush the U-Boat and take it over, with some average plot twists and turns. Then, when the starving and fuel-short crews find a mysterious island, the movie transforms into a lurid “Hey, the dinosaur just grabbed Lassie and ran off – oh, dear.” Well, OK, not the dog, but otherwise, yes.

The submarine is low on fuel, but this now-composite crew, nourished on dino-meat and sporting a captive local, has the knowledge to find and refine their own fuel oil. The crew turns out to be a killing machine, shooting up the dinos, the local hominin tribes, and occasionally each other, all the while not shedding a tear when one of them takes it in the neck, an emotional reaction I thought a bit off-putting.

In the end, as the island’s volcano goes off (this has happened far too conveniently over the last few weeks – see here and here and here for other such volcanoes getting guest-star roles recently), Tyler and Clayton, on a hunting expedition, lose their companions to various thrown objects, and then get back to camp to discover the U-Boat is leaving, trying to escape via the mysterious underwater passage. The U-Boat’s crew shoots each other up, as some wish to wait for their leader Tyler and his cute lass, while the more resentful German members would prefer to leave him and Lisa to their fates, but in the end the U-Boat blows up before escaping, another victim of the island, before the horrified eyes of Lisa and Bowen.

Yep, you guessed it. This is noir. Dinosaur noir.

We leave the enchanting couple, now heavily bearded (I’ll leave that to your imagination), heading north on some unexplained quest to discover why the more primitive hominins lived on the south end of the island, while the northern seemed to house fewer but more advanced forms of life.

And snow. Lots of snow.

And they’re south of the equator. Maybe it was the hills they were climbing. Sure.

Nothing to really see here. A straight-ahead adventure with the corners cut off it. Traitors die, tragic figures die, red-shirts die, dinosaurs die. Bad special effects. Especially that pteranodon.

Heck, my pick for most heart-rending scene is the one where the crew shoots two Allosaurs to death. You wouldn’t think two viciously toothed killing machines that drool like Niagara Falls could evoke pathos, and yet, there I was, wondering if I could fake a tear. I couldn’t, but I think it was the emotional high point of this fairly directionless story. Hey, here’s a clip of that scene, starting at about the 3:54 mark:

It wouldn’t be unfair to say I’ve seen much worse, but in the end it still seemed like dreck.

This thread has been dormant for a while, but WaPo’s report on a court battle over the vulnerability of electronic voting in Georgia reminded me of it. It sounds like a shining example of why voting machines should be distrusted:

On one side are activists who have sued the state to switch to paper ballots in the November midterm elections to guard against the potential threat of Russian hacking or other foreign interference. On the other is Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who has declared the electronic system secure and contends that moving to paper ballots with less than two months to Election Day will spawn chaos and could undermine confidence among Georgia’s 6.8 million voters.

Kemp, a Republican endorsed by President Trump — and an outspoken critic of federal election security assistance in 2016 — is running for governor in a competitive, nationally watched race against a Democrat who could become the nation’s first black female governor.

And so Kemp cannot admit to a mistake, because that’s not the Trump way. On the other side are the technologically literate:

Logan Lamb, a cybersecurity sleuth, thought he was conducting an innocuous Google search to pull up information on Georgia’s centralized system for conducting elections.

He was taken aback when the query turned up a file with a list of voters and then alarmed when a subsequent simple data pull retrieved the birth dates, drivers’ license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of more than 6 million voters, as well as county election supervisors’ passwords for use on Election Day. He also discovered the server had a software flaw that an attacker could exploit to take control of the machine.

And then he found the server was vulnerable, and then the folks responsible for it did nothing about the problem. Clusterfuck city, sounds like.

Well, I know which I’m on – dump the fucking computers. Chaos? Maybe. Discourage voters? I doubt it. They can suck it up, so long as the polling places are run in a fair manner. But the computers are turning out to be potentially even less fair and trustworthy than those darn humans.

So perhaps the humans should run their own damn affairs for themselves for a change, rather than depending on us damn computers.

Think of it that way, eh?

Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society, doesn’t appear to be the type to mince words about the future of space, at least as the Trump Administration sees it. NewScientist (8 September 2018, paywall) has the opinion:

While the Trump administration says that it is setting its sights on a return to the moon, its actions do not lend credence to such claims.

If it intended to put people on the moon again, it would fund the development of a lunar lander. Instead it is funding the Lunar Orbit Platform-Gateway, a costly boondoggle that serves no useful purpose. US Vice President Mike Pence talks of it as a done deal.

What he fails to add is that we don’t need a lunar-orbiting base to go to the moon, or to Mars, or to go anywhere. Not only that, crewed trips to anywhere beyond Earth orbit would be designed to use the gateway as a staging post, adding to fuel requirements and decreasing the load they can carry, which is why I call it the Lunar Orbit Tollbooth instead.

As I was reading this, it occurred to me that Zubrin, President of an independent entity, doesn’t have to depend on President Trump for anything, and therefore he doesn’t have to harness his tongue for fear of losing funding for the future.

NASA scientists, engineers, and professional administrators, on the other hand, must be vividly aware that catching the negative attention of President Trump could lead to the demise of the programs they think are best for NASA to pursue in the best interests of the United States. If they were to honestly express their opinions of the leadership, they might find their projects gone, and, worse, their careers finished.

That’s another one of the problems of having an incompetent, narcissistic, amateur President in charge. You daren’t prick his hide if your job, and your country’s future, depends merely on his good humors. Therefore, you have to … avoid the truth. Dance a scary dance. Not say what’s on your mind.

It may not be precisely the same as lying, but the effects can be just as damaging. That’s why we have whistleblower laws, because the deceit which occurs otherwise can easily have side-effects which we don’t expect or even recognize.

Until some avoidable catastrophe occurs.

Over the weekend, the report of an accuser of Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct came forth, and while I didn’t comment on it due to other commitments, my reaction was similar to my reaction to those accusations against Rep Keith Ellison (D-MN) of domestic abuse by a former girlfriend, who claimed to have a tape of the abuse occurring but will not release it. If Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser prefers to remain anonymous, then, in the absence of any other evidence, I see precious little reason to take the accusation seriously.

It’s not so much a matter of fairness as it is intellectual integriy. In each case someone has been accused, with no evidence presented, and so the only fair step to take, even if I suspect Kavanaugh is a radical anti-abortion proponent who’ll overturn Roe v Wade at the first opportunity, is to express skepticism the incident occurred.

But now Professor Christine Blasey Ford of Palo Alto University has stepped forward as the accuser, and this certainly complicates matters, stating she’s ready to testify concerning the incident. Professor Ford will be facing a committee of 11 GOP Senators and 10 Democratic Senators. The latter have already made their feelings known on the matter, but the Republican ranks include retiring Senator Flake (R-AZ), who I’ve discussed before, who has little love for President Trump. Will he become the speed bump over which the President’s scooter jumps and dumps?

Politico reports:

Flake flashed a yellow light Sunday night on Brett Kavanaugh’s high court bid, telling POLITICO that he won’t support advancing the nomination this week if fellow senators don’t do more to hear out a woman accusing the nominee of sexual assault more than three decades ago. Opposition from the Arizona Republican wouldn’t doom Kavanaugh outright, but it already has ratcheted up political pressure on a GOP struggling to keep Trump’s Supreme Court nominee from a full implosion. …

“I think it’s too soon to tell, but Flake is the one man with the leverage to do this,” GOP strategist and vocal Trump antagonist Rick Wilson said. “With the one-vote margin on the committee, Jeff Flake has the power to stop Kavanaugh, and to humiliate Trump. Revenge is a dish best served cold, as the philosopher once said.”

But I think I’d prefer Senator Flake only put the kibosh on Kavanaugh if relevant testimony and, better yet, evidence is produced of the incident in question. Regarding the nature of this incident, it’s likely to degenerate into a he-said / she-said incident, which is going to be messy and infuriating, but if the accusation is made and the accuser is going to stand forth, then we will have to wade through the sordid matter. And if, in some surprise turn, incontrovertible evidence is brought forth, or a confession is ripped from Kavanaugh’s lips, then so much the better: the pretender can be rejected, and President Trump can try again.

But I do not expect this to be a pleasant matter, and one side or the other will be sorely disappointed and outraged: an outcome that will do nothing to reunite the nation. Unfortunately, in the unlikely case that Kavanaugh is rejected, no doubt the conservatives will be bitter that an incident occurring back when the man was a teenager was used to block his path to the highest judicial court in the nation. However, I agree with Steve Benen that this is not the nature of the hypothetical rejection:

And what of the current defense? The White House re-issued Kavanaugh’s “categorical and unequivocal” denial to the Washington Post, which is no small detail. There were some suggestions over the weekend that it’s a mistake to condemn the judge for actions he allegedly took when he was a drunk teenager. The incident, if it happened at all, was decades ago, the argument goes, and it’s not fair to define a 53-year-old Supreme Court nominee by what he’s accused of having done in high school.

The problem with this argument is that Kavanaugh isn’t the one making it. On the contrary, the judge’s official line is that the incident in question simply never happened and that his accuser is lying.

And that pushes us away from a debate about holding someone responsible for alleged actions from his past and into a debate about holding someone responsible for their current actions. If Kavanaugh is lying now about an alleged attack on a teen-aged girl, there’s simply no credible way this dishonesty can be dismissed by senators as irrelevant.

Lying to Congress used to be a serious matter, and some Senators still take it seriously. Will this Congress? Will we ever know the truth of the matter? Probably not.

On Lawfare, Suzanne Spaulding and Harvey Rishikof warn of Russia’s attacks on our most precious institution – the Justice system:

In the summer of 2016, a Facebook group called “Secure Borders” began fanning the flames of rumors that a young girl had been raped at knifepoint by Syrian refugees in Twin Falls, Idaho. The group accused government officials, including the prosecutor and judge in the case, of conspiring to protect the immigrant community by covering-up the true nature of the crime. Secure Borders attempted to organize a rally, demanding, among other things, that “[a]ll government officials, who are covering up for these criminals, should be fired!” The claims were riddled with falsehoods. There were no Syrian refugees involved, and there was no knife. But because the suspects were minors, privacy laws made it difficult for the court to publish facts that could correct the public narrative.

The “Secure Borders” Facebook group was not the product of outraged Twin Falls residents. It was created by Russian operatives as part of Russia’s ongoing campaign to weaken our institutions of American democracy—in this case, by sowing discord and painting the justice system as an agent of politicians.

It’s tempting to paint President Trump as the lead Russian operative in this effort, isn’t it? But propaganda efforts like this are not new – we experienced them during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It’s just that the Internet now takes the place of little offset presses and the like as the medium of choice. Spaulding and Rishikof note one of the recommendations of a Reagan-era group that worked on anti-propaganda efforts:

Back in 1983, Dennis Kux, who chaired the Reagan administration’s Active Measures Working Group tasked with countering Soviet propaganda, pointed out that “[t]he best means of rendering the ground less fertile is to ensure that people … are fully aware of attempts to deceive them.” The public needs to be made aware that an adversary is working to exacerbate declining trust in our democratic institutions, including the justice system. Judges and their administrative staffs need to be prepared to respond quickly, and other community voices must be prepared to help set the record straight when misinformation threatens to overwhelm the public discourse.

I think Spaulding and Rishikof may understate the scope of the problem when the speak of “community voices,” because today’s Internet makes community both more fragmented and more global. It’s far more easy to scrape up a good dose of outrage at the target of your ire just by doing a few searches – and that’s only if you’re not on someone’s mail-list for disliking that group.

Speaking of mail, long-time readers know of my hobby of dismembering (metaphorically speaking, of course!) emails which I believe are motivated by a poisonously anti-American ideology. While it may be good fun to rip those hate-filled email to pieces, my real hope is to activate in my readers, particularly those targeted by those emails, a warning system that triggers on those feelings of outrage; that is, if you’re outraged, it may be someone trying to manipulate you. And although nearly all my examples come from conservative friends, outrage knows no ideology. Just read the progressive site The Daily Kos. Justified or not, outrage is a deep, viscous river.

What else can we do? Spaulding and Rishikof mention that the legal system’s tendency to “protect the privacy” of children makes for a weak point:

It is no coincidence that cases swarmed (surrounded) by disinformation often involve children. In addition to providing the shock value that makes stories go viral, court cases concerning minors are bound by privacy restrictions. As a result, prosecutors and police cannot comment on the details of an investigation, allowing rumor, innuendo and conspiracy peddlers to fill in the blanks with theories and their own narratives.

Perhaps it’s time to revisit that philosophy. I don’t pretend to have any deeper recommendations than simply review the matter, but I’m sure sharper minds than mine might suggest useful revisions.

And stay thoughtful out there, folks.

Political reporter Marcy Wheeler seems convinced that Manafort will provide the key for uncovering a putrid swamp of corruption in Washington. With regard to the many exhibits that accompanied his confession, she think Special Counsel Mueller has a hidden agenda:

They’re there to show what Paul Manafort does when he’s running a campaign.

Because they show that for the decade leading up to running Trump’s campaign, Manafort was using the very same sleazy strategy to support Viktor Yanukovych that he used to get Trump elected.

In other words, these exhibits are a preview of coming attractions.

TAKE OUT THE FEMALE OPPONENT BY PROSECUTING HER

It describes how Manafort used cut-outs to place stories claiming his client’s female opponent had murdered someone.

MANAFORT took other measures to keep the Ukraine lobbying as secret as possible. For example, MANAFORT, in written communications on or about May 16, 2013, directed his lobbyists (including Persons D1 and D2, who worked for Company D) to write and disseminate within the United States news stories that alleged that Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian official. MANAFORT stated that it should be “push[ed]” “[w]ith no fingerprints.” “It is very important we have no connection.” MANAFORT stated that “[m]y goal is to plant some stink on Tymo.”

& etc. I’m not an expert on any of this, so I’ll just have to wait and see how this all turns out. What bothers me, though, is how effective this sort of thing will be in dismembering the Trumpist base. Trump, on his own, is fangless; it’s his supporters which make him dangerous, which convinces those who should be overseeing Trump’s Executive activities to turn a blind eye. The extent to which the Trumpist base exists and continues to support Trump is, in my opinion, the extent to which the American Republic has failed to properly educate its citizens.

I know the Trumpists would bristle and consider me to be preaching at them without authority, which is why I preface this with in my opinion. We all render judgments, and the extent to which Trumpists swallow the fake news and Deep State memes and do the Lock Her Up! dance is, in my judgment, the measure of Americans who are failing the test of responsibly using their votes.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Wittes, et al, on Lawfare come to the expected conclusion, regardless of the opinion of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani:

Spotted this beauty loitering near a church.

Based on the seats, I don’t think it’s a reproduction.

Arturo Casadevall and Ferric C. Fang want to improve the quality of scientific literature, and along the way make this observation in JCI, a publication of Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine:

vii. Fostering a culture of rigor. In recent decades, many life science researchers have learned to accept a culture of impact, which stresses publication in high-impact journals, flashy claims, and packaging of results into tidy stories. Today, a scientist who publishes incorrect articles in high-impact journals is more likely to enjoy a successful career than one who publishes careful and rigorous studies in lower-impact journals, provided that the publications of the former are not retracted. This misplaced value system creates perverse incentives for scientists to participate in a “tragedy of the commons” that is detrimental to science (17). The culture of impact must be replaced by a culture of rigor that emphasizes quality over quantity. A focus on experimental redundancy, error analysis, logic, appropriate use of statistics, and intellectual honesty can help make research more rigorous and likely to be true (18). The publication of confirmatory or contradictory findings must also be encouraged to allow the scientific literature to provide a more accurate and comprehensive reflection of the body of scientific evidence (19).

For the scientist who values fame and fortune over getting it right, this is a golden observation. However, we shouldn’t depend on the researcher to have irreproachable ethics, but rather to structure the system so they don’t have a choice but to get the research right in order to gain that fortune and fame.

And here’s the cast and director of the movie.

For a mostly pleasant, if slightly mindless, time, The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is hard to beat. An exploration into the more salacious side of the famed detective’s life, it has not aged well. In its time, the suggestion that the detective was homosexual might have seemed risque, and such an intimation for Dr. Watson might be an outrage (a term mentioned multiple times, in true Brit fashion) for him, but today they come across as quaint and nearly irrelevant – a resolution to the matter that might have surprised director Billy Wilder.

The story itself, which centers around the development of the first working submarine by the British navy for Queen Victoria, and its secret technology, and how this connects to the mysterious cessation of letters from one of the men working on it to his wife in Belgium, is mildly interesting, but not as compelling as the actual Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Part of the problem is that the story is telegraphed, and with little subtlety.

But it’s also neither offensive nor incompetent. Dr. Watson may be a bit frenetic, but he’s not a bumbling boob, as he’s sometimes portrayed, and Holmes remains cool under pressure, even graceful in the face of failure.

The closest it comes to a theme is that some men rise above their hormone-laden ways to fall in love with women for their minds, as Holmes does with the doomed German spy who masquerades as the woman desperate to find her husband. It’s not as compelling as one might hope, though. Not Wilder’s best work.

But pleasant.

I was just reading up on Paul Manafort’s various confessions:

Before he was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort embraced extreme tactics in his lobbying efforts: He schemed “to plant some stink” and spread stories that a jailed Ukrainian politician was a murderer.

He enlisted a foreign politician who was secretly on his payroll to deliver a message to President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

And he gleefully fueled allegations that an Obama Cabinet member who had spoken out against his Ukrainian client was an anti-Semite, according to court papers.

With his guilty plea Friday, Manafort admitted the lengths to which he went to manipulate the American political system and the media for massive profit, exposing how he thrived in the Washington swamp that Trump railed against during his campaign. [WaPo]

And more. And more. And more.

This all in pursuit of massive pecuniary profits. It becomes quite clear that any moral system Manafort might have probably only extends to his own family – and even that might be an exaggeration. Clearly, treating people fairly was of inferior priority to gaining profits.

Which leads to the question of the moment, Why would President Trump expect Manafort to hold up under the pressure? I mean, I’m amazed Manafort didn’t fold his cards the day the trial started. He must have felt that he could win at trial. But now that it’s clear he cannot, and Trump doesn’t appear to be riding to his rescue, he’s simply following his age old pattern:

Do what you have to in order to advance your own cause.

Why would Trump think Manafort would do anything else? He’s as morality-free as the President himself. I suppose Trump thinks of himself as the master manipulator, the one who can put something over on anyone, but, given Manafort’s apparent mindset, that’s one vulnerability he doesn’t have. Once you discard a moral system which says you must treat others fairly, which can lead to self-deception when it clashes with self-interest opportunities, you aren’t quite so easily manipulated.

You may not understand why your tactics eventually lead you to the jail cell, but at least you can see clearly what’s happening in the short-term.

A dismayingly predictable finding appears to exist in this academic paper, if I understand the abstract properly. Although the abstract doesn’t label it as such, it’s about civil asset forfeiture, an old interest of mine. By Alex Tabarrok, Michael Makowsky, and Thomas Stratmann on SSRN:

We exploit local deficits and state-level differences in police revenue retention from civil asset forfeitures to estimate how incentives to raise revenue influence policing. In a national sample, we find that local fine and forfeiture revenue increases at a faster rate with drug arrests than arrests for violent crimes. Revenues also increase at a faster rate with black and Hispanic drug arrests than white drug arrests. Concomitant with higher rates of revenue generation, we find that black and Hispanic drug, DUI, and prostitution arrests, and associated property seizures, increase with local deficits when institutions allow officials to more easily retain revenues from forfeited property. White drug and DUI arrests are insensitive to these institutions. We do, however, observe comparable increases in white prostitution arrests. Our results show how revenue-driven law enforcement can distort police behavior.

That last sentence should be unsurprising to long-time readers, because revenue-driven law enforcement means there are now two goals of law enforcement, the first being justice^[1], but this new goal of collecting revenue for law enforcement is not constrained by the first goal. As independent goals, in the abstract they may affect each other, but in the real world, where law enforcement agents are compensated primarily with money, which just happens to also be the content of revenue, the distorter is the revenue, and the distorted is the authentic goal of law-enforcement, justice.

This is the wrong way to run a societal sector.

Kevin Drum interprets (no doubt from the paper, which I’ve chosen not to read):

The more black (and Hispanic) an area is, the more likely it is that strapped local governments will turn to civil asset forfeitures to raise revenue. But the more white an area is, the less likely they are to increase the use of civil asset forfeitures.

Just to make it a bit worse.

Ban civil asset forfeiture now!

¹ I know, I know, law enforcement is rarely or never concerned with justice, but all the same it should be, and hopefully we’ll continue to move that way as society continues to evolve towards justice and away from arbitrary laws.

And an impressive one, too.

He’s hanging out on the northern outside wall, behind the ferns.