Author Archives: Hue White

With regard to stadium noise a reader writes,

Noise exposure, like hazardous chemical exposure, is tricky to measure. The relevant concept is DOSE. Dose is a factor of volume (or concentration) and duration. Most high noise exposures are short duration. Think gun shots or other impact noises. Not a real problem unless, for ex, you’re a competitive skeet shooter or pile driver. Of greater import are continuous high volume noises like those experienced by musicians and concert goers. A big deal, especially for higher frequency noise.

Right. Energy / volume¹, basically – with enough volume, who cares how much energy? Although there’s the trickier question of point of origin of the energy, and in a stadium there will be multiple sources. Time to call in an acoustic engineer.

¹Odd how ‘volume’ can mean 3 dimensional space or audio level, and that it is confusing in this context; I mean it in the former sense in this case.

Today we lost Smudge, our little tuxedo cat we inherited from my parents. While she was clearly slowing down, we were still surprised when she abruptly started falling apart Wednesday. The vet confirmed her third bout of cancer, and she wouldn’t survive surgery. Following is the obituary written by Deb, who had been principle caretaker of Smudge.

Today we lost our sweet little black and white kitty, Smudge. She was approaching 17 years old.

When she came to us, she was a scared, silent 14 year old who hid all day long. Within six months, she was a charming, loving lap cat and constant companion. Eventually she developed into the boss of the household, with Hue & I filling the role of loyal servants. She survived two cancer surgeries, but today has finally succumbed to cancer and old age. She was an utter delight, and despite regularly bombing the rugs and peeing in my shoes, we loved her and will miss her terribly.

RIP, Smudge. August 26, 2016.

Lookout Blog is dedicated to tracking spyware and the vulnerabilities they use to accomplish their tasks. A recent posting details how governments may use spyware against those who threaten the power-base:

Ahmed Mansoor is an internationally recognized human rights defender and a Martin Ennals Award Laureate (sometimes referred to as a “Nobel prize for human rights”), based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). On August 10th and 11th, he received text messages promising “secrets” about detainees tortured in UAE jails if he clicked on an included link. Instead of clicking, Mansoor sent the messages to Citizen Lab researchers. Recognizing the links as belonging to an exploit infrastructure connected to NSO group, Citizen Lab collaborated with Lookout to determine that the links led to a chain of zero-day exploits that would have jailbroken Mansoor’s iPhone and installed sophisticated malware.

This marks the third time Mansoor has been targeted with “lawful intercept” malware. Previous Citizen Lab research found that in 2011 he was targeted with FinFisher spyware, and in 2012 with Hacking Team spyware. The use of such expensive tools against Mansoor shows the lengths that governments are willing to go to target activists.

Citizen Lab also found evidence that state-sponsored actors used NSO’s exploit infrastructure against a Mexican journalist who reported on corruption by Mexico’s head of state, and an unknown target or targets in Kenya.

The NSO group used fake domains, impersonating sites such as the International Committee for the Red Cross, the U.K. government’s visa application processing website, and a wide range of news organizations and major technology companies. This nods toward the targeted nature of this software.

It’s interesting – and depressing – to note how a government operates at one level of civilization, while a journalist might be argued is unique to another level of civilization. The more barbarian government operates against its own citizen/journalist using the most modern of tools in order to preserve its power.

On Vox Sarah Kliff digs into the recent Epipen controversy, and I found some parts … unsatisfying – because they are not thought through:

In Europe, Canada, and Australia, governments view the market for cures as essentially uncompetitive and set the price as part of a bureaucratic process, similar to how electricity or water are priced in regulated US utility markets.

Other countries do this for drugs and medical care — but not other products, like phones or cars — because of something fundamentally unique about medication: If consumers can’t afford the product, they could have worse odds of living. In some cases, they face quite certain odds of dying. So most governments have decided that keeping these products affordable is a good reason to introduce more government regulation.

So if I can find an example of an unregulated product without which life is worse – even endangered – and yet the very thought of regulating the product will cause gales of laughter, then Sarah’s argument is in trouble.

Here’s one.

Parkas in Minnesota. (Sure, we could go with heavy coats or even clothing, but parka is more fun.)

Regulating the price of parkas seems, on the face of it, to be silly – but take it from me, being in Minnesota, in January, without a parka is just begging to make you either housebound or cold enough to hurt. Even die.

This is one of the kinds of arguments which will erupt – and rightfully – from the free markets crowd. Why would we regulate the price of parkas? Understanding and stating why we don’t is important.

Details matter.

Get the details wrong and you may end up with a solution that solves nothing and engenders scorn from the other side of the aisle. And while some will scorn you regardless – these are the dead-ender ideologues – there will be those who listen, who think, and if you can convince them, you may find you have a bi-partisan effort. But you have to have the details right, and understand that these sorts of arguments are often non-linear – that is, a detail may skew a solution way out of its apparent importance.

Understanding the differentiating factors between life saving drugs and life saving parkas may lead to a better understanding of how to solve what appears to be a problem – and to understand what might be a temporary problem. Let’s abstract a bit – why do we forbid monopolies and price-setting conspiracies? Because this is how prices get too high.  The latter case is clearly a violation of the ideals of free markets, where competition is cherished; in the real world, we only cherish it when we’re not on top, but once we’re king of the hill then, for most folks, competition is a bane on one’s existence. It’s much easier to influence lawmakers to suppress that up-and-comer than to come up with the topper to the competition’s new product. Company’s must be forced to compete.

In the former case, that of monopolies, this time we’re protecting consumers from an instability in the free market system. Free marketers will claim that a competitor will spring up to depose the king; I’m not certain about market histories to comment on the claim.

Back to Sarah’s article:

When drug companies set their American prices, they don’t focus on the price of making the pills. Instead, they look at what their competitors already charge for similar products and try to land their price somewhere in the same range, regardless of production costs or how good the drug actually is. Since most drugs are already expensive, new drugs keep matching those prices.

This does not match the traditional narrative of a market in which competitors step the prices of the products down as costs slide over production runs and competitors slide their prices down in hopes of securing market share. Because it doesn’t, I think it’s important Sarah state why she believes this narrative doesn’t apply in general.

More detailed, “they don’t focus on the price of making the pills” is no doubt accurate, but the follow-on is misleading – because most pharmaceuticals have to cover the costs of not only the research to validate the efficacy and safety of this particular pill, but also the costs of those products which failed somewhere along the development path. There’s more to this process than just manufacturing.

Her description is actually reminiscent of a monopoly situation in which there’s a conspiracy to raise prices – which is illegal and can lead to serious fines and jail time. I don’t think this is happening in general. But perhaps that assertion, or a related assertion, could be fruitfully applied to the Epipen situation. But evidence should be supplied.

Sarah goes on to reference how prices are set in other countries – an interesting process – but doesn’t address the free market concern of how regulated pricing would affect the decisions of the pharmas in deciding which biomed problems to pursue next. How much are pharmaceuticals developed for the American market vs regulated markets? If we went regulated, how would that change?

I’ve talked about the problem of the intrusion of the practices of one sector into another in this thread, but I have no ready solutions of my own. While many researchers are motivated by personal losses or a sense of contributing to society, or even just ravenous curiosity and drive to achieve, the investors who fund the efforts, whose funds by the critical supplies and pays the salaries, often, though not always, are driven by a quest for profits – often large profits. How do you replace them? How do you replace those researchers who are driven by money? How do you handle the lost investments, of those efforts which failed?

Tough questions. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced by Sarah’s narrative. And if you can’t get reasonable free marketers and conservatives on board, any solution appears dubious.

And if the Epipen is suddenly faced with a competitor priced at a tenth of the Epipen’s, much like happened to Daraprim? Sarah mentions Daraprim – but not the competition aspect which arose a few months later, and what happened to Shkreli, the CEO that raised the price of Daraprim. How will this impact her argument, if it happens?

I have my doubts about how the medical sector is impinged upon by the private sector (see here) – and I wish Sarah had perhaps asked whether the free market, as defined by Adam Smith, is appropriate for the medical area. The arguments made here are uneven, and in several cases, unconvincing.

This post sparked some worries from readers. Here’s one:

Just more fuel for my arguments that (1) there are already too many people, (2) larger corporations never behave in any kind of moral or sustainable fashion — it’s just inherent to the system and rules surrounding large* institutions. (*where “large” is some unknown size but at which any moral helm provided by the founders ceases to have major effect)

Quite possibly. In my book, one of the functions of government is to prevent harm by the corporations, seeking redress when necessary. Another:

What about the old munitions plant I believe it is Shore View. After all this time, what about the ground water there? They say it has been cleaned up but to be honest I don’t think it has been either.

Later corrected to Arden Hills. I know it’s been unused for decades, but I’m not sure how the water has been treated. I think my Arts Editor knows more. Its official name was Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant. That page notes,

What’s left to do

• Groundwater treatment is expected to continue until approximately 2040. The Army will continue to operate and pay for groundwater treatment, even if part of the property is sold.
• While the historical waste disposal areas have all been addressed, some areas of soil contamination, particularly under existing buildings, require additional investigation and possible cleanup. The best time to complete this task is when the buildings are demolished.

Frank Vyan Walton on The Daily Kos mounts a spirited defense of the Clinton Foundation:

Mr. Mook mentions some of the above, but he doesn’t elaborate because Bash should already know all this, but quiteobviously she doesn’t. He does point out that while George W. Bush was president, members of his family were a part of several foreign boards, specifically George H.W. Bush. He was a member of the Carlyle Group which had Saudi investors including members of the Bin Laden family.  GHW Bush also ran the Points of Light Foundation while he was President. While Senator Bob Dole was running for president in 1996, his wife, Elizabeth Dole, was collecting a$200,000/year salary as head of the American Red Cross.

So what Bill Clinton is offering to do, stepping down from his own charity organization and ending his paid speeches which essentially kills his own personal revenue stream, is actually going far, far above and beyond what anyone has ever been expected to do in the past.

It is true that Saudi Arabia gave $10 million to the Foundation largely to help fund the Clinton Library (they also gave a similar amount to support the George W. Bush Presidential Library) but that they stopped giving anything while Clinton was Secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation lists its donors, which actually goes above and beyond legal requirements because charities don’t have to do that, but it doesn’t specify exactly when they gave in most cases, so many of the claims that they accepted foreign donations between 2008-2012 are not very well confirmed as noted by PolitiFact.

While ambling about the parking lot at work today, I chanced upon a delivery truck with the logo FedEx Express on it.

Now, I recall when FedEx was actually Federal Express, which leaves me wondering …

Does that logo really expand to Federal Express Express?

Or am I just sliding down the hill into literality hell?

Back in October 2015 I mentioned the University of British Columbia was building the tallest wood structure in the world. Treehugger.com reports the structure is finished – not meaning it’s ready for occupation, but the essentials are in place:

Image: Acton Ostry Architects

And of course TreeHugger loves it because wood is a renewable resource, and building with it sequesters carbon dioxide. In this building, according to Hermann Kaufmann, “the carbon stored in the mass timber structure, plus avoided greenhouse gas emissions, results in a total estimated carbon benefit of 2,563 tonnes of CO2, which is equivalent to taking 490 cars off the road for a year.”

Up and ahead of schedule. Gotta like that. They report the stairs are made of poured concrete – I wonder if the next ‘tall wood’ building will try to avoid that as well?

Kate Raddatz at local CBS affiliate WCCO reports on a problem at the new US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis:

“Stadiums for a long time have had noise levels that can be damaging to your hearing,” Dr. David Geddes, an audiologist for HealthPartners, said.

U.S. Bank Stadium could be the loudest stadium Minnesota has ever seen. The Minnesota Vikings website says the roof on U.S. Bank Stadium features more “acoustically reflective material” and “should make the stadium louder” than the Metrodome.

A local radio station measured the sound during the soccer match at U.S. Bank Stadium reaching over 105 decibels. HealthPartners says that is ten times louder than the volume at an average NFL stadium.

Dr. Geddes says any sound over 85 decibels can damage tiny cells inside the ear. Even if your ears stop ringing after a loud event, you could have problems down the line.

And what is stadium management doing about this damaging environment?

The Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority said ear plugs will be handed out for events at U.S. Bank Stadium.

I’m sorry, but I’m just an engineer. I generally prefer to fix problems – not offer band-aids while not covering the runaway band saw that’s cutting children in half.

I suppose someone will tell me why a class action suit is just not possible. Maybe ticket buyers give away their constitutional rights when they agree to buy a ticket. I know I’d write that into the purchase agreement if I were the lawyer in charge of writing the legal verbiage of a stadium ticket.

But the fact is that this is a human-created environment, and there’s no reason it should damage your hearing.

We step into A Blueprint for Murder (1953) to the cries of a little girl, in a hospital setting off-camera, screaming, “no one touch my feet!”

That’s known as a hook.

We follow the travails of a man (played by Joseph Cotten) called to the bed of his niece by her stepmother, the attractive Lynne (Jean Peters). The father, his brother, died months ago. The girl begins to recover and the man and woman, along with the man’s young nephew, go to the stepmother’s luxury condo for dinner.

And then the little girl abruptly dies. Eventually, the delayed autopsy indicates strychnine.

This tense, gripping drama is a psychological exploration masquerading as a murder mystery. Make no mistake, there’s a murder mystery, but it mainly serves as a backdrop for the emotional torment of a man who’s gradually led to believe that his highly attractive and now available ex-sister-in-law may have killed his niece, and even possibly his brother. He can’t believe it – women don’t kill. But the meddling wife of his lawyer points out some uncomfortable facts.  Police become involved, but the legal system rebuffs the attempts to put her on trial and to separate the boy from his stepmother.

And now our protagonist is left with a terrible dilemma, as he believes his nephew is in danger.

My Arts Editor and I had seen this before, but we were still riveted. These moral questions that are posed and resolved in the plot exist for every society built on the belief that justice is a key to a peaceful, satisfying society, and the concepts are as relevant and important today as they were in 1953. The movie may involve old fashioned phones and ocean liners, but rather than feeling dated, it’s simply part of the background. The mental agonies of our protagonist are fully motivated, Right up to the final twist, we’re wondering – what would we do?

Highly Recommended.

And now, having written this review, I read the “Critical Reception” section in Wikipedia, from which I learn the New York Times had little good to say about it. IMDB gives it 6.8/10. Rotten Tomatoes has an audience score of 62/100, with only 1 critic contribution (“well-acted”).

So your mileage may vary.

Fair warning: The 3 Day Novel contest is upon us, namely September 3-5. My Arts Editor & I participated several years ago, and while we didn’t make the short list, we had both fun and some pain as we spent three days madly writing, rewriting, and (at least the AE) cursing the computer that ate a sex scene revision.

It’s an interesting experience because the rough ideas with which you plunge into the contest begin to refine, mutate, explode, reassemble – and generate people. Oh, sure, they’re characters in your story, but if you’re doing this right their voices start to echo in your head, asking you why you’re forcing decisions upon them with which they disagree, even haring off on adventures which you never planned.

We do not plan to enter this year, we’ve been too busy to plan anything. Not that plans are all that necessary, but we (or at least I) don’t feel ready to devote three days to just writing.

Although put that way, it’s a bit tempting.

Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare continues to report on the apparent breach of the NSA by hackers. He has some questions he’d like Congress to ask the NSA:

When did NSA become aware of the breach? The answer to this initial question affects the subsequent questions. Whether NSA knew about the breach in 2013 or shortly thereafter or whether the agency learned of it approximately when the rest of the world did, there are significant implications.

If the NSA was aware of the breach in 2013, why didn’t they contact Fortinet and Cisco?

…

If NSA only recently learned of the breach, what failed?

Nicholas has a series of good questions, but I’m a little curious as to why we think Congress will be asking these questions when they couldn’t be troubled to properly address the potential Zika outbreak – which appears to be slowly blossoming before our eyes.

I also found this interesting:

Further affecting the calculation as to whether these exploits should have been retained is the ease of exploitation. Although both exploits require a privileged location—namely having previously compromised a system administrator’s computer—the actual exploits themselves are easy to recreate—they are classic “buffer overflow” attacks of the sort that undergraduate computer science students learn to exploit.

Credit: WUHAN MACHINE EQUIPMENT CO LTD

The important point here should really be, How much longer will we continue to use error-prone computer languages in mission critical systems? Honestly, buffer overflow attacks date back 30 years if not more, and we should really be using languages that simply do NOT PERMIT these sorts of errors to occur. This is like using humans to dig huge tunnels these days – it’s a waste of the humans’ time. Instead, you rent a tunnel digger and it does the job without risking human lives.

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

CNN has a nice video on the rocky planet orbiting nearby Proxima Centauri. Space.com provides a description of how the planet was found, along with this lovely artist’s impression.

The discovery of Proxima b was a long time in the making.

Astronomers have been hunting intensively for planets around Proxima Centauri for more 15 years, using instruments such as the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) and the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), both of which are installed on telescopes run by the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

UVES, HARPS and other instruments like them allow researchers to detect the slight wobbles in a star’s movement caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

Astronomers found hints of such a wobble back in 2013, but the signal was not convincing, Anglada-Escude said. So he and a number of other researchers launched a campaign to ferret out the planet. They called this effort the Pale Red Dot — a nod to Carl Sagan’s famous description of Earth as a “pale blue dot,” and the fact that Proxima Centauri is a small, dim star known as a red dwarf.

Local CBS affiliate WCCO is reporting that the water has become undrinkable in portions of Washington County, which is to the east of the Twin Cities, due to leakage from a landfill:

Dozens of homeowners in Washington County are being told not to drink their well water. The Minnesota Department of Health says well water at about 80 homes contains concerning levels of man-made pollutants called PFCs, which are often found in firefighting foam.

Years ago, 3M used the chemicals at their Woodbury, Oakdale and Cottage Grove sites and legally disposed of them at the Lake Elmo landfill.  From there, the pollutants leaked into ground water.

“We never drink the well water,” said Terry Hickey.

Hickey said there is a lot to like about his Lake Elmo neighborhood. But when it comes to his well water, he’ll use it for everything but drinking.

“Ever since we found out about it, we get bottled water,” said Hickey.

And the homeowners will be provided bottled water, partially by 3M.

This isn’t so much condemnatory as emblematic of the future that will be faced by many in the United States in the future as landfills containing noxious chemical degrade¹ and begin leaking. Cleaning these landfills will no doubt be expensive – and time consuming, not only due to the difficulties, but because leaching into aquifers may take years, so cleaning those aquifers will take at least as many years, simply as a result of the physics of the matter – unless we find ways to force-flush cleansers through the earth and into the aquifers, since the pathway to the aquifer also needs cleansing.

This will be a sobering time, and while opportunity will arise because of this unfortunate situation, it’s going to be mostly about the cost and dangers of our previous polluting ways, whether it’s here in relatively clean Minnesota, or out in some manufacturing city.

The truly frustrating part will be the continued pollution by those who don’t wish to acknowledge their responsibility, who still want to be pollute as did their forefathers – and don’t understand that the far greater population density. Perhaps they should have to take a course in conscious capitalism.

¹In a sense, ‘degrading’ is simply what nature tends to do, dispersing concentrations into the general ‘soup’ of the planet, as it were.

CNN/Money reports that the second test flight of the Airlander 10 has ended in a slight incident:

The 300-feet long Airlander 10 nosedived on its return to an airfield north of London after spending more than an hour and half in the air.

“The Airlander experienced a heavy landing and the front of the flight deck has sustained some damage which is currently being assessed,” Hybrid Air Vehicles, the British company behind the aircraft, said in a statement.

The company did not explain what caused the crash but said all planned tasks were completed during the flight. The pilots were unhurt, it added.

New flight craft always encounter bumps along the way. The nice thing about it happening with lighter than air craft is that it’s more often survivable.

Joshua Sokol has published an article in NewScientist (13 August 2016, paywall) on potential ocean life in the solar system. I found a sidebar on the nature of life on Saturn’s moon Titan to be particularly interesting.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho

Astrobiologists have speculated that any life there might run on an entirely alien chemistry. Some suggest that microbes could make a living by breathing hydrogen and eating organic molecules like acetylene and ethane. The Cassini probe has spied evidence of chemical activity in Titan’s atmosphere that seems consistent with the idea.

There could, of course, be non-biological explanations for this activity, but the only way to know what causes it is to visit Titan. No such mission has yet been signed off, but recent work has given us fresh impetus by suggesting that the moon’s ice-cold chemistry would offer the toolkit required to make weird analogues of the molecules that support life on Earth.

In 2015, a team at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, constructed a flexible, cell-membrane-like structure using only the ingredients and conditions available on Titan. Earlier this year, Martin Rahm, also at Cornell, and colleagues did some modelling to show that Titan should possess the chemicals required to create even more complex molecules.

Hydrogen cyanide is abundant in Titan’s atmosphere and should rain down on the surface, but it doesn’t appear to build up there. Instead, Rahm suggests, hydrogen cyanide combines with other molecules when it lands, forming larger ones made of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen called polyimines – and these could form the backbone of an alternative biology.

At terrestrial temperatures, these chemical structures would fall apart. In the cryogenic seas of Titan, however, they would be preserved and could take on a wide array of forms, some of which could carry out primitive versions of the reactions in living cells here on Earth. Rahm says they might even float to the surface of tidal pools as membrane-like films, or as mats of stacked, crystalline molecules.

Trying to visualize an entire ecology built along these lines, at the low temperatures present on Titan, leaves me breathless.

Osotua.

LIFE isn’t easy as a Maasai herder on the Serengeti plain in eastern Africa. At any moment, disease could sweep through your livestock, the source of almost all your wealth. Drought could parch your pastures, or bandits could steal the herd. No matter how careful you are, or how hard you work, fate could leave you destitute. What’s a herder to do?

The answer is simple: ask for help. Thanks to a Maasai tradition known as osotua – literally, umbilical cord – anyone in need can request aid from their network of friends. Anyone who’s asked is obliged to help, often by giving livestock, as long as it doesn’t jeopardise their own survival. No one expects a recipient to repay the gift, and no one keeps track of how often a person asks or gives.

— “The kindness paradox: Why be generous?” by Bob Holmes, NewScientist (13 August 2016, paywall)

The cultural struggles in Iran have analogies in the United States – but are far more sharply delineated, due to the overtly religious nature of the country. Take this report by Rohollah Faghihi in AL Monitor:

Hard-liners say [President Rouhani’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ali] Jannati is crossing the red lines of the 1979 Islamic Revolution’s values, while Reformists charge that he is retreating in the face of criticism and attacks by conservatives.

During the past decade, concerts have rarely made waves, but ever since Rouhani took office, concert organizers have repeatedly faced obstruction and consequent cancellation.

To avoid concert cancellations, which damage Rouhani’s approval ratings, the administration has issued a circular to prevent other state bodies such as the judiciary and the police from calling them off. The circular states that the police isn’t allowed to stop concerts. Jannati has said that based on the new law, singers shall request permission to hold a concert from the Ministry of Culture, while the police is only to deal with traffic around the venue. In response, the deputy head of Iran’s armed forces, Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, ordered the police to continue “dealing with ethical and misbehavior anomalies in places, including concert venues.” …

The judiciary and police in the province have recently stopped planned concerts by acclaimed traditional singers such as Shahram Nazeri and Salar Aghili. Explaining the cancellation of Aghili’s concert, Khorasan Razavi’s General Prosecutor Gholam-Ali Sadeghi said, “There were some problems regarding the content and performance of concerts, as well as the outfits of the audience. … This led to different classes of people [such as] seminarians and senior clerics complaining to the prosecutor’s office about concert performances in the religious capital of Iran.”

The hardliners may even be upsetting the notoriously conservative Supreme Leader Khamenei:

” … Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei is an artist, poet, musicologist and scholar.”

The supreme leader has in the past expressed his views on music and concerts. In a notable speech two decades ago, he said, “The music in our region hasn’t been used for higher goals, which is in contrast to the path of music in Europe. You know that I am naturally anti-Western. Nothing in the West fascinates me. At the same time, I approve of the positive characteristics of the West. One of those attributes is music. … Informative and meaningful music has long existed there. … In the West, sometimes a nation has been saved by music.”

Properly abstracted, it’s battles over power cloaked in religion.

Reminds me of the history of the Vatican.

I’ve been pondering whether or not to respond to an email missive I received a few days ago. On the one hand, it’s a deceptive crock of shit, which I detest especially when it’s used to attack anyone. On the other hand, I get tired of digging through crocks of shit, and no doubt my readers tire of it as well.

But it’s bugging me.

So here’s the mail in totality:

The problems begin and end with context, specifically those of President Truman and of the Clintons. Let’s set them.

President Truman, successor to the Presidency after the death of President Roosevelt in 1945, was a machine politician, which is to say he worked for the Democrats and did what he was told until he achieved higher office. Not that he lacked leadership skills, as he demonstrated in his military service during WW I, rising to Major before discharge, but his political career was more to fill positions that needed filling than as a standout politician; even his selection to run for VP was as a second choice.

His education was undistinguished, not attaining a college degree.

Finally, his environment: a world devastated by two World Wars. While certain individuals, such as the Kennedys, were wealthy, there wasn’t a lot of loose change waiting to be swept up by casual janitors, and Truman wasn’t even willing to do that – refusing corporate endorsement opportunities, etc. As a poor businessman prior to his political career, he had little to build and live on, and basically survived on the Presidential pension.

A reader comments about water & cities:

“It is not overly dramatic to say that the world’s “use once and throw away” attitude has enabled a slow-motion water apocalypse.”

I posit that our population is already beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth; we’ve been borrowing from the future in our usage of water, crop land, forests, and hydrocarbon fuels for decades.

Someone needs to develop a virus which causes sterility in all post-infant humans alive today, so that there is not another birth until those infants (and those in gestation) grow to adulthood. And even that might not be enough of a dip in population. I suspect the “adjustment” will be a lot more nasty than that fanciful notion when it comes.

In my darker moments I figure it’s going to be a nasty plague which will leave the survivors with two tasks: burying the dead and learning how to restrain our reproductive capabilities to stay within the carrying capacity.

How we step over the “all [human] life is sacred” line, without justifying casual murder, will be quite an accomplishment. Cordwainer Smith approached that problem in his two Norstrilia stories – when a child reached the age of majority, they were examined by representatives of the government (the “Instrumentality”) as to whether they would be contributing members of society, and those who didn’t pass were humanely killed. The criteria were skipped over, as it wasn’t really the point of the series.

I suspect we’ll never get there, and will instead discover population dynamics apply to humans as well as deer, wolves, and other creatures which consume resources. We’re just good at dodging the bullet, as it were.

Controversy has come to a subject that’s a kissin’ cousin (sorry) to sex robots – child sized robots and allied Virtual Reality (VR) constructs for pedophiles. Aviva Rutkin reports on it in NewScientist (13 August 2016):

But what if dolls like these could help rather than hurt? Ron Arkin, a robotics engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Kate Darling, who studies human-robot interaction at MIT argue that virtual reality and sex robots might function as an outlet to redirect dark desires towards machines and away from real children. If it works, it could help past offenders reintegrate harmlessly into society as well as helping prevent those who have never offended from doing so.

I’m puzzled – should these two be considered expert on what is basically a psychological subject? But here’s one:

… [Patrice Renaud, a psychologist at the University of Montreal, Canada,] began to wonder if VR pornography could do better, and avoid the moral concerns posed by real pictures. In a series of experiments, he and his team showed that non-deviant men and sexual offenders both responded realistically to VR stimuli. …

But so little is known – what will happen if a pedophile is given free rein with a child sized sex robot?

But Renaud cautions that it may also have the opposite effect: a bot could normalise the behaviour and promote “the need to go further and to cross the line with real victims”.

A real dilemma. We may have a treatment for pedophilia to hand – or a tool for removing the last restraint for those who’ve not indulged. And we really don’t know offhand. If there’s some way to discover which we have, without exposing a pedophile to it, then that’s the way to go – but what if there isn’t? What if it’s just a matter of trying it?

Do you do it?

Adding to the swirl of Saudi Arabian politics are concerns about the impending American Presidential election, as Bruce Riedel reports in AL Monitor:

Trump is a scary unknown for the Saudis. His vitriolic anti-Muslim rhetoric and tough talk about countries that preach radical Islam is seen as a threat. They noticed that in his foreign policy speech last week, Saudi Arabia was not included in the list of friends of America (Trump listed Israel, Egypt and Jordan but none of the Gulf states). He did talk about how poor Saudi visa vetting let al-Qaeda extremists into the United States before 9/11.

Trump promises to tear up the Iran deal but he seems to be in cahoots with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has no foreign policy experience and his advisers aren’t known for their expertise on the Gulf. Trump has also said that the United States should have kept Iraq’s oil wealth after the 2003 invasion, a very alarming precedent for the kingdom.

Clinton, as secretary of state, is a well-known figure in Riyadh. The Saudis are much more comfortable with her and her advisers, and have a long history with the Clintons. They were extremely disappointed that Bill didn’t press Israel harder and tougher in 2000 to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict when they thought he would. Instead, he blamed the Palestinians.

Clinton sought to advance political reform in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, which helped prompt the Saudi intervention on the island. She was part of the Obama team that dumped Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. She backed the Iran deal. Riyadh expects a Clinton White House to be a continuation of Obama, whom they soured on years ago. Continuity is not what the Saudis are hoping for in US policy.

So the Saudi royal family is rather gloomy – neither candidate looks sympathetic to their concerns. Which are …

Riyadh sees the ever closer relations between Iran, Russia, Syria, Hezbollah and Shiite Iraqis as a fundamental shift in the strategic environment in the Middle East. One Saudi commentator with close connections to the royal family labeled the Russian deployment a strategic “shock” that demonstrates how badly the United States underestimated Iranian and Russian aggressive intentions.

The Saudis always feared the Iran nuclear deal would end Tehran’s pariah status and give it more strategic options. Saudi efforts to buy off Moscow have been a failure. …

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir is a veteran America watcher. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef is the most pro-American prince since King Fahd. As defense minister, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has sought to reassure Washington that he is ready for prime time despite his inexperience. Riyadh has bought over $110 billion in arms from Obama. But there is no confidence in the Saudi leadership about the future of American leadership. Meanwhile, Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are growing closer. Saudi paranoia about Iran is exaggerated but nonetheless a reality unlikely to change.

Note the sweet red limbs of this babe of the Swiss.

Swiss Chard, it is.

For those who worry that the United States is becoming a vast land of intolerant shitheads, here’s a bit of relief: CNN reports on a waitress stiffed out of a tip because the customers thought she was an illegal immigrant (she was born in the USA), and how the community rallied around her:

When locals heard what happened, a group of residents wrote a note to the waitress.

“We appreciate and value your hard work in taking care of the people in the community…you are the one who belongs in downtown,” the Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance letter said.

Included with the note: a tip. A substantial one.

Gotta hope the folks who indulged in this fine fit of xenophobia heard about the response. To me, it’s a profound violation of American ideals of generosity towards those who work with and for us to treat the waitress in such a thoughtless hostile manner.

For the record, the Pew Research Center reports illegal immigrant flow has been falling under the Obama Administration:

Which, on first blush, suggests we’re returning more illegals home than are entering. However, there are other factors, such as deaths, voluntary returns, and no doubt others that don’t occur to me at the moment.