Author Archives: Hue White

This is unsurprising news, given evangelicals’ embrace of the former President:

The long, slow decline of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination continues.

Membership in the Southern Baptist Convention [known as the SBC] was down by nearly half a million in 2022, according to a recently released denomination report. Nashville-based Lifeway Research reported Tuesday (May 9) that the SBC had 13.2 million members in 2022, down from 13.68 million in 2021. That loss of 457,371 members is the largest in more than a century, according to the Annual Church Profile compiled by Lifeway.

Once a denomination of 16.3 million, the SBC has declined by 1.5 million members since 2018, and by more than 3 million members since 2006. The COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the downturn, as did the reality that as older members die off, there are fewer young people to replace them. [Religion News]

This, no doubt, contributed to the decline:

[Delegates] at the [annual] meeting [in June] will also discuss the role of women in church leadership. Earlier this year, the SBC’s Executive Committee voted to expel several churches for having women pastors, including Saddleback Church, a California megachurch and one of the denomination’s largest congregations, for having women pastors. Saddleback is expected to appeal that decision.

But is this a theological dispute, an arbitrary display of power – or a concern that women leaders would be more likely to interfere with the general leadership inclination towards loyalty to former President Trump, who has been accused of, and even admitted to, sexual improprieties?

From the San Antonio Current:

With its Ghost Tracks, Donkey Lady and haunted hotels, San Antonio is home to an array of eerie places and urban legends, which may explain why it was recently ranked one of the nation’s most paranormal cities.

The Alamo City landed at No. 7 in a report published on Monday by online lawn-care service provider Lawn Love that purports to rank U.S. cities by their paranormal happenings.

Yep, a lawn care company. Kinda sad, except it’s the paranormal, so I laugh, instead. OK, chuckle.

Having lost his true love, here is Neo on a blind date. At a prom. She’s not charmed.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) is self-indulgent in so many ways: nods to the audience and how it reacted to the first three movies; guns; magic masquerading as cool tech; self-doubt; progress in artificial intelligence; and, no doubt, several other topics I missed.

But, in case you’ve seen it and wondered, I deliberately omit gaming. Those gestures were weak and ineffective.

All to occult a love story.

And that’s about it. My Arts Editor had two comments: “His acting is so wooden”, and “The Easter Egg is the best part of the movie.” I might add that the CGI seemed faultless, and Thomas Anderson as a scruffy old dude had me sniggering.

But I concur with my Arts Editor. If you’re a Neal Patrick Harris completist, or, yes, a Keanu Reeves completist, then you have to see this. But I suggest you pre-grit your teeth.

Kathleen Parker’s opinion piece in WaPo on fiction writing and who is qualified to write what was, speaking as an aspiring fiction writer who never gets around to writing fiction, fascinating:

When it comes to the “evidence” that Joe Biden is corrupt that I mentioned in this previous Landgrebe nomination post, as asserted by Erick Erickson, well, Erickson appears to be another order-follower. Here’s WaPo’s Eugene Robinson on the matter:

Republicans who have been trying for years to “prove” that President Biden is somehow corrupt made a big show Wednesday of revealing their smear campaign to be a shameless, empty exercise in rumor and innuendo.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Steve Doocy, one of the hosts of the morning show “Fox & Friends,” which is normally the safest possible space for Republican politicians to trumpet their talking points.

“You don’t actually have any facts to that point,” Doocy said Thursday to House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), who was trying to sell the idea that the president, his brother James and his son Hunter were part of some shadowy influence-peddling scheme. “And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is — there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”

That wasn’t the reaction Comer had hoped to get in a GOP-friendly venue the morning after his much-hyped news conference releasing the findings of the Oversight Committee’s investigation into the president’s family. You might have missed Comer’s event, because it happened while another Republican member of Congress, Rep. George Santos (N.Y.), was being taken into custody and arraigned on felony charges of wire fraud, money laundering and other federal crimes.

Apparently Doocy didn’t get the same memo as Erickson. Incidentally, I consider using sources from the adversary to refute an adversary’s killer assertion to be a superior approach to winning debates and arguments; it’s akin to aikido, which attempts to use the attacker’s energy to defend oneself.

Judging from Comer’s results, he just seems to be another fourth-rater, holding a press conference proclaiming victory in the face of overwhelming defeat.

… because Spring has lallygagged. Our first surprise is how the spurge is pushing back the frenetic ornamental onions:

We’re liking the “line the path” theme that we didn’t plan or encourage.

The power of positive gardening, maybe. Off to pull dandelions.

The former President’s loss in the E. Jean Carroll civil suit on accusations of sexual assault and defamation – but not rape – has provoked a visit or two from the ghost of former Rep. Earl Landgrebe, the owner of the quote, “Don’t confuse me with the facts. I’ve got a closed mind. I will not vote for impeachment. I’m going to stick with my president even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot,” in connection with his loyalty to then-President Nixon.

Let’s start with Senator Rubio (R-FL):

“That jury’s a joke. The whole case is a joke,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told reporters on Tuesday.

“If someone accuses me of raping them and I didn’t do it, and you’re innocent, of course you’re going to say something about it … it was a joke,” Rubio added of the defamation findings. [HuffPo]

Senator Tuberville (R-AL) gets in on the brown-nosing:

“It makes me want to vote for him twice,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told HuffPost when asked about the verdict. “They’re going to do anything they can to keep him from winning. It ain’t gonna work … people are gonna see through the lines; a New York jury, he had no chance.”[HuffPo]

Senator Scott (R-FL):

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), another Trump ally, simply repeated Trump’s denial of the allegation. “He said he didn’t do it,” Scott said. Asked if he could support someone found liable for sexual battery, the senator said, “I don’t know the facts. It’s a New York jury, too.”

One longs to hear Scott’s explanation, incoherent as it might be, for how it being a New York jury might be relevant.

So what’s going on? As I’ve mentioned before, Trump is not an accident or an invader, he is the product of a Republican Party whose culture directly produced a mendacious, boastful, grasping, and incompetent boob.

If his supporters condemn him, they condemn themselves through association: they are basically Trump’s ideological and moral siblings.  That’s not acceptable to them, so of course they’re not condemning him en masse.

Instead, it appears the strategy is minimization and distraction. Erick Erickson demonstrates the first here:

How is the Jean Carroll lawsuit, funded by Democrats, supposed to hurt Donald Trump? I mean, really. The man was caught on video talking about how women would let him grab them by their…you know… and he still won a presidential election.

A lawsuit funded by Democrats in New York City about events that happened decades ago and rejected the central accusation of rape will not be what does in Donald Trump. But don’t tell the Democrats. They believe, epistemically, that this is the beginning of the end of Donald Trump. See the video above. We’ve been promised the beginning of the end since he got elected when they said there was no way he could be elected.

Grabbing women didn’t stop his election. Adultery did not stop him. Porn stars did not stop him. This will not stop Donald Trump. Neither will Alvin Bragg’s silly prosecution that even Democrats roll their eyes at.

And the second here:

Joe Biden and his extended family have received at least $10 million in shady deals from foreign nationals during his time as Vice President. Hunter Biden and at least eight other family members were involved in the creation of at least 16 companies that profited from countries overlapping with the policy initiatives Joe Biden oversaw in the Obama admin…

As to this latter post, entitled “Damning Evidence of Biden Corruption,” and mostly behind a paywall, this is the first I’ve heard of it. That means maybe Erickson is right.

But his history isn’t encouraging. While I’ll be waiting to hear more about this report, which apparently comes from a House committee, I will not be surprised if it sinks into the swamp. It smells of distraction, it smells of moral equality. Our guy may be shit, but so’s yours!

And, meanwhile, the GOP Senate response to Trump’s loss in court remains an embarrassment to all concerned.

I don’t doubt this is a serious endeavour, but the visuals make me smile:

[Premature b]abies are laid on their front on the skateboard and strapped on so they can’t fall off. The slight elevation allows them to use their arms and legs to propel themselves forward. Very premature babies are unable to breastfeed, but the motions they use on the skateboard are similar to those of non-premature newborns who push themselves forwards if breastfeeding. [“Skateboard helps very premature babies develop their motor skills,” Alice Klein, NewScientist (29 April 2023, paywall)]

Amici:

1. plural of amicus [Wiktionary]

Ummmm, ok.

Amicus:

1. Abbreviation of amicus curiae. [Wiktionary]

Ummmmm, sure.

amicus curiae:

1. (law, US) A person or entity who has been allowed by the court to plead or make submissions but who is not directly involved in the action. quotations
2. (law, Canada) An independent lawyer, not retained by any party, whom the court has ordered to provide legal submissions regarding the matter in dispute; for example, to provide submissions regarding the situation of an unrepresented litigant or accused person. [Wiktionary]

Ah, a bunch of lawyers! Noted in “Why the Supreme Court should have stepped up on Indiana’s fetal burial law,” Elizabeth Reiner Platt, Religion News Service:

Though amici did not get their day in court Monday, it’s increasingly clear that courts will not be able to avoid growing conflicts between ever-expanding religious liberty doctrine and draconian regulations of reproductive health care.

Exhausted, I am.

Steve Benen summarizes the use of the 14th Amendment to obviate the debt ceiling crisis:

Circling back to our recent coverage, the 14th Amendment solution is sometimes derided as a “gimmick,” but it’s rooted in a relatively straightforward reading of the constitutional text, which states that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”

If the validity of the debt, under constitutional mandate, can’t be questioned, then it’s not up to Congress to pass legislation — it’s up to the executive branch to simply honor the nation’s obligations.

And political consequences:

I won’t pretend to know what would happen then, but Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard, wrote a New York Times op-ed on the subject over the weekend, concluding, “The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding. There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no. And there is only one person with the power to give Congress that answer: the president of the United States.”

Finally, here’s another angle to keep in mind as the process moves forward: If this were to work out, and the 14th Amendment were to supplant the debt ceiling statute, it wouldn’t just resolve the ongoing crisis we’re facing now, it would also end all future debt ceiling standoffs going forward.

I still expect to see this when I look out the window.

Yes, there is something like institutional cognitive dissonance going on in Congress, a credible notion until one realizes that this institutional creature has a relatively short renewal time of two years, and the conservatives have become far-right extremists. The view that Congress is telling the Executive to spending too much money, without giving it permission to fulfill obligations incurred is entertaining, but something of an illusion.

But what’s catching my attention is that Benen doesn’t mention the end point of a Court-driven approach to the debt ceiling crisis: SCOTUS. What will a conservative wing, riven with scandal and, if they were honorable, embarrassment, do if faced with such a partisan issue?

Punt?

It’s just a soccer, errr, football team:

Qatar’s Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani hopes to secure the takeover of Manchester United by promising to invest an extra £800 million ($1 billion) in the British soccer club on top of his offer of around £5bn, according to reports.

The additional £800 million will be spent on improving the English Premier League club’s Old Trafford stadium and the team’s training group, London-based business newspaper City A.M. reported on Monday. [AL-Monitor]

And there’s worse, but I refuse to quote it. The rich, I guess, entertain themselves a little differently.

It’s been a while since I’ve responded to an item from the “conservative” email stream, mostly because it’s not a lot of fun, partly because my source has been inactive. I put conservative in scare quotes because, to me, I expect a real conservative to have a near-reverence for facts, truth, and plain speaking.

What I ran across in this email has little relationship to those values, and it’s important for what I’ll call non-political conservatives to see why. The person who assembled this mail is preying upon understandable ignorance, using carefully chosen words to trigger confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, to continue an age-old theme of such writers: continue to widen the gap between conservatives and everyone else in this country.

It’s important to keep in mind the context at the present moment. The conservatives in government have suffered many blows to their moral reputation. In the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas has been caught in an enormous scandal with real estate magnate Harlan Crow, Justice Gorsuch has his own real estate scandal, if of lesser magnitude, and even Chief Justice Roberts left undeclared an enormous sum of income brought in by his wife. Of less visibility is the nakedly partisan speeches give by Justice Alito, and the presence of Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh at highly partisan events. And in terms of official business, the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe vs. Wade, has, to judge from polling, raised grave concerns about the judgment of the conservative wing of SCOTUS among Republicans; the Establishment Clause appears to be under attack by the same conservatives; and a few other decisions have also seemed dubious, again to Republicans.

The reputation of GOP House members has been considerably besmirched by a large number of members. Let’s start, though, with former member Rep Madison Cawthorn (FL), who pled guilty to violating laws against attempting to carry a gun on an airplane; less visibly was a general inclination towards inflating, or inventing, his achievements, not to mention threats against fellow Republicans when he lost his reelection primary. In the same category of mendacity, but with more fanfare, come Rep Santos (R-NY) and Ogles (R-TN), who seem to indulge in mendacity with pleasure, and not only to gain seats in the House.

And that’s just personal behavior observations of just a few. In the arena of official business, Speaker McCarthy (R) has not covered himself in glory, but simply explicit greed for position, trading committee chairmanships like poker chips in order to buy votes; Rep Jordan (R-OH) has been eagerly, if reportedly ineffectively, weaponizing the committees he chairs; and, of course, the entire debt ceiling mismanagement by the GOP House caucus is a debacle of monumental proportions.

Comparatively speaking, the Senate comes off relatively well, but the actions of Senator Tuberville (R-AL), weakening our country’s defenses in the name of a strident position on abortion, further besmirches conservative reputation. Nor has Senator Scott’s (R-FL) official activities as chairman of the 2022 election committee gone over well, as it may have cost the Republicans control of the Senate.

But that’s enough of context. The email consists of a series of pictures and cartoons, each self-contained, and so I’ll note each with my commentary. Notice the common theme, though: Liberals being stupid. At this juncture, it’s an exercise in moral equivalency: We’ve been undeniably awful, so surely they must be, too.

As comforting as that may be, it doesn’t make it true. If that sentence isn’t jarring to my reader, read it again.

In fact, let’s make it a game. Every time my reader is tempted to stop reading because they find my assertions irritating and, oh, obviously untrue, instead add it to your confirmation bias tally. If your tally at the end is more than two, then you may need to ask yourself if you’re too eager for news that confirms your biases.

And that’s a problem for you. Bad thinking habits leads to false conclusions.

This picture is the setup: See, electric cars need to be towed as well. The true key word here, though, isn’t towed, but as well. That is, all vehicles can suffer defects and damage. This realization blunts the point, doesn’t it?

Yes, yes. On rare occasion, a battery pack will go bad. Early on, it’ll be covered by warranty.

Just like an engine, eh?

This is all about focusing attention on big numbers without acknowledging that the electric battery and motor replaces the fossil fuel engine and gas tank, and that each has its weaknesses. I’ve known plenty of people who’ve been faced with large bills because their fossil fuel engine has failed. That I’ve not known anyone who needed to replace their EV’s batteries or motor is, to supply context, actually not not significant: EVs haven’t been around in the numbers that fossil fuel cars have been.

My point is that honesty in communication is critical to making effective arguments.

Reduction in the consumption of oil, from which plastics are made, is a widely acknowledged public good, as the problems of microplastics, as little known as it is, is a matter of grave concern to everyone who acknowledges that we are dependent on Nature for our continued survival. The banning of straws is a simple & straightforward step in stopping the generation of plastics.

But when it comes to needle supplies, the situation is far more complex. Taking needles as a reference to the abuse of drugs, I’ve been around sixty years now, and American society has been fighting the problem of drugs for longer than that, going all the way back to Prohibition – yes, alcohol is a drug – and the “Drug War” has been a continual failure. Sixty years ago it was reefers; today, it’s fentanyl and opioids. We’ve tried Just Say No and brutal drug raids, and suffered the side effects of police corruption, all in our failed efforts to stop the abuse of drugs.

Supplying needles to drug addicts can, for those who believe the United States is a redemptive country, be seen as part of the process of redemption. A dead person cannot be salvaged, and a person suffering from diseases transferred by dirty needles is certainly far harder to salvage. But if an abuser’s “only” problem is addiction, then they have a better shot at redemption.

Does it work? Beats me. Maybe it’ll fail. But it’s worth a shot. So long we, as a society, believe every person should be fought for, then every tactic in this centuries long issue need to be tried and evaluated, until we find one that works.

And that makes this horrific simplification of a difficult problem a hypocritical statement that really should be disdained, in my book.

In the midst of a reprehensible message collection comes something I can sort of approve. I’ll just note that this includes such dubious personalities as NFL star and failed Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R-GA), college football coach and successful Senate candidate Tommy Tuberville (R-A), and actors and former Presidents Reagan (R) and Trump (R).

On the left side of politics, the only name that comes to mind is former Senator Al Franken (D-MN), who usually gets good reviews for his work.

That point driven home, the inclination to pay attention to the prominent and well-off is an evolutionary trait: Learn from those who’ve succeeded. Even Imitate them. I get annoyed when someone who is a “business leader” thinks that means they can lead in politics as well, or, more generally, that they can succeed in a sector other than their current (private vs public, or private vs free press). While there are examples of such successes, such as George and Mitt Romney, the general rule is, without proper preparation, they won’t. Governor Ventura (I-MN) did well when he moved from private sector to public sector, but he also put in the prep time of being a mayor of Minneapolis suburb Brooklyn Park. Reagan was Governor of California previous to being President, although evaluations of his Presidential legacy come under heavy debate, and will probably be inaccurate until all the relevant cultural warriors have passed away.

But a fascination with the successful is understandable, and, to some extent, a net positive.

Ag workers, Albert Einstein, a third of our medical staff. I’m not kidding, many of our medical professionals come from overseas. Ask any doctor or nurse.

But note the mendacity: illegal aliens do not get welfare, except for that delivered by churches. “Terrorism” is not delivered over “open borders,” but by discontented citizens, as FBI analyses indicate. Human trafficking has been a trait of humanity since just about as long as humans have been around, I’d wager, and is not relevant to open borders.

And drugs? Drugs are tangible things that are not easily carried over borders by people on their feet. Rather, it’s all about ports of entry, where vehicles can carry them.

This message is all about provoking fear and rage, without regard to truth, while making the reader feel “smart”. And that’s mendacious.

Note the sleight-of-hand trick. If it’s not clear, and it’s designed not to be noticed, then ask yourself, Why is $56K the right number?

Yeah.

I can’t imagine why. The right number? It’s the difference in price of a fossil fuel car, of comparable capability, to the “average” EV’s price. Assuming the EV is pricier, then the question is how fast the differential of the two prices will be consumed by savings on gas, discounting for the price of the electricity. Obviously, there are a few variables here, such as how much driving an individual does, the intangible inconvenience of recharge times, etc.

My general rule of thumb isn’t 84 years, though. It’s on the order of … 5 years.

And note the other omission. As an EV owner (from July 2020, MiniCooper SE), I can testify that nearly every year I have owned a fossil fuel car there was at least an oil change necessary, if not other repairs peculiar to the engine, transmission and/or exhaust. For the MiniCooper so far, nothing.

A big, fat $0 in repairs to the unique features of an EV. (In case you wonder: Damn potholes.)

This message is a nearly explicit use of confirmation bias to engage the reader to the message. It’s badly misleading, and relies on the understandable ignorance of the reader, while appealing to their vanity. Once we realize really quite monstrous flaws in the argument, we can take the remark on Buttigieg to be both accurate, and appropriate: insulating ourselves from bouncing gasoline prices is a fiscally responsible action.

Yes, things can and do go boom. Navel-staring, as this guy does, is, as usual, unproductive. Understanding what happened and fixing it, rather than weeping, is the American thing to do. Too bad this guy doesn’t get it.

But you can correct the mendacious. This pic was fully debunked in this article, but I’ll summarize. This pic is of an experiment in Australia; electric charging stations are not hooked up to generators, but to electric grids. The great thing about an electric grid is that the electricity can be supplied in a variety of ways: Diesel generators, nuclear power plants, hydropower, other fossil fuelds, wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Last time I checked, Xcel Power here in Minnesota was generating 40% of its power from renewables, including nuclear; it may be even higher now.

Meaning? The caption on the above picture is based on an unique experiment, not a typical setup, and in a typical setup the mix of electricity sources may render the MPG up in the thousands of miles / gallon.

But notice the “can’t fix stupid.” That’s the conservative rallying cry, meant to inculcate an arrogant, superior attitude, all through the use of misinformation. Keep the herd together – as any sheep farmer will tell you, it’s easier to shear a herd kept together than it is one that has scattered.

Merely banging their point home, in the mind of the author.

But it inadvertently makes a different point for the discerning reader, doesn’t it? That someone who blunders their electricity management doesn’t have to be towed, with all its inherent dangers. Someone with a couple of cups of gasoline and a generator that consumes it can recharge the car easily enough, at least enough for a few miles of driving.

In the future, tow trucks may come equipped with just such a contraption, particularly if we can improve recharge technology.

It’s actually quite a relief to know.

… while improving the grid and not allowing Texas to run the grid, eh?

That’s the hidden assumption, isn’t it? That we’re not allowed to improve the grid. It’s dumb, but it’s there and it’s hidden because the writer is trying to evoke that sense of superiority that he’s been building.

But it’s a failure on his part. Why? Because now you know the flaw. While we continue to gradually change out fossil fuel cars for EVs, we’ll also improve the grid.

As the thorough reader will recall, an electric grid disconnects vehicles from a dependence on a particular source. Coal is rapidly disappearing as a source of electricity, being replaced by renewables. Ask Xcel Power.

Another entry in the snide faux-superiority list, this is.

See my earlier comment on portable generators, helpfully supplied by the author of the above. Sloppy thinking on his part.

Continuing the balsa wood battering ram of ignorance, while adding in legal liability for stealing a corporate logo. It turns out this guy’s not too bright.

Coal is, of course, so dirty that power companies are dropping it – see above. Now, it is true that, at one time, people would glory in soot, as they saw it as proof of living in civilization, which protected them from wild animals and pathogens, which tended to take away their loved ones.

But we’ve grown beyond that now.

But this guy hasn’t even grown beyond lying.

And … I’m done.

It’s a disappointment that such trash is circulating in the conservative blood stream, but too many folks benefit mightily from fossil fuels to expect that they’d soberly think about the world they’re leaving for their kids.

And what was your confirmation bias score?

He wants me to reproduce a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon now?

47 Ronin (2013) is a modern retelling of the Japanese historical event and morality tale known as Forty-Seven rōnin, an incident in which the warriors sworn to a lord become suddenly masterless when their lord is provoked into attacking Kira, a powerful court official of the shogun, who has come visiting. The lord, Lord Asano, is required by the shogun to commit seppuku for this crime.

This movie enhances the moral clash at the heart of this tale by adding in the servant Kai, a half-breed who, along with being Japanese and a Westerner, also appears to be a demon. As good a warrior as those who are warriors, his counterbalance, fictional as Kai, is Mizuki the Witch, supernatural in her powers, who serves Kira. She, in fact, provokes the attack on Kira, not as an assassination attempt, but in order to give Kira the opportunity to take Lord Asano’s title and property, once he’s been condemned for his crime.

To finish the summary, the forty seven rōnin endure torture and must counter both tactics and witchery before they get to commence the final assault on Kira. And should they succeed, they know what comes next for disobeying the shogun: death.

And this is moral center of this story. The shogun, as I understand it, provided stability in a land divided between Lords of various standing, ambitions, and egos. When Lord Asano attacks Lord Kira under the hidden prodding of Mizuki, he seals his fate because the shogun cannot risk the stability of the country. The purpose of the shogunate is to bring peace, and thus his command must be moral.

But the very provocation results in an immoral action requiring a counteraction, and the shogun sealing off that counteraction does not impose justice upon the rōnin, but injustice. Deprived of their beloved leader by a deliberate action of an unjust nature, we now have the clash that makes for a tragedy, as the rōnin become a group separate from the rest of society.

In this way, Forty-Seven rōnin functions as an example of a fracture in the governing nature of this society, a lesson in how imposition of pacifism is not necessarily a moral action. That it’s a recounting of a historical tale, even if dressed up a bit, simply makes it a stronger.

And it’s not a badly told story, either. It’s a good way to spend a couple of hours, in fact, if you like fantasy with your historical tales. Enjoy.

Moscow is claiming that Ukraine took a shot at Putin with two drones yesterday:

The light, easily obtainable commercial drones apparently used in the attack typically have limited flight ranges, suggesting that someone in Moscow or close to it had launched the craft, according to another senior European defense official. The explosive charge on the drone appeared to be small, the defense official added, and probably could not have caused much destruction. [WaPo]

The fascinating part? The article never considers the possibility that this might be an assassination attempt by Russians.

The cited drones are, as noted, short-range, and while that can be fixed or worked around, a simpler explanation is that one of Putin’s unwilling allies may be losing patience with Putin.

Sure, this not likely – but it’s not impossible.

The noise in the political world is – a lovely onomatopoeicism – cacophonous, and it’s all about 2024. The current fun is the debt limit, a drama in which the Republicans are playing the dog chasing the car, having no idea what they’ll be doing with the car that will almost undoubtedly back over them if they do set tooth to fender.

Which is to say, the Republicans are playing a lose-lose game, no matter how much they end up shouting that they won when the curtain comes down. Jolting the economy, hard, will simply function as another sign of their basic failure to understand how economies and human psychology works – last seen at the Federal government level in the 2017 tax reform bill, which did not achieve any of the predictions asserted by its conservative authors and backers. Alternatively, folding on their demands will make them look spineless.

But back to the racket numbing our ears. If you listen to conservative pundit Erick Erickson, he’d have you believe that the Republicans have the Democrats on the ropes, and never mind that they’re going up against Representative / Senator / Vice President / President Joe Biden, possibly the most experienced politician in Washington these days – and the Republicans have never shown themselves to be anything but a pack of fourth-raters, slavishly following the precepts of their predecessors and teachers, the historical revisionists descending from the Civil War. But his task is to keep the herd together; reading his public facing blog has been quite instructive of late, as he spends nearly as much time shouting at Republicans as he does Democrats. And when does shout at the latter, he leaves out inconvenient facts: a complaint about the media being slanted causing the electorate to distrust it couldn’t be bothered to note that the leading example was, without a doubt, Fox News. Moral equivalency is a sad game to play.

But don’t be fooled. Some of the Republicans are actually paying attention to the outside world, as WaPo has noted:

His wife picked out the wallpaper.

Constantine: City of Demons (2018) is an animated version of a John Constantine adventure. A buddy of his, Chas, from a time of a personal disaster, has fathered a daughter, but now the marriage is in ruins, and the teen daughter has lapsed into a coma in the hospital.

Constantine’s diagnosis? The kid’s soul has disappeared, and Constantine may be the only one to be able to find it.

The adventurers, Constantine and buddy, fly out of London, heading for Los Angeles, and are immediately in the soup upon landing, chasing clues and meeting the damned, from victims to pleasure seeking demons chasing franchises to … well, an elder God. Sort of decrepit, you know?. In a way, the cut throat ways of the demons is illustrative of the problems that can cripple cooperative ventures, but that’s not the point here.

The point is the city doesn’t want demons as residents.

I didn’t much care for the animation style, but if you’ve been a fan of Constantine, it’s not hard to step into the mindset again. The sacrifices he must make are, oh, sort of credible – the problem with fantasy is that it’s easy to paper over plot holes, but it’s often highly unsatisfactory.

But the twist near the end almost makes it worthwhile.

Yeah, I enjoyed the story, but it’s not memorable, and some of the joy is simply the ‘tude of the big C. Mouthing off to demons is always a special, if precarious, joy. But this one’s not worth remembering.

Which may be … ummmmm … I forget.

It’s all about those predator-prey relationships.

Do you think you’ve thought through all the threats of ChatGPT? How about this one?

A recent study outlined the devastating and undisclosed water footprint of large artificial intelligence (AI) models like ChatGPT on the world’s environment. The impact of this would be a great concern for the future of the Middle East and North Africa, the world’s most water-scarce region.

This is a factor that companies like Dubai Electric and Water Authority (DEWA) — which said in February that it plans to use ChatGPT in its offerings — need to consider in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of most water-scarce countries in the world. Other highly water-scarce countries in the region plan to use ChatGPT on a large scale and face similar risks.

The amount of water needed to cool down computational processes of advanced AI-powered language learning models (LLM) like GPT-3 and GPT-4 is massive and also “kept as a secret,” according to the April 2022 report “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models,” by UC-Riverside and UT-Arlington researchers. [Salim A. Essaid, AL-Monitor]

I’m moving towards the viewpoint that AI should be restricted to limited tasks at which human performance is miserable.

WaPo’s Dana Milbank could be more generous:

Bolgia:

1. a division of the eighth circle of Hell, Malebolge, in Dante’s Divine Comedy [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Ukraine Update: Russia brings the (literal) big guns to Bakhmut,” Mark Sumner, Daily Kos:

For several days, the situation in Bakhmut was relatively calm. Relatively. Meaning that it only looked like one of the middle tiers of hell instead of the lowermost bolgia. Having reached the railroad station at the center of town, Russian forces seemed to reduce their pace and for nearly a week not only did Russia show little advance, Ukraine actually pushed Wagner forces back in at least two areas of the city.

WaPo presents a summary of the debt limit problem, particularly as it applies to the GOP. As I read it, I finally identified what’s been bothering me about discussions of the debt limit and the financial and political repercussions. But, first, a portion of that article summarizing the projected results if President Biden doesn’t accede to Republican demands:

A small group of conservative budget experts is cautioning House Republicans that brinkmanship over the nation’s borrowing limit could lead to economic disaster, warning of severe financial ramifications even as their own party ignores their advice.

In both public and private comments, a handful of GOP budget experts — Brian Riedl, who was an aide to former Ohio Republican senator Rob Portman; Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute; and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — have tried to counter the growing argument on the right that the debt ceiling can be breached with only minimal economic impact.

So are the Republicans engaging in motivated reasoning, or, as it’s more commonly known, wishful thinking?

Probably. The Democratic economists who predict disaster if the world loses confidence in the trustworthiness of the United States have a better track record than their Republican counterparts, who’ve been shrilling for decades about debt and deficits and imminent disaster, without confirmation from reality.

But: it’s my guess that there’s a key element missing from the Democratic messaging on this issue, and that is time. That is, the day we start defaulting on the debt is not the day the country falls into ruin. This will, instead, be a gradual process.

But I fear the extremists in the House will celebrate the day the defaults start, because disaster did not befall us.

Not immediately.

They’ll win re-election once, possibly even twice.

But within five years, we’ll see the results predicted by the Democratic economists, or something like them.

I think the Democrats should prepare the public through messaging that incorporates the time element. Not that it has to be accurate; it simply has to inform the public that over X years our financial position will degrade because of the failure of Republicans to raise the debt limit.

And probably, at some point, indicate that if the Republicans are all that excited about debt and deficits, despite the objective evidence, then there’s a simple way to begin attacking that problem:

RAISE TAXES.

It’s simple and virtually risk-free, at least as an element of the public business. It may imperil the seats of certain Republicans who’ve made the mistake of running where there’s a widespread belief that taxes are ruinous, rather than proper investments in the future of the country. But that’s just a consequence of insistent propaganda.

It appears that now Associate Justice Gorsuch, IJ^[1], appears to have committed a foul on the basketball floor of federal service, according to Politico:

For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colo.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court. Gorsuch owned the property with two other individuals.

On April 16 of 2017, Greenberg’s Brian Duffy put under contract the 3,000-square foot log home on the Colorado River and nestled in the mountains northwest of Denver, according to real estate records.

He and his wife closed on the house a month later, paying $1.825 million, according to a deed in the county’s record system. Gorsuch, who held a 20 percent stake, reported making between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale on his federal disclosure forms.

And …

Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser. That box was left blank.

Unsurprisingly, Greenberg Traurig has had cases up before SCOTUS, at least 22. Any recusals by the good Justice?

The article doesn’t address that question in those terms.

So this is no guarantee of actual corruption, but failing to disclose the buyer is certainly a problem of appearances.

It’s worth stopping for a summary of corruption these days. Along with Gorsuch:

• Justice Thomas’ plentiful interactions with Texas real estate developer Harlan Crow have looked quite sordid.
• Rep Santos’ (R-NY) many lies and other social transgressions, such as possibly defrauding an Amish farmer of his valuable puppies, have been a revelation.
• Rep Ogles (R-TN), too, in support of his successful campaign for election to the House, has since had his alleged lies revealed.
• On the local level, several members of the Tennessee House have had mud daubed on them liberally, such as the Speaker of the House not living in the district he represents as required by law.
• U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the judge trying to suspend mifepristone, has had this reported about him: “… lists his most valuable investment as a holding in a single stock worth at least $5 million. The name of the company, however, is blacked out.” He claims the Clerk’s Office has the information and will automatically recuse him if necessary. That may be a credible excuse, but why is the secrecy necessary? Is this major source of his wealth a company dealing in dishonorable causes? Would it perhaps suggest he’s a hypocrite?

Overall, regardless of the truth of the matter of Kacsmaryk, the behaviors of these individuals is going to be an open wound for the Republicans going forward into the next election. Add in the clownish behavior of a number of GOP House members, and a minimally competent Democratic Party should make inroads in the 2024 elections.

¹ For those readers who do not recall, “IJ” means Illicit Justice. Gorsuch sits in what might have been Merrick Garland’s seat, a seat held open by Senator McConnell (R-KY) neglecting his Constitutionally-specified duty to give advice and consent, in other words consideration, as to who should sit on the SCOTUS. Associate Justice Barrett, through no real fault of her own, also deserves such an appellation.

And, in the case of Fox News, Carlson is out:

Fox News and Tucker Carlson, the right-wing extremist who hosted the network’s highly rated 8pm hour, have severed ties, the network said in a stunning announcement Monday.

The announcement came one week after Fox News settled a monster defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million over the network’s dissemination of election lies. [CNN/Business]

No comment, as of yet, from Carlson.

But his continued employment over the years is really a stunning indictment of his management, right up to the top where the Murdochs live. I’m sure Fox News will live on, regardless of the status of Carlson and upper management and the ownership, but if Fox News doesn’t experience wholesale change, one of the most monetarily valuable news organizations in Western Civilization may slowly implode into a third-tier, Remember them? places that Chris Wallace and all the other quality, honorable former employees – vs Fox & Friends, Hannity, etc – get together and shake their heads over twenty years from now.

And if Fox News does implode, they’ll be an object lesson for not understanding that they were primarily a free press organization, a sector for which the best measurement isn’t money, but something along the lines of Pulitzers. (See Sectors of Society for a rambling meditation on this subject.)

Keep an eye on Hannity, and upper management. The rot clearly is widespread.

Polymath David Wolpert sits down for an interview with Abigail Beall of NewScientist (15 April 2023, paywall), and I thought this was interesting, if only for the sloppy thinking:

What are distributed systems and why are they interesting?

Think of the “flash crash” of 2010, an event in which stock markets fell by trillions of dollars in minutes before recovering most of their value in about half an hour. It was caused by a lot of bots that do automated trades. On their own, these bots are based on simple if/then programs, but they somehow interacted collectively to suddenly cause the entire market to nosedive. The market slowly crawled its way back to where it was, so this wasn’t like the much more protracted economic downturn that began in 2007. But to this day, nobody can understand what went on. No new regulations have been put in place to try to prevent a repeat, because nobody knows exactly why it happened. It is described in the scientific literature as having been like some kind of alien ecosystem that we don’t understand.

Now, imagine something like that, but with artificial intelligence systems like AlphaGo that are practising and learning across the whole web. What sort of vastly more complicated versions of the flash crash ensue when the bots are replaced by these kinds of machines? It’s not going to be some human-like intelligence any more, it’s going to be different. It’s hard not to believe that, in some ways, it will be vastly more powerful.

Between CRISPR [our currently best gene-editing technology] and distributed, interacting AIs, I can’t imagine that, by the year 2100, we will still be “the most intelligent creatures on Earth”. Our progeny will be here.

He forgets that the accumulation of wealth, prosperity, or a stable situation, is a driving force for much, even most, of humanity, and crashes of the sort he recalls represent potential and actual losses. After all, a drop in price posted to an exchange is caused by an actual buy & sell; it’s not a hypothetical or potential^[1]. Has there been another flash crash of that magnitude since?

Not that I’ve heard of.

Look, an intelligent creature will, in most cases, correct errors and minimize losses in order to stabilize a situation. All those algorithms that, running in concert, caused a crash?

I’ll guarantee they’ve been modified since.

Look, I don’t know how their behavior has been modified. Frankly, most of these are short-term trader algorithms, and, as a long-term investor, I don’t see needing algorithms to implement the long-term strategy. My interest would be only academic, and I haven’t tried to find what are probably proprietary algorithms.

But the lack of disaster since does suggest modification, not to mention the “short-circuits” installed by the exchanges. If Wolpert were brave, he’d suggest the entire species of algorithm went through an improvement phase, much like trilobite predecessors acquiring eyes. However, did they interact to do so, or was each one acting in isolation?

But his remark about … distributed, interacting AIs … reminded me of an observation I had a few months after smartphones began infiltrating the populace: the best distributed, interacting entities are … humans.

We’ve always interacted with each other; smartphones have enabled geography-free interactions with an efficiency on the order of face-to-face interactions, and all that may imply. So AIs can interact. Do we think we’re going to be overwhelmed?

I doubt it. I’m reminded of David Gerrold’s SF novel, Voyage of the Star Wolf, which posits creatures created by humans, that have decided that their superior physical and mental capabilities make them superior to humans. Too late, they discover humans, with their million years of predatory training, are far more deadly than, to use Wolpert’s terminology, progeny, that are only one or two hundred years (? it’s been a far while since I read this book) in existence, and have … savage temperaments.

Now, if you want to be unsettled, the following article in the print edition, The Hidden Extinction (by staff writer Graham Lawton), which covers how the number of microbial species seems to be falling precipitously, is a far better candidate. It suggests our ignorance combined with our avariciousness may lead to disaster. But that’s a topic for another post.

¹And that the crash was erased is reflective of the fact that good investing is based on fundamentals, not technicals, using these words from their investing context. The former evaluates the industry, potentials, and competency of a business, while the latter is little more than an ad hoc psychological profile of investor behavior, unconnected to the fundamentals of a business, and while occasionally yielding positive results, is quite vulnerable to failure when the fundamentals change.