Author Archives: Hue White

Related to the elephant ivory trade is the rhino horn trade. Recently there’s been discussion of farming the rhinos in order to harvest their horns in a sustainable way – the horns will grow back. NewScientist (4 November 2017) reports on the objections to this approach:

But others object. “It is a terrible idea,” says David Blanton of Serengeti Watch.

Instead of merely meeting existing demand, the extra supply might boost it – keeping prices high and poachers incentivised.

Legalisation “creates the perception that buying these products is fine”, says Andrea Crosta of the Elephant Action League. China’s growing wealth is creating “hundreds of millions of consumers of rhino horn”.

Worse, the legal trade could be subverted. An investigation by the Elephant Action League revealed Asian dealers moving products via a web of couriers, including the Chinese navy. They could exploit a legal trade, says Crosta. “The legal system will create an opportunity to launder all rhino horns from Africa and Asia.”

I agree. This is entirely the wrong approach to the problem of illegal rhino horn trading – because it doesn’t reinforce the idea that rhino horn is not a medicine, traditional or not. And even if it were, the resource is now at a critically low level.

The second problem of the harvesting of rhino horns – that of it being a trophy – is of a somewhat different nature. As humanity continues to overpopulate this planet and, critically, doesn’t upgrade its primitive morality, more and more species will face this conundrum, and many will fail. It’s a simple mathematical proposition. We saw an iconic incident a few years ago when an idiot local dentist, Walter Palmer, went out trophy hunting and killed a lion. The consistent hunting of lions will inevitably lead to their end, because they simply don’t have our firepower. In a sense, this is an example of taking things to the “nth” degree – it used to be they killed us, so we figured out how to kill them, and, as a group, humanity has never quite figured out that now they’re no threat to us in general, there’s no need to kill them. Instead, we keep at it with better and better weapons (although, in Palmer’s case he shot the lion with a bow and arrow – twice!) and tools, as if it proves something. In point of fact, Nature is no longer the bountiful source of wealth it once was, and wantonly killing wildlife, particularly predators who keep the herbivore populations stable, keeps pushing the human species closer to its own tragedy.

Because Nature is still our undergirding necessity.

Looks like a nacho!

Y’all remember Terror Birds (2016), that sterling example of mixing dinosaurs with humans? Well, tonight’s head cold movie is Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs (2015), which pretty much runs in the same vein as Terror Birds, only not nearly so clever. My selected adjective for tonight is preposterous, as in every angle of this movie is preposterous, from the idea that the dinosaurs survived for millions of years in an iridium mine in the American West, to the thought that they’ve adapted to that mine’s atmosphere of methane by running various flammables through their veins (that’s right: Exploding Dinosaurs! But only sometimes), to the horses that are placidly munching on their feed while the dinosaurs are running hither and yon. Oh, and the special effects? Preposterous. The acting, I regret to say, is somewhat better than my chosen adjective, but they should still all keep their day jobs.

Throw in a tug of war over a pretty lady and some guy with a big ol’ jaw, and it’s pretty much a bourbon movie. Just how much bourbon will you need to finish watching it? I couldn’t guess. I’m still goggling that someone actually made this thing.

Daniel Byman on Lawfare bewails the Trumpist approach to international diplomacy:

Even worse, the U.S. abandonment of the wingman role allowed U.S. adversaries entrée. To escape its isolation and to put its thumb in Riyadh’s eye, Qatar is expanding ties to Iran. Similarly, Iran is exploiting the chaos between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq to increase its influence there, and any further escalation of violence there could present opportunities for the Islamic State to regain its foothold. In Yemen, Iran is increasing its ties to anti-Saudi Houthi fighters, who need Tehran’s support now more than ever before. Even Russia is taking advantage of the situation by playing a bigger role in Iraqi energy politics and, thus, increasing its sway in both Baghdad and Irbil. In the end, it’s America’s regional foes that are benefiting when America’s friends fight.

What to do is obvious and, unlike so many foreign policy challenges, not all that difficult. The United States should call together the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE and press them hard to end their squabbling. The leaders of the states’s biggest concern remains Iranian meddling in the region. But without the United States, even the most powerful of these countries, Saudi Arabia, lacks the strategic capacity to mount a serious challenge to Tehran. All of them are waiting for the United States to take a leadership role. In Iraq too, the United States should use its close ties to the Kurds and extensive relationship with Baghdad to try to stop the fighting and find an acceptable settlement. America has influence; it’s just not using it.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz called for American diplomats to spend much of their time “gardening”—working with allies constantly and especially in the early stages of a crisis. Unfortunately, it looks like the Trump administration is waiting for crises to emerge and only then will it pay attention to the dangers that could have been avoided.

The easy answer is amateurism. For the simple reason that I muttered that automatically, I went back and thought about alternatives. How about this one?

This is a deliberate ploy by the Trump Administration to stir up divisions in the Muslim world. Remember, the Trump Administration has (or had) several Muslim-phobes in important positions throughout the Administration. This may be the fruit of their labors – withdrawing our calming influence on that area, letting the flames of mutual hate and distrust flare high, until once again it’s all chaos.

And never mind the damage done to the American reputation.

Purely speculative. I actually incline more towards the amateurism explanation.

Fred Bauer in National Review has a prescription for the GOP:

Unless Republicans want to follow the 2010–14 downward trajectory of Democrats, they should consider making a course correction: Adopt a more moderate tone, defer austerity politics, and promote policies that help shore up the working class. A big-picture infrastructure bill could deliver resources to struggling communities, win over Democratic votes, and give voters the rare sight of a functioning Washington. Health-care reform that prioritizes cutting the cost of medical care (not slashing subsidies for the working class) could be an opportunity to combine a conservative belief in markets with a populist interest in the social-safety net. Tax reform could be recalibrated to deliver sustained benefits to working families — less estate-tax repeal and more credits for children. Policy reforms to advance the economic interests of Americans of all colors and creeds could win support across the socioeconomic spectrum.

So what? The GOP has shown precious little interest in reform or moving back to the center of the political spectrum – and there’s been a tacit admission of such an inability in the horde of Republicans who have signaled their intention to retire at the end of this cycle – or are already gone.

Indeed, following Fred’s prescription would be an admission of error by whichever donor is running the GOP these days. Between a horrendous ACA ‘reform’ bill, awful judicial picks, and a tax reform bill which the public, by and large, doesn’t believe is needed, the GOP looks less like a governing party and more like a party in crisis, jerked around by the puppeteers’ strings – and puppeteers who are intent on getting what they want.

I rather suspect this is what you get when you have government by Man, rather than government by Law. The divergence from public opinion over issues which, frankly, have little urgency and could have been treated with minor modifications and optimizations, but instead appear to be amputative, suggests someone with an ideological axe to grind, and not a thoughtful person in close contact with the issues on the ground.

I also found this off-the-cuff deceit by Fred to be fascinating:

While the American press has often treated President Trump with a hostility that would make a partisan super PAC blush, the administration’s own decisions play a considerable role …

A clear implication of an unfair treatment of the President, rather an acknowledgement that President Trump’s behavior patterns in terms of mendacity and treatment of women, subcontractors, wives, etc, has been dishonorable and undesirable in a Presidential candidate. Fred is actually missing a huge story in how the President’s character flaws are not only damaging his Administration, but also inflicting long term damage on the United States as he fills the judiciary with unqualified personnel, and damages the Party itself by facilitating the admittance of more flawed characters when it desperately needs to move away from extremists with unrealistic ideologies.

In his automatic reaction to maintream media, he misses out on one of the most important stories of the year decade.

Pixar/Disney

There are many mundane descriptions which might be applied to Monsters, Inc. (2001), such as perfect timing, engaging music, well-drawn characters, a plot of twists and surprises, the tremendous attention to detail in the artwork, and I’m sure they’ve been applied many times before. So let me point out that this is an environmentalist’s movie.

How? On entry, this movie opens on those who are alien to the audience – the monsters in Monster City. And, in this respect, this is also a fine example of the anti-xenophobe movie, perhaps a theme for another time. As it goes, we soon discover how humans figure into this story.

They, or more precisely human children, and their fear and terror at the sight of monsters, are a natural resource harvested by Monsters, Inc, for conversion into energy usable in the city. To go along with that, the children who are the easiest extraction source are also considered toxic. Just the rumor of a child loose in Monster City can cause chaos.

And it’s through the chaos caused by just such an intrusion that our two protagonists, Sully and Mike, begin their own journey from xenophobes to lovers of diversity, thus reinforcing the theme that I’m ignoring. That same transition, though, also applies to the status of the children which they have been deliberately terrifying – beginning the journey from toxic sheep, as it were, to the status of reasoning beings whose dignity they are trampling.

This leads to the scene in which the necessary changes to the moral systems Sully and Mike use to get through life become apparent, and the storytellers helpfully bring out the high points by contrasting Sully’s improving morality with Mike’s stubborn clinging to his old morality. We already Mike to be a materialist, who now clings desperately to the old morality which had brought him so many tangible benefits, from a speedy sports car to a girlfriend. When we see Sully grimly push forward to follow what his new morality tells him is right – saving a human child from torture and likely death at the hands of the antagonists – we also see Mike, still trapped in his old morality which valued things more than the Other – even though he knows the child is more like a Monster than he ever imagined – separating from his best friend, Sully. Mike is headed for a friendless, bitter existence, while Sully may be heading for destruction, and the audience can see that. Sully’s death is only aborted when Mike adopts the new morality and fortunately comes on Sully’s death scene and rescues him.

But lurking in the background is our subject, barely touched on, that the abuse of a natural resource can lead to its cessation. To scare a child is to wear out the fear reflex. This is most vividly exemplified by a fast subscene in which a monster stumbles out of the human domain, terrified itself by the children he had been dispatched to frighten. But it’s also a lingering descant in the continual grousing of the owner of the factory, as he exclaims over the problems of meeting the quotas, and how children just don’t scare as before. In the minds of the antagonists, this developing problem needs to be met by continuing to do the same thing that lead to the problem in the first place, but to the nth degree: children will be captured and the very essence of their fear will be forcibly extracted by machine. With little thought given to the consequences of kidnapping children and quite possibly destroying them, there’s an insistent parallel between them and, well, the parts of modern Western civilization that many environmentalists find offensive – or terrifying.

From here, it’s easy to see the harvesting of laughter from the children, a far more sustainable resource, rather than fear, as a metaphor for striving to find a better solution, no matter the inconvenience, or how it might upset existing power structures. And so we see the story the environmentalist wants told, where we discard that which is harmful, whether physically or morally, for solutions which will hold up for the long-term.

Or, if that was all too silly for you, then just watch this because it’s fun. And pay attention, the detail work is amazing.

Strongly Recommended.

But so does China.

The building’s mass extrudes upwards from the site and is ‘punctured’ by a spherical auditorium in the centre. Bookshelves are arrayed on either side of the sphere and act as everything from stairs to seating, even continuing along the ceiling to create an illuminated topography. These contours also continue along the two full glass facades that connect the library to the park outside and the public corridor inside, serving as louvres to protect the interior against excessive sunlight whilst also creating a bright and evenly lit interior.

Makes me wish I lived in Tianjin. More here.

Robert Carlin on 38 North finds the North Korean knot a gnarly one, and thinks President Trump’s advisors are not up to the task of unraveling this worn sleeve:

On the US side, the President may well believe that his personal style has thus far proved successful on any number of policy fronts. That’s up to him. But on the North Korean issue, I can only say, no, it is not working here. I know it is not, and with all humility, I’d tell him so if he asked. Whether he subsequently adjusted his approach would obviously be his choice.

Up to now, the North Korean issue is one on which he is apparently listening to his advisers. They are failing him. The President’s senior White House advisers may well believe—and believe fervently—that history shows diplomacy with North Korea always fails because each time the North takes what it wants and then breaks the agreements. On this, they are—plain and simple—wrong. This wouldn’t matter on some arcane problem (people misread history all the time), but there is the mistaken notion that using this interpretation is a solid platform for a “new” policy on North Korea. Actually, it is a rotten plank. A misinterpretation of the facts here will not support anything but still more failed policy, repeating the same failure that has marked US policy on the Korean issue since January 2001.

I note that he excludes the Clinton Administration from failure, so Robert must be another believer in the agreements the Clinton Administration reached with the North Koreans, and thus the Bush Administration gets another grease spots on its report card.

This is a known scene stealer. If she’d been in The Seven Seals, Death would have lost his entire wardrobe.

Post-Throw Momma from the Train (1987) I was bemused. This story about two evil women bedeviling innocent Professor Donner and his student, Owen Lift, and the men’s escapades in trying to rid themselves of their female counterparts seemed to be the lightest of fluff, and yet I found it easy to keep on watching. This is abnormal for me, as my taste in fluff does tend to be a trifle eclectic. Think The Video Dead.

I think, perhaps, it was the dynamic between Owen and his ever abusive mother, a mother who may have supped so strongly upon the stew of the traditional high hopes of a mother for her son that it had turned her emotionally inside-out, until his ever apparent inadequacies, physical and mental, have reduced her to a quivering screaming hulk of a woman. Demanding every service from her son (and I’ll just say AUGH! here), and finding them continually defective, he is now smothering under her demands for his improvement until he’s ready to … to …

Well, perhaps throwing Momma from the train might be a bit much for him, but when it seems she’s a better wordsmith than Professor Donner, that’s it. In the resulting fracas, Owen finds his inner goodness, and his mother, who just possibly maybe might have underhandedly planned this entire episode in a last ditch effort to get her son over the hump, finally finds good in her son.

And the Professor? His wife returns from the dead and, as one might expect from such a creature, becomes his muse, in a way, perhaps a zombie muse if we’re feeling expansive, resulting in a pop-up near disaster for him and his mental health.

And if you can’t decide if you’d like to see this movie from this review, you’re probably the wiser for it. The only other advice I can suggest is to watch it with a head cold, like I may have done.

A few weeks ago, the Trump Administration modified the ACA rule requiring employers to offer birth control services, and the University of Notre Dame, being a Catholic institution, jumped right on board that wagon, as NPR reported at the time:

In an email to faculty and staff, which the university shared with NPR, a spokesman wrote that the school “honors the moral teachings of the Catholic Church.”

Much to my surprise, they’ve fallen right back off that wagon, CNN/Money is reporting:

In his annual faculty address Tuesday, Notre Dame’s president, the Rev. John Jenkins, said the university had decided to keep the accommodation for employees in place.

“As I have said from the start, the university’s interest has never been in preventing access to those who make conscientious decisions to use contraceptives,” he said. “Our interest, rather, has been to avoid being compelled by the federal government to be the agent in their provision.”

A university spokesman confirmed that students would continue to have access to no-cost birth control, as well.

Notre Dame’s initial response was based on its belief that it could no longer utilize the accommodation because the new rule would prompt insurers to discontinue providing no-cost contraceptives. It then learned that carriers would maintain the coverage anyway.

That’s not really congruent with their rationale for removing the accommodation. In fact, it sounds like frantic face-saving to me. My best guess is that Notre Dame administrators suddenly realized that pack of unsavory characters inhabiting the White House these days are more or less the equivalent of Satan, and it reflected poorly on Notre Dame to be taking a handout from them. They decided to look to the future when the GOP was not in charge, when the current Administration had been consigned to the dustbin of history with an almighty thump, and decided they didn’t want to occupy that same dustbin.

I would be a bit disappointed in myself if I didn’t make the effort to be fair, so on this thread, here it is:

The Motley Fool wrote a letter to its members that didn’t try to sell a service.

It was just advice, and the best advice it’s been handing out for years. In the face of the robots and High Frequency Traders …

Minute-by-minute stock moves aren’t our game

Our game is played over years. Decades even. Across our Foolish services and across the continents, we’ve demonstrated the power of long-term, patient, business-like investing.

And competing against the billions of dollars supporting HFTs or quantitative shops stacked with PhDs isn’t our idea of winning.

It reminds me of Warren Buffett’s advice about playing a world-class chess champion. “How do you beat Bobby Fischer?” he asked. “You play him at any game but chess. I try to stay in games where I have an edge.”

Like Buffett, your investing edge lies in focusing on your businesses more than your stock prices.

And the letter goes on to extol long-term investing. Much as I said in this post, you can’t beat robots and HFTers at their game – but you can win at your own if it’s long-term investing.

Not that this excuses the blatant manipulation I’ve noted in other discussions, but it’s good to see TMF still remembers their roots.

Former GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has a vision of the future.

And it doesn’t include that monstrous 3 car garage you just built onto the front of your house.

From Automotive News:

It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.

The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.

Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.

The end state will be the fully autonomous module with no capability for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you’ll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.

On the freeway, it will merge seamlessly into a stream of other modules traveling at 120, 150 mph. The speed doesn’t matter. You have a blending of rail-type with individual transportation.

Then, as you approach your exit, your module will enter deceleration lanes, exit and go to your final destination. You will be billed for the transportation. You will enter your credit card number or your thumbprint or whatever it will be then. The module will take off and go to its collection point, ready for the next person to call.

This might be the culmination of technology, of overpopulation, the consumption of natural resources, the sinking income of the middle-class family, or of the dialogue of how mass transit should occur. Any of these arguments can be at least made well enough to make a rebuttal require some skull-sweat.

This will be interesting – and not necessarily a bad thing. Just a different thing.

And what happens when your train hits a moose?

Mondegreen:

1. a word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of another word or phrase, especially in a song or poem. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in the Feedback column of NewScientist (28 October 2017):

A MONDEGREEN that turned the social media ecosystem into an egosystem for Tony Compton reminds Howie Vernon of a similar misapprehension (30 September). “While walking down the hall, I spotted a poster on a bulletin board for a social media giant. But the poster was slightly blocked by another one, and as such, all I could see was the word FACEBO.”

Howie says this prompted him to wonder what this “facebo effect” might be. Perhaps, he says, “the phenomenon of thinking you’re having real, beneficial personal interactions, when, in fact, you’re not.”

I see that Murphy in New Jersey and Northam in Virginia are the projected winners of their respective governor races, and that the Democrats seem to have done well. While congratulations are in order, this is a small first step in returning the GOP to sanity, and by itself it’s fairly meaningless. The next elections, in a year, will be far more important for the Democrats to win.

And winning takes organization, so I’m a little worried that I was receiving donation requests saying that they had run out of supplies because of an overwhelming response yesterday, Monday. They may be trying to spin this in a positive way, but any clear-headed evaluation is either going to be

1. This is bad, bad organization, which will discourage your voters and prove, once again, that the Democrats are not truly ready to be a national governing party, or
2. This is deception to increase donations.

Either answer is bad. The Democrats need to get their shit together on every level, from operational crap like this all the way to figuring out how to properly message. If you want to see a criticism concerning that, see this column by Andrew Sullivan, where he expected Northam to lose or barely win (I haven’t seen actual numbers just yet, although one article suggests > 5 percentage points; UPDATE – WaPo says 9 points), based on his campaign:

Northam seems to me almost a classic Democratic politician of our time. I have no idea what his core message is (and neither, it seems, does he); on paper, he’s close to perfect; his personality is anodyne; his skills as a campaigner are risible; and he has negative charisma. More to the point, he is running against an amphibian swamp creature, Ed Gillespie, and yet the Washington lobbyist is outflanking him on populism. Northam’s ads are super lame, and have lately been largely on the defensive, especially on crime, culture, and immigration. He hasn’t galvanized minority voters, has alienated many white voters, and has failed to consolidate a broader anti-Trump coalition. In Virginia, Trump’s approval rating is 38/59, but Northam is winning only 81 percent of the disapprovers, while Gillespie is winning 95 percent of the approvers. Northam’s early double-digit lead has now collapsed to within the margin of error.

If a political Ph.D. doesn’t understand a candidate’s message, this suggests the Democrat’s internal training programs (you guys do have them, right?) are in serious need of revamping.

And if the Democrats start taking next year for granted, I fear they’ll get a very big shock. Most voters just want to shake things up; they’re not particularly ideologically driven, they’re more disgusted by political behavior than anything. The Democrats need to bear this in mind.

Charles Lee on 38 North discusses how North Korea gathers intelligence on the United States:

With regard to intelligence collection against the United States, however, North Korea leans heavily on OSINT [open-source intelligence] —a readily available and potentially valuable source of reliable intelligence. Public statements from US officials and powerbrokers, in particular, can have added significance when they provide insights into US military courses of action. Corroboration through other intelligence disciplines can amplify the value of these statements. If, for example, North Korea were able to acquire and leverage long-range ISR platforms like the United States and its allies, it could exploit geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) to better ascertain whether US forces were actually postured for preventive military action. Without such capabilities, North Korea greatly appreciates OSINT exploitation. …

Like their American adversary, North Korea’s intelligence analysts assign measures of analytic confidence to their intelligence sources—namely, the statements of US officials, power-brokers and other influential voices on US Asia policy. High-confidence intelligence can serve as effective guideposts for policy decisions. For example, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s claim that North Korea will never relinquish its nuclear weapons likely sent a strong signal to North Korean intelligence officials that this represents the summary judgment of the American IC at-large based on its vast instruments of collection. North Korea may have read his opinion as “we, the US IC, assess with high confidence that North Korea will never relinquish nuclear weapons.” When viewed alongside the absence of US/South Korean military action, Pyongyang could have been convinced that such an intelligence judgment may have led the US to abandon the goal of denuclearizing North Korea. In other words, the DNI may have unwittingly served as a credible, high-confidence source for North Korean intelligence on US intentions. It is entirely possible that this may have emboldened North Korea to continue its aggressive pursuit of missile and nuclear development.

An interesting problem in communications. Do our officials carefully decide, with each statement with regards to North Korea, whether to lie or not? But there’s more: for those of us who think war is merely trying to blast the other guy to smithereens, think again: communications with the enemy is an important aspect of war, because the cessation of war can only come with the agreement of the other side – or his extinction. The latter is not likely and may not make you popular with your neighbors.

But communications with the North Koreans is a very delicate dance that requires years of experience to intepret – and even then we’re never sure we’re right.

In the category of Not Knowing The Role of Government is Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) who, according to The Hill, said:

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) had been describing the flurry of lobbying from special interests seeking to protect favored tax provisions when a reporter asked if donors are happy with the tax-reform proposal.

“My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’ ” Collins replied.

House GOP leaders are pushing an aggressive timeline for overhauling the tax code for the first time since 1986. They hope to pass the bill, which was only unveiled last week, before Thanksgiving so that it can be enacted into law by the end of the year.

Legislation should be undertaken as we understand the needs of the country, not the desires of a bunch of donors. Indeed, making them happy would be quite un-American, as it’s traditional in our democracy to compromise, which thus leaves no one happy, but everyone in various stages of unhappiness.

Would the responsible district in New York show Rep. Collins the door?

This Forbes article on Commerce Secretary has a delicious tang to it, given Trump’s devotion to money and hiring for his Cabinet those with lots of it:

Fresh off a tour through Thailand, Laos and China, United States Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross Jr. picked up the phone on a Sunday afternoon in October to discuss something deeply personal: how much money he has. A year earlier, Forbes had listed his net worth at $2.9 billion on The Forbes 400, a number Ross claimed was far too low: He maintained he was closer to $3.7 billion. Now, after examining the financial-disclosure forms he filed after his nomination to President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, which showed less than $700 million in assets, Forbes was intent on removing him entirely.

Ross protested, citing trusts for his family that he said he did not have to disclose in federal filings. “You’re apparently not counting those, which are more than $2 billion,” he said. When asked for documentation, the 79-year-old demurred, citing “privacy issues.” Told that Forbes nonetheless planned to remove him from the list for the first time in 13 years, he responded: “As long as you explain that the reason is that assets were put into trust, I’m fine with that.” And when did he make the transfer that allowed him to not disclose over $2 billion? “Between the election and the nomination.”

So began the mystery of Wilbur Ross’ missing $2 billion. And after one month of digging, Forbes is confident it has found the answer: That money never existed. It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004. In addition to just padding his ego, Ross’ machinations helped bolster his standing in a way that translated into business opportunities. And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross’ private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits. Additionally, according to six U.S. senators, Ross failed to initially mention 19 suits in response to a questionnaire during his confirmation process.

Never mind Congress. If Trump discovers someone lied about how much money he had in order to make it into Trump’s Cabinet, well, will Trump admire him for his gall or chuck him out on his ear for not having enough money?

Autochthonous:

1. (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists.
   1. Geology (of a deposit or formation) formed in its present position.
      Often contrasted with allochthonous

[Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in the Feedback column of NewScientist (28 October 2017):

[A reader] informs us that King Leopold III of Belgium was a fervent naturalist and traveller. “He led several expeditions in Africa, Asia and South America among others,” says Anne, and, unlike his infamous grandfather, “was acclaimed for his defence of nature and of autochthonous populations.”

Martian on right, painfully earnest frat brother on left. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Mars Needs Women (1967) proves only that its script needed a rewrite. This patched together piece of shit has really nothing at all to say, except maybe that the director had the sort of ego which could be soothed with shallow drek.

Blech.

This thread has been quiet, but here’s Michael C. Horowitz and Julia M. Macdonald on Lawfare comparing the campaign to stop autonomous weapons from being used (one of them is known as The Campaign To Stop Killer Robots) to the successful anti-landmine campaign. They worry that we haven’t piled up enough bodies yet:

Second, while there was clear evidence of the human costs of the use of landmines around the world, the lack of casualties from the use of lethal autonomous weapon systems muddies the ability of the movement to build public support. The pictures of ordinary people injured and maimed by mines, combined with the casualty statistics, played a key role in shocking and shaming governments to take action. It also bolstered the legal argument that mines violated the proportionality and distinction principles of international humanitarian law. Persuading the international community to ban a technology preemptively without observing these human costs will be difficult. Moreover, autonomous weapon systems are a much broader category than blinding lasers, the only previous technology to be subject to a preemptive ban.

Not only is the international community less emotionally affected, but there remains uncertainty as to whether these weapons would, in fact, inherently transgress international law. It is also possible that autonomous weapon systems might reduce civilian casualties in some cases if they have high levels of accuracy, lack human emotions (e.g. revenge), and do not suffer from the same physical limitations as humans, such as fatigue.

They may have a point. However, if enough bodies are piled up, it may also suggest the lethality of the system – a desirable trait, no?

Their conclusion:

Therefore, while the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots appears to be following a similar playbook as the ICBL, we should be cautious in drawing too many conclusions about the likelihood of a ban on LAWS [Lethal Autonomous Weapon System]. The differences between the two issue areas—in particular, the lack of consensus around the definition of lethal autonomous weapons, uncertainty as to their military effectiveness, and the current lack of human casualties from the use of these weapons—will make attaining a preemptive prohibition on their use harder to achieve. That being said, continued dialogue and discussion about what LAWS are is essential to determining something very important: agreement on the proper role of humans in decisions about the use of force, and how to best achieve that aim.

I cannot help but notice that there is no address of the issue of using a potentially sentient artificial entity as a military recruit may induce ethical objections as well.

It’s hard to come up with anything insightful to say about yesterday’s tragic mass murder in Texas. There’ll be the cries for this not to happen and here’s how, the drummed up outrage at the idea of politicizing the murder by actually proposing legal changes to prevent it from happening, some conspiracy-theorists will try to lump it in with the Sandy Elementary Shooting as never having happened, etc. It’s all becoming depressingly predictable.

It’s a rut we’re in, and I don’t know how to get out of it. One side thinks the other side is taking advantage of this for political gain, while the other sees an incomprehensibly lax regulation of the means for killing our fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, all us normal folks are just pigeons being shot out of the air.

From my libertarian readings from years ago, I know the gun rights advocates believe that arming the populace is supposed to stop these things from happening. My personal observations so far culminate in the conclusion that this theory is a primitive application of shallow reasoning to a scenario full of potential nuances. It’s becoming apparent that he who gets off the first shot wins – he may still end up dead, but it’s damn well clear that mankind is not a rational species, as anthropologist will tell you. The shooters are not rational people, they’re madmen looking for a personal escort to Hell.

Since I woke up with this on my mind, I suppose I’ll dispense the same political script as everyone else concerned with the NRA’s control of the issue. This is for my benefit, to blow off steam and anger.

For each and every GOP Congressperson up for re-election in 2018 who did nothing in Congress to respond to tragedies of this sort, the same rough script should be employed.

Since the last election there have been N mass shootings. (Populate with appropriate sad images of people mourning.)

Has our Congressman XYZ proposed legislation to prevent madmen from gaining access to guns?

No.

Is this failure irresponsible?

Yes.

When you elect me, ABC, the first thing I will do is begin work on gun-control legislation that will make it difficult for madmen to get their hands on guns. I will submit it for consideration within a month of taking office. And then I will push for it to passed.

Why? Because if one day I hear on the radio that some of my own family have been killed by a madman with a gun, how can I possibly hope to look my family in the eye?

How can I hope to look my constituents in the eye?

This is how responsible governance takes place, and Congressman XYZ doesn’t understand this.

I do. Vote ABC.

And if the GOP screams that this is a coordinated campaign, everyone answers You’re damn well right, you murderous morons. This is a national problem and you’re not addressing it.

I don’t really feel better, but at least I tried.

Ya know, lady, later someone talks about a “vibrator”. Would that be your vibrator, or the gentleman’s?

Proving multi-tasking has never been a skill of mankind, Michael Shayne spends so much time trying to finance his impending wedding and subsequent marriage that he loses the girl in Dressed To Kill (1941), the third installment of the Michael Shayne, Private Detective, series. The strength of this installment may also be seen as the bandages that cover its weakness: some fairly clever dialog obscures the fact that we never really get to know these characters, not even Shayne, a private detective who, from what his beau has to say, has never really cracked a murder case before, despite multiple tries.

But he has empty pockets and a bride-to-be when, responding to screams in the Hotel du Nord, he discovers a maid shrieking at the sight of a body of a woman, sporting a neat hole between the eyes, and a man, the head of a dog on his head, also shot in the head, sitting at an elegantly laid dinner table. These are a former theatrical producer and one of his leading ladies, and Shayne employs sharp patter, a certain jocular attitude towards the dead, evidence he purloins from the murder scene, and some street smarts as he wades through misdirection, lies, more bodies, a fairly clever murder device, and some clumsy cops.

But no real backstory, no insight. This is a straight B-class movie, I think, and it’s purely about the entertainment value. And it does deliver. Shayne is a pleasant and clever character, and yet in the end even he says “Well, color me pink….”

It’s fun. But if you never see it, you won’t have missed any profound insights.

Ossicone:

Ossicones are horn-like (or antler-like) protuberances on the heads of giraffes, male okapis, and their extinct relatives, such as Sivatherium, and the climacoceratids, such as Climacoceras.^[1] The base that a deer’s antlers grow from is very similar to an ossicone.

Ossicones are similar to the horns of antelopes and cattle, save that they are derived from ossified cartilage rather than living bone,^[2] and that the ossicones remain covered in skin and fur, rather than horny keratin. Antlers (such as on deer) are derived from bone tissue: when mature, the skin and fur covering of the antlers, termed “velvet,” is sloughed and scraped off to expose the bone of the antlers. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Giraffe ancestor didn’t have a long neck, but two sets of horns,” Science:

Kevin Williamson meditates on the functions of political parties in the context of the Donna Brazile revelation concerning the Clinton campaign and the DNC on National Review:

There is a contradiction within American progressivism, which seeks to make the political process more democratic while pushing the policymaking process in a less democratic direction. For a century, progressives have championed more open primary elections and open primaries, popular ballot measures, referendum and recall processes, and wider voter participation. At the same time, progressives, particularly those of a Wilsonian bent, have sought to remove the substance of policymaking from democratically accountable elected representatives and entrust it to unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies in the belief that panels of experts immune from ordinary democratic oversight could make hard decisions based on reason and evidence rather than on short-term political necessity and popular passions. They regarded the political parties and their infamous smoke-filled rooms as embodiments of corruption and old-fashioned wheeler-dealer politics at odds with the brave new centrally planned world they imagined themselves to be building.

As it turns out, political parties are — like churches, civic groups, unions, trade groups, lobbyists, pressure groups, and business associations — part of the secret sauce of civil society. In much the same way as our senators — in their original, unelected role — were expected to provide a sober brake on the passions of the members of the more democratic House of Representatives, political parties exercised a soft veto that helped to keep extremism and demagoguery in check. Anybody can run for president — but not just anybody can run as the candidate of the Republican party or the Democratic party. Third parties face an uphill battle, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot prevail: The Republican party was a very successful third party, displacing the moribund Whigs. The difference between a republic and a democracy is that republics put up more roadblocks between fools and their desires.

The denuded political parties provide an important fund-raising and administrative apparatus — along with a tribal identity that is arguably more important — but they do not offer much more than that. Instead, we have relatively little in the way of mediating institutions between candidates and the public at large.

And, if this is an accurate view of the Republicans and the Democrats, it means we’re moving from the Age of Policy to the Age of Personality. That never ends well.

But while I find his remark that a fully functioning party should provide a veto against bad politicians appealing, I do not see how this connects to his previous remarks concerning Wilsonians who want to employ experts in making policy. The idea that a bunch of politicians, sans expertise in most facets of modern life, can hope to cope with the complexities of the modern world makes me shake my head in disbelief. Given my own numerous remarks on the defective efforts of amateurs, I could not dare to make any other statement – nor would I wish to.

The solution cannot be to elect a bunch of amateurs – especially the second-raters put forth by the GOP, who respond to the modern world by rejecting it and all of its necessary complexities – but instead learn how to integrate the elected world of republics and democracies with the meritocracy which is scientific knowledge. We used to know how to do this, but we’ve partially forgotten, I think, through the willful rejection of the distilled opinions of the experts because they clash with the ideology of the elected. I state it this way because no traditional political party with which I’m familiar is immune to such rejections.

But Kevin smoothly and slickly uses the phrase … unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies … as if it were a historical and unassailable truth, and it’s not. Bureaucracies can be held accountable, and they can be replaced. Neither operation is easy, of course, but then effective and fair governing is a non-trivial business.