Author Archives: Hue White

Speciose:

(taxonomy) Rich in species, such as when many species are members of a single genus. [Wiktionary]

Noted on iNaturalist in their Birds of the World section:

In this vast world of ours there are over 10,000 species of Birds, which makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. This is what makes them so popular with bird watchers, along with there being so many different colors, shapes, sizes, sounds, behaviors, and ranges. With your help, together we can help the growth and knowledge of these amazing creatures! -John Fones

A different yellow iris. The first is blurry – but why waste pixels?

Much like the bellicose conservatives in the United States, the hardliners of Iran are unable to accept that they are not the anointed of the masses. Rohollah Faghihi reports in AL Monitor on the objections of the hardliners to the results of the recent Presidential election won by Reformist and current President Rouhani – and, somehow, their objections sound faintly familiar:

In remarks published May 22 on the Telegram channel of the hard-line Raja News, Ebrahim Raisi, the leading conservative candidate in the election, asserted that the alleged violations were not of a limited scope and that he is pursuing the matter through the Guardian Council.

Moreover, Ali Nikzad, head of Raisi’s campaign, said that same day, “Seyyed Ebrahim is like a mother who left his baby to prevent him from being hurt, and the baby fell [into the hands] of the stepmother.” In other words, Nikzad is alleging voting fraud, but for the sake of Iran’s national security Raisi has not publicly announced anything — and that is why Rouhani is now president.

Raisi wrote a letter dated May 21 to Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the conservative chairman of the Guardian Council — the body tasked with vetting candidates and probing objections to voting results. In the letter, Raisi asked Jannati to look into violations of the law before and during the elections. He also attached 100 pages of documentation to supposedly substantiate his allegations.

On the same day, in an interview with the state-run Arabic news channel Al-Alam, Guardian Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaie rejected the notion that there had been major violations during the voting process, stating, “Though there were minor violations, fortunately the violations weren’t so important that they would compel us to stop the election process.” Moreover, in a short message published May 22 on his Telegram channel, Kadkhodaie advised Raisi and his supporters to accept the results of the elections.

A particularly striking echo:

… Hossein Shariatmadari — editor of the hard-line daily Kayhan — claimed May 21 that Raisi’s votes could have been twice that of Rouhani had it not been for “violations of the law” by the Rouhani-controlled Interior Ministry, which oversees elections.

An amazing assertion, isn’t it? But to the chagrin of the hardliners, the election of the relatively moderate Rouhani, rather than the more hardline Raisi, leaves in place the JCPOA (aka the Iran Nuclear Deal), and so the most easily understood result of recent years confrontation should remain inviolate – at least from that side of the table.

An immediate question is, of course, whether the current Trump Administration will “tear it up” as some of his rivals suggested, despite the judgment of most experts that it’s a good agreement. But I think a more subtle point, which this Administration may miss, is the continued and subtle influence on Iranian politics of previous Administration policies. Andrew Sullivan noted it in New York:

While Obama prudently leveraged the Shia-Sunni conflict by engaging Iran as well as the Sunni states, Trump has returned to the pro-Sunni and pro-Israeli playbook.

This was particularly weird on the same weekend that Iran — the focus of Trump’s ire — actually held an election, in which both men and women voted. Yes, of course, the choices were constrained by Tehran’s theocracy —but the reelection victory of Rouhani, the architect of the nuclear deal, was striking. Seventy percent of the country turned out, and Rouhani won by a near-20-point margin against his hard-line opponent. He has a mandate for more liberalization, and picked up momentum in the final weeks of the race by emphasizing more liberal themes. This is, of course, Obama’s long game vindicated. The former president gambled that by engaging Iran and getting a nuclear deal, he could buttress the resistance movement that fueled the Green Revolution, and slowly pull Iran back into a more moderate path. While the mullahs’ grip holds, it’s remarkable how successful Obama’s strategy has turned out to be:

Despite controlling most unelected councils, the conservative clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders have suffered a string of political defeats, starting with Mr. Rouhani’s election in 2013. That led to direct talks with their archenemy, the United States, and ultimately to the nuclear deal, which they opposed. Then moderate and reformist candidates made strong gains in last year’s parliamentary elections.

While Trump is little influenced on a fundamental level by GOP kant concerning an evil axis and all that, he is influenced to the extent that he sees it enhancing his reputation and political position to pursue Iranian policies which demonize them and result in little more than confrontation and hostility. While this is one avenue for influencing the behavior of an adversary, it rarely works as well as one might hope, and given the Iraq War debacle, in which we learned that dictator Saddam Hussein had, in fact, destroyed all of his WMDs in response to the American invasion following the repulse of Iraq from Kuwait, and was nevertheless invaded, hunted down, and taken prisoner years later in the Iraq War … well, the point being that even kowtowing to the postures of a bully is not enough to save your skin – or that of your nation.

The subtle engagement pursued by Obama may lack the high drama of bombs dropped and lives lost, the funerals to attend, and the broken families, but it does appear to have the advantage of being effective. President Washington famously advised the avoidance of foreign entanglements, but care must be taken in understanding his meaning – a care I fear is beyond the capabilities of the current Administration. To my ear, Washington’s advice may be best taken to have allies and adversaries – but not friends and enemies. To understand the importance of discarding emotions, instead evaluating each country on its own terms, to understand how you need them to behave in order to maximize your own position, and to take the steps necessary to induce such behavior – not through noxious posturing on a national stage, designed to induce hatred in our own people, but through engagements with the country or countries in question, using both carrot and stick as appropriate and possible.

The demonisation of Iran, fair or not, merely offends a prideful (a word I use deliberately) nation capable of producing nuclear bombs and waging ruinous war. We can engage in real war, in a war of words – or a subtle war of economic pressures which leave their more savage members beaten by their own countrymen, starved of the attention they crave. Is this not a better approach?

But I do not think the Trump Administration has the capacity to understand such a politically mature approach.

Michael Harris, in “The New Science of Daydreaming,” (Discover Magazine, June 2017, paywall) notes how hard some of us apparently find it to be ourselves – a thought I almost can’t fathom:

“I’m sorry, Julie, but it’s just a fact — people are terrified of being in their heads,” I say. “I read this study where subjects chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than be alone with their own thoughts.”

It’s the summer of 2015 and the University of British Columbia’s half-vacated grounds droop with bloom. Julie — an old friend I’ve run into on campus — gives me a skeptical side-eye and says she’s perfectly capable of being alone with her thoughts. Proving her point, she wanders out of the rose garden in search of caffeine. I glower at the plants.

The study was a real one. It was published in 2014 in Science and was authored by University of Virginia professor Timothy D. Wilson and his team. Their research revealed that, left in our own company, most of us start to lose it after six to 15 minutes. The shocks are preferable, despite the pain, because anything — anything — is better than what the human brain starts getting up to when left to its own devices.

Or so we assume.

What the brain in fact gets up to in the absence of antagonizing external stimuli (buzzing phones, chirping people) is daydreaming. I am purposefully making it sound benign. Daydreaming is such a soft term. And yet it refers to a state of mind that most of us — myself included — have learned to suppress like a dirty thought. Perhaps we suppress it out of fear that daydreaming is related to the sin of idle hands. From at least medieval times onward, there’s been a steady campaign against idleness, that instigator of evil.

Is this really true? I’m well aware that I’m an introvert, if not a misanthrope (my Arts Editor ventures closer to that land than I do, but there are days I can see its misty headlands). But to not daydream – I find that hard to believe.

For me, daydreaming is where I find solutions to problems, and problems in solutions. It’s where the stories lurk, those to edify the audiences, and those to satisfy my ego. Drifting over the landscape of yesterday’s trivial adventures, sometimes I can see a theme from the vantage point of cross-connections.

And sometimes it’s merely reminiscing over old friends.

And I do believe it’s part of what makes for good software, when I do generate such. I’ve often said you’re just as likely to see my feet up on the desk as you’ll find me typing away. I’m actually fairly well convinced I don’t leave my feet up on the desk enough, sometimes. Hurried solutions are just bugs not yet found.

But on the other side of the table, what does it say when people cannot stand the idea of being alone with their thoughts? Never having watched people fall apart under torture of solitary confinement, I’m not sure how they really react, and from that derive sound suppositions. How life-like are dramas?

So let me speculate in computer terms. I’ve mentioned before (or should have) my musings that the current world-wide fascination with smart phones and texting and that sort of thing bears more than a passing resemblance to a distributed computing project, as the various nodes talk to each other, develop thoughts, do work, etc. Now, remove the hardware, and does it hold together?

Yes. Social networks are simply all of us talking to each other, bound by bonds of necessity, affection, mercantile, and others. And while we see ourselves as autonomous creatures, with clear boundaries and strongly held beliefs, it’s far more accurate that our interdependencies, our requirements of each other, define ourselves. (I think I’m echoing a fairly recent philosopher at this juncture, but I can’t think of whom, or where).

Now push this another millimeter along – just how much do we share? Take myself for an utterly trivial example – while in my youth I’d follow various sports teams, these days the best I can muster is a faint “good for them!” when the Minnesota Twins put together a win streak. If I wanted to be more a part of that particular bit of tribalism, I’d have to reach out on my network, find friends already involved in Twins fandom, etc. On the other hand, I can offer a lot in the area of UNIX software development, as well as glib philosophizing (as an acquaintance once emphasized in frustration).

So let’s move it to the classic conception – the hive mind. It’s not improper to suggest that various members of the human hive mind will have various and differing responsibilities, from the hunters and farmers, strong in their disciplines of food generation, to philosophers who (ideally!) are strong in the subtleties of morality, and all the other job responsibilities. This all just flows along.

So if we add in the reasonable supposition that some responsibilities will breed stronger minds than others – or at least minds more suited to such rigors as actually being alone – we might assume that, as a composite creature, some parts of the human hive mind will be dependent on others, just as I am dependent on others in the area of sports enthusiasm. As a more concrete example, some folks may have an inclination towards moral contemplation, while others just sort of go along with the flow in terms of moral behaviors, occasionally straying as opportunity arises.

Some of us know those folks, some of us are those folks.

So Michael’s article suggests there’s a great lie at the heart of the entire “autonomous” human. Our interdependencies are not merely of tangible goods and services, but of the entire gamut of moral, emotional, and intellectual realms, some unsurprising, some surprising, and no doubt some galling to the great adherents of the autonomy myth.

And I find it galling to think that most of us can’t stand being alone with our own thoughts.

If you enjoy applying classic scientific concepts to novel situations, then I must highly recommend this column by Janet Factor in The Flammifer. It was published back in August 2016 in a paper newsletter from the Center For Inquiry named Freethought In Action. Back then I just skimmed it and put it away for later examination, which has now arrived. First, she gives an admirably abstract and concise definition of the process of evolution (which will upset those folks who think evolution only applies to biological processes), and then she describes the candidacy of Donald Trump in evolutionary terms:

The Republican party is in disarray because its leadership has failed to grasp the fact that Trump is not interested in playing politics. Donald Trump is playing evolution instead. …

Now we can see what an enormous advantage a complete indifference to actualities is to someone generating political memes. Being willing to say absolutely anything enables one to maximize the number of variants produced; it removes any limit on the mutation rate and opens up many more avenues for movement more quickly. Even someone who is crafting convincing lies is at a disadvantage to someone who constantly and swiftly generates random changes of all sorts. The raw material of available elements is hugely multiplied thereby. …

When it comes to selection, Trump’s utter lack of consistency is an advantage. If an idea does not work for him, he immediately abandons it. He feels no need to defend any position. Far be it from Trump to sacrifice popularity for principle! He pours his energy into whichever random offspring multiply, and wastes none on making the case for those that falter. Thus he pays almost no price for mistakes, and never expends any political capital. There is no limit to his adaptability. Rather than struggling to overcome selective forces, he rides them wherever they go.

What an irony that so many of Trump’s supporters are creationists! He is living proof that a totally mindless process can lead to runaway success. Donald Trump is running a memetic evolutionary algorithm that is optimized to create mass appeal quickly. Does this mean he will inevitably win the presidency? No, but it means it may be incredibly hard to stop him. The usual tactics will not work, because he is not playing the usual game.

And, as we saw, he won by the slimmest of margins.

It’s one of those quietly marvelous columns which generates ideas hours after you’ve read it. I particularly like the schadenfreude inherent in the idea that the GOP, which generally rejects the idea of evolution, finding itself victimized, even destroyed, by a veritable avatar of evolution. While basic knowledge of evolution would not, on its own, have saved them from their fate, the inevitable accompanying devotion to tangible, reality-derived truth might have given them the inclination to demand Trump conform to the generally accepted norms of political campaigning – and not indulge, for instance, in fake math, which has now even leaked into Trump’s budget. In other words, they should have bounced him out on his ass as soon as it became clear he wasn’t a serious debater.

The loam of creationism does appear to be rich for Mr. Trump, but the garden plot of the credulous does have its limits. Janet closes with a warning:

This is a test of our success in educating and socializing our population to a level commensurate with continued civilization. If our failures in that effort over the last few decades have been too great, if in our complacency vigilance has flagged for too long, the ship of state will founder. There will be no “Women and children first!” this time. We will all go down together into waters icy, dark, and deep.

Trump’s election is not necessarily our doom. Outside of his little garden plot of sadly credulous supporters, his vast and continuous incompetence, dismaying as it is, is also exposed for all to see, thus depriving him of the soil he needs. I will borrow a philosophical concept to describe him, that of the tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon which many choose to read in him what they wish to see: white supremacism being victorious, American weakness being remedied, evil immigrants on the rampage. But his inability, even disinclination, to deliver on many of his promises must inevitably penetrate the consciousness of all but the most credulous & foolish Trump supporters – not as fast as I could wish, but with certainty.

Go read her column. If you don’t recall evolution so well, maybe refresh first on that.

We seem to have a problem, Cap’n!

Don’t suck on it too hard, sir!

Invidious:

(of an action or situation) likely to arouse or incur resentment or anger in others.
‘she’d put herself in an invidious position’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Seen in the recent Federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion regarding the Trump Administration’s “Muslim ban” Executive Order:

Invidious discrimination that is shrouded in layers of legality is no less an insult to our Constitution than naked invidious discrimination. We have matured from the lessons learned by past experiences documented, for example, in Dred Scott and Korematsu. But we again encounter the affront of invidious discrimination—this time layered under the guise of a President’s claim of unfettered congressionally delegated authority to control immigration and his proclamation that national security requires his exercise of that authority to deny entry to a class of aliens defined solely by their nation of origin. Laid bare, this Executive Order is no more than what the President promised before and after his election: naked invidious discrimination against Muslims. Such discrimination contravenes the authority Congress delegated to the President in the Immigration and Nationality Act (the “Immigration Act”), 8 U.S.C. § 1101 et seq., and it is unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause.

Politico is reporting that, if Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) decides to retire, Mitt Romney is not going to run to replace him:

On Wednesday the website UtahPolicy floated the likelihood that the 83-year old Utah Republican would retire and Romney would run to replace him. That prompted pushback from the GOP’s most senior senator, who is also in the line of presidential succession.

“I’ve talked to Mitt Romney. He’s not going to run for this seat. I would be glad for him if he would,” Hatch told reporters.

The Democratic presence in Utah is fairly small, as Clinton was walloped, winning only 27.5% of Utah voters (most of the rest went for either of the Republicans in the race, Trump and McMullin). Similarly, all the Senators and Representatives to Congress from Utah are also Republicans.

So is it too bad? His Presidential campaign was not a thing of beauty, as he was caught spouting off embarrassing GOP kant regarding the how welfare recipients will always vote. But I also recall that he was also the successful governor of Massachusetts, and his father the successful governor of Michigan. What does this mean to me? It means there’s a possibility that Mitt, for all his privilege & wealth, may have a clue there’s more to running a government than reading fringe websites and thinking there’s valuable information to be found there, or just apply principles learned in business and away you go.

He may have an idea of how to be responsible & successful at governance.

So, in the absence of a candidate obviously cognizant of the requirements of good government, there has to be some regret that someone who might have a smidgen of an idea of how to govern has decided not to run. And wonder at just which flake the GOP will choose to run to succeed Hatch.

Like most folks (I hope!), I diversify my sources of advice and ideas when it comes to investments. My first source is my financial advisor; my third source is my random readings, where I keep a weather eye out for ideas, whether it’s new science with commercial possibilities or pure commercial news and rumors.

And that second source I so blithely skipped over? The Motley Fool.

I ran into TMF many years ago, back near the start of their site. I stuck around for several reasons (and I apologize for the mix of tenses):

1. They didn’t seem to hype stocks. They certainly had their recommendations & favorites, but they also had criteria, publicly shared and understandable, for holding and folding – and they took it seriously. It seemed – and seems – far more reasonable than other stockpickers who seem to pull predictions out of their asses. Indeed, they built philosophies of investing – and subjected them to actual analyses to evaluate their potential for successful prediction.
2. Unlike most competing agencies, they were – and still are – advocates of the long view of investing. They are buy and hold investors, with time horizons, for the most part, at a minimum of five years, and in some cases far longer. Not that they don’t sometimes point at short-term opportunities, but they approach such opportunities with both practical and philosophical caution.
3. Related to the previous point, they were unreformed contrarians. The wisdom on the street didn’t impress them. Technical investing, based on possibly meaningless patterns in buy and sell orders? They ridiculed it. They preferred to assess fundamentals, both in terms of how the businesses were run, and the markets they were in. They pointed out that while you might get lucky in short-term investing, the brokers you’re using don’t need luck – all they need is you to try your luck, and the brokers make their money on the fees charged for making the trades. Why pay fees for many, many buys & sells when you can buy and hold – and avoid the fees (and taxes on short-term gains is higher than long-term gains)? Issues such as these, where they raised questions about dominant trends and suggested answers that could be considered at leisure, made them quite attractive.

TMF currently has, I believe, a public side to their site, but the value is in the services they offer for sale – Stock Advisor, Hidden Gems, Rule Breakers, etc. These are structured around specific investment strategies, and often their own money is invested next to your’s.

I continue to use them, but over the last few years I’ve had a feeling of creeping disappointment. Why? Changes in how they seem to reach out to the public.

For a long time, I suppose as they built themselves from a two man operation selling their chutzpah at stock recommendations (maybe I was naive to think it was a couple of guys – and some technical support – with a good idea), it really felt like a couple of guys who brought fresh thinking to the question of how to invest in the stock market, looking at each facet of the traditional investment model with skeptical eyes that, like children at a magic show, weren’t distracted by the bright lights, but saw the magician slip the ball into a pocket while staring up at the imaginary ball^[1].

But now?

Honestly, now I apply that same skepticism (and my own home-grown bottle) to their advertising. From a recent mailing for their Motley Fool Explorer service:

You might have heard of Motley Fool Explorer. It’s quickly become one of the fastest-growing services in Motley Fool history for good reason.

The Explorer team conducts boots-on-the-ground research every month to identify the David Gardner stocks they think are poised to profit from the market’s most promising trends.

Fastest-growing meaning what, exactly? Ah, I see.

I should follow the herd. Otherwise, I may lose out.

And that is exactly what the Gardner brothers warned against when they first started out – herds of sheep get sheared, after all.

Another marketing tactic, for which I don’t happen to have a solid example (that mail was deleted) has to do with “seats” – open slots in a service. The new seats are going fast, and once they’re gone, the service will be closed to new members at least until next year. This is the sort of marketing hype meant to instill anxiety in the inexperienced investor. It’s a fight or flight response, meant to hit a reflex and get a profitable response, rather than appeal to the rational mind. That appeal to the rational, DIY approach to investing was the main attraction for them all those years ago. You could analyze their arguments, see their insights, and incorporate their strategies into your own approach. But this … marketing hype? It’s not designed to appeal to the intellect, but to suck in investors who may not be prepared for the situation. Add in such marketing copy as,

That’s because they know David’s track record for calling trends is legendary in this industry. Since 2002, he’s made 140 recommendations that have more than doubled in value… and 21 recommendations that have returned more than 1,000%!

Those kinds of 10x, 25x, and even 50x returns are possible only by spotting the market’s biggest waves.

And it just adds to the fight or flight response by appealing to the reputation of David Gardner. Not his ideas, but his results. And I know the Gardners will give you the documentation proving these claims – I’ve seen many of them happen, such as AOL and Amazon (but too bad for me, I didn’t act on those recommendations). But – it’s a bit of a magician’s trick. There’s no mention of the emotional stability required for this investment strategy, because they are making riskier bets and they sometimes have to stick to a stock like glue before it pays off years later. Nor do we get any feeling for his recent record. Did he get off to a hot start and then tail off? I can’t tell, and while I think he’s still making good calls, I can’t really be sure – and certainly the novice investor won’t even know to ask that subtle question. No, the advertising for these services makes it sound as smooth as silk.

And then there’s the follow-up emails. “Yes, your opportunity closed at midnight last night, but this morning we got a few sad calls from desperate investors who missed the boat, and so here’s one last chance to get a crippled entry into the service! Quick, call us at once!” Now this is just a bit slimy. Other people had regrets – maybe you should, too! Did you see the sheep go walking by?

Yeah, the follow-up emails are really the worst of the lot. Sure, maybe they’re in earnest – but even for a trusting guy like me^[2], the red flags come popping out so hard it makes my head jerk. After all, sending out these final e-mails cost a few pennies, and writing the marketing copy that fills them isn’t going to be more than a $1000. And the emotional manipulation is fairly blatant. It has all the signs of being all about the money.

Now, I’m sure my more jaded readers are shaking their heads and asking why I’m bothering to even read these promotional mails if I don’t like them. Here’s what you need to understand:

I like the Fool. They’ve given me a lot of good stock ideas, and I appreciate that. And I appreciate the culture of their early business they built, based on the foundation of their philosophy. They’ve tried to build a community based on mutual aid and information exchange, and having done that myself in the ’80s in the BBS world, I understand how satisfying it can be to see people exchanging ideas and wisdom and learning and knowing you were part of making that happen.

But now I’m seeing this marketing blitz which, frankly, is at odds with their earlier methods of sharing their philosophies, insights, even ethics. And a marketing blitz which relies on hitting emotional reflexes is not a particularly ethical operation. It may be standard in the industry, and I understand, I really do, using their successes to build the business. Heck, I suppose they’re just trying to monetize their business. I understand that’s a typical maneuver, try to leverage the business as much as possible.

But it doesn’t feel like they’re really running ahead of the industry in the area of marketing. What do I know? Nothing. I am neither a marketing nor investment professional; I’m a software engineer who, to be bluntly honest, has sometimes treated investing as more of an entertainment than anything else. I couldn’t tell you the difference between cash flow and profit. (I read about them, recognize the difference, but five minutes later it all flees my brain.) I’m far more of a story guy, who appreciated the story of Amazon way back when, but was too shy to follow through.

But I worry about the Fool. Will this marketing effort, which strikes me as on the border of unethical, if only in my world, seep into their stock-picking operations? This is some matter of concern to me – maybe because I’m an ignoramus.

I will probably stick with the Fool, even though I’m not the active investor I used to be – I tend to stay within the ruts. But every time I receive one of these mails promoting their new services, I shudder. And wonder.

¹Magicians find children their hardest audience, as one told me years ago – they don’t know they’re supposed to be distracted by what distracts adults.

²My wife tells me at least once a month that I am too eager to believe the best of people. Of course, she’s a cynic from Chicago, so I know she knows better and is just following her training.

In case  you missed it, Gianforte won the race for the empty lone Montana House of Representatives seat. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver notes vote finalization takes a while in Montana:

Gianforte leads by about 7 percentage points as we wrap up this live blog. The numbers will shift around a bit — Montana takes a long time to finalize its vote — but we should wind up somewhere in that range, which we can call the mid-to-high single digits.

CNN shows a 6 point gap, with 5.7 points to the Libertarian candidate – Gianforte is at 50.1%. CNN’s Lauren Fox comments:

But Montana’s election may be an unreliable arbiter of what’s to come in races across the country. After all, the race here featured a banjo-playing, first-time Democratic candidate, and many of Montana’s voters cast absentee ballots before the alleged assault even took place. The events that transpired here won’t be easily replicated.

“All politics are local,” said Art Wittich, a Gianforte supporter. “It comes down to two candidates.”

Perhaps Quist didn’t have what it takes to be a good candidate. After all, being a folk singer is not the same as being an experienced politician.

So now it’s up to Gianforte to prove he’s not another GOP zombie, that he’s not joining the Gohmert/Roby/Ryan crew to vote in solid lock-step with the GOP dictates. It’s so easy, when you’re not sitting in that hot seat, to say this:

… Gianforte didn’t fully embrace the Republican House-passed bill from the beginning, arguing it was rushed and not fully baked. His own campaign staff said Gianforte wouldn’t have voted for it.

It’s quite another to actually have to face the pressure of a vote and the angry glare of the GOP whip. So will Gianforte exercise his best judgment and vote against legislation which is bad for America?

Or will he just be another zombie GOP member and betray Montana in the process?

Which could also be the name of a story idea I’m contemplating.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog is appalled at the remarks of Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development:

Carson said it’s mind over matter. “I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind,” said Carson. “You take somebody who has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street and I guarantee you in a little while they’ll be right back up there. And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.”

This is not an argument that anyone should take seriously. The causes of chronic, generational poverty are complex, but “the wrong mindset” isn’t among them.

Except that it does, if you accept the hypothesis that racism has been a factor in generational, chronic poverty – so that it’s not the mindset of the victims so much as the shared mindset of the victimizers, whether it be actively malicious or just the go-with-the-flow folks.

All that said, Dr. Carson should probably recognize that some mindsets are not currently changeable. Those who are brain-damaged are certainly going to have more problems than those who are not. Given the number of homeless veterans on the streets, perhaps Dr. Carson should make it his number one priority to advocate against war.

Greg Gianforte, candidate for the empty Montana seat in the House of Representatives, has been charged with assault on the day of the special election. The Guardian reports on the incident, including reactions of Fox News reporters on the scene:

“He took me to the ground,” Jacobs said by phone from the back of an ambulance. “I think he wailed on me once or twice … He got on me and I think he hit me … This is the strangest thing that has ever happened to me in reporting on politics.”

Fox News reporter Alicia Acuna, field producer Faith Mangan and photographer Keith Railey witnessed the incident at Gianforte’s campaign headquarters in Montana, according to an account published on the Fox News website. After Jacobs asked Gianforte his question, Acuna wrote: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him.

“Faith, Keith and I watched in disbelief as Gianforte then began punching the man, as he moved on top the reporter and began yelling something to the effect of ‘I’m sick and tired of this!’ … To be clear, at no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies.”

Jacobs subsequently reported the incident to the police. The Gallatin county sheriff’s office said on Wednesday night it had completed its investigation and that Gianforte had been issued with a charge of misdemeanour assault.

RawStory follows up on Fox News:

On Fox & Friends, however, Mele simply repeated the Gianforte campaign’s talking points by noting that “the candidate says that reporter tried to push a phone in his face before this happened” and that “Gianforte’s campaign says the men both fell.”

The network also ran a chyron that simply read, “Gianforte blames reporter for incident.”
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Later on Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade did reference Acuna’s report on the incident — but he never talked about its contents or the fact that it completely contradicted the Gianforte campaign’s spin.

Their founder may be dead, but his spirit lives on. Mediaite notes the reaction of pundit Joe Scarborough:

“All three papers overnight took their endorsements away from this Republican guy,” said Scarborough. “It’s that incredible. A guy assault a reporter, which I guess shouldn’t be too surprising in an age of Trump where he calls the press ‘enemy of the people.’ These reckless words have consequences.”

“This candidate had also said things sort of Trumpian about the press,” offered Willie Geist for the assist.

Weirdly, I wonder if this will play well with the GOP base. There has been a current of fury in the past campaign season, enough so that the spats of violence reported at some events were not negative, but rather positives for Trump. Given Gianforte is a Trump supporter, it suggests this could even be a planned incident – trade a misdemeanour assault for building street cred with the base. I haven’t paid much attention to the Montana electorate, not living there, so it’s hard to say if they lean that way, or if the endorsements of the major newspapers, snatched away overnight, will have any influence on the election.

This will be a major marker as to whether the American electorate is transmuting from the traditional ways of evaluating candidates – or staying with tried and true values. If the former, GOPer Gianforte wins and we enter a more violent stage of our Republic;  if the latter, Democrat Quist wins and we back away from a nasty little precipice.

Stay tuned. Today’s the special election.

He’s really a child, isn’t he? CNN:

UK Prime Minister Theresa May said Thursday she would raise leaks to US media from the Manchester bombing investigation with US President Donald Trump when the pair meet later at a NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium.

“I will make clear to President Trump that intelligence that is shared between our law enforcement agencies must remain secure,” she said, following a cabinet-level security meeting.

The United States has faced growing criticism from UK lawmakers over the leaks, amid concern they could disrupt the fast-moving investigation into Monday night’s attack against concertgoers at Manchester Arena.

I realize it may not be Trump, personally, doing the leaking – but, even so, he sets the tone. Worse yet, it’s easy to suspect members of his Administration are leaking this information in order to advance their political agenda – because that’s the kind of people he’s hired, politicos who think the world revolves around their agenda and will use anything to advance it against their foes, who just happen to be their fellow Americans.

The tragedy of the Manchester bombing should not be permitted to distract from the dangerous meltdown which is the Trump Administration.

BTW, shortly after Obama had taken office, someone bought some time on a highway billboard, on which they put Bush’s face and the message, “Miss me yet?” I’ve always thought that was a sincere, if misguided message. Repeating that with Obama’s face would be far more effective, and remind us of just what professionally run government looks like – no scandals, just trying to improve life.

The bleeding hearts and blue bells were out last week in full swing.

And I ain’t speaking in metaphors.

Bluebells are one of my favorites, due to their shapes and short display times.

Recondite:

1 : difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend : deep a recondite subject

2 : of, relating to, or dealing with something little known or obscure
recondite fact about the origin of the holiday — Floyd Dell

3 : hidden from sight : concealed

[Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Odds on: 10 science breakthroughs you can bet on,” Michael Brooks, NewScientist (13 May 2017, paywall):

Alien contact at least has a protocol: it must be confirmed by the US President or UK Prime Minister. Policing more recondite bets can be tough, though. “Say we were to take a bet on there being more to evolution than genetics,” says Sharpe. “Who’s going to chair that debate?”

As the Cassini probe enters its last few orbits, known as the Grand Finale, it’s measuring the density of dust between the various rings – and getting a surprise:

As NASA’s Cassini spacecraft prepares to shoot the narrow gap between Saturn and its rings for the second time in its Grand Finale, Cassini engineers are delighted, while ring scientists are puzzled, that the region appears to be relatively dust-free. This assessment is based on data Cassini collected during its first dive through the region on April 26.

With this information in hand, the Cassini team will now move forward with its preferred plan of science observations.

“The region between the rings and Saturn is ‘the big empty,’ apparently,” said Cassini Project Manager Earl Maize of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Cassini will stay the course, while the scientists work on the mystery of why the dust level is much lower than expected.”

They have a couple nifty conversions of the impacts of dust particles to our audible range at that link. And just how big are the things they are hitting?

The team’s analysis suggests Cassini only encountered a few particles as it crossed the gap — none larger than those in smoke (about 1 micron across).

So the rings seem to represent tightly defined areas of orbital stability, and if you’re not in a ring – you’re not in a stable area. It’s a little like seeing iron fillings near a magnet as they outline the energy – although this Q&A answer from the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois was a bit of a letdown for my analogy:

Great question, and one that can easily lead to confusion, due to an accident of nature.

First of all, electric, gravitational, AND magentic fields are all completely smooth. The “field lines” taught in many classes and used by physicists to visualize field strengths are purely to guide the eye; they don’t have physical meaning. (Even so, they are useful lines to draw, and even contain weakly quantitative behavior, since the field strength is proportional to the density of field lines. Just remember that between any two such field lines, the field strength is just as strong as on the lines themselves. The field is smooth.)

Ironically, when you do the classic magnet and iron filing experiment, this is what you see:

It sure looks like field lines, right? Actually, this clumpiness has nothing to do with field lines; it’s just a coincidence that it looks like lines (or perhaps it inspired the idea of field lines?). The reason for the creation of these pretty iron filing shapes is that each little iron filing, when subject to a magnetic field, becomes a little dipole itself. This dipole feels the force of the magnet, and aligns in the direction of the field lines. In addition, each little dipole feels a small force from the other nearby dipoles, and they move to minimize their local energy. This causes the clumping into lines that you see, as the opposite ends of the dipoles move together.

The clumping is NOT a property of the magnetic field from the large magnet, it is a consequence of the magnetic fields of the small iron filings.

You can do a similar experiment with electric fields instead, and you would expect the same result, since the “test particles” would form electric dipoles and clump.

… and there’s more. So I was wrong about my analogy, but found the reason I’m wrong to be interesting.

In Egypt, Amira Sayed Ahmed reports in AL Monitor on the grounds a government with an explicit religious association must traverse, which makes our occasional tippy-toes through religious controversy looking quite easy:

The bill would restrict the issuance of public edicts or fatwas to clerics and researchers affiliated with only four entities: Al-Azhar, the Ministry of Religious Endowments, Dar al-Ifta (official entity charged with issuing edicts) and Majma al-Buhuth al-Islamiya (Islamic Research Academy). Clerics should get permission from one of these entities before issuing any public fatwa on TV.

According to the bill, preachers and professors of Al-Azhar University could perform their tasks of preaching to people without being obliged to get permission, since preaching is not considered a public fatwa. But if they wanted to issue a certain public fatwa, they should first obtain a license from one of the four entities.

This step came as part of Al-Azhar’s efforts to reform religious discourse and curb the torrent of the so-called fatwa chaos that flooded media outlets, inciting extremism and fanatical thinking. The draft law was approved one day before Al-Azhar University President Ahmed Hosni labeled Islamic researcher Islam al-Beheiry an apostate. Hosni apologized and resigned May 5.

“A fatwa is a huge responsibility and it has certain requirements, no question. The issuance of a fatwa should be exclusively limited to specialists since these edicts may lead to crucial consequences. I highly welcome this bill,” parliament member Amna Nosseir told Al-Monitor.

Which leads to the question, does the government control the religion – or does the religion control the government? While the answer may appear to be the former, it could be the latter, as a single sect may be trying to restrict other sects from using fatwas – legal opinions on issues pertaining to Islamic law – which can lead to unfortunate consequences. This is rooted in the believers’ certainty of the righteousness of their beliefs.

Incorporating such strains into our own government would bode very poorly for a peaceful, prosperous future. Not every sect can be right – but none willing to assert the rightness of Dominionism will be willing to back down in the face of anything less than terminal violence.

Which, as the Founders noted, is an excellent reason to keep the United States secular.

Tom Mechler, the chairman of the Texas GOP, has resigned for personal reasons. His counterpart in the Texas Democratic Party is lamenting the event, according to The Texas Tribute:

Of an iris, that is.

Kind of an hairy tongue, no? Gotta like the blue in the background, though. Totally inadvertent.

Yeah, it’s hairy.

A shot sort of down the gullet.

Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic comments on the compromises faced by government lawyers and others and ends up with categories, one good, one not so good:

Following Weber, we might define two categories of moral compromise presented by political service: first, compromises that are difficult, painful, and even tragic, but from which one emerges with one’s moral sense and one’s sense of self basically intact. But there are also compromises that are so inherently degrading that there is no coming away from them intact. (Luban makes a similar point in his use of Avishai Margalit’s distinction between “bad compromises” and “rotten compromises.”)

The first kind of compromise is hard, and it’s also inherent in government service. People go into government, after all, because they believe in things, and the bureaucracies they serve in do not always reach, from their points of view, the right answers. Think of the Obama administration officials who believed the President should do more to close Guantanamo or the Bush administration officials who believed sincerely in the tough actions the administration took even as it started to back off of them.

The second kind of compromise, however, is corrupting. This second case is exactly what concerns both Luban and Eliot Cohen, in his Atlantic essay: it’s the result of having lost the keenness of one’s moral sense, in having made the ugly choice to begin with, and it breeds further path-dependencies. Once one has made one degrading compromise, after all, it’s easy to slip toward others. And it also destroys the person’s ability to function as a figure worthy of others’ trust in one’ honorable service and efforts to mitigate harm—which may be the very reason that the official accepted an appointment in the first place. I suspect both the public and those within government will be much more hesitant now to trust Rosenstein and McMaster to serve as guardians of their respective institutions going forward.

And the intuitive psychological responses to your hierarchical superiors has to play into this drama. After all, that’s how we’re built, even if we like to think we’re rational creatures. Quinta’s insights should probably be required reading for any lawyer considering government service – and who prides themselves on their ethical behavior:

I suspect that Rosenstein and McMaster’s behavior has rattled so many of us because it has served as a reminder that the distinction between painful and indefensible compromises can easily become confused, however anguished one feels. More specifically, it suggests that the specific pressures of the Trump administration push in the direction of turning difficult compromises into the sort of compromises that can destroy a person. Jack made a similar point, noting the President’s “mendacity, norm-breaking, and impetuousness,” along with his apparent demands for personal loyalty over integrity and institutional legitimacy. It is entirely possible that a person could go into the Trump administration with open eyes, prepared to make difficult and painful choices for the sake of mitigating harm, and instead be pushed toward degradation.

Like it says…

Rick Hasen on Election Law Blog notes SCOTUS passing on an opportunity with regards to limits on donations to political parties:

If my count is correct, this is Jim Bopp’s fourth attempt to get the Court to hear a soft money case to overturn one of the two main pillars of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law (the Court overturned the other in Citizens United.) In one of those earlier attempts, Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas dissented from the Court’s refusal to hear the case.  And the Chief Justice has said that he feels an obligation to take appeals that come up through three judge courts. And we know that Justice Gorsuch expressed skepticism of campaign finance laws when he was a Tenth Circuit judge.

So what explains the Court refusing to take a case which could have been used to further deregulate campaign financing, by extending the narrow views of corruption and strong reading of the First Amendment that the Supreme Court put forward in Citizens United and McCutcheon? And why did it take only one Court conference to reach this conclusion, when the Court has been taking so long with many other cases (in part as J. Gorsuch got up to speed on the Court’s cases)?

This suggests to me that the Court has really no appetite to get back into this area right now—perhaps they want to save their capital in ruling on other high profile cases coming down the line. Perhaps there was something about Bopp’s petition that made the Court believe the issue of overturning the Supreme Court’s decision in McConnell v. FEC (upholding the soft money ban) not properly presented to it.

Along with the commentary on SCOTUS, the societal impact:

On the other hand, we now have a situation where political parties (especially state and local political parties, the subject of Bopp’s petition) are limited in what they can do, while Super PACs and non-disclosing 501c4s can operate without limit, and in the case of c4s, without adequate disclosure. This further weakens the political parties, which many political scientists and election law scholars leads to further polarization and political dysfunction.

Shark Dentistry: Does It Have A Future?

This is a Public Service Announcement.

DO not, I repeat NOT, attempt to do shots each time someone dies in Avalanche Sharks (2014), you will wind up at the ER with alcohol poisoning – or possibly choking, in a most serious manner, on the alcohol as you gasp with laughter at each attack.

ADDITIONALLY, if you are deathly allergic to thoughts of misanthropy, do not attempt to view this movie. Once we had ascertained there was no themes, no acting, no sympathetic characters (ok, there was one or two, but I wanted to keep the rhythms of the sentence going), the most nebulous of story-tellling, and wretched special-effects, we began cheering the sharks on, pumping our fists at each successful attack. If you have a sore shoulder, you should also view this movie only with great caution.

YOU may be prone to nightmares after watching this movie, but only because you’ll want those two hours back. Desperately.