Author Archives: Hue White

Over the last few years we’ve visited Byblos in Burnsville, MN maybe a dozen times – and never been disappointed. Featuring Lebanese food, we find their food to be boldly spiced and tasty, and we especially like their treatments of meats as well as their garlic sauce, which appears to simply be well mashed garlic with a little salt.

And I don’t think my wife will be kissing me tonight.

If you’re in Burnsville, MN, looking for food, you could do a lot worse.

Byblos, 14637 County Rd 11, Burnsville , MN 55337

NewScientist (15 April 2017) reports the Trump Administration is looking at Yucca Mountain for burying nuclear waste – and that the Department of Energy is developing a Plan B:

So the Department of Energy is working on an alternative. It plans to bury the spent fuel in hundreds of narrow shafts drilled 5 kilometres down into solid granite across the US. The technique has yet to be tested, but the idea is that the waste would melt surrounding rock and then slowly solidify into a granite “coffin”.

The first test drilling site is set to be announced next month.

I wonder how “full’ each shaft will be filled with nuclear waste – and what happens if someone finds a use for nuclear waste?

A random thought that came up while watching You Can’t Take It With You (1938): Trying to imagine the role of Grandpa Vanderhof, played by Lionel Barrymore in the movie, instead being played by … Tom Cruise.

I’ll just leave you with that thought.

Continuing this thread, I see that not every North Carolina GOP member is involved in dishonorable tactics. Consider this report, from The News & Observer, concerning the abrupt resignation of GOP member Judge Doug McCullough:

The Republican legislators leading an effort to reduce the size of the state Court of Appeals as three Republican judges near mandatory retirement age hit an unexpected obstacle on Monday.

Judge Doug McCullough, a Republican on the appellate bench who was expected to retire from the bench at the end of May, decided to retire early and give Gov. Roy Cooper the power to appoint his replacement. …

“I did not want my legacy to be the elimination of a seat and the impairment of a court that I have served on,” McCullough said Monday morning after the announcement. …

McCullough, while stressing that he was honored to serve on the bench, recalled a time when Gov. Jim Martin, a Republican, was in the executive office and the Democrats at the helm of the General Assembly “did not interfere with his power to make appointments to the judiciary.”

Kudos to Judge McCullough for circumventing the leadership of his own party in order to preserve the integrity of the North Carolina judiciary. His mature conduct may lead to his ejection from the party, but then one wonders if there’s really that many members with which he wishes to have an association.

In a fairly dense article, Young-Keun Chang, professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at Korea Aerospace University, discusses recent missile developments by North Korea on 38 North. His conclusion is stark, however:

Ultimately, the transition from liquid to solid propellant missiles will bring about a fundamental paradigm shift in North Korean missile systems (Figure 8). A road-mobile ICBM, tentatively named the Pukguksong-3, employing solid propellant rocket motors could easily achieve the range performance required to hit the US mainland in the future, making it a serious potential threat to the United States.

It would be interesting to know if American experts agree with this assessment. If so, then this may be the paramount challenge facing President Trump and his successors. If there are aliens watching, they must be vastly amused at the thought of two cartoon characters in control of such destructive capabilities, trying to stare each other down.

xylograph:

Kunyu wanguo quantu, or Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the Earth, is the oldest surviving Chinese map to show the Americas. It is a xylograph (wood block print) on six scrolls of fine native paper, each scroll measuring approximately 1820 x 3650 mm (each panel is approximately 2 feet by 5.75 feet). The carving of the wood blocks was done by Zhang Wentao. [University of Minnesota / James Ford Bell Library]

A panoply of nuts.

The award-winning You Can’t Take It With You (1938) is the classic cautionary tale, told through contrast. J. P. Kirby is an industrialist intent on sewing up the biggest takeover of his career, but in order to do so he must obtain control of the house owned by Grandpa Vanderhof, a man who dropped out of the business world 35 years ago to pursue stamp collecting, harmonica playing, and raising his slapdash, happy-go-lucky family. As Kirby is operating through an agent, neither is aware that Vanderhof’s beautiful daughter, Alice, is working for Kirby’s dashing son, Tony, and by the time the movie opens, they are testing the waters of love.

Eventually, marriage plans are made and it’s time to play Meet the Parents, but Tony, disturbed by his own family’s social pretensions, brings them to Alice’s house a day earlier than planned in order to ensure each gets to meet the other side as they really are. This goes poorly, and the arrival of the police with accusations of fomenting a revolution (which are conveniently forgotten), exacerbated by an accidental fireworks release, lands the entire mob, already upset and tousled, in jail, awaiting the pleasure of the night court.

Here the contrast is deepest, as Kirby’s support system at the immediate trial is his corporate lawyers, while Vanderhof, without lawyers, confesses to the firework mishap and is fined – a fine immediately paid by all this neighbors, who have been the recipient of much help over the years and arrived for the trial in support.

The disappearance of Alice, distraught over the debacle and her failed courtship, and wishing to avoid Tony, places pressure on the Vanderhofs, who support each other, and when word comes of her presence across town, Vanderhof decides it’s time to sell out and move across town to give his daughter more support. The word from Vanderhof to the agent trying to buy the property triggers Kirby’s business deal, and within days eviction notices are delivered to people in the neighborhood. In the board room, Kirby’s partners begin the war on the corporation to be taken over. But when the day arrives, Kirby is stricken with a family defection – Tony, his son, who he was going to make President of the new conglomerate, announces his decision to resign from the company and seek a new life elsewhere. His reasons? They mirror Vanderhof’s – a desire for happiness, rather than success.

And then, rather much like Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol, the owner of the firm taken over by Kirby’s, now forced out and broke, appears at Kirby’s office. Does he plead for mercy? No. Instead, he delivers a warning that this mode of business never delivers happiness, he has learned to his regret, and leaves. As Kirby considers his advice, his secretary interrupts and says the man has died in the washroom.

Kirby, bereft of son and doubtful of his only passion in life, appears at Vanderhof’s, who is busy moving out, and begs for advice. A gentle smile and a harmonica are all that is offered, and that is enough.

This is a movie that dances the delicate line between drama and fluffy farce, and the former wins when the thematic material is reinforced through the warning and death of the rival business owner, as well as the jail scene. This, in concert with the behavior of his son, brings into focus the continual problem of making business your entire life. The constant virtual warfare of the predatory business world and its concomitant devotion to money is brought out, examined, and shown for what it is: a distraction from the more important aspects of the real world.

Don’t be fooled, this is not outright condemnation of the corporate world; after all, it’s a movie made by a large corporation. But it’s a recommendation that the corporate world viewed as war is sheer foolishness. Businesses exist to provide goods & services to customers, not to destroy each other and, in the process, consume the employees right down to their shoes – whether they’re worn out or made of alligator hide.

Add in superb performances, even from the supporting cast, excellent staging, and a strong story which seems like fluff, but isn’t, and it’s not hard to say You Can’t Take It with You is Recommended.

Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare discusses the resemblance between the medieval theory of monarchy, wherein a King has a mortal body but embodies an immortal essence, and similarities to President Trump and its legal ramifications:

In short, the distinction between the “personal” [Twitter] account and the “official” account is far from a dispositive one; the King’s Two Bodies exist layered on top of one another. With that in mind, how are we to identify a tweet from the Office of the President versus a tweet from Donald Trump in his personal capacity—if there is even a difference at all?

Amusing as this question may be, it actually does matter, across a number of different axes. I’m not talking here merely about maintaining the cognitive distinction between the statements of a person and the statement of the institutional presidency. But there are important legal implications too.

Consider the problem first in terms of its litigation implications. Delineating the scope of presidential immunity from civil suit in Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court ruled that the President enjoys absolute immunity when acting “within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.” Writing sixteen years later in Jones, the Court further held that Fitzgerald’s “reasoning provides no support for an immunity for unofficial conduct,” denying that “the President … has an immunity that extends beyond the scope of any action taken in an official capacity.”

Jones never considered what “unofficial conduct” undertaken by the President in office might look like, because it focused on conduct that took place before President Clinton assumed the presidency. But the Court’s arguments regarding the divisions between official and unofficial conduct in these two cases can arguably apply to behavior carried out within a president’s time in office as well. I feel confident the Trump administration will produce litigation fleshing out the boundaries of non-immune presidential conduct in office.

So the questions are whether anything said on any Trump Twitter account is immune to litigation – or if none of them are. It isn’t like being impolitic near a hot microphone, since tweeting by accident seems highly unlikely; it’s a deliberate act. So when is the President immune, and when isn’t he?

The Hill seems to indicate that Trump will be part of the Ossoff / Handel race in Georgia:

President Trump made a Thursday [April 20] fundraising pitch for Georgia GOP House candidate Karen Handel, as both parties pull out all the stops for a much-watched June runoff.

If this continues, Handel’s fate may be tied to Trump’s actions to a greater than normal extent – and, as noted earlier, this may be a negative for Handel as Trump did not do well in Georgia District 6. It also doesn’t hurt to review Trump’s messaging on the first campaign:

Trump got involved in the race days ahead of the primary, recording robocalls urging voters to rebuke Ossoff at the ballot box and tweeting that the Georgia Democrat is a “super liberal.”

“Now that we have a Republican nominee, Democrats will stop at nothing to tear down Karen Handel in Georgia,” Trump wrote in a fundraising email to supporters. “We must unite and fight back, Fellow Conservative.”

“Please, make an emergency contribution RIGHT NOW to support Karen Handel in the Georgia special election.”

Following Tuesday’s results, Trump tweeted that it was a “big” win for Republicans and took partial credit for the outcome. He also called Handel by phone to congratulate her on making the runoff.

“Despite major outside money, FAKE media support and eleven Republican candidate, BIG ‘R’ win with runoff in Georgia,” Trump tweeted late Tuesday. “Glad to be of help!”

But Ossoff did better than expected, won the “jungle primary,” regardless of Trump’s blathering, and nearly ended the election early. This will be interesting to watch.

Graving dock:

an excavated shore dry dock for the repair and maintenance of ships. [Dictionary.com]

Observed on an informative plaque aboard the USS Constellation.

I’ve run into a bit of a conundrum today, as I struggle to catch up on my reading that piled up while we were away on a vacation. First, Andrew Sullivan posted a continuation of the controversy swirling about some college campuses these days. Here’s a bit of it:

Check out this recent staff editorial at the Wellesley News. It draws an explicit distinction between “free speech” and what it calls “hate speech.” The former is fine, the latter impermissible. How does the editorial define “hate speech”? “Racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech.” Oppose affirmative action? Free speech denied. Challenge the subjugation of women in Islam? Ditto. Support a traditionalist view of marriage? Silence the bigot! Wellesley’s student journalists argue, moreover, that they are not being intolerant. They insist they are in fact in favor of free speech and quite forgiving of contrary views. Behold the compassion: “Mistakes will happen and controversial statements will be said … It is vital that we encourage people to correct and learn from their mistakes rather than berate them for a lack of education they could not control.” But there are, of course, limits. If you persist in your error, and are not successfully re-educated, “then hostility may be warranted.” That includes anyone who supports “racist politicians or pay[s] for speakers that prop up speech that will lead to the harm of others.” The latter category is so vast and vague it would essentially ban the speech of anyone who supported the campaign of our current president, i.e., 46 percent of the country.

The students’ polemic is a fine example of shallow analysis, hardly shielding the power-hungry grasping motivating it; perhaps I’ll take it apart in more detail at a later date. But then I received a petition from change.org:

In its public statement of core purpose, The New York Times commits itself to telling “the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it.” Now, scientists and concerned citizens across the country urge The New York Times to uphold its commitment to the truth and rescind its job offer to the climate denier Bret Stephens.

Science says that climate change is happening, human activity is causing it, and its adverse impacts will only increase unless we act to curb the emissions of fossil fuels. Over 97% of peer-reviewed climate-science studies have reaffirmed this truth. Climate change threatens our agricultural system, our water supply, our coastal cities, our public health, and our national security. It threatens the lives of the current generation of young children. The New York Times itself has acknowledged that climate change is “the most important story in the world.”

Yet Bret Stephens writes about climate change with utter contempt, calling climate science a “religion without God […] presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge.” He slanders the integrity of climate scientists, claiming that they practice the “hyping of flimsy studies—melting Himalayan glaciers; vanishing polar ice—to press the political point.” And he falsifies the significance of scientific data to claim that the climate crisis is merely “hysteria generated by an imperceptible temperature rise of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.” As the NASA Earth Observatory explains: “A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all the oceans, atmosphere, and land by that much. In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age. A five-degree drop was enough to bury a large part of North America under a towering mass of ice 20,000 years ago.” Whether or not insults and slander have a place on the Opinion Page of The New York Times, surely his falsification of scientific facts puts Mr. Stephens in direct conflict with the Times’ public commitment to uphold the truth.

And something about the two pieces – not so much Andrew himself, but the anonymous student quoted – and the petition struck me as related. I believe it’s the determination of each writer (singular or plural) to deny someone else a voice, and that the group they implicitly represent has a singular and  unique claim on the truth. Neither is a pleasant truth to embody, as, taken together, they antagonize those who are not part of the group. In this respect, the Wellesley group is in more desperate straits as their claim is patronizing, arbitrary, and not consistent with serious, scholarly investigation. It stinks of “wisdom” handed down from on high, criticism not to be met with reason, but with the sword.

And that never ends well.

The petition makes me uncomfortable more because it wishes to shut down the voice of a critic before he ever gets started. While this does not meet the definition of censorship, since government is not involved, it is unfair to a fellow citizen.

It is my consistent belief that every citizen should have the opportunity to make a fool of himself in public. If Mr. Stephens wishes to do so in The New York Times, then, at the discretion of the Editor, he should be permitted to do so – and he should be held to the standards of The New York Times as stated:

… “the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it.”

If, as the petitioner writes, Mr. Stephens misrepresents the facts, then I would hope the editorial staff would inform him of his errors, and if he persists, can his ass.

And then maybe tatoo “LIAR!” on his forehead.

But to shut him down before he can go there? This smacks of personal vendetta. This smacks of antagonism. And that will not facilitate whatever collective actions we may need to undertake in the future for our very survival.

As much as I’m sympathetic to the climate scientists and their concerns, this was not a petition I could sign.

Spat:

The life cycle of the oyster begins with a free-swimming larval stage that eventually attaches to a hard substrate forming an oyster spat. The spat commences a growth period that is classified into sub-adult and adult phases. [NOAA]

Noted on an informational sign at a rest stop between Baltimore and Charlottesville.

Michael Le Page in NewScientist (8 April 2017) suggests that if the United States will not lead on climate change, it could be dragged:

The nightmare scenario that Trump’s inauguration posed for the nearly 200 countries signed up to the Paris climate agreement has now become reality. The world’s second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases has given up on even trying to meet its target under the agreement.

Now what matters is how the world responds. If other countries stand by and let the US brazenly flout its commitments, the entire agreement could slowly unravel as its credibility evaporates. But what can the other nations do when the agreement includes no enforcement measures?

There is an alternative approach, and many think it could lead to faster emissions cuts. It is introducing a global price on carbon, and slapping carbon tariffs on goods from any country that refuses to join in.

Such a global carbon price has historically been dismissed as politically infeasible. But that was before Trump’s flagrant climate rollback. Suddenly, an intriguing possibility has arisen: could the outrageous behaviour of the US unite nations to take action on climate that will be effective?

It is the role of governments to look to the general welfare of their citizens – and that must include pressuring countries run by recalcitrants to live up to their duties, when their failure to do so will negatively impact your own citizens. One of the problems of having a democracy in which virtually anyone can be elected to high office is that we end up with leaders whose entire conception of the role of government is not congruent with a model which will lead to efficiency – i.e., long term survival. Trump’s emphasis on regulation reduction, the destruction of the EPA, even the reduction in specific coal regulations, as well as many other  activities are memorable for how they will increase corporate profits – not for how they will affect the public welfare.

Of course, the United States has long been known as the home of free enterprise as well as government role ignorance. President Coolidge is famously known for the misquote (which speaks more for the misquoters than for President Coolidge),

“The business of America is business” or “The business of the American people is business.”

The accurate quote is “the chief business of the American people is business.” Comparing the two clarifies that the accurate quote refers to the citizenry; the first is easily interpreted to refer to America in all the roles. I have not investigated whether this is a deliberate misquote, or merely a sloppy editor thinking to compress a sentence; but it does its part in discrediting the important regulatory role government has in society.

I also found this remark interesting from Le Page’s article:

For many economists, the risk of trade wars is the strongest argument against carbon tariffs. However, world leaders will need to weigh this risk against the immense and growing costs of climate change. There is an opportunity here for countries that are serious about tackling climate change to bypass the ineffectual Paris agreement and club together to impose a global carbon price.

Here again, Trump might make the decision easier. He has been threatening to slap big tariffs on goods from China to boost US industries, an action that could spark a trade war. If it happens, imposing carbon tariffs on US goods would be one of the ways China and others could respond while maintaining the moral high ground. We live in interesting times.

And would Trump survive a trade war? Is he a good enough politician to turn that to his advantage? Or would the resultant hit on the economy finally result in his being boosted out of office?

As asteroid recently went zipping by us and NASA/JPL captured some radar images of it. Gotta love this sequence:

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR

Radar images of asteroid 2014 JO25 were obtained in the early morning hours on Tuesday[April 18th, 2017], with NASA’s 70-meter (230-foot) antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. The images reveal a peanut-shaped asteroid that rotates about once every five hours. The images have resolutions as fine as 25 feet (7.5 meters) per pixel.

Asteroid 2014 JO25 was discovered in May 2014 by astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona — a project of NASA’s Near-Earth Objects Observations Program in collaboration with the University of Arizona. The asteroid will fly safely past Earth on Wednesday at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The encounter is the closest the object will have come to Earth in 400 years and will be its closest approach for at least the next 500 years.

“The asteroid has a contact binary structure – two lobes connected by a neck-like region,” said Shantanu Naidu, a scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the Goldstone observations. “The images show flat facets, concavities and angular topography.”

The largest of the asteroid’s two lobes is estimated to be 2,000 feet (620 meters) across.

Can’t help but wonder about the material connecting the two lobs – solid? Doesn’t really seem like enough gravity would be present to hold it together if it wasn’t solid, but then there must be a reason for it to separate as well, and as close as the two lobes are, that doesn’t seem likely either.

Assigns:

ASSIGNS, contracts. Those to whom rights have been transmitted by particular title, such as sale, gift, legacy, transfer, or cession. Vide Ham. Paities, 230; Lofft. 316. These words, and also the word forever, are commonly added to the word heirs in deeds conveying a fee simple, heirs and assigns forever “but they are in such cases inoperative. 2 Barton’s Elem. Convey. 7, (n.) But see Fleta, lib. 3, cap. 14, Sec. 6. The use of naming them, is explained in Spencer’s Case, 5 Rep. 16; and Ham. Parties, 128. The word heirs, however, does not include or imply assigns. [The Free Dictionary – Legal Dictionary]

Heard from my Arts Editor today.

NewScientist (8 April 2017) reports on a fascinating development in organ replacements – implantation in not-traditional locations:

BLIND tadpoles have learned to see again – using eyes implanted in their tails.

With help from a drug usually used to treat migraines, the eyes grew new connections to the tadpoles’ nervous systems. The same approach may work in people, allowing the body to integrate organs grown in the lab.

“If a human had an eye implanted in their back, connected to their spinal cord, would the human be able to see out of that eye? My guess is probably yes,” says Michael Levin at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

How about an EMT with an extra eye in his finger so she can explore a wound more thoroughly? Even more so for docs. And then the exotic location community would probably pop into being. I’ll not explore that sordid thought.

And then be disappointed when they discovered these are not heritable traits.

Pelagic:

Any water in a sea or lake that is neither close to the bottom nor near the shore can be said to be in the pelagic zone. The word “pelagic” is derived from Greek πέλαγος (pélagos), meaning ‘open sea’. The pelagic zone can be thought of in terms of an imaginary cylinder or water column that goes from the surface of the sea almost to the bottom. Conditions differ deeper in the water column such that as pressure increases with depth, the temperature drops and less light penetrates. Depending on the depth, the water column, rather like the Earth’s atmosphere, may be divided into different layers.

The pelagic zone occupies 1,330 million km³ (320 million mi³) with a mean depth of 3.68 km (2.29 mi) and maximum depth of 11 km (6.8 mi). [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Quantification of bioluminescence from the surface to the deep sea demonstrates its predominance as an ecological trait,” Séverine Martini & Steven H. D. Haddock, Scientific Reports:

For coastal environments less than 2.5% of the species are estimated to be bioluminescent¹⁵, while for pelagic environments, this percentage is considerably higher. Indeed, the earliest studies estimate that bioluminescence occurs in approximately 70% of fish species¹⁶, and by number of individuals, 90% of fishes observed below 500 m depth in the eastern North Atlantic were said to be bioluminescent¹⁶

Dr. Haddock appears to be a fine example of nominative determinism.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had been a vocal opponent of President Trump, but, according to Politico, not anymore:

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham enthusiastically praised President Donald Trump on Wednesday for his foreign policy, a continued departure from his sharp criticism of Trump during the 2016 race and even after the election.

“I am like the happiest dude in America right now,” a beaming Graham said on “Fox & Friends.” “We have got a president and a national security team that I’ve been dreaming of for eight years.”

Graham, who unsuccessfully ran against Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries, cited Trump’s decision to put Iran “on notice” in February, and for his increased aggression against North Korea as the country continues to conduct missile tests, as the reasons he was pleased.

Either the GOP is congenitally unhinged, or someone has those strings pulled tight. I really am looking forward to 20-25 years from now, when the tell-all stories start coming out and we find out why even the GOP’s saner members don’t seem to be able to keep on this side of the sanity line.

It’ll probably involve money and their love of power, honestly.

It’s a mark of President Trump’s immaturity that he believes all the answers should come to him – far more than Bush’s infamous “I’m the Decider” remark. Consider Steve Benen’s remark on Trump’s recent meeting with former Colombian Presidents Uribe and Pastrana concerning the treaty with the revolutionary group FARC:

And then there’s the significance of U.S. policy towards Colombia. While Trump hasn’t expressed an opinion about the proposed agreement, what we have here is a group of powerful freelancers: the Miami Herald noted that the former Colombian presidents circumvented diplomatic channels to speak to Trump, and at the same time, Trump appears to have hosted this conversation without coordinating with the U.S. State Department, which is supposed to be responsible for overseeing high-level diplomatic talks.

Indeed, that’s what makes stories like these so interesting to me; the president’s willingness to marginalize the State Department, failing to even consider the agency as an afterthought, is an astonishing development for U.S. foreign policy.

In a normal Administration, this would have gone through the Secretary of State, who would have added his or  her years of experience in these matters, along with their subordinates views, as to how to handle the request to meet, as well as the viewpoints of the requestors.

Trump has little to no experience, no demonstrated ability to plan or deeply think, and no willingness to use other people’s advice and judgment. His conception of government, amply demonstrated by his reactions to the blockages of his Executive Orders, is that of the strong man making decisions and the hell with the consequences.

How long will Congress permit this to continue?

Former President Ahmadinejad’s run for a third term as President came to a screeching halt, according to Yahoo! News:

Former Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was barred from running in next month’s election Thursday while President Hassan Rouhani was among six candidates approved by Iran’s conservative-controlled Guardian Council, state media reported.

The other candidates selected were hardliners Ebrahim Raisi and Mostafa Mirsalim, Tehran mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, moderate Mostafa Hashemitaba and Rouhani’s ally and vice-president Eshaq Jahangiri.

Former hardline president Ahmadinejad, who ruled from 2005 to 2013, was barred along with his close ally Hamid Baghaie.

Since both Ahmadinejad and his former vice president Baghaie were barred from running, it appears Supreme Leader Khamenei wasn’t kidding when he voiced worries about domestic unrest resulting from candidacies from Ahmadinejad’s camp. Of course, it’s a knife’s edge – there have to be worries about the denial to run as well. And Ahmadinejad’s followers were not adverse to violence during the election campaign leading to his second term.

This may prove interesting.

However, Erdoğan’s speech to his party supporters was not very promising in that sense. He continued to blame the West and says he is considering the restitution of capital punishment.

From “Referendum results risk further polarization in Turkey,”Kemal Kirişci, Order From Chaos.

I ran across a conservative / liberal yell fest on Facebook concerning Minnesota and Wisconsin taxes and economies, and I ended up writing a rant of my own. I thought I’d just reproduce it here. I thought it came out rather well.

Seems to me you can have a lovely name-calling fight, or you can look at the numbers and realize that MN is doing quite well in an era of higher taxes that some might like, and ask yourself why that might be. MN, unlike North Dakota, hasn’t had an amazing natural resource discovery.

Under Walker, WI economy has not done especially well and his promised spurt in job creation hasn’t materialized – last I looked. Maybe I’m out of date.

Or let’s look at Kansas. Governor Brownback and the legislature drastically dropped tax rates 6 years ago, and sat back and waited for the economic prosperity make up for the resultant holes in the state budget.

Didn’t happen. Kansas is in a huge mess and Brownback is going the way of Arthur Laffer, his advisor and the guy who came up with the discredited Laffer Curve, which suggests that dropping taxes increases tax revenues because of the economic growth spurred by the drop in taxes. But Brownback still desperately clings to his kant, suggesting he’s not nearly the bright boy that he used to be advertised as.

The mistaken assumption in all this is that taxes ALWAYS suppresses economic activity. That’s turned out to be wrong, but conservatives still believe it (and something I probably unconsciously believed when I was young). My suspicion, probably already proven by economists, is that there’s a bell curve involved – too high of taxes is bad for the economy, but so is too low of taxes, because taxes pay for necessary services, from roads to schools, all of which are the foundation for solid economics. Established companies want happy employees; happy employees have families and children and homes that demand good schools, roads, and a stable society. They want to go out and hunt, have entertainment … and all that leads to taxes. Because they pay for the social environment that provides all those good things.

The important thing? It’s a bell curve. Not a single slanty line that let’s you say “taxes are BAD!”. It’s a curve, and that means figuring out the shape of the bell curve … and that’s hard.

A Meeting Of The Boston Blackie Book Club

In Boston Blackie Goes Hollywood (1942) Blackie’s hijinks with Inspector Farraday continue. Blackie’s rich friend Arthur has been duped out of his friend’s diamond, and now needs $60,000 to buy it back and return it to his friend. The problem? He’s on the West Coast, and his money’s on the East Coast. So he calls up Blackie to get the money and bring it to him.

The fun begins with Boston breaking into Arthur’s safe while Farraday’s watching, and continues through disguises, twists, and turns. It’s fun, but between a climactic scene to set everything back to rights which is drawn out far too long, and shooting by characters who don’t really seem to have their heart in it, it’s a trifle tiresome. Add the lack of compelling thematic material, and this is little more than fluff.

Watch if you don’t want to think or if you have an admiration for Chester Morris’ jawline.

estoppel:

a bar or impediment preventing a party from asserting a fact or a claim inconsistent with a position that party previously took, either by conduct or words, especially where a representation has been relied or acted upon by others. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in the same article from the previous Word of the Day:

The Supreme Court said in 1991’s Lampf, Pleva v. Gilbertson that the three-year Securities Act time limit is a statute of repose and said in 2014’s CTS v. Waldburger that statutes of repose cannot be tolled – so, under the court’s own precedent, CalPERS can’t get around the absolute three-year time bar. “A statute of repose means repose,” Clement said. “Its defining feature is that it’s not subject to tolling or estoppel rules.”