Author Archives: Hue White

Pakistan, or more importantly the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a religious nation, is being torn apart by … religion. Lawfare’s Rishabh Bhandari and Cody M. Poplin report on just one facet of the deliberate disintegration:

Monday’s [bombing] victims were not a random assortment of civilians waiting for medical care, but instead represented Quetta’s liberal elite. More than 200 lawyers had congregated to mourn the murder of Bilal Anwar Kasi, the president of the Balochistan Bar Association, who had been fatally shot earlier that day. A number of journalists had also arrived to cover Kasi’s death when the bomb detonated.

One surviving lawyer Barkhurdar Khan lamented that an entire generation of lawyers in Balochistan—Pakistan’s poorest province and the home of a deep-seated insurgency—had been wiped out. “Everyone who has given me a lift home is dead except for one person,” Khan said. Lawyers throughout the country boycotted court proceedings on Tuesday. …

But lawyers and judges are not targeted solely out of revenge for their role in prosecuting and sentencing terrorists. Instead, Pakistani society is witnessing a systematic attempt to undermine the integrity of its judicial system, drive courts from restive areas, and implement the Taliban’s own form of rough but relatively efficient justice in areas it seeks to control. A Pakistani Taliban spokesman said following an attack three months ago, “Pakistani courts give decisions against the laws revealed by Allah” and suggested that undermining Pakistan’s court system is a central component of establishing a state under the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia law.

It’s not hard to apply the lessons learned from the behaviors of the English Royal family to the plight of Pakistan today, as I detailed in this Pillar (see the section on English History) but has no doubt been done much better elsewhere: as the members of the various sects fall to fighting with each other, their small differences become magnified by the lens of Faith, and a nation which one might think should exist in easy harmony and solidarity has, instead, become a victim of the trivial differences of humanity. Each sect exists to climb to power, and then to direct its fruits to its members, buoyed by the certain faith that God is on their side. So are barbarous crimes sanctified, so do the winners fall to fighting amongst themselves, as God backs each individually, and so do the innocent fall to the sacred knife of the righteous, the power hungry, the lost.

American fundamentalists, who weep for more power of their own, should soberly assess this lesson from the far side of the world, and perhaps placing God on the sidelines while they reassess how they select leaders and what will serve America best. Even as a secular nation we have a bloody religious history, and we’d best hug our secular, tolerant nature tighter as we continue our tightrope walk.

The first is untouched, the second modified by my Arts Editor.

Actually, it’s just what happens to some of our wall paint when the humidity climbs too high.

I am not a horror movie aficionado and have not given much thought to what makes for a successful horror movie. I suppose, like most storytelling, I expect the characters to behave in a predictable manner, and the horror comes from the disasters these predictable, even reasonable behaviors result in. This is certainly only one way; the movies Alien and its sequel, Aliens, were certainly horror movies, although lacking the noir endings most horror movies employ, and in these the reasonableness of the activities of the characters may be questioned.

From Beyond (1986) doesn’t really seem to feature such characters. From the two psychologists who behave in a most shockingly unprofessional manner to the neighbor with the little dog that bursts in on a horrific scene, these characters seem to indulge in some downright daft behaviors which lead to their downfalls with depressing accuracy. Worse yet, possibly the best-acted character in the entire movie dies halfway through, leaving the less-talented to soldier on.

Then it also makes the mistake of not being familiar with Burke’s idea of the sublime, which includes the concept of implying there’s always more, that the true beauty or horror of something is just outside of perception. Think of the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): as it emerges within the Mines of Moria, we never really see the whole thing, since flames and smoke envelop it. What we see is bad enough, but the hints of what may be far worse are just out of sight. The Watcher in the Lake is another example from the same movie.

But the monsters in From Beyond are presented in loving and complete detail – but it’s not competent. I wasn’t horrified, I was amused as the horrid primary monster tried to be frightening. For a horror movie not to be able to trigger some primal jerk of fear and terror is to admit that it is a failure. And the dated costumes and hairstyles simply add to the disaster.

For all that, there are some clever bits. The cop is played with outsized enthusiasm that I really enjoyed. The logic introduced early in the film in which the monster’s consumption of a victim results in the victim – a depraved scientist himself – taking over the monster is remembered and repeated when a more virtuous scientist is consumed and then attempts his own takeover, lending new meaning to the old phrase, You are what you eat.

And, finally, the emergence of the pineal gland from the forehead really left me thinking: what dickheads!

It’s not a movie I can recommend, although we finished it and were always curious if the movie was going to get better. Unfortunately, it did not.

While thinking about the racial composition of the Twin Cities area and the Castile tragedy, I happened to run across a link to a post on Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish with some slightly out of date relevance – a fantastic map of racial composition in the United States based on the 2010 Census, built by Dustin Cable at theUniversity of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. Andrew was referencing a Wired article:

White people are shown with blue dots; African-Americans with green; Asians with red; and Latinos with orange, with all other race categories from the Census represented by brown. Since the dots are smaller than pixels at most zoom levels, Cable assigned shades of color based on the multiple dots therein. From a distance, for example, certain neighborhoods will look purple, but zooming-in reveals a finer-grained breakdown of red and blue–or, really, black and white.

“There are a lot of moving parts in this process, so this can cause different shades of color to appear at different zoom levels in really dense areas, like you see in NYC,” Cable explains. “I played around with dot size and transparency for a while and settled on the current scheme as being adequate.” You can read more about Cable’s methodology here, but it comes down to this: When you’re dealing with 300 million dots at varying levels of zoom, getting the presentation just right is as much an art as a science.

So here’s the Twin Cities area, with Lauderdale / Falcon Heights in the center of the picture, at max zoom:

It gives an idea of how white and asian the Twin Cities area remains. Here’s a direct link to the map.

Some news on this long dormant thread from NewScientist (6 August 2016) noting research indicating a lower sperm count for the bees:

Neonicotinoid pesticides, neurotoxins used in agriculture that kill many types of insects, also cut honeybees’ live sperm count by almost 40 per cent, found Lars Straub of the Institute of Bee Health at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and his colleagues (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, doi.org/bm6x).

However, we can’t yet be sure if this is the main reason behind the major decline in bee populations, he says, because many factors are probably playing a part.

From the cited Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences article we can learn that when we apply a chemical and a bug dies, we’re happy and keep on doing it:

Advances in agrochemical research highlight a lack of knowledge of the sublethal effects of insecticides on their target insect pests [10], as well as on sympatric beneficial insects such as bees that provide vital ecosystem services [11–13]. Frequently applied neonicotinoid insecticides can affect the nervous system of insects by acting as agonists of postsynaptic nicotinic acetylcholine receptors [14–16]. Recently, they have been shown to elicit sublethal effects on several bee genera, such as impairing bumblebee queen (primary reproductive females) production and diminishing honeybee queen reproduction [17,18]. However, to date no data exist on how neonicotinoid insecticides may affect male insect reproduction.

In an odd way, this is similar to the way Israel is threatening its own water supply by punishing the Palestinians.

The tensions caused by the Grand Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia continue to persist as construction continues. AL Monitor‘s Ayah Aman reports:

“One of the key advantages of the dam is to organize the water flow all year long. Hence, we can avoid dangers of a flood and water losses caused by natural flow and evaporation, as well as alluvium accumulation problems. It will also make navigation in the Nile smoother and support peace and regional stability,” [Renaissance Dam project manager Simegnew Bekele] said.

Despite the transparency Bekele showed, as he is responsible for running Renaissance Dam construction and was showing the press delegation around the dam sites all day, he refused to answer pressing questions about when water will be stored behind the dam and the number of years it will take to fill the reservoir. The answers would help determine the amount of water that will flow to Egypt and Sudan, and represent important factors in assessing the risks Egypt might face.

I would think the filling of such a large dam will be tricky since there are downstream users dependent on that output. They probably cannot survive long-term disruptions, and yet since these will be Sudanese and Egyptians, the Ethiopians will not have an intrinsic reason to care for them. Thus the political engagement of the Sudanese and Egyptians – and, no doubt, the implicit military threat that goes with it. This is called the Tripartite Committee.

“The tripartite committee is not concerned about continuing construction or ending the project this year or any time. However, we want to make sure that filling and operating [the dam] will have the least impact on downstream countries, and will have the most benefit for [Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia],” said Saif Hamad, head of the Sudanese delegation.

The impact of the dam is to be assessed by independent French firms, but there have been holdups in signing contracts, as Africa Review reports. They also note the proposed content of the studies:

The three countries have agreed to conduct two additional studies: the first one on the effects on the water quota for Sudan and Egypt and the second on environmental, economic and social impacts of the dam on Sudan and Egypt.

An unofficial translation of the Declaration of Principles is provided by Aigaforum here.

My correspondent responds regarding Trump’s mental condition:

I don’t think Trump is capable of empathy*. It simply would not occur to him to imagine how people (gun lovers or otherwise) would feel if he announced that it was all a joke.

*Not trying to be unkind. I believe he has full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. See symptoms: http://www.mayoclinic.org/…/basics/symptoms/con-20025568

Oddly enough I was just reading about narcissism in NewScientist (9 July 2016, paywall), which was not coincidental given the obvious correspondence to Mr. Trump. This paragraph seems relevant:

Looking at data on 42 US presidents up to and including George W. Bush, Ashley Watts of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her colleagues found that those rated higher for grandiose narcissism were judged as being greater presidents: they did better on rankings of public persuasiveness, agenda-setting and the initiation of legislation, for example. However, they were also more likely to be seen as impulsive and bullying, and to face impeachment charges. The study suggests that the benefits of grandiose narcissism stem largely from its association with extroversion, whereas the downside is largely due to lack of agreeableness.

But I myself think he may be a psychopath, in which case he’d probably be aware that dropping out would be an upsetting event for his supporters.

A reader writes regarding RINOs:

I don’t think the GOP will die that easily. There’s a lot of diehards out there, and nothing so far has swayed them away from supporting Trump and other extremists like Ryan, Bachmann, etc. Facts don’t sway them in the least.

It’s not so much that the diehards won’t leave the party so much as, to quote President Reagan, the party will leave them. The diehards will be hounded out as apostates and RINOs, despite changing their core convictions not a whit, and those who leveled the accusations will progress from fringe to right wing to solid “conservatives” to slightly suspect to RINOs to having their memberships revoked if they refuse to leave on their own in outrage.

I’ll suggest an estimated lifetime, from one edge to the other, of about 4 years.

I can hear the hooves of this noxious herd now.

A reader remarks on an alluring bit of technology:

Can they make a commercially viable product by next year, please?

No, I’m afraid you’re going to have to stick with your rocks and cute water fountain.

The dangers of talking to your wife while driving somewhere is that sometimes awkward phrases are uttered.

Like Premature Forgetfulness.

This reader suggests I might need the help of some demi-god to keep up this series:

You’ll need to get more server space if you do “Petulance of the day” for the next 3 months.

Another reader has a deeper analysis:

I think I’m starting to understand Trump’s ongoing outrageousness:

If (when) he loses the election, he plans to say that he was just pranking America. “Of course I was kidding,” he’ll say. “I never wanted the job. I just wanted to see how many idiotic, horrible things I could say before people caught on, but they never did. It was the ultimate reality show, and the American voters are a bunch of losers!”

I’m completely serious. It’s a way for him to save face when Hillary shellacks him in November. Plus, we all know how much he loves to joke around.

I almost buy it until I think about the audience to whom he’s playing – they’re not likely to take his jest lightly. I hate to think this of fellow Americans, but they might try to hunt him down for playing with their affections in such a slapdash manner. Is he too egotistical to realize this?

You know the answer.

Attack of the Killer Tomato.

Plants.

Water is imperiled from many sources: weather, neglect, malicious forethought – and sometimes karma. AL Monitor‘s Shlomi Eldar explores Israel’s self-inflicted water wound:

In May, Gaza’s sewage system collapsed, and raw sewage reached the water reservoir of the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council. Gaza’s sewage plants have ceased functioning due to the lack of electricity, and left wastewater flows into Israel untreated.

“Without electricity, water cannot be produced and wastewater cannot be treated,” said Eilon Adar, a hydrologist and the former director of Ben-Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, Department of Environmental Hydrology and Microbiology in Beersheba. “An aquifer knows no borders. Water does not stop at a border. At the moment the damage is negligible, but Gaza is now dumping its untreated wastewater near the Beit Lahia wastewater treatment plant. This site, founded a number of years ago with Israel’s agreement, is only about 200 meters [660 feet] from Israel’s border and the [effluent] ‘lake’ seeps into the coastal aquifer.”

According to Adar, when Gaza’s wastewater treatment plant does not function, Israel stands to suffer as well. The ramifications of this can already be seen.

“Gaza sends wastewater to the area of the nonfunctional treatment plant, causing the water level to rise. A virtual mountain of underground water has been created that will flow to the only place in Gaza that still has drinkable water. That water will become contaminated and then disaster will hit. Once [contaminated] water permeates potable water, it will be almost impossible to fix the situation.”

So why the shortage of electricity?

The electricity crisis in Gaza began after former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert instructed the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the transformers in Gaza’s electrical station in retaliation for the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006. Although the station was partially restored, it never returned to its former level of performance.

“Today there is only one operating turbine, which supplies a bit of electricity to Gaza residents,” said one of Gaza’s largest fuel merchants, who requested anonymity. He told Al-Monitor that there is just enough fuel to partially operate one out of four small, reconstructed turbines. Before the station was destroyed it supplied some 125 megawatts. The station’s capacity, together with electricity supplied through direct lines from Israel and Egypt, guaranteed a more or less reasonable level of electricity. Now, however, the station provides no more than 50 megawatts, and the direct electricity lines from Israel and Egypt often suffer temporary cuts.

Will Netanyahu work to resolve the problem? If he doesn’t then he hurts his own people as well as inflicting suffering on the Palestinians. Sort of a negative version of the Golden Rule.

Vincent Price stars in the surprisingly limp The Last Man on Earth (1964), a movie chronicling the travails of a scientist, Robert Morgan, who is the only unchanged survivor of an unspecified bacterial plague. There are other ‘survivors’, but they die in sunlight, are averse to garlic and mirrors, and… need I go on?

Through flashbacks we see his research attempting to cure the plague (unconvincing), his arguments with a friend over the nature of the plague, and the death of his young child (thrown into a pit and burned to prevent her from “returning”). The problem with the movie begins somewhere in this sequence, as Morgan’s argument with his friend has Morgan scoffing at reports of the dead returning to ‘life’.  It’s a rather lifeless argument, and within moments we transition to the loss of his child and the death – and return to life – of his wife. He may be horrified at these events, but we’ve lost some emotional punch that goes with Morgan realizing he was wrong about the argument.

Back in the present, the physically and intellectually weakened ‘undead’ batter at Morgan’s house during the night; during the day, he searches them out and kills them with a stake, a sad activity he performs more as a duty than a matter of survival.

And then one day a dog appears. He analyzes its blood… and kills it. I think. In any case, the dog dies. This ambiguity, unintended I’m sure, is puzzling and deflating.

And then a woman appears in the daytime.  She runs away, but he catches her and brings her back to his home to discover how she has survived. She is an emissary from another group of survivors who want to know if Morgan knows more than they.

Except it’s a lie. They want to kill Morgan. Why? It’s not clear. She claims they want to kill him because he has staked some of their undead family and friends, but that’s so unconvincing that it’s not worth discussing.

So the acting is OK, the script is inadequate but not laughable, the staging is good – I really believed it was an empty city – and the corpses of those caught in daylight are effectively underplayed. I really wanted to like this movie, but I didn’t.  While the premise was worthy of attention, the conclusion was abrupt and unsatisfactory.  I’m sorry to say I can’t recommend it.

Derek Markham @ Treehugger reports on a new dryer technology:

Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with support from the US Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office and GE Appliances, has developed a prototype of an innovative clothes drying technology that could shorten drying times down to just 20 minutes, and reduce the amount of energy used for each load by 70%. Instead of using heat to remove water from clothing, this prototype uses high-frequency vibrations – ultrasonic waves – produced by piezoelectric transducers driven by a custom amplifier.

I wonder about the gotcha – ultrasonics may need to be damped. Will this still require spinning? What about failure modes? It’s interesting since, as Mark notes, home dryers consume 4% of electricity produced today. And big efficiency increases are cool. The question will be whether this can be made consumer-tough and -safe.

The news is positively frothing with this. From CNN:

Trump was asked by host Hugh Hewitt about the comments Trump made Wednesday night in Florida, and Hewitt said he understood Trump to mean “that he (Obama) created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”

On Lawfare Stephanie Leutert interviews security analyst Alejandro Hope to discover the possible reasons behind a surge in murders in Mexico:

Hypothesis #1: Ongoing Cartel Fragmentation

Since 2007, the Mexican government has more aggressively targeted cartel leadership, effectively using the so-called kingpin approach to decapitate criminal groups. Former President Calderón killed or captured 25 of his 37 most wanted narcos and current President Peña Nieto has already “neutralized” 100 of his top 122. Such blows may weaken Mexico’s criminal groups, but they don’t mean less bloodshed. Often, it’s the opposite.

Each downed kingpin means a leadership succession, frequently characterized by power vacuums, internal struggles, and splinter groups. When Calderón took office in 2007, there were five recognized cartels. Today, if you take the Attorney General’s count, there are nine cartels and forty-three fragmented cells, or if you prefer to listen to Mexico’s chief criminal prosecutor, it’s two cartels and hundreds of splinter groups.

Either way, with each additional actor on the fractured criminal landscape, there is another set of armed criminals trying to enforce its rules over a slice of land. And there are the inevitable bloody clashes when those frontiers overlap.

In another section we learn Mexico supplies about half of the heroin used in the United States. While I find it difficult to justify the legalization of cocaine, since it’s far more destructive than marijuana, it would certainly be interesting to know – or at least model – the effect of such a legalization on the gangs of Mexico.

From a real court opinion:

We’re beginning to think we have an inkling of Sisyphus’s fate. Courts of law exist to resolve disputes so that both sides might move on with their lives. Yet here we are, forty years in, issuing our seventh opinion in the Ute line and still addressing the same arguments we have addressed so many times before.

Thirty years ago, this court decided all boundary disputes between the Ute Indian Tribe, the State of Utah, and its subdivisions. The only thing that remained was for the district court to memorialize that mandate in a permanent injunction. Twenty years ago, we modified our mandate in one respect, but stressed that in all others our decision of a decade earlier remained in place. Once more, we expected this boundary dispute to march expeditiously to its end. Yet just last year the State of Utah and several of its counties sought to relitigate those same boundaries. And now one of its cities tries to do the same thing today. Over the last forty years the questions haven’t changed – and neither have our answers. We just keep rolling the rock.

(h/t Howard Bashman of the How Appealing blog)

The Republican party continues to gnaw at its intestines, as can be seen in the reactions of some of Trump’s supporters to his formal endorsement of House Speaker Paul Ryan. This is from RawStory:

The trio of endorsements – especially the one for Mr. Ryan – shocked some of Mr. Trump’s diehard supporters.

“He has broken our heart doing this tonight,” said Trump supporter Sue Payne, a conservative activist working to defeat Mr. Ryan.

“We finally thought we had a voice to stand up against the RINO establishment. He sold us out,” she said. “What happened tonight is the establishment got their claws in him and they are pulling the strings. What do we believe now?”

Speaker Ryan was described by Nate Silver at the time of his selection for nominee for VP, in 2012:

Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

By this measure, in fact, which rates members of the House and Senate throughout different time periods on a common ideology scale, Mr. Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center. (The statistic does not provide scores for governors and other vice-presidential nominees who never served in Congress.)

The deployment of the epithet RINO – Republican in Name Only – against the most conservative House Speaker in living memory, and most likely since the Civil War, as if he were working with the Democrats, either correlates with the extremist views of Ms Payne and her compatriots, or with their thirst for power. In either case, to label them as ‘conservative’ seems like a typo.

I do not recall if I’ve suggested this before, but I believe that one of the tactical moves the GOP organization must make if it is to persist as a national party is to take action whenever one GOP member deploys the term RINO against another GOP member: return their dues, kick them out of the party, and publicize it. Otherwise the party will continue its accelerating race to extremist positions with which most true conservatives cannot, as a moral matter, be associated.

Eventually, it’ll be party of two people, and one will be on probation.

This is one of those achievements I admire because it uses waste materials to do something useful. Really useful. From IT News Africa:

Using orange peels and avocado skins, [Kiara Nirghin of South Africa] has managed to create a material, that can hold hundreds of times its weight in water, in the soil. This super absorbent polymer then acts as a water reservoir in the earth.

By saving water this way, her idea could have a massive impact on how the continent manages the effects of climate change in years to come. And, because it’s made from orange and avocado skins, it won’t break the budget of local farmers, like so many other water storage devices currently do.

I do wonder how this disturbance in water movement will impact the environment. Water – potentially a lot of it – won’t go somewhere that it was going. This could have effects ranging from someone else going thirsty or hungry to impacts on weather systems.

But it’s still really cool.

The final pics from the vacation …

From my mother-in-law’s garden.