Category Archives: Uncategorized

George F. Will, WaPo:

Those who believe that the nation’s real founding was the arrival of slaves in 1619, that the American Revolution was fought to defend slavery, that the nation remains saturated with “systemic racism,” that the economic system has always been fundamentally exploitive, that the social order is rotten with injustice and that even the nation’s most revered historical figures are unworthy of respect — those who think like this can be credited with moral earnestness, but not with patriotism: They cannot love what they will not praise.

I don’t often like George Will, even when I agree with him, but I think this is a paragraph worthy of meditation, extraction of questions with regard to one’s own beliefs – especially for the woke – and derivation of answers to those questions that are more than “But, but, but!” and bulgy eyes.

We’ll open with a hand of tulips.

Mummiform:

1. Having the shape of a mummy. [Wiktionary]

Noted in this Ask A Mortician video at roughly the 1:40 mark.

The title says it all:

One side of Earth’s interior is losing heat much faster than the other

This article from NewScientist (20 March 2021) explains:

Our planet is a bit lopsided. One half of Earth is losing heat from the planet’s interior faster than the other, and has been for much of the past 400 million years.

The uneven heat loss is probably a relic of past supercontinents, when all the land masses were joined together on one side of the planet.

“We see that the Pacific has lost more heat,” says Krister Karlsen at the University of Oslo in Norway. “That is in large part due to the distribution of the continental land masses.”

Why?

The first [dataset] concerns the amount of heat from Earth’s interior that flows up through the crust. This data set shows that oceans aren’t as good at trapping heat inside Earth as the continents are, says Karlsen. That is partly down to the thickness of the rock: continental crust is often many kilometres thicker than oceanic crust, so it is a better insulator.

The second data set relates to the movement of the continents deep in prehistory. Some continental rocks carry telltale traces of Earth’s magnetic field, which varies around the globe.

Data from these rocks can be used to show that Earth has, on several occasions, been home to a supercontinent – and it can help establish some of those supercontinents’ approximate position. The most recent supercontinent was Pangaea, which existed from around 335 to 175 million years ago, and was centred roughly where Africa lies today.

Which leaves me to wonder: is the imbalance enough to impact Earth’s orbital dynamics around the Sun?

I didn’t realize spaceships came with so much furniture these days!

Devil Girl From Mars (1954) is a surprisingly good rendition of the conquering monsters from Mars tale. There’s drama already at the Scottish rural hotel Bonnie Charlie, as a convicted murderer escapes from prison and ends up at the Charlie where his girlfriend awaits him, supporting herself as a barmaid. It’s the off season, so the hotel owners are a little overwhelmed when as astronomer and a journalist, investigating reports of a flying saucer in the area, show up.

Nyah, right, and the exceedingly slow robot, Chani during a vacation trip to Saturn. He’s useful on those long, lonely interplanetary trips.

The hotel owner may be a flying bitch, her husband suffering from the blues of old age, and that little grandson of there’s is the usual pain in the tuckus, but it all fades at the entrance of Nyah, Martian flying saucer commander. She screwed up, as she miscalculated the density of Earth’s atmosphere and thus sustained damage on entry and missed her destination of London, but don’t mistake her for some frail lass; this imperious, arrogant invader has little time for the inferior beings before her. A few repairs by her robot, Chani, and she’ll be off to put an end to the sorry charade that is humanity.

The herd of humans are soon jostling each other uneasily, aware that their very species’ continued existence may be at risk. The astronomer can do little to counter the plans of Nyah, and he’s the best of the bunch. Technologically speaking, at least.

Who’s willing to go off with Nyah and stand at stud for her own wounded species? Stick around and find out. The acting’s 1950s British, which is to say not bad, the science is laughable, and you’ll really hate Nyah by the end.

But Chani the Imperturbable is the real scene stealer here.

From WaPo:

The nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., last fall are currently packaged in 40 cardboard shrink-wrapped boxes and stacked on 45 pallets in a county facility in Phoenix known as “the vault,” due to its sophisticated security and special fire-suppression system.

But on order of the Republican-led [Arizona] state Senate, the ballots and the county’s voting equipment are scheduled to be trucked away next week — handed over for a new recount and audit spurred by unsubstantiated claims that fraud or errors tainted President Biden’s win in Arizona’s largest county.

The ballots will be scrutinized not by election officials, but by a group of private companies led by a private Florida-based firm, whose owner has promoted claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent and who has been cited as an expert by allies of former president Donald Trump seeking to cast doubt on the election in other parts of the country.

If you live in Arizona and your state Senator supports this, you know they’re a petulant five year old, stomping their feet in frustration. They have no respect for ethics. Don’t believe that? Ask them if they’d be angry if Democrats pulled the same stunt. Watch them agree, not realizing the trap you just sprang on them. Or watch them stutter, if they’re paying more attention and see the trap.

Toxic team politics and RINO-ing has led to the dominance of the Party by third-class personalities who don’t know enough to be ashamed. The American electorate needs to kick them out as a reprimand to the entire Republican Party.

I see Matt Gaetz has chosen a traditional focus for his defensive maneuvers when it comes to recent revelations concerning Justice Department criminal investigation of his activities:

Rep. Matt Gaetz on Wednesday announced a six-figure ad buy for a spot that targets CNN, as he fights to save his political career amid sexual trafficking allegations.

The new 30-second ad will be featured in the Florida Republican’s congressional district and nationally on select cable networks, according to a statement from Gaetz’s congressional campaign. The ad marks the beginning of Gaetz’s counteroffensive, as he “fight[s] back against a multiweek fake news cycle against him,” it said.

“Now we see what’s really behind all of this: Democratic Party and media-driven smears aimed at taking out a Congressman of the United States,” a spokesperson for the Friends of Matt Gaetz said in the statement. [Politico]

Sadly for him, neither CNN nor the Biden Administration started this investigation; it’s the product of the Trump Administration.

Which is not to say Trump is rewarding Gaetz’s loyalty with a spike up the backside. Perhaps former AG Barr didn’t much care for him. Perhaps a lower level official carried out a political hit on Gaetz.

Maybe Gaetz is even guilty.

But Gaetz is faced with a conundrum here. If he goes after the real source of his investigation, he may find himself attacking influential figures in the conservative movement, and as a firebrand conservative himself, he knows the movement is fragile at the moment. The January 6th insurrection did not play well outside of the Republican Party, and even within the party it’s only acceptable due to self-deception. This has lessened support for the Republican Party, and while it’s not yet in danger of sinking into the self-made swamp of mass irrelevance, it’s been moving that way since the term of Gingrich as Speaker of the House.

Gaetz needs to survive without knocking over any Republican kingpins.

So he’ll go after traditional targets and hope that he can make it stick. Will he? I doubt it. If he is put on trial, I think he’ll be done. But until then, he’ll scrabble around and look worse and worse.

Or he’ll be vindicated. That is looking less and less likely, but it’s not impossible.

Erick Erickson:

Kim Potter should be prosecuted for her negligence, but [Daunte] Wright would be alive but for his actions too. Ashli Babbitt [the January 6th insurrectionist who was shot and died at the insurrection] should be alive as well. In our tribal times, we have broken our bond with truth. We have an obligation to the truth that must outweigh our obligations to our tribes.

If, indeed, the facts as presented are true, then I think the protesters should consider finding the local National Rifle Association office and protesting them. Without guns, many of these tragedies would not have happened.

Keepwell:

It’s a type of credit protection mainly seen in China’s $885 billion market for dollar bonds (those sold outside mainland China, denominated in U.S. dollars). The keepwell provision often involves a Chinese company’s pledge to keep an offshore subsidiary that is issuing the bonds solvent — but without any guarantee of payment to the bondholders. (Actual guarantees require regulatory approval but keepwells don’t.) The clauses often include an agreement where the parent will purchase equity interest or assets in the offshore subsidiary as a way of servicing payments on overseas notes, according to an analysis by Fitch Ratings. Terms can vary, with different definitions of default, trigger events or what actions the keepwell provider promises to take. [“What ‘Keepwell’ Means in Case of China Bond Defaults,” Bloomberg/WaPo]

I’ve banged on Erick Erickson enough times that finding myself in agreement with him – if only in response, if not in the theoretical underpinnings – leaves me with a bit of a squirm. The piece is entitled, “Why Is College So Expensive?” He, of course, can’t help but see everything through his prism:

Specifically, the Biden administration doesn’t want to have that conversation [about banning student loans]. The left doesn’t either. Why? Because academics are their constituent base. Essentially, the student loan industry props up a large and almost universally consolidating base of Democratic voters called professors.

If you keep the student loan industry going, and then you bail out the students, the money continues to flow to the academic intuitions that provide you a reliable pool of elite, white voters for the Democratic Party. They don’t want to meaningfully deal with student loans or the rising cost of tuition. Instead, they would rather have the American taxpayers bail out the people who got loans for degrees in professional victimology and can’t pay them back.

Because that pool is so … big? Without checking, I rather doubt that there’s a substantial imbalance in the political leanings of new college graduates, enough to tip the country into a Democratic stranglehold.

But that thought appeals to conservative cant, so he tosses that in as he’s now a conservative thought leader.

But this is what I proposed, if only as an experiment, years ago, if not quite so hyperbolicly as does Erickson:

If we’re going to have a discussion about college tuition inflation, we’re not having a real discussion until we get to the student loan market. The solution is not to bail out students, the solution is to ban student loans. If we got rid of student loan programs, you would see a remarkable collapse in college tuition in this country.

Getting rid of the student loan industry would force colleges and universities to scale back to reality. Everyone in higher-ed would be outraged and claim many schools would go out of business. Would that happen? Yes and good riddance. The fewer academic incubators for ignorance, the better. But we don’t want to have that conversation.

Perhaps the for-profit schools would go under. Some marginal institutions might also disappear, or be forced to reform various financial practices. And I don’t appreciate the politically motivated bile.

But long-time readers know that I’ve addressed the topic of tuition subsidies before, and identified the freeloading component of society, riding the backs of students, poor and rich alike, to be … society. Society is an entity in and of itself, defined by its network effects between members, and it benefits from having highly educated citizens. The less it contributes to ameliorating the costs of college, the more it is a freeloading institution: an inverse correlation.

And Erickson misses that key, critical part completely. As does most everyone else.

The Ever Given may no longer be physically stuck in the Suez Canal, but it’s … legally stuck:

Lieutenant General Osama Rabie, Chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, confirmed in a press statement, today, Tuesday, that the Panamanian vessel “Evergiven”, which ran aground earlier for six days, was seized for failure to pay an amount of $ 900 million, which is the value of what it caused. The delinquent ship caused losses to the Authority as well as the flotation and maintenance process, according to a court ruling issued by the Ismailia Economic Court. [Ahram Gate (Egypt)]

WaPo notes there’s some confusion over who pays what:

The Ever Given is owned by Shoei Kisen Kaisha, a Japanese holding company, but leased by Evergreen Marine Corp., a Taiwan-based conglomerate. Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, a German firm, was responsible for hiring the crew.

Egypt has not said which company it expects to pay for the damage, but Shoei Kisen Kaisha told the Journal last week that it was “in the middle of negotiations” with Suez authorities. The company has filed a lawsuit in British court aimed at limiting its liability for the incident.

Even more surprising – to me – is no word of other shipping companies, large and small, suing over an incident which cost any company ordinarily using the Suez Canal a good chunk of change.

Which leads me to wonder why these ships don’t carry insurance against exactly what happened. Will no insurance company offer it? I did a little digging but came up empty. It seems like a good idea.

In case you wonder how much it costs to use the Suez Canal, here’s a video that talks about that. I haven’t finished watching it myself, but this seems like a good place to put it.

Erick Erickson goes plunging over the waterfall of hyperbolic rhetoric in his pursuit of leadership in the conservative movement in this post, and it’s really too bad, at least for me, because it’s on the topic of transgender youth. That is to say, I might actually agree, at least in general, with his point, but he’s so over the top that he ends up throwing his own ideological allies under the bus in his mad rush to get out front and take a bit of credit. Here he is:

The NCAA has decided it will not send an NCAA tournament to any state that prohibits boys from playing on girls’ athletic teams. According to their statement,

The NCAA Board of Governors firmly and unequivocally supports the opportunity for transgender student-athletes to compete in college sports. This commitment is grounded in our values of inclusion and fair competition.

Notice what we are quibbling with over here. No one objects to transgender athletes playing college sports. People just think they need to play with others of their same sex, not those whose gender they identify with if it deviates from their biological sex.

The anti-vaccine proponents have scores of doctors willing to say vaccines cause autism and other ailments. The transgender crowd now has doctors willing to say that, in the case of boys who identify as girls, their testosterone really is not an issue.

The science, on both counts, disagrees with the fringe, but the mainstream media and left elevate the fringe doctors of the transgender crowd and demand we treat them seriously. Real-world experience of boys playing as girls on the field overwhelmingly shows they tend to have more physical prowess.

Ultimately, conservatives will have to decide if they are willing to give up money in favor of not just God, but biology, science, and sanity.

I do notice that he cites science without specific citation, but this statement from Dr. Renee Richards, disagreeing with ideological statements that, athletically speaking, a transgender woman is the equivalent of a standard-issue woman, is enough to permit me to provisionally take Erickson’s statement at face value.

It doesn’t hurt that, to my software engineer sensibilities, the likelihood that two types of entities that have such dissimilar categorical histories can be properly defined as equivalent without extensive testing and discussion seems low, though not impossible. Worse, putting on my communications analysis hat, the presentations of just such assertions have not come across as reasoned and data-driven analytical results, but as ideologically driven proclamations that, quite frankly, grate on my nerves.

Furthermore, the topic really raises questions concerning the entire concept of sex-segregated athletic competitions, questions echoed by the controversy over the South African runner Caster Semenya, the hyperandrogenous woman athlete whose naturally abnormally high levels of testosterone give her an advantage in her sport, resulting in this:

World Athletics (IAAF), the international governing body of track and field, decided that gave her an unfair advantage over other women. The organization created a new rule stipulating that Semenya and other female athletes like her with naturally high levels of testosterone, would be forced to take medication in order to alter their hormones. [MSN]

Is there a simple answer to the question of what constitutes a valid competition? What is the purpose of competition?

BUT … I’m not here to explore fascinating questions like this. Rather, it’s how Erickson reacted to Governor Hutchinson (R-AR) vetoing a law the Arkansas Legislature passed forbidding doctors … from providing gender-affirming “procedures” for trans people under age 18:

Asa Hutchinson, the Governor of Arkansas, chose Mammon. If you watch him closely, you’ll see a Walmart lobbyist with his hand so far up Hutchinson’s rectum as to muppet him into whatever Walmart wants. The Arkansas legislature was not bought off, but perhaps the temptation will ultimately be too strong.

And how did Governor Hutchinson justify his veto?

Arkansas’ Republican governor on Monday vetoed an anti-transgender health care bill that would’ve prohibited physicians in the state from providing gender-affirming “procedures” for trans people under age 18.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson told reporters that he killed HB 1570 because the bill “would be and is a vast government overreach” and because it would’ve created “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters involving young people.” [CNN/Politics]

For Erickson, eager to stir the outrage soup, employing a religiously charged term with a political base that is at least more likely to be religious than the average American may seem logical, but it’s an invocation of the forces of irrationality in support of a position that he considers to be rational.

But it’s not. No civil legislature possesses the medical knowledge, nor the situational knowledge, to decide that a class of medical procedures should be banned. To believe otherwise is to indulge in arrogance of the worst sort. Hutchinson, recognizing that governmental overreach that is an oft-used accusation against his political opponents, quite properly vetoed the bill.

Incidentally, the veto was overridden.

So what about me? While I don’t feel obligated to offer an opinion, I will.

First, I have to wonder about performing procedures and treatments which will have profound emotional impact on non-adult patients that may, and, in view of our current knowledge of neuroscience, usually won’t have the capacity to comprehend completely where they are, metaphorically, and where they propose to go. Consider the case of Kiera Bell, who now regrets transitioning to male. In her story, she didn’t understand her own situation, or where she was going; when she arrived, she bought a return ticket back home, but by then she’d had a double mastectomy.

Therefore, performing “gender-affirming procedures” on those below the age of adulthood should not be a first-line treatment, but a treatment of last resort. All of us have been younger than full adults, and remember it as a confusing time. The brain is not fully wired, and the body is awash in natural chemicals that are urging at least half the population to mate and mate now. To expect adult, well-considered decisions from immature members of society is unwise; it is, in fact, betrayal of the adult responsibility to help raise responsible and mature members of society. Do those who think they desire these procedures need support? Yes. Does that include actually performing those procedures? No. Support doesn’t mean delivery, and it doesn’t mean dissuasion. It means delay until they’ve reached an age which we can reasonably hope they know what they’re doing.

All that said, the Legislature has no role here. These should be medical decisions made by professionals who are intimate with the situation, not a bunch of amateurs. Yes, it sounds like the professionals failed completely in the Bell case, and if the Bell case exists, there’s going to be more. However, that is a problem for the medical profession to resolve, whether it be the infiltration of rank ideology into the profession, or simply mistakes being made. A Legislature has little chance of getting it right.

That’s why we license professionals.

But I think Erickson is letting his emotions carry him down a path he really shouldn’t be on.

In the Republican corner, the crisis – the real crisis – is the toxic culture of which so many have spoken, which is reaching its nadir in a base that would rather believe blatant lies than think rationally about national results. Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who is either a brazen criminal or a moving target for his intra-party rivals, Rep Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and the entire generation of Republicans who have been condemned by former Speaker Boehner (R-OH) are the results of this toxic culture.

On the Democratic side, there may – may – be a crisis brewing in the issue of the southern border. Axios reports:

Southern border coordinator Roberta Jacobson’s last day in the Biden White House will be at the end of April before she retires, she announced on Friday.

Why it matters: The former ambassador to Mexico has been at the forefront of the administration’s efforts to handle the surge of migrants at the border — which shows no sign of stopping.

• Jacobson’s departure comes after there were more illegal border crossings in March than in any single month in 15 years on top of record numbers of unaccompanied minors overwhelming government immigration and shelter systems.

While Erick Erickson’s paid to put the worst possible spin on such things, it’s worth taking a look, which appears to be associated with his radio show rather than his blog, so it came in private email:

The word “crisis” may not have been used, but this is an explicit acknowledgment by the Biden Administration that it has a crisis on its hands and Jacobson has made it worse.

Not content to acknowledge the crisis, the Biden Administration is preparing to make it worse by sending cash payments to the illegal aliens trying to come here in order to keep them from coming.

The United States is considering a conditional cash transfer program to help address economic woes that lead migrants from certain Central American countries to trek north, as well as sending COVID-19 vaccines to those countries, a senior White House official told Reuters on Friday.

The possible cash transfer program would be targeted at people in the Northern Triangle region of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, Roberta Jacobson, the White House’s southern border coordinator, told Reuters in an interview, without saying who exactly would receive the cash.

Yes, that would be the same Roberta Jacobson who, after eighty days, is retiring. Perhaps that is why she is retiring and the Biden Administration realized the moment she opened her mouth that she needed to be sent to pasture.

Erickson isn’t going to give all the context:

Andrew Selee, president of nonpartisan think tank the Migration Policy Institute, affirmed that Jacobson’s role “was definitely only supposed to be a 100-day job. [Los Angeles Times]

So that retirement isn’t quite as shocking as Erickson might want you to think. But it remains true that the border problem is a tough problem, particularly so long as we try to slap a bandaid on a gaping wound, which this is becoming. Jacobson, limited as she is in her role, gives more context for her proposal:

Instead of pouring most of the money into national treasuries, she said in that interview, greater amounts would go to nongovernmental organizations and programs for single mothers, youth training and similar groups, “so that in the end, you are strengthening the societies and not enriching these governments.” [Los Angeles Times]

But I think this is inadequate. Obama, Trump, Bush, Clinton – it’s not in the least clear to me that any of them initiated the programs necessary to discover why the civil societies of these countries have foundered so badly that people are leaving home. We need a thoroughly honest investigation that leaves behind American jingoism in favor of understanding what is going on, and then taking action.

And what if the result is really unpalatable? What if, just as an example, we discover our food exports have swamped their markets, and their farmers, unable to compete, are now flooding their labor markets with too much labor? A sociopath would recommend that all food exports be shut off, making the role of the local farmer once again viable.

But could we do that? No.

And there are even worse conclusions, which I shan’t explore as, while plausible, they lead to plans of action that are completely unacceptable in current morality systems.

While the Republicans may have a terminal cultural problem, the Democrats have been handed a hot potato which they are not apparently willing to properly investigate. And it’s hot:

(Above from cbp.gov.) I am uninterested in conservative outrage strategies, which Erickson shamelessly indulges in with this:

In other words, though they clearly realize they have a crisis, the Biden Administration has zero idea how to fix it.

How about, I don’t know, maybe a wall? Or return to the Trump policy of making asylum seekers stay in Central America when they apply? Just a few thoughts. Have a good weekend.

Neither of which were particularly successful. But his audience cannot tolerate being told Trump was a fool and an idiot, so he has to say it, I suppose.

This is a problem that needs to be resolved. How are the Democrats going to do it? If they’re unwilling to really dig into it, I’d recommend the Obama solution: deport everyone in sight.

And that won’t play well with the immigration advocates. We know that because they weren’t happy last time.

I earlier cited Kate Crawford on AI research, but this bit on corporate-government warfare caught my eye as well:

Are we also seeing government pushback? Like when the Australian government drafted legislation for big tech firms to pay for content from news organisations and Facebook responded by briefly turning off all news for Australians on its platform?

It was horrifying to see that. This was a signal being sent by Facebook to the world that says: “If you pass laws that we don’t like, we will simply take our toys and go home.” And given how many countries right now are looking to produce much stricter forms of regulation on the tech sector, it seems like a troublesome type of strongman tactics.

Are tech companies any different to powerful companies that have gone before them?

Tech companies have taken on the roles of states in terms of things like providing civic infrastructure. Facebook, for example, has spent huge amounts of money to convince populations that they are the place where you can communicate with family, where student groups can put up their information. This is where you connect with your communities. What was so extraordinary to see was that this civic infrastructure can be switched off any minute. The power of technology companies has in some ways leapfrogged the power of states and this is very unusual.

But I have to wonder: why did Australia back off? I think this may have been an opportunity to push Facebook out of the news delivery service, and either force them of of the news area completely, or to invest in the news collection business as well – thus generating jobs.

And if they hadn’t? Local demand might have allowed Australian news services to regain jobs. Indeed, if Australia had insisted that Facebook pay for all news, from both foreign and domestic sources, it could have started an Australian renaissance in the news business.

And if they had worked with other countries, such as the behemoth United States, on this insistence, Facebook may have had to put up the cash to buy the rights to broadcast all that news – from their obscene profits (2020: $29.1 billion with a B).

That could have proven very interesting.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote, very briefly, about the trans debate, including the regrets of some young transitioners about taking the plunge. They are known as detransitioners. Keira Bell, who transitioned from female to male and back to female, while suing the NHS (Britain’s National Health Service), has written a piece on her own experience:

As I look back, I see how everything led me to conclude it would be best if I stopped becoming a woman. My thinking was that, if I took hormones, I’d grow taller and wouldn’t look much different from biological men.

I began seeing a psychologist through the National Health Service, or NHS. When I was 15—because I kept insisting that I wanted to be a boy—I was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service, at the Tavistock and Portman clinic in London. There, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress because of a mismatch between your biological sex and your perceived gender identity.

By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation.

And a panel of British High Court justices found that the docs at Tavistock were operating most unprofessionally.

If you’re at all interested in this subject, this is a good piece to read. It provokes the question: if someone you know, or don’t know, were to tell you that they wanted to transition, and were of a young age, what would you say?

1. You’re crazy!
2. Of course, dear, let me help arrange that.
3. Why?

Let me know in comments.

Misandrist:

Misandry (/mɪˈsændri/) is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against men or boys in general. Misandry may be manifested in numerous ways, including social exclusion, sexism, hostility, gynocentrism, belittling of men, violence against men, and sexual objectification. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “A Truce Proposal In The Trans Wars,” Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish:

In our current culture, this somewhat complicated stance is anathema. For some trans activists, especially the younger more thoroughly woke ones, I am simply evil, beset by phobias, and determined to persecute and kill trans people, or seek their genocide. I wish this were a caricature of their views, but it isn’t. For some radical feminists, my empathy for trans women, and concern for their welfare, is regarded as a function of my misogyny and hatred of women, often wrapped up in some anti-gay, misandrist bile. I wish I were exaggerating here as well. The proportion of people in this debate who seem psychologically unstable, emotionally volatile and personally vicious seems larger than usual.

It’s not a bad article and proposal.

Hemant Mehta is commenting on Jimmy Bakker’s guest on his show, Tom Horn, who thinks asteroid Apophis will hit the Earth in 2029, resulting in the release of the Antichrist, and while the red flags are flocking like maggots to a corpse in this unremarkable case, I had to admire Mehta’s commentary:

I’m not sure why [Horn’s] worried when Bakker has a “Silver Solution” that allegedly cures viruses…

I guess we should be happy that in the future, even nutbags will get their shots? Whatever it takes to convince them vaccines are real. (One of these days, I need to learn Bakker’s secret to always being able to find guests so insane that he gets to look like the smart one on the panel.)

Bold mine.

That commentary stuck in my brain for a couple of days, and I’m thinking that it’s because it’s a symptom of the competition that is taking place in an arena of madness.

Look: “Prophets,” much like everyone else, want to stand out and win admiration, which translates to wealth and power. In this contest, differentiation is one key. But, when the arena is purely imaginary, there are few, if any constraints on where you go. Go nuts. All it has to do is resonate with the audience.

Or at least so you’d think.

Which makes me wonder if Bakker is a step ahead of his nuttier guests. By presenting as relatively sane and >eeek!< trustworthy, he may be actually scooping up some adherents and their money that might have otherwise flowed to his guests.

And that’s not bad pickins’ for a disgraced preacher with multiple felony convictions, a grifter who flamed out. Not bad at all.

Spaceweather.com reports on new research regarding the frequency of devastating CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections) hitting the Earth:

If you think you’re safe from geomagnetic storms, think again. A new study just published in the research journal Space Weather finds that powerful storms may be twice as likely as previously thought.

Jeffrey Love of the US Geological Survey, who authored the study, analyzed Earth’s strongest geomagnetic storms since the early 1900s. Previous studies looked back only to the 1950s. The extra data led to a surprise:

“A storm as intense as, say, the Québec Blackout of 1989 is predicted to occur, on average, about every four solar cycles. This is twice as often as estimated using only the traditional shorter dataset,” says Love.

Such storms are capable of knocking out satellites as well, such as geostationary communications satellites, or Elon Musk’s Starlink project.

Which makes such projects questionable when trying to offer a reliable Internet connection.

Vexillology:

Flags of the World (FOTW), founded in 1994, is the Internet’s largest site devoted to vexillology (the study of flags). Here you can read more than 75,000 pages about flags and view more than 161,000 images of flags of countries, organizations, states, territories, districts and cities, both past and present. [FOTW]

In a not-unexpected followup to Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan’s (R-GA) comments concerning the new Georgia law on voting, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports Duncan is taking the hard path of politics:

Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan is unlikely to run for a second term as the state’s No. 2 politician, according to a senior aide who said the Republican is instead expected to focus on his “GOP 2.0” initiative to reframe the party in a post-Trump era.

Duncan has signaled for months that he would not seek reelection after he’s repeatedly criticized former President Donald Trump, but he’s declined to say publicly whether he will stand for another term. Duncan’s chief of staff, John Porter, said the lieutenant governor was not planning a 2022 bid, though he added the decision hasn’t been finalized.

Instead:

Lissome:

attractively thin and able to move quickly and smoothly [Cambridge Dictionary]

Somehow I’ve never known the definition. Noted in “Prince Philip, royal consort to Queen Elizabeth II, dies at 99,” Adrian Higgins, WaPo:

During a visit to the naval college by the royal family, less than two months before the outbreak of World War II, Philip, then 18, entertained Princess Elizabeth, who was just 13 and was soon smitten by the lissome, blue-eyed cadet.

Microsoft Research’s Kate Crawford has been studying AI for close to twenty years, and in this NewScientist (27 March 2021) interview she discusses her observations. NS provides a helpful introduction:

[Crawford] argues that AI, far from being something abstract and objective, is both material and intrinsically linked to power structures. The way it is made involves extracting resources from people and the planet, and the way it is used reflects the beliefs and biases of those who wield it. Only when we come to terms with this, says Crawford, will we be able to chart a just and sustainable future with AI.

Or, perhaps, reject it. But how to define AI?

You say in your new book [Atlas of AI] that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. What do you mean?

Often when people think about artificial intelligence, they’ll think about binary code and math, or something that’s ethereal and in the cloud, or they might think about a series of corporate products like Alexa, Siri or Google’s search algorithm. But none of these things are artificial – in fact they are profoundly material. They only function because of large amounts of data scraped from the internet and an enormous extraction of resources, including minerals, energy and the human labour that is necessary to label the data used by AI systems. In this sense, AI is a material system that is very much coming from humans, created by humans, and more widely from the earth.

The implication is that artificial and material are opposites, but, at least in my mind, they are not opposites, at least in common usage. I think Crawford needs to consider her communications strategy, because I, a software engineer from the 1980s onward who, while not involved in AI R&D, have given it some thought on the ethical level, as noted on this blog, and I don’t quite understand the point she’s trying to make.

Artificial Intelligence from the movies!

I can – and do – accept the operational aspects of that paragraph, and I think they have enormous implications. I also reject the notion that we’ve nearly achieved AI in the literal sense – that is, as long-time readers know, in the emergence of self-agency, the notion that an entity should select its own goals, that it should evaluate its hypothetical actions in reaction to a stimulus in terms of its self-selected goals.

What computer science departments and corporate marketing calls AI is nothing more than exceedingly sophisticated tools developed by and for humans.

This paragraph, too, is somewhat puzzling:

You say that it is inherently political too. How?

Artificial intelligence is politics all the way down. From the way in which data is collected, to the automated classification of personal characteristics like gender, race, emotion or sexual identity, to the way in which those tools are built and who experiences the downsides.

Time and time again we’ve seen that people who are already marginalised are the ones who experience the worst harms from large-scale artificial intelligence systems. We’ve seen communities of colour targeted by predictive policing systems, immigrants surveilled and tracked by deportation tools, and people with disabilities cut off from support services due to poorly designed healthcare algorithms.

I’m optimistic when I see people starting to demand greater justice, transparency and accountability. We’ve seen widespread student protests in the UK over algorithmic mismanagement in the education system and we’ve seen substantial public pushback around facial recognition in the US.

Politics is an intentional activity, and I’m not convinced that the data collection practices we’ve seen produce poor results in such areas as facial recognition, for example, are the result of politics. I’ve been too long in the trenches to know that, hey, people make mistakes. That doesn’t make them deliberately political, it just means that we are humans operating in a world which we’ve constructed, but for which we have not evolved. When the big picture means the populations of seven continents in all of their eccentricities and you’ve never left the suburb of Philly that you grew up in, except for that one big trip to NYC, it’s not hard to see mistakes being made.

But I’m presenting nits – important nits – to her argument. Because “AI” lacks self-agency, it also necessarily lacks an independent ethics^[1]. It does what it’s told – and if that’s to track Chinese citizens to make sure they behave in the manner prescribed by the Chinese Communist Party, then that’s what it’ll do. And that is political.

Given the proliferation of these tools, what are better called Machine Learning tools (ML), I think Crawford is absolutely asking and answering the right questions, and whether or not I understand those answers, I think she’s doing important work. The interview is a good place to start.

¹ Not that intelligence necessarily gives rise to a sense of ethics! But I think it’s a necessary precursor, whether that sense of ethics is self-generated, collaboratively or not, or taught. But, of course, people like serial killer Ted Bundy show that intelligence doesn’t automatically lead to ethics. To not recognize that is to make the digital mistake with human intelligence. Even this postscript is making that mistake to a degree: I could see an argument that all humans come with a code of ethics, it’s just that some are agreeable to building a stable, peaceful society, and some are so self-centered that society rejects them. The malleability of the concept is treacherous.

One of the laments of recent in pop-sci articles on physics has been a lack of new physics, despite the fact that there’s a gap in how to meld quantum physics with gravity. Yesterday, however, The New York Times reports a possible breakthrough, also known as breaking the Standard Model:

The particle célèbre is the muon, which is akin to an electron but far heavier, and is an integral element of the cosmos. Dr. Polly and his colleagues — an international team of 200 physicists from seven countries — found that muons did not behave as predicted when shot through an intense magnetic field at Fermilab.

The aberrant behavior poses a firm challenge to the Standard Model, the suite of equations that enumerates the fundamental particles in the universe (17, at last count) and how they interact.

But in all fairness:

The measurements have about one chance in 40,000 of being a fluke, the scientists reported, well short of the gold standard needed to claim an official discovery by physics standards. Promising signals disappear all the time in science, but more data are on the way. Wednesday’s results represent only 6 percent of the total data the muon experiment is expected to garner in the coming years.

Messing about with what resembles ghosts is quite the tricky thing:

Muons are an unlikely particle to hold center stage in physics. Sometimes called “fat electrons,” they resemble the familiar elementary particles that power our batteries, lights and computers and whiz around the nuclei of atoms; they have a negative electrical charge, and they have a property called spin, which makes them behave like tiny magnets.

But they are 207 times as massive as their better-known cousins. They are also unstable, decaying radioactively into electrons and super-lightweight particles called neutrinos in 2.2 millionths of a second.

And so, at least for some quantum physicists, there is hope in physics-town.

From CNN/Politics: