Author Archives: Hue White

The problem of passwords has been around for a long time. Its grandparents are such things as the recognition passwords used by the military in the field for centuries, with cousins including learning to recognize the clothing common to the enemy so they can be cornered and captured.

But I digress. Passwords have been a problem for me ever since I started logging into computers: learning them, having someone break them, re-learning them, changing them, and again. Social media and multiple, multiple sites demanding them just made it harder. And, now, Big Tech thinks they’ll be solving the problem:

Apple, Google and Microsoft announced this week they will soon support an approach to authentication that avoids passwords altogether, and instead requires users to merely unlock their smartphones to sign in to websites or online services. Experts say the changes should help defeat many types of phishing attacks and ease the overall password burden on Internet users, but caution that a true passwordless future may still be years away for most websites.

The tech giants are part of an industry-led effort to replace passwords, which are easily forgotten, frequently stolen by malware and phishing schemes, or leaked and sold online in the wake of corporate data breaches.

Apple, Google and Microsoft are some of the more active contributors to a passwordless sign-in standard crafted by the FIDO (“Fast Identity Online”) Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), groups that have been working with hundreds of tech companies over the past decade to develop a new login standard that works the same way across multiple browsers and operating systems. …

“This new approach protects against phishing and sign-in will be radically more secure when compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS,” the alliance wrote on May 5. [KrebsOnSecurity]

Maybe. This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I have no clue as to the technical approach. But fixes that fix everything are frequently disasters.

And, of course, you must have a smartphone to participate.

I wonder if this is an early sign of the Internet apocalypse. Between trying to solve a hard problem by requiring someone own yet more high technology, and the addictive hell hole that social media often becomes, I wonder if we’re nearing the end of the Web Age.

Probably not. There’s always a youngster ready to take the place of a bruised and bloodied oldster.

But I’ve been musing on the thought that the absolutism noted by a number of pundits, from myself to Andrew Sullivan to Erick Erickson to, well, anyone distrustful of ideological zealots, has been accentuated by the leveling of the playing field. This idea is closely allied to the much observed loss of gatekeepers, the editors and others of newspapers and magazines who acted as default censors, operating under the valid excuse of limited resources. Never perfect and sometimes with their own extreme biases, nevertheless they kept the boat of civic discourse on something approaching an even keel, and, if they didn’t, a public outcry or angry publisher could get them fired.

Today? No editors, no censors, and the cursed cry of No compromise! echoes from all political factions, because most of us haven’t the foggiest idea of what it takes to successfully govern a democracy, and most of us think some Divine creature or another is on our side. Hubris, one of the most common human flaws these days.

So I do wonder how many folks are doing what Cliff Stoll did 30 or more years ago, declaring the Internet anti-social and walking away from it. I wonder if he found a way to live with it, or went hard core. I see he contributes to a channel on YouTube, so he must have found a compromise.

But my point is that if the Internet just gets too hard, people will learn to do without it. Is this the breaking point? Or are too many people dependent on it for their income to abandon it?

Nature has an article on the dissolution of plastic – from the abstract:

Here, we use a structure-based, machine learning algorithm to engineer a robust and active PET hydrolase. Our mutant and scaffold combination (FAST-PETase: functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase) contains five mutations compared to wild-type PETase (N233K/R224Q/S121E from prediction and D186H/R280A from scaffold) and shows superior PET-hydrolytic activity relative to both wild-type and engineered alternatives¹² between 30 and 50 °C and a range of pH levels. We demonstrate that untreated, postconsumer-PET from 51 different thermoformed products can all be almost completely degraded by FAST-PETase in 1 week.

I’m not reading the actual paper, not being a PhD level chemist, but skralyx on Daily Kos remarks, hopefully knowledgeably:

If you’re concerned about the release of CO₂ by such a process, that’s justified, but there’s more to this story!

Not only can this process be used to degrade PET, but in fact to reconstitute it. Once you break the polymer down into its components, you can let bacteria in the wild reduce them to CO₂ and water. OR you can re-polymerize them, which is a nifty way of casting aside any impurities like dyes or product residue and regenerating “virgin” PET. This is a recycling program where you don’t have to worry too much about the state of the discarded plastic.

So maybe some good news here.

The title says it all:

Doomed to disappear within a couple of days, I’m sure.

This WaPo article on the supposedly pro-choice Republican Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) reminded me about some further thoughts I’ve had on the assertions of Erick Erickson, quoted in the initial post of this thread. First, Senator Collins:

Professor Richardson, who is working from a The New York Times article, to which I have no access:

Supply chain issues have also driven up prices, both because of shortages and because the ten shipping companies that dominate the global trade have jacked up prices so astronomically that U.S. importers have asked the U.S. government to intervene (this year container companies will pocket $300 billion in profits, up from $23 billion before the pandemic).

Well, that explains a helluva lot. Way too much, in fact. Profits, that is.

For famous artist™Jeff Koons, NFTs (non-fungible tokens, indicating ownership of something as recorded on a blockchain) seem to be win-win:

Liftoff! Jeff Koons has announced that he will send a group of new sculptures to the moon later this year. Works by the world’s most expensive living artist are set to reach the earth’s only natural satellite in July and will remain there in perpetuity.

They are being sent on board a lunar lander known as Nova C, developed by the private American company Intuitive Machines. The spacecraft, which will be launched at the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, will touch down on Oceanus Procellarum, a region of the near side of the moon (the hemisphere facing the Earth). It takes an average spacecraft around three days to travel the 240,000 miles between the Earth and the moon.

Upon their landing, the sculptures will be permanently housed in a transparent, thermally coated cube. Further details of the works will be revealed via a dedicated website in the coming weeks, but only one Nova C lander carrying the works will be sent. With a load capacity of 100kg and measuring two-by-three meters, it is therefore unlikely that Koons’s lunar-bound works will be as large as his most famous sculptures.

Alongside this lunar expedition, Koons will also release his first group of NFTs as part of the project Jeff Koons: Moon Phases. [Kabir Jhala, The Art Newspaper]

Yep. He gets to put artwork on the Moon, which should be a PR bonanza, while still having the financial advantages of selling the artwork.

I suppose, at some point in the future, the then-current owner of the art could fly up to the moon and collect what he’s bought.

Maybe. First, Intuitive Machines has to get them there. I wonder if the NFTs are sold pre- or post- launch? And how valuable are artworks lost in a launch accident?

Little blue things, maybe a month late:

My Arts Editor’s commentary:

Kind of bleak, but a good representation of how far behind we are.

Ouch.

This CNN report on the Ukraine war has to be upsetting anyone who cares about food prices:

Russian forces are stealing farm equipment and thousands of tons of grain from Ukrainian farmers in areas they have occupied, as well as targeting food storage sites with artillery, multiple sources have told CNN.

The phenomenon has accelerated in recent weeks as Russian units have tightened their grip on parts of the rich agricultural regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, the sources said. Sowing operations in many areas have since been disrupted or abandoned.

The actions of the Russian forces may threaten the harvest this year in one of the world’s most important grain-producing countries. The volumes involved are said to be huge.

And

“They took away a new harvester, which was recently delivered to us. They took away the sowing complex, a large and expensive machine. And they overturned one of the tractors, driving around drunk. Now it’s lying in a ditch.” Tsvigun said.

As for his grain — 2,000 tons of it — Tsvigun said “most likely, they took it too. But about the harvesters, this is already a fact.”

This sort of tactic is meant to ruin and sow terror, but it also marks the Russians not as a civilized people, but bandits. Desperate bandits, too, because no matter how much they steal, it’s unlikely to add a lot to their currency reserves, their reputations, or really much else, except their own casualty count. They’re modern day Vandals, but as more parents lose sons and daughters to Putin’s War, the less support there will be for the Russian government, which is a risk in itself.

And, worse, in our highly interconnected world, a war can trigger problems half way around the globe, as AL-Monitor reports:

The Russian-Ukraine war’s impact on food and energy prices has hit Turkey’s economy especially hard, where annual consumer inflation reached a two-decade high last month.

Sibel Hurtas writes that the rising costs have exposed long-running problems in the country’s agricultural sector, including its increasing reliance on imported materials to make livestock fodder and fertilizers. (Russia and Ukraine are providers of such materials.)

Plus, Mustafa Sonmez explains why Turkey’s chronic income inequalities are exacerbated by the soaring inflation, which is set to top 100% in the fall.

There may be a backlash even for the Egypt-Sudan-Ethiopia contretemps, as AL-Monitor suggests in the above article, around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, already a flashpoint as Egypt’s primary water source may be dammed by Ethiopians hungry for more power and control of the water.

Ukraine is a leading food producing country, and Russia’s decision to ruin it, even if only temporarily, could lead to higher food prices, and as food prices in this scenario function in inverse correlation to food scarcity, we may even see starvation in some sectors of the globe. In turn, NATO and allied countries will need to consider punishment for the miscreants of Moscow, and that, in turn, may increase the risk that Russia will try to use nuclear weapons.

If that happens, then we’ll discover how well their nuclear weapons, inherited from the Soviet Union to some extent, function – and whether or not the United States actually has a rumored anti-missile technology that has never been formally revealed.

Blue food:

In 2021, Jessica Gephart at the American University in Washington DC and her colleagues took a deep dive into what they call “blue food”, a catch-all category for anything edible from fresh water or the sea. That includes fish, shellfish and cephalopods, but also an aquarium of lesser-eaten creatures such as sea cucumbers, jellyfish, seaweed and microalgae. If managed carefully, they concluded, blue foods have a lot of room for sustainable growth. “There is such a thing as sustainably managed fisheries,” says John Virdin at Duke University in North Carolina. “It takes smart rules and enforcing those rules, but it can be done. And it’s not impossible to do aquaculture sustainably.” [“How four big industries are driving the exploitation of our oceans,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (23 April 2022, paywall)]

Which Party owns that car in November?

Ever see those signs on mountain roads warning of boulders occasionally falling on the highway? Yesterday’s leak of a draft of the SCOTUS opinion aggressively overturning key decisions Roe and Casey, authored by Justice Alito, is a bit like that. The questions are the size of the boulder, and how it’ll impact the highway, or, in this case, the 2022 elections.

Professor Richardson thinks it’s a big boulder:

Democrats are outraged; so are the many Republican voters who dismissed Democratic alarms about the antiabortion justices Trump was putting on the court because they believed Republican assurances that the Supreme Court justices nominated by Republican presidents and confirmed with Republican votes would honor precedent and leave Roe v. Wade alone. Today, clips of nomination hearings circulated in which Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and even Samuel Alito–—the presumed majority in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade—assured the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that they considered Roe v. Wade and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision upholding Roe settled law and had no agenda to challenge them.

Those statements were made under oath by those seeking confirmation to our highest judicial body, and they now appear to have been misleading, at best. In addition, the decision itself is full of right-wing talking points and such poor history that historians have spent the day explaining the actual history of abortion in the United States. This sloppiness suggests that the decision—should it be handed down in its current state—is politically motivated. And in a Pew poll conducted in February, 84% of Americans said they believed that justices should not bring their political views into their decision making.

Suggesting that she believes this issue will be burning in the minds of independents in November.

Erick Erickson, who I already quoted here in his defense of the proposed decision, also said this:

Fifth and, for now, finally, everyone wants to know about the political implications. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there really won’t be many. We are in May. The election is in November. The people who care passionately about this issue are already on sides. Few are actually directly impacted by it. The economy, inflation, supply chain issues, crime, wokeness, etc. will be big issues people are regularly grappling with.

[My bold] I think Erickson’s blinded by his own position, perhaps best described by his epithet for Democrats: Baby-killers. His position is absolutist, and he projects that attribute on everyone.

But many voters, particularly independents, are old-style voters: we evaluate and weigh across a spectrum of point, from competency to ideology to various issues, like abortion, death penalty, economic management, and, for the more adventurous, foreign relations. They are not generally single-issue voters, a variety of voter that I’ll generally loathe, with exceptions. They look at the whole picture.

So if he thinks the voters are already decided on the upcoming election because everyone is already set on this issue, he doesn’t understand how this works. If this were true, hell, every election would go the same way. Looking at results over the decades, they don’t – sharply, they don’t.

Steve Benen:

The common thread tying each of these messages together is obvious: Democrats are telling voters that if they’re opposed to what Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices are doing to reproductive rights, the proper response is to vote for the party that supports reproductive rights.

Democrats can seize on this from a position of relative strength because they and the American mainstream are roughly on the same page. For years, polling has been consistent on public attitudes: Most of the country wants the Roe v. Wade precedent to remain intact. In fact, a well timed Washington Post-ABC News poll was released this week that showed Americans, by a nearly two-to-one margin, want to see Roe upheld, not overturned.

What’s more, there’s reason to believe Americans don’t yet realize what’s poised to happen. The week after the justices heard oral arguments in the Dobbs case, a Politico/Morning Consult poll found that nearly two-thirds of the public “either said they didn’t know how likely the court was to overturn Roe or said the court isn’t likely to overturn the precedent.”

In my earlier response to Erickson, I noted that one part of his defense was how the Republicans “followed the rules.” But, as Benen notes, the non-political segment of Americans, which is roughly 85% on just a guess, is getting a surprise, and, worse yet, as numerous commentators have point out, the SCOTUS Republican majority looks exceedingly awful in terms of their shared morality. While Thomas is well-known for his anti-Roe v Wade sentiments, and thus suffers no degradation of reputation, Justices Barrett, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are all on tape affirming Roe as “settled law,” implying they would not overturn it.

They look awfully mendacious, now, and I think that’ll rebound terribly on the Republican Party.

So that leads to the question: how will each side prep for 2022?

I suspect the Republicans will try to take cover under the Democrats’ botched management of the transgender issue, they’ll try to blame inflation and shortages on Biden, and we’ll continue to see the fringe-right (Greene, Gaetz, etc) continue to agitate to the benefit of Moscow, rather than Kyiv, using a variety of imaginary reasons.

The Democrats, meanwhile, will have the January 6th Insurrection incident, the refusal of certain Republican members of Congress to testify to the investigating Committee, and the abortion issue. The chance to pass a Federal level law supposedly overriding State level laws will be dangled, in order to get out as many voters as possible.

It’ll be interesting to see what other issues are used in the upcoming election campaigns.

Godzilla was having some wee GI issues during this scene. The director was understandably irate. Until Godzilla ate him. After that, King Ghidorah quit whining about his co-star, given the lack of self-control during the rending of the director.
Oh, wait, is that Mothra? No? A suppository tool? Oh, ugh.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964), with a previous review here, bears little resemblance to the previous review, leading me to think this is a different cut of the movie. After all, the previous review references Martians, while in this movie the extra-terrestrial is a Venusian.

Let’s go with that, because this did not seem at all familiar to either of us.

In some fictional country, the Princess Salno is leaving for a visit to Japan on her obviously model plane. Nefarious forces are at work at home, though, and the Princess is considered to be surplus by the Powers That Wannabe. As her plane flies through the night, a meteor storm entrances her to the extent that she opens the plane’s door and plunges out into the night sky, and the plane, ummmm, explodes, sure, let’s use that verb, moments later.

Meanwhile, that meteor storm brought more than illusions for a Princess. There’s a huge and growing meteor in the side of Mt. Kurodake, a madwoman running around predicting Rodan is about to pop out of his hidey hole, also in Mt. Kurodake, and maybe Mothra’s fairy twins, in town for a visit, shouldn’t take that ship back to Infant Isle, home of their master. Mistress. Deity. Cute pet? So hard to tell the difference these days.

And the Powers That Wannabe are becoming suspicious about that madwoman, enough so to send an assassination squad.

All this time there’s a brother (cop) and sister (journalist) who are pursuing the madwoman to see just what’s going on with her, and they collide with the assassination squad in a hotel. Fun!

Yeah, that rough character on the right is one of the worst Rodan’s I’ve ever seen.

As the madwoman undergoes analysis at a top researcher’s clinic, incidentally revealing she’s the last surviving Venusian and thereby winning a prize for the researcher, Godzilla, having randomly torched a ship – remember? – now wades ashore, while Rodan, a really bad Rodan in any way you want to take that, pops out of the mountain, much to the chagrin of a guy fetching a mistake made during a selfie. Yeah, selfies are not a new phenom.

Rodan and Godzilla get together and … act like spoiled children.

No kidding. And in the meantime, that meteor has burst and the forthcoming King Ghidorah, he/she/it/them of the three legs and three tails, the lightning coming forth and all that rot. Yeah, I’m not cleaning up that sentence, it reflects all the incoherence of KG.

But the Mothra groupies fairies are still around, and, informed that two rather large infants are having a go of it, rather than working KG over, sings a request to Mothra to come and make the kids shape up. Mothra arrives and finds KG to be a real handful, and in fact her, I’m sticking with that gender for what’s really just a giant larva, role appears to consist of being tossed around like a salad. Can she get Godzilla and Rodan to grow up and behave? Or will she die once again?

Uh.

And that’s the real disappointment in this story. In the first installment of this series, Gojira (1955), Godzilla comes across as baleful, almost otherworldly metaphysically speaking, creature with an inscrutable agenda, or at least a lust for destruction. This Godzilla and Rodan are just oversized brats.

And it really spoils an otherwise OK movie, which won positive commentary on its cinematography and something that actually resembles a plot from my Arts Editor, although the special effects are not impressive at all. It’s too bad, but don’t waste your time with this version, either, if you’ve seen Gojira, because it’s just demoralizing.

Erick Erickson is frantic to claim to his audience that the possible upending of Roe v. Wade is entirely legitimate, because any hint of dirty work will taint, and in fact legitimize a later reversal of this decision, should enough believers in abortion rights be appointed to SCOTUS in the near term.

So how is he doing? Not well. Here’s just one paragraph:

Fourth, the pro-life movement followed the rule of law to accomplish this goal. They elected Republican Presidents and pushed for pro-life judges. They elected Republican senators who approved those judges and justices. Ironically, it was the Democrats’ own rule-breaking that got the Dobbs case across the finish line. Had Harry Reid and the Democrats not ended the filibuster for nominations, this moment would not have come. Their rule-breaking ended Roe and progressive law clerks’ rule-breaking brought us the first notice of it. Pro-lifers followed the rules and were able to capitalize on the Democrats rewriting the rules. Ironic.

Where to start? I suppose in order of assertions is best.

They elected Republican Presidents …

They did? Shall we discuss the illegitimacy of the Bush Administration, when a Republican-dominated SCOTUS terminated a poorly run Florida election, declaring for Bush, before the recount was finished? Shall we discuss the intimidating Brooks Brothers riot?

The Brooks Brothers riot was a demonstration at a meeting of election canvassers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on November 22, 2000, during a recount of votes made during the 2000 United States presidential election, with the goal of shutting down the recount. After demonstrations and acts of violence, local officials shut down the recount early. [Wikipedia]

That’s hardly legitimacy, now is it? But let’s finish off that first sentence:

… and pushed for pro-life [i.e., anti-abortion – hw] judges.

Illegitimate on its face, Erickson, and you know that. Judges do many things, but letting their opinions be shaped by religious doctrine is not one of those things. And we all should know that.

This one made me laugh:

They elected Republican senators who approved those judges and justices.

And didn’t even consider Judge Garland. Indeed, to better understand the issue, more context is needed. When Justice Scalia passed away, more than a year before the end of President Obama’s second term, Obama displayed professional behavior by consulting with Republican Senators and nominating Judge Garland, with their approval, a month or two later.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) then led his caucus in a series of bald-faced lies about how new Justices are never approved during the final year of a term, such ridiculous lies that I think we lost a few journalists to death by laughter. It was that silly.

But McConnell, by not even permitting the hearings required by the Constitution, if I may take a positive view of Constitutional governance, won his dishonorable point. When Trump defeated Clinton, permitting Trump to nominate and have confirmed Judge Gorsuch, we have one Illegitimate Justice; when Justice Ginsburg passed away in the final weeks of Trump’s term, McConnell couldn’t wait to break his own made-up rule concerning nomination and confirmation of justices, confirming Amy Coney Barrett to SCOTUS just prior to the election resulting in the easily predictable election of Joe Biden to the Presidency.

Count ’em: that’s two Illegitimate Justices.

And then there’s this utterly mendacious line:

Had Harry Reid and the Democrats not ended the filibuster for nominations, this moment would not have come.

The first lie is the most obvious: The Democrats didn’t end the filibuster for SCOTUS nominations.

In 2017 [when the Senate was held by the Republicans] the number of senators required to invoke cloture on Supreme Court nominations was reduced from 60 to a majority of senators voting. [Wikipedia]

A little more research reveals that this was used for the Gorsuch nomination. Erickson might defend by claiming he was talking about all the non-SCOTUS nominations, which would make his argument true, but that is made irrelevant by his own last clause, … this moment would never have come. That invalidates the argument.

But if we charitably – very charitably – give him that point, the argument I just employed makes it clear that the Republicans were just as likely, if not more so, to change the rules when it came to SCOTUS nominations.

And if he wants to claim that the Republicans were merely inspired by the Democrats’ action to remove the filibuster for non-SCOTUS nominations, well, I just may have to die laughing as well. Of course they would. The Democrats would not have approved far-right judges for SCOTUS, and the Republicans’ control of the Senate in 2017 didn’t extend to the necessary 60 vote limit. Given a choice between a reasonable judge to nominate and killing the filibuster in order to force through an arbitrarily far-right choice, we know what McConnell’s decision would be, because he demonstrated it already.

The other option, of a SCOTUS slowly eroding as justices retired or died, would not have been tolerable to the American public, especially the independents. The Republicans suffer whenever they are closely examined, and a decaying SCOTUS would have brought forth a lot of examination.

Erickson’s last bit:

Their rule-breaking ended Roe and progressive law clerks’ rule-breaking brought us the first notice of it. Pro-lifers followed the rules and were able to capitalize on the Democrats rewriting the rules. Ironic.

This is nothing more than a sparkly bit to make sure no one examines what he’s written too closely. Invoke the smug morality, certain that a Divinity is behind them, and the feel-good hormones will stop most sympathetic readers from thinking about this line of bullshit that our ever-pious radio talk show guy is peddling.

Another reason not to take Erickson too seriously.

In an unusual turn of events, this nomination comes via a politico, Tony Daunt, who has parted ways with the nominees – the Michigan Republican Party’s state committee:

Instead of focusing on Democrats’ “myriad failures,” Daunt wrote that “feckless, cowardly party ‘leaders’ have made the election here in Michigan a test of who is the most cravenly loyal to Donald Trump and re-litigating the results of the 2020 cycle.”

Daunt described Trump as a “deranged narcissist.” [The Detroit News]

It’s this last part that probably describes most Earl Landgrebe nominees:

“Incredibly, rather than distancing themselves from this undisciplined loser, far too many Republican ‘leaders’ have decided that encouraging his delusional lies — and, even worse — cynically appeasing him despite knowing they are lies, is the easiest path to ensuring their continued hold on power, general election consequences be damned,” Daunt wrote in his email.

“Rather than assembling the courage to do the right thing, at the right time, and guide the activist base towards the truth, they’ve repeatedly backed down and dissembled, hoping that just one more act of cowardice will be what does the trick.”

They’re in a position of power, finally, and why spit on their benefactor? He claims he could bounce them out.

So kiss the Trumpian shoes.

The article notes this:

Daunt’s resignation was another sign of growing divisions within the Michigan Republican Party ahead of the 2022 election, in which the state will elect a governor and fill every seat in the state Legislature.

No surprise. Fourth-raters are in it for the personal glory, and someone else getting glory isn’t part of the game plan. So backbiting and being the amateurs they are will not play well with many voters.

Amplexus:

Amplexus (Latin “embrace”) is a type of mating behavior exhibited by some externally fertilizing species (chiefly amphibians and horseshoe crabs) in which a male grasps a female with his front legs as part of the mating process, and at the same time or with some time delay, he fertilizes the eggs, as they are released from the female’s body.^[1] In amphibians, females may be grasped by the head, waist, or armpits, and the type of amplexus is characteristic of some taxonomic groups. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Male toad clings to female for 5 months waiting for chance to mate,” Luke Taylor, NewScientist (23 April 2022, paywall):

A species of endangered toad endemic to Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains is clinging on for dear life. The tiny Santa Marta harlequin toad (Atelopus laetissimus), which is just 4 centimetres long, can cling to the back of a female for five months without feeding until the pair are ready to mate.

The grasping behaviour, which is known as “amplexus”, is seen in many other animal species – but rarely continues for such a long period of time, says Luis Alberto Rueda-Solano at the University of Magdalena, Colombia. In some cases, it can even prove fatal. But finding a female early in the breeding season and holding on for the long haul comes with big reproductive benefits, he adds.

I guess the couple get to know each other really well?

With the rise of crypto, which I think is just Mary Kaye for tech bros …
– Erick Erickson

I love it!

I forgot to publish this post way back when, but it still amazes me. [7/2/2022]

I suppose this is better than prison, even country club prison:

US billionaire Michael Steinhardt has surrendered 180 stolen relics worth an estimated $70 million and agreed to an “unprecedented” lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities, officials in Manhattan have said.

Investigators found that Steinhardt, one of the world’s largest ancient art collectors, was in possession of looted artifacts smuggled out of 11 countries by 12 criminal networks, according to a statement from the Manhattan District Attorney’s (DA) office on Monday.

“For decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold, or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr. in the statement. [CNN/Style]

He claims he was buying from dealers who claimed these were legal, so the ban suggests the government didn’t really believe him – or that he should have double-checked, as a guy with his resources could easily do so.

This made me prick up my antennae:

Legislation that would subject U.S. Supreme Court justices and federal judges to tougher disclosure requirements for their financial holdings and stock trades passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday in a rare show of bipartisanship.

The bill, approved on a voice vote after winning Senate passage in February, would make it easier for the public to see if a member of the federal judiciary has a financial conflict of interest warranting recusal from hearing a case.

The Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act now goes to President Joe Biden to sign into law. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said that while he had yet to talk to Biden about the bill, “he has always been full throated about furthering ethics and transparency in government and restoring trust in institutions, and this kind of policy is aligned with those goals.” [Reuters]

I think we’re going to see a few judges, mostly of the Trump vintage, getting caught up in the gears of this legislation, as well as public opinion, because it seems that public officials of any background can sure misunderstand financial ethics rules.

But I expect the Trump nominated judges, both from quality and numbers, to be the most likely to get caught up. And then what?

Threats of impeachment. Resignations.

All over the next four years. I expect to see five ± three judges end up leaving the bench prematurely because of this legislation befouling their sails, if you’ll forgive the pun, and possibly giving the Democrats a chance to make up judicial numbers.

Hey, how do you cock this thing anyways?

The General (1926) is the story of a railroad engineer in the American Confederacy, transparently named Johnnie Gray, and his travails during the American Civil War. His attempt to enlist in a Confederate regiment has been rejected without a reason being given when the War begins, and he is shamed in front of his fiancee by her father and brother for his failure.

A year or two later, Union forces are knocking at the door to the South, and Annabelle’s father has been wounded in the fighting. She chooses to go to the front to care for him, and travels on Gray’s train, the engine of which is named The General. Stopping for a meal in a small town, the crew and passengers disembark, but Annabelle stays behind. This small decision leads to potential disaster as Union raiders, disguised as Confederates, steal the train and whisk Annabelle off to captivity.

Or so they think, but this is Gray’s former and, he hopes, future fiancee, and he’s off like a shot in pursuit, by foot and handcar and anything else he can lay his hands on, up to and including, eventually, the engine Texas. Shots are exchanged when the pursuit is discovered, including employment of one bloody large cannon, but the shots are more customary than effective.

When night comes, the Union soldiers believe themselves safe and stop to rendezvous with Union commanders, but Gray is sneakier and not only frees Annabelle, but hears the plans of the Union commanders. With morning comes his recapture of The General and a harried return to Confederate lines, bearing a warning to the Confederate generals. Will the notoriously incompetent Confederate generals deal with an imminent Union surprise attack properly? Will Gray retain command of The General?

And has Annabelle given her virtue to someone else already, much like the South gave it away in its thirst for prosperity for some, but not all? This is one aspect of the greater context given absolutely no attention at all. It’s a tricky question, of course: assuming the audience knows the context of the American Civil War when revisionism was running rampant in the 1920s. The movie gives no hint of the War’s underpinnings of racism and the injustice of slavery, leaving this to be an action-adventure tale for which the greater moral context is completely neglected.

This is one of the best silent movies that I’ve seen, with lovely cinematography, a good, tight story, and excellent acting. The only other annoying problem is the occasional bit of slapstick, probably thrown in as the lead actor, Buster Keaton, was known for his slapstick. But, overall, it all works quite well.

Recommended for anyone interested in film history, silent movies, or just a well thought out story.

Will it capsize all boats?

The discredited trickle-down economic theory, that lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations will result in a supercharged economy as they invest in the economy, had a slogan attached to it, that rising waters lift all boats, wealthy and poverty stricken alike.

I couldn’t help but think of it while reading Professor Richardson’s latest post to her Letters from an American blog:

Far from the policy struggles of the Republicans and Democrats back East, in the summer of 1890, a new movement began, quietly, to take shape. In western towns, workers and poor farmers and entrepreneurs shut out of opportunities by monopolies began to talk to each other. They discovered a shared dismay over a government that seemed to work only for the rich industrialists, and anger that they seemed to be working themselves to the bone only to have the fruits of their labor taken by the rich. “Wall Street owns the country,” western organizer Mary Elizabeth Lease told audiences. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

Westerners suffering in the new economy began to come together. Reviving older Farmers’ Alliances, they distributed literature across the country explaining how tariffs worked and how railroad monopolies jacked up prices. Existing newspapers began to echo their arguments, and where there weren’t local newspapers, Alliance members began to print them.

Resulting in…

While congressmen and eastern newspapers fought over every scrap of Washington political gossip, western farmers and workers and entrepreneurs had organized. New newspapers, letters, barbecues, lectures, and picnics had done their work, educating those on the peripheries of politics about the grand issues of the day. When the votes were counted after the November 1890 election, the Alliances had carried South Dakota and almost the whole state ticket in Kansas, and they held the balance of power in the Minnesota and Illinois legislatures. In Nebraska and Iowa, they had split the Republicans and given the governorship to a Democrat. They controlled 52 seats in the new Congress, enough to swing laws in their direction.

While Professor Richardson undoubtedly is hoping for a similar wave this year, lifting the Democrats over the Republicans, from my vantage point I’m wondering if both canoes are going to end up tipped over. Could a political movement, independent of either major Party and the old smaller parties, achieve success in the scant time left to it in 2022?

Neither Party seems to be worthy of confidence. The Republicans feature amateur hour elected officials who run around howling that the last election was stolen, and sometimes even engaging in politically and/or legally dubious behavior. I do not exclude the former President from this characterization, as he has served as an inspiration to half-baked idiots nation-wide, as well as inspiring an attempt to interfere with the lawful procedures of Congress. He, and his devotees, live on the mistaken political philosophy that the only criteria a politician need have is a devotion to Party leaders and specified ideological/theological positions; experience, character, and expertise as a rhetorician need not apply.

The Democrats continue to labor under the twin crosses of their botch of handling the transgenderism issue and a whiff of arrogance that alienates independents. Add in a perception that certain elected officials’ philosophy, when it comes to crime, has led to an increase in highly violent crime – true or not – and a few other issues, and this appears to stir up the independents’ fears, as shown in the Virginia elections last year.

BUT – The problem with a new party is that it may be populated with smart people, or with grifters and power-seekers, and it’s unlikely to be populated with folks with relevant experience to the challenges of governing. Would we want that sort of thing? While the Republicans continue to howl out criticisms of how President Biden has handled the Afghanistan pull-out and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I have come to view those criticisms as hollow, being divided between those outraged that we’ve given up on Afghanistan, and those who just don’t like Biden and the governmental philosophies he represents. I think Biden, in the face of unremitting opposition from Republicans and traps set, clumsily as they were, by the former President Trump (R), has done quite well on the foreign relations front, while on the domestic front he’s been hobbled and unable to implement a full recovery program, although what has been implemented has done relatively well. Those squealing about inflation fail to consider the impact of Russia’s actions on the world economy.

And I don’t honestly see a new political party self-organizing in time to field candidates by 2022. But by 2024?

That’s a distinct possibility.

So, we’ll see what the people have to say. I’m looking forward to it, if with a little trepidation.

There’s a lot to be said for the observations of the disinterested expert, especially if they derive expertise from hands-on experience. Therefore, without further ado, here’s former Rep Charlie Dent (R-PA):

Far too many Republicans serve in Congress under a constant cloud of fear. Let’s call them the Fear Caucus. This group of decent men and women are unfortunately too worried about their own positions to publicly say what they believe about the former President’s conduct, temperament and fitness for office. What McCarthy said in exasperation about Trump’s responsibility for the Capitol riot probably reflects the sentiments of the majority of House and Senate Republicans. But what these Republicans are willing to say in public is too often another story. [CNN]

Too jealous of their position to exert leadership and speak out against madness spewing from one’s own side, whether it be theocratic or ideological, suggests third-raters afraid of the fourth-raters who are ruining the Party.

It’s perhaps understandable, but remains inexcusable, just as it does for Democrats who fail to denounce extremists on their flanks.

Dent’s statement functions as a useful fact in trying to understand the situation – and change it for the better, for all Americans.

Reaching for the Pepto-Abysmol, oh yeah!

The Curse Of The Demon (1957, aka The Night Of The Demon) is a snurty little story about an atheist scientist confronting a warlock/witch/wizard/whatever the bad guy might be, and finding out the supernatural does, indeed, exist.

Comeuppance, one might say.

Beautifully photographed and well-acted, with some goofy and almost believable special effects, it’s all effort wasted because someone didn’t like scientists. Don’t waste your time unless you think scientists are closed-minded twits.

And I don’t care what Martin Scorsese thinks about this movie.

How monarchies treat their subjects is the message here.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) is a classic silent movie from another era, in more ways than one, depicting not the Russian Revolution, but rather an important predecessor incident – the mutiny on the Russian warship Potemkin in 1905, twelve years prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In treatment that seems emblematic of Russian leaders, whether monarchical or otherwise, the crew of the Potemkin discovers its rations are covered in maggots. The officers receive their complaint by sending the ship’s doctor to inspect the rations, and he declares, after cursory inspection, that the rations are safe. Sailor Vakulinchuk, who claims all of Russia is in revolt, encourages mutiny, but the crew must be pushed to the very edge by a Captain and officers who are casually cruel, and not above sudden executions, before the crew does actually mutiny. A protracted struggle occurs, and eventually the officers are chucked into the sea to their deaths, but Vakulinchuk himself is also killed.

Now in charge of Potemkin, the mutineers make port in Odessa, where Vakulinchuk’s body is displayed for the citizens of Odessa to mourn. Their fury at the injustice of the now-dead officers of the Potemkin, and thus the monarchy itself, must face the retaliation of the Tsar’s heavily armed military forces, though, and the Odessans are injured and killed in droves in a famous and effective scene, the Odessa Steps, the victims of the barbarous forces of the monarchy. In revenge, the crew of the Potemkin fire on the Odessa Opera House, where Tsarist generals are gathered, although to what effect is not clear.

The Potemkin puts to sea on reports of an incoming Russian fleet, and signals the fleet that a revolution is come and the sailors should join. Will the Potemkin have to do battle, or will the fleet’s common sailors throw off their bonds and join Vakulinchuk’s heirs?

Battleship Potemkin is a classic example of propaganda, but it’s important to remember that propaganda is not always false. Historically, the Russian monarchy was infamous for its barbarous behaviors, which it justified by its belief that the Divine had selected them to head Russia (a belief I read about in a display at The Museum of Russian Art a few years ago). Keeping this in mind, it’s not difficult to believe the situation on Potemkin did occur, nor the slaughter in Odessa – although the latter is somewhat more fictional than the former, according to Wikipedia.

I’m not entirely comfortable with the interpretation of this film as an embodiment of the Soviets’ emphasis on the people, plural, as the basis of power. First, there’s Vakulinchuk, whose role is to stir up trouble or awaken the sailors to their power, depending on your viewpoint. It’s hard to accept that he’s symbolic of the people, for he is definitely someone unique.

Then, the firepower of both the ship itself and the monarchy makes them a menace to the people that they cannot really counter. Finally, the importance of the Soviet leaders over the decades – Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev are all names that roll off the tongue – also makes it a little hard to accept some interpretations of the film.

But, in the end, the story is quite compelling, especially given its early position in  movie making history. If a historical sense of movies and stories is important to you, then Battleship Potemkin is Recommended.

If you worry about how your data may allow you to be tracked, despite encryption and its burial in a mass of data, you may be seeing the acronym FHE, fully homomorphic encryption, in the near future:

There is a completely different and more extreme solution, however, one with origins going back 40 years. What if you could encrypt and share data in such a way that others could analyse it and perform calculations on it, but never actually see it? It would be a bit like placing a precious gemstone in a glovebox, the chambers in labs used for handling hazardous material. You could invite people to put their arms into the gloves and handle the gem. But they wouldn’t have free access and could never steal anything.

This was the thought that occurred to Ronald Rivest, Len Adleman and Michael Dertouzos at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. They devised a theoretical way of making the equivalent of a secure glovebox to protect data. It rested on a mathematical idea called a homomorphism, which refers to the ability to map data from one form to another without changing its underlying structure. Much of this hinges on using algebra to represent the same numbers in different ways. [“An extreme form of encryption could solve big data’s privacy problem,” Edd Gent, NewScientist (9 April 2022, paywall)]

Because the data structure is retained, analysis of the encrypted data set should be possible – and, according to the article, the results will be encrypted, too. I’m looking forward to hearing how this works out, as it’s out beyond my solution intuition.

Nothing like realizing you’re not going home:

But the Martian helicopter Ingenuity doesn’t have enough AI to care, I suspect. This is the parachute and backshell of the its delivery vehicle, photographed by Ingenuity from the air.

My Arts Editor observed we litter everywhere we go, which is true.