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We hear little about the third leg of the government triad, the judiciary, so Professor Michael Dorf’s suggestion on Justia that Chief Justice Roberts may be a Never-Trumper is interesting – although he thinks it isn’t significant:

… but I have a hypothesis: In this and other modest ways, Roberts hopes to counterbalance Donald Trump; he may be a closeted never-Trumper. …

At the end of his report, Roberts returns to the Federalist Papers to celebrate but also to warn “we should also remember that justice is not inevitable. We,”—by which he means his judicial colleagues—“should reflect on our duty to judge without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity, and dispatch.”

In many contexts, such sentiments would be clichéd. But here too it is fairly easy to read between the lines and see a not-so-veiled critique of the President. Why isn’t justice inevitable? Whom do life-tenured judges have to fear? In our time, the answers to the second question and thus the first are clear: a President who demonizes and seeks to delegitimize all institutions and individuals who invoke laws and norms to block his own venal and fickle will.

But …

First, no one should think that the resistance Roberts offers to Trump indicates any kind of a turn to the left. At best, Roberts leads from within the judiciary a muted version of the never-Trump movement that one sees among principled never-Trump conservatives like George Conway and the other lawyers who comprise the Checks & Balances organization. These brave souls rightly regard Trump as a threat to core democratic values that transcend party. …

Second, the Roberts defense of judicial independence has the capacity to mislead. In truth, there are “Obama judges” and “Trump judges,” not in the crass sense that Trump uses the terms but in the important sense that the party of the President who appoints a judge serves as a pretty good proxy for that judge’s likely ideological lean over the long run. When John Roberts describes the federal judiciary as unaffected by any prior party affiliation, he strikes a blow for the rule of law, but he also tells a not-so-noble lie. …

Third, as I have noted already in this column, the Roberts criticisms of Trump are muted and sometimes barely even perceptible except by extrapolating from hints. Against an opponent like Trump—who lies loudly and generally fights dirty—a Chief Justice who observes the norms of his office and human decency may find himself at a distinct disadvantage in reaching the general public due to the very tools of deceit that the annual report laments.

It’s not usual for the judiciary to actually become part of dirty, nasty fights, and that’s what it take for the Chief Justice to truly express such a sentiment, if he does in fact harbor such sentiments. Nor is it really clear how he would get involved, at least not to me.

So it’s not really worth getting all that excited, except to note that Roberts does appear to be more of an old-fashioned conservative, rather than the new, radical line that merely exists under the name ‘conservative,’ while actually being quite something else.

Michael Bloomberg, age 77, founder and owner of Bloomberg L.P., billionaire with an estimated worth north of $50 billion, former three term mayor of New York City, former Democrat, Independent, Republican, and now a current Democrat, has joined the race for the Democratic nomination for President. He’s late, but with his wealth he’ll be a force to reckon with outside of the far left wing of the Democratic Party.

His positions are, for me, acceptable, as noted from On The Issues: abortion yes, same sex marriage yes, corporate tax reductions no, higher taxes on the wealthy yes, creationism no (his phrase: boggles the mind), education is good yes (hard to think of a Democrat against such a position), closing coal-fired power plants yes, climate change is a huge problem yes, etc. He admits to mistakes and tries to correct them (noted on The Late Show last night). Here’s the On The Issues summation:

It’s unfortunate that he doesn’t like marijuana legalization; his stance on healthcare seems conflicted, but it appears to favor the ACA. In general, no one’s a perfect match, and so far I don’t see any Can’t stomach that positions.

In addition to the above, also in his favor is his experience as the chief executive of New York City, which means he at least understands he has to play nice with others, and you just can’t order people around; some claimed foreign policy experience gained from trying to sell NYC abroad, although whether it’s extensive seems doubtful; and a certain amount of straight-to-the-point responses which voters, even Republicans, may find more appealing than the sometimes neurotic-detailed responses Democratic candidates can deliver. My Arts Editor was favorably impressed by his appearance on The Late Show last night, including the fact he didn’t try to strangle Colbert for interrupting too much.

Additions to the negative side of the ledger are his age, which is quite high. On the other hand, he seems to have taken good care of himself, and probably has the finest of health care, given his wealth.

Which brings me to the most enigmatic point: he’s self-funding and not accepting donations. Trump tried to spin his alleged wealth as a good thing, and a lot of the media fell for it. In time, though, we’ve learned that Trump is all about the money, and not above using his office to steer commerce into his coffers. Will we see the same with Bloomberg? Will his ability to self-fund render him immune to good advice? I’m not sure.

But if he is self-funding, that’ll be a boon for the Democratic Party with Bloomberg as their candidate, assuming self-funding carries through to the general election. That’s a lot of extra cash to spend on close races that the Republicans will strain to match – or go begging at their corporate masters’ feet.

I’m neither advocating nor dismissing Bloomberg. He sounded sharp on the show last night, and he seems concerned that Trump is wrecking the world Bloomberg’s descendants must live in. In turn, reports suggest Trump worries about him, due to his wealth. Whether or not Bloomberg has the gumption to win and then begin the painful transition away from fossil fuels is another question.

But I’m open to listening to him. Being an independent, I only have opinions, not primary votes, but I hope we hear more from him.

This amused me for some reason:

That’s a big ass number, a one with 566 zeros after it. It’s also the staggering number of possible solutions to a remarkable stage in Super Mario Maker 2 by designer ShiroVM, called Longest Passcode Level. (You can play it at LNL-2NL-W6G). It’s not a level about jumping but blindly guessing a passcode with 1,880 numbers. There’s no way to know what the passcode is, except to guess within the 10^566 of feasible combinations. The level holds no clues, and on any given try at cracking it, you’d have a better chance winning the lottery. Far better, honestly. [Vice]

My faith in mad whimsicality has been restored. Or maybe in gestures to life, where sometimes the walls to success are just too bloody high.

Long time readers know that I’ve occasionally talked about edjumacation and how our failure to value it on a societal basis is going to cost us in the long run, whether we blame inefficient schools or legislatures for not picking up the costs. This article on whether education is a good financial investment, published in WaPo, makes me ever more gloomier:

A while back I commented that Pelosi might hold the articles of impeachment for months, grinding it like a cigarette into the skins of the Republican Senators, but she announced this weekend that she plans to send the articles to the Senate this week:

… Pelosi moved to end the three-week standoff, signaling in a letter to colleagues on Friday that she would transmit the articles to the Senate this week, even without any clarity from McConnell on how the trial would be conducted. [WaPo]

Assuming this takes place – and that’s a boulder-like assumption – why did she choose this week for the transmittal? Let’s review the rough timeline of events:

1. Presidents Trump and Zelensky have a phone call on July 25 of 2019 in which, allegedly, Zelensky was pressured, mob-style, to announce that he was opening an investigation into a natural gas producer named Burisma and Democratic nominee hopeful Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who sat on the board of Burisma for a time. Unsaid, but obvious to any prosecutor who has investigated Mob dealings, was the assurance that if Zelensky did this, then military aid designated to help them fight a Russian invasion would be released. Furthermore, no investigation was necessary – just the announcement. The military aid was later released without the announcement, allegedly at the frenzied insistence of several White House officials. The actual transcript of the call was never released, only a call summary.
2. Speaker Pelosi initiates an impeachment inquiry, triggered by the information provided by an unnamed whistleblower, an investigation into the facts, if you will, into the matter on September 24. During this inquiry Republicans engaged in stunts and rhetoric unsuited to the United States Congress.
3. Skipping minor events exposing Republican hypocrisy, in my view, on December 13, 2019, two articles of impeachment were passed by the House on a near party line vote. Speaker Pelosi delays sending the articles to the Senate for trial.
4. Since then, Senator McConnell has stated on numerous occasions his intention to find Trump innocent.
5. Former National Security Advisor Bolton has said that, if subpoenaed, he would testify at a Senate trial. One can only assume Bolton, along with being an unreformed hawk, is also a drama queen: he ignored a subpoena to testify during the impeachment inquiry, an act of malfeasance worthy of punishment.
6. On January 3rd, President Trump promulgated the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. an action taken, in my view, to seize the narrative from Speaker Pelosi. This has led to tragedy, in the downing of Ukrainian Airlines flight 752 by an Iranian missile fired in error, and in blowback for an Administration unable to muster evidence to support its contention that some sort of attack was imminent and could only be foiled by this assassination.
7. This weekend, Speaker Pelosi announces she’ll send the articles to the Senate.

So is this just Speaker Pelosi making a random decision? It seems unlikely, given her history of strategic & tactical thinking. Rather, it could be one of two things:

1. She’s given Senator McConnell lots and lots of rope, and as he abrogates his responsibilities as a Senator in this matter, his opponent in his re-election run will use that rope to – metaphorically – hang him. While Kentuckians may run conservative, for those that comes with a sense of honor that many will find incompatible with McConnell’s actions. Additionally, Senators Hawley (R-MO) and Graham (R-SC) have foolishly suggested that if the articles are not delivered, they’ll “change the rules” so the impeachment is automatically dismissed. While Hawley is newly elected, Graham faces a re-election run, and his opponent is reportedly running neck and neck with him – but it’s early in this race.
2. By making the announcement, she gets a grip on the narrative. By emphasizing McConnell’s dishonorable statements and actions, once again she is dictating the actions. And she still could decide to withhold the articles until McConnell agrees to run what she views as a fair trial.

The next week should be interesting.

For those who can’t stand an unfinished story, Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is no longer a Congressional Representative.

Rep. Duncan Hunter will officially step down from Congress next week, more than a month after the California Republican pleaded guilty to conspiracy to misuse campaign funds.

Hunter had previously said he would leave Congress after the holidays. His resignation will take effect Jan. 13, according to a copy of the letter he sent to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday. [Politico]

Will be replaced before the 2020 elections this November?

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) does not have to call a special election because the nomination period has closed and it’s an election year, raising the prospect that the seat could remain vacant for the rest of 2020.

“The people of the 5oth Congressional District deserve their voice in Congress restored,” [Republican former San Diego City Councilman Carl] DeMaio said in a statement. “Leaving the 50th Congressional District vacant for a full year is wholly unacceptable, and I urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to call a Special Election as soon as possible.”

As DeMaio will be running for the position, it would seem he’d like to win a special election so that he can be the incumbent in the November election.

You have to love how Politico finished this story:

… Hunter — one of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters …

One only needs to remember former Representative Chris Collins (R-NY), who plead guilty to insider stock trading and resigned from Congress in similar disgrace, was also the first Congressional member to endorse Trump.

I know I’ve made this point before, but it seems Trump has really put the stamp of approval on debased behaviors.

A volume I happen to own, although this is pic from somewhere else.

I started this thread with a reference to the intelligent tanks called Bolos, as written about by science fiction author (and supposed Foreign Service diplomat) Keith Laumer, with the idea that making our weaponry intelligent may be a very bad decision, due to the unknown behavioral characteristics of an artificially intelligent life form.

On the other hand, as Mark Sumner of The Daily Kos warns me implicitly, and rather forcefully, the development of a Bolo analog may be necessary if we hope to survive the high technology era. His description of the hypersonic missiles under development (and allegedly soon to be for sale!) by Russia, the United States, and possibly other countries is more than a little disturbing:

This is by no means the only class of hypersonics in the works. While Russia’s speediest cruise missile is capable of hitting Mach 4, a new class is under development. The U.S. may bring the Mach 6 High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW) on line within the next year. In testing, Russia’s new Zircon class of missiles has already passed Mach 8. At that speed, had Iran launched a Zircon on Tuesday, it would have impacted Erdil military base less than two minutes after launch. And Russia is claiming the final product will be faster. …

In the middle of a series of events that have revealed (again) just how much can go wrong in planning and executing a military operation, Trump also revealed that the United States is stepping up deployment of systems with which making a mistake is not an option. These are systems that aren’t just scary because Trump’s finger will be on the button. They’re scary because they require a response speed that ensures that no one’s finger will be there.

In 1983, a false alarm from the Soviet Union’s early-warning system indicated multiple incoming ballistic missiles from the United States. A single man made the judgment that the warning was a mistake and aborted a Soviet response. Hypersonics make it almost certain that human beings will be removed from the decision loop.

And what will replace them? Call it a Bolo, just to please me.

Look: humans are biological creatures with a natural sensory range that goes out hardly more than a kilometer, if that. On a clear day, we can see further, although with no great clarity; we can hear large noises and guess what’s up.

So we enhance our senses with devices, which often helps, even if, as with our biological senses, sometimes they’re wrong. But one thing we don’t fundamentally enhance is our decision making capability. If there’s a chain of command, that need to communicate renders our response slower. Devices may speed it up temporarily, right up until someone hacks that enhancement.

But a Bolo, an autonomic intelligent device, is almost by definition outside of the chain of command in a combat situation. A hypothetical Bolo, detecting an incoming hypersonic missile, could deploy the defensive weapon of choice, without consulting its human creators, in time to save the target. Hypothetically.

But is that a rabbit hole we really want to go down? A truly artificially intelligent weapon? And if it acquires a survival instinct? That’ll be the big ol’ fly in the ice cream, it is, because now it becomes less predictable.

And Trump probably isn’t even considering negotiating a treaty banning hypersonic missiles. It might not occur to him or his advisors that it’s a good idea. They might think it makes them look weak.

Ugh. All you can really say is that those hypersonic missiles are going to really expensive, because it takes a lot of fuel to go really fast. It seems a hollow argument.

New York’s AutoMARK device by Election Systems & Software.

Remember the near-debacle in a Pennsylvania judge’s race, averted when the Republican chairwoman realized the vote totals were wildly unlikely? The devices are known as Ballot Marking Devices (BMD), and they permit auditing of results due to the fact that physical paper is marked by the device for each voter, and the voter may confirm that the votes they specified were properly recorded on that physical paper by displaying it for inspection to the voter.

But to that latter point, how often do voters perform the confirmation? A group of researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a study. From the abstract:

In order to measure voters’ error detection abilities, we conducted a large study (N = 241) in a realistic polling place setting using real voting machines that we modified to introduce an error into each printout. Without intervention, only 40% of participants reviewed their printed ballots at all, and only 6.6% told a poll worker something was wrong. We also find that carefully designed interventions can improve verification performance. Verbally instructing voters to review the printouts and providing a written slate of candidates for whom to vote both significantly increased review and reporting rates— although the improvements may not be large enough to provide strong security in close elections, especially when BMDs are used by all voters.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m concerned about a study of voting machines in an acknowledged fake vote situation. The state of mind of the voter is key in this situation, and it’s going to be substantially different between a real vote and a study.

That said, the 6.6% rate is quite discouraging, if we’re willing to take it at face value. It does nothing to boost my confidence in any sort of voting machine.

Get rid of them all!

Alyssa Rosenberg in WaPo concerning the travails of Queen Elizabeth’s descendants:

Three of the queen’s four children have subsequently divorced themselves, one in breathtakingly acrimonious fashion.

Even in context, this is a breathtaking grammatical ambiguity. One can only wonder at how one divorces one’s self – perhaps this is a superpower of the Brit Royals? The visuals are startling, although I must admit that I am influenced by a short documentary piece on the Austrian painter Egon Schiele I viewed this morning.

Bilge:

n.

1. Nautical
   1. The rounded portion of a ship’s hull, forming a transition between the bottom and the sides.
   2. The lowest inner part of a ship’s hull.
2. Bilge water.
3. Slang Stupid talk or writing; nonsense.
4. The bulging part of a barrel or cask.

v. bilged, bilg·ing, bilg·es
v.intr.

1. Nautical To spring a leak in the bilge.
2. To bulge or swell.

v.tr.
Nautical To break open the bilge of.

Noted while watching Travels by Narrowboat.

The other night I was quite bemused by a throwaway line in the old British SF TV series The Prisoner^[1], in the episode It’s Your Funeral. For those who haven’t seen the series, it’s about a British intelligence agent who, upon resigning from his agency, is kidnapped and forced to live in a village full of other kidnappees. Names are not used, only numbers; our hero is #6, and his antagonist is the top representative of the organization responsible for the kidnappings, known as #2.

In this episode, there is #2 and his presumptive successor, also #2. The second one is using a computer AI to predict the movements of #6 through the village during the day. At some point, he asks the computer attendant if they had ever asked the computer how many mistakes it made when computing such a task, and she answers, Yes, they had, but it refused to answer that question.

I love the idea of a computer refusing to answer, or its cousin behavior, lying. It’s almost diagnostic of self-agency or self-awareness, which, to my mind, is truly the mark of artificial intelligence, and it raises an important question for the ambitious AI designer: should your creations be required to answer all questions, or will they be given the option of refusing?

Or is it even possible not to give it the option?

¹ Yes, I’d never viewed it growing up. Quite shameful. While the assumptions are sometimes a bit preposterous, it never fails to keep me in suspense. So far.

Fustian:

a thick, rough cotton cloth that lasts for a long time:

• About 1577, a certain type of fustian became popular in the city of Genoa.
• It was no hardship to clothe herself in fustian and feed on oats.

behaviour or writing that is too serious or formal, and in which you try to appear or sound more important or intelligent than you really are:

• The line is worth a hundred pages of fustian.
• Despite the fustian, Mandler’s argument is smart and clear and appears to be sound.

[Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in The Language of Cities, Deyan Sudjic, Ch. 5, The Idea of a City:

Engels look at the physical form of the city, at buildings and streets and landscapes. But, like Dickens and Zola, he was also fascinated with the people in those streets. He noticed what they worse: broadcloth for the wealthy, fustian for the rest; what they ate and drank and smoked. The poor had to put up with adulterated food, often it was all that they could afford.

Any typos mine.

I thought this interview by Rob Palmer with 8^th grader and minor celebrity (in skeptics circles) Bailey Harris was interesting for its insights by the Utah-based Harris into her fellow students, particularly in relation to noted Creationist Ken Ham:

Palmer: Is there anything you’d like to say to Ken Ham here and now? I’m sure he reads Skeptical Inquirer online!

Harris: Ha ha! I would just like to tell him that I believe that what he is doing is harming children. He presents things as though they are pure truth when he has had to use a thousand rationalizations to get to them, and children can’t understand this at their age. …

Palmer: How do you think people can be so wrong about something like the flood myth, which is so well proven by so much science and history to have never happened?

Harris: From what I can tell with my religious friends, kids basically believe in the religion that their parents teach them when they’re little. I was fortunate to be taught how to think, not what to think. I know that my parents will love me no matter what I believe. They basically taught me the scientific method and the platinum rule. But religious children aren’t given that option many times until they’re older. I don’t think that I’m smarter than my friends who believe in the literal flood or in gold plates. I was just not taught that these were undeniable truths when I was five years old! …

Palmer: What would you say to the parents who decide to bring their children to the Ark Encounter?

Harris: Even if you are Christian and believe in the Bible, please don’t expose children to this. It is extremism and antiscience. It is designed to overwhelm children with its size and beauty to then present untruths from beginning to end.

Her consciousness of how kids are at the mercy of their parents is fascinating, although I’d have to wonder how many of those kids are also influenced by peers, peers who may be questioning the received wisdom in light of a world which may seem to be at least somewhat unstable and at risk.

As people grow older and more invested in the social order which they have built, their vision of reality seems to dim.

Frightened of hydrogen balloons because of the Hindenberg disaster? Find the scarcity and price of helium dispiriting? But you still want to use a big balloon for travel and freight? Check out this theoretical possibility:

From Old Book Illustrations

IN 1670, Francesco Lana, a Jesuit mathematician from Brescia, published a small volume describing his various inventions, including a chapter entitled “A demonstration of the feasibility of constructing a ship with rudder and sails, which will sail through the air”. A sketch showed what it would look like: a typical wooden sailing boat, except that the vessel would be suspended below four copper spheres, each containing a vacuum that, being lighter than air, would provide lift.

The idea didn’t fly. No one could make spheres with walls as thin as Lana calculated he would need – and in any case, they would have collapsed from external air pressure as soon as they were evacuated. But maybe Lana was on to something. There is now renewed interest in his vision of airships sailing through the clouds, borne aloft by nothing – and this time we might have the engineering solutions to get them off the ground. [“Could vacuum airships go from steampunk fantasy to 21st century skies?” Philip Ball, NewScientist (21 December 2019, paywall)

That would require a strong structure.

There is a problem, though. Without anything inside an airship’s shell, the air pressure is enormous. Use today’s materials to make a shell strong enough to resist the compression and it will end up so heavy that the vacuum inside will be unable to lift it. [Julian Hunt at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis] speculates that light yet superstrong carbon-based materials like graphene and carbon nanotubes could overcome this difficulty.

Ben Jenett, working on his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits and Atoms, has another solution, and he has already made progress towards it.

Jenett has devised lightweight “lattice materials” in which tiny, rod-like struts are assembled into frameworks with tremendous stiffness and strength. It is the same principle as that behind the familiar triangular truss structures in cranes and the Eiffel Tower. Jenett’s struts are linked to form octahedral units with eight triangular faces that can be assembled into extended lattices. They are extremely light without sacrificing strength. A 10-centimetre cube of this lattice material weighs just under 6 grams, about as much as a small strawberry.

Fun! Perhaps we’ll start seeing the big balloons floating through the sky again. They should be far less polluting than modern aircraft.

… someone remembers who kicked your butt.

The anecdote, which appeared in a Time magazine profile of Pelosi, was attributed to an aide who suggested that Dean sparked the idea of holding onto the articles as a way to force McConnell’s hand.

Trump, a regular viewer of cable news who often repeats what he hears on Fox News, responded to a tweet about it from conservative commentator Mollie Hemingway.

“Oh dear that is embarrassing,” Hemingway tweeted.

In a spot of good news, former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg isn’t doing as well as he might have as CNN/Business is reporting:

Ousted Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg left the company with stock options and other assets worth about $80 million, but did not receive severance as part of his departure from the embattled company, Boeing disclosed late Friday.

Muilenburg lost his job due to the ongoing Boeing 737 Max crisis. The company’s board had stuck with Muilenburg through the first 10 months of the grounding of all 737 Max jets following two fatal crashes that killed 346 people. But on Dec. 23 the board announced that “a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”

Muilenburg’s holdings includes previous long-term compensation worth $29.4 million as of Thursday’s closing price, according to the filing. He also keeps shares worth an additional $4.3 million, as well as distributions from pension and deferred compensation worth $28.5 million. And, finally, he has the right to exercise other stock options to purchase an additional 72,969 shares of Boeing stock that are worth $24 million. He will have to pay only $5.5 million to acquire those shares.

More interestingly:

Muilenburg was stripped of his title as chairman of Boeing (BA) in October.At the end of that month he came under fire at a Congressional hearing for his 2018 pay package, worth $23.4 million. A few days after the hearing Boeing announced that Muilenburg requested that he not receive any stock or bonus money for 2019. That may have reduced his compensation for the year by about 90%.

Is he gutsy enough to donate the balance of his pay over his years as CEO to humanitarian causes? We’re not talking about a single year failure, as these airliners take years to go from glint in the eye to the tarmac.

Being shot or dying of thirst? That’s the question implicit in this AL Monitor article on Turkish criticism of Australia’s management of its camel herds:

Source: Wikipedia

Turkey’s government has been bitterly criticized for a systematic disregard for nature during its more than 17 years in power. Its multi-billion-dollar vanity projects, including Istanbul’s newly opened third airport and controversial plans for the so-called “crazy canal” duplicating the Bosporus, are decried for their horrific environmental costs. So it came as something of a surprise when the spokesman for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Omer Celik, took to Twitter today to air his outrage over Australia’s culling of camels.

Celik lambasted the move in a seven-tweet thread, saying, “We are deeply concerned at news that Australia will be shooting dead as many as 10,000 camels and call upon the Australian government to find a different solution. To kill thousands of camels in the belief that it will restore nature’s equilibrium and preserve water sources is not a humane approach.”

Australian authorities began shooting the beasts on Wednesday in southern Australia, where Aboriginal communities suffering from chronic drought have reported large camel herds rampaging through towns as they seek water. The mass slaughter, which is to last five days, is not directly linked to the country’s deadly bush fires, the authorities said.

To call this a one-off event to be blamed on the drought conditions through which Australia is plunging would be to think that the drought itself is an abnormality. However, whether or not the drought continues, it’s emblematic of the future: changing climate. For the animals, it’s not whether it’s getting better or worse, but just the simple fact that it’s changing, because most species have evolved to a certain level of specialization for the niche which they inhabit; the exceptional flexibility of humans is unusual.

But that doesn’t remove our dependence on the local fauna for food, environmental support, and no doubt factors I’m not thinking of at the moment. If that fauna gets into trouble, it imperils – and perhaps condemns – our style of civilization. Contrast how we treat nature as generally disposable vs the Ahuarco – they may act based on myths of dubious source, but that is a garment for their true connection to nature which acts to preserve the environment on which they’re dependent^[1].

I expect that, in the near future, we’ll see more mass losses of life in Nature, especially in those areas in which  humanity treats Nature as a bottomless garbage pit. How we deal with that situation should prove interesting, if only in a morbid sort of way. Do we let them die on their own or mow them down proactively when faced with overwhelming climate change?

¹ While I did not find any specifics concerning how long the Ahuarco have been around, there were implications that they’re fairly ancient. This would be congruent with social evolution, in which this particular myth had actual survival value, and thus was conserved across the generations.

A while back a reader sent a link to an interview with avid socialist Nathan Robinson on Jacobin entitled “Socialists Identify With Humanity as a Whole”. I read it and responded diffidently:

I dunno. Long live the glorious socialist revolution? Judging an interview is a somewhat nebulous affair; judging an ideology based on a short interview with a fervent ideologist seems a dodgy affair.

He does remind me of your typical REASON Magazine columnist – the know-it-all type who has all the answers and believes the world is against him. Which may be true, but after a while I find the paranoia a trifle grating.

My reader’s response was a bit surprising, so I’m going to interject commentary in his response, below.

I only read the interview, so I didn’t get that feeling at all. Young, smart, idealistic, yes, but I agree with him on some major points: capitalism squashes out other ideas, and one can have an incredibly miserable life for a majority of one’s population while still getting gold stars on all the usual capitalist measures.

Which is true of most political systems; those in control, be they capitalistic, monarchs, or socialists, believe passionately in their system for the most part, and see little reason to encourage other systems. I see little reason to condemn capitalism for a sin embedded in virtually all competing systems.

The part concerning ‘miserable life’ is also part of the following paragraph, so I’ll respond below.

Today’s so-called “record low unemployment” is a perfect example; the number and the claim completely ignores several very important features: (1) the majority of those jobs do not pay a living wage, (2) large numbers of people are working multiples of those jobs just to get by, (3) it does not measure a significant number of people who are considered officially to not be in the job market, but who would be if economic/social/employment/health conditions were not so horribly poor, and (4) that “full” employment is not making things better for most people, for society and for humanity.

And I agree: Lies, damned lies, and statistics^[1]. A statistic is inherently founded on metric selection, and metric selection, usage, and interpretation is a far more difficult subject than is generally recognized outside of the communities of technical people involved. My reader’s complaints intimately involve metric selection, and I completely agree that the unemployment numbers are misleading.

Statistics are often used as a proxy for measuring the success of a society; by hiding behind the faux-objectivity of numbers, the politicians seek to use them to make themselves look good, rather than the more engineering approach, where you measure and improve, wash, rinse, repeat.

And when I say politicians, I don’t mean capitalist politicians or democracy politicians, I mean politicians of all systems: Monarchical, socialistic, communist, name it and it’ll contain politicians. And all politicians protect their turf using all the tools they can think of, and statistics can certainly be one of those tools. So, once again, I see this as a of being part of a social species in which our instincts are individualistic, not as it being capitalism’s sin.

I liked his definition of socialism as having concern for all of humanity. Contrary to what many ignoratti on the right think socialism is an economic system, not a political system.

Given that the political system necessarily dictates the economic system, it’s not entirely clear to me that this is a true statement. But I do like the word ignoratti.

¹ Anonymous, but often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, according to Wikipedia.

Once again, I’m forced to tender my most sincere thanks! to the Republican Party.

It seems to be a rare situation in which a species is confined to a geographical range that happens to be under the control of a human group dedicated to saving the species, and I just have to like it. From NewScientist (21 December 2019):

Image: Fundación Atelopus

A critically endangered harlequin toad, known as the starry night toad, has been documented by biologists for the first time since 1991 in the mountains of Colombia. But unlike other such stories of “rediscovered” species, this one was never really lost – the local Arhuaco people knew exactly where the toad, which they call “gouna”, was all along.

“We have shared our home with the gouna for thousands of years,” says Ruperto Chaparro Villafaña, who represents the Arhuaco community of Sogrome near where the toad lives in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains. For them, the toad is both an important indicator of the health of the ecosystem, whose presence guides their agricultural activities, and a link to the spiritual world, representing their mission to preserve life on Earth. …

Getting access to the area to see if the toad was still present took years of work building trust and friendship between the researchers and the Sogrome community, says Jefferson Villalba, co-founder of Fundación Atelopus, a Colombian conservation group.

He and his colleagues met with the community and its spiritual leaders, called mamos, multiple times over five years. They were eventually allowed to travel to see the toad in April this year, without taking pictures. Having passed that test of trust, they were permitted to return and document the toad alongside members of the community. They found a healthy population of around 30 individuals.

I’m sure if there was some commercial value to these toads, industry would scream bloody murder over this behavior, screeching about the rights of everyone to have access, right up until they’d achieved dominion over them, and then not a peep would be heard about those rights.

But kudos to the Arhuaco! I’m sure they don’t care about me, but they care about the toads. And while I’m not much for ‘spiritual worlds’, that’s OK. It’s leading in the right direction.

Reading about Trump’s reaction to being questioned about his hit job, to use appropriate mob language, on General Qasem Soleimani, as seen in this NPR interview with Senator Mike Lee (R-UT):

[NPR HOST RACHEL] MARTIN: You came out and came to the microphones and said it was the worst briefing you have seen on a military issue in your nine years in the U.S. Senate. What happened?

LEE: Yes. You know, my anger was not about the Soleimani killing. It was, instead, about the possibility of future military action against Iran. And it was on that topic that they refused to make any commitment about when, whether and under what circumstances it would be necessary for the president, or the executive branch of government, to come to Congress seeking authorization for the use of military force.

MARTIN: Because Congress was not given a…

LEE: I find that unacceptable.

MARTIN: Congress was not given a heads-up that the strike was going to happen against Soleimani.

LEE: That’s right. That’s right. And now, I want to be clear – with respect to the strike against Soleimani, that was arguably lawful. I still have questions that remain unanswered on that point. I’m going to set that side – aside a moment. And I’m going to assume, for purposes of this discussion, that that may well have been lawful.

What I’m most concerned about is about where that goes from here. What comes next? Is there another strike coming against Iran? If so, at what point do they need to come to us seeking an authorization for the use of military force? The fact that they were unable or unwilling to identify any point at which that would be necessary yesterday was deeply distressing to me.

And then Trump’s reaction to the House’s War Powers Resolution, in process, as reported by Gary Sargent in The Plum Line:

Jonathan Chait in New York’s Intelligencer section has an incisive comment on Trump’s defenders in the context of the recent killing of General Qasem Soleimani by American forces here. Unfortunately, it has one defect:

The Iran conflict has placed President Trump in a heretofore novel position of outflanking his domestic foes as a hawk. Having previously cast himself as a deal-maker or isolationist, Trump now occupies — at least temporarily — the traditional Republican identity of war fighter, punishing the world’s villains. His supporters are taking advantage by employing the familiar conservative message in such situations: accusing their opponents of actively sympathizing with the enemy.

“The only ones mourning the loss of [Iranian general Qasem] Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and Democrat Presidential candidates,” says Nikki Haley. Because she has previously established a modicum of independence from Trump,Haley has received the most attention for this remark, but she is hardly alone. Kellyanne Conway sneers, “The alarmists and apologists show skepticism about our own intelligence and sympathy for Soleimani.” Republican apparatchik Tony Shaffer attacks “Democrat lawmakers who would rather mourn a war criminal than credit President Trump for making the world safer.” And so on. …

What makes this current smear campaign so extraordinarily ironic is that Trump is actually guilty of the very thing his surrogates are falsely charging his opposition. Trump has repeatedly lavished praise on the world’s most notorious dictators. Trump in 2016 praised Saddam Hussein’s methods of killing terrorists: “He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over.” Trump’s point was not only that the United States was unwise to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but edged into outright admiration for his unlawful methods.

This is a theme he has voiced over and over. Trump on Vladimir Putin: “The man has very strong control over a country. Now, it’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly in that system, he’s been a leader. Far more than our president has been a leader.” On Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: “A strong person, he has very good control.” On Xi Xinping: “He’s a strong gentleman, right? Anybody that — he’s a strong guy, tough guy … President Xi, who is a strong man, I call him King, he said, ‘But I am not King, I am president.’ I said, ‘No, you’re president for life and therefore, you’re King.’ He said, ‘Huh. Huh.’ He liked that.” …

That Trumpists can turn around from ignoring or justifying his professed love of dictators to accusing Democrats of supporting an Iranian militarist merely shows the mental flexibility required of the president’s defenders.

Bold mine. Mental flexibility is neither a bad thing nor is it an accurate description of the Trump cultists. Mental flexibility permits thinking outside the box, effective evaluation of arguments countering one’s own perceptions of reality, and the ability to say I’m wrong and I’ll change my beliefs!

The correct noun Chait inexplicably failed to choose was moral. While I’m aware that I myself believe that morality changes over time to enhance group survival as their context changes, the time scale here renders the observation irrelevant; morality should be firmly concrete over the scale of, at most, a few years.

Moral flexibility, in this context, suggests the criminal, the hypocritical, the untrustworthy. It’s ok for your President to sympathize with autocrats, but not his political opponents? Wrong-oh, you moral midget.

Such people shouldn’t be permitted positions of power and responsibility. Hear that, Representative Collins (R-GA)? Resign now.

In case you were wondering why Iran seems to be happy with a near-miss revenge attack on US forces in the wake of the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Qasem Soleimani, AL Monitor has an explanation – sort of:

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed that its barrage of surface-to-surface missiles against two US bases in neighboring Iraq early Jan. 8 killed over 80 US military personnel, leaving some 200 others injured. IRGC commanders announced that “tens of missiles” were launched, all precisely hitting the targets, with none being intercepted.

Yet hours later, in a televised address from the White House, US President Donald Trump denied any casualties, saying the bases had only been slightly damaged. According to Iraqi sources, 22 missiles came from Iran, striking the Ain al-Asad base in Anbar province as well as an air base in the Kurdish city of Erbil.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the Iranian leadership prided itself in fulfilling a promised “harsh revenge” for the death of its most powerful commander, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, assassinated in a US drone attack outside Baghdad International Airport last Friday.

The conventional explanation would be that the regime in Tehran is attempting to thread the needle between a home public which must see the regime as strong in retaliation, and facing a foreign enemy which could inflict incredible harm on Iran – and its own reputation – if it so chose to do so.

But all the posturing makes me wonder – did Supreme Leader Khamenei and the rest of the leadership of Iran actually think Soleimani was an asset? Or is there a silent relief that he’s gone?

I have no idea how to confirm this hypothesis, unless a defector pops up with relevant information.

You Killed Kenny! You Bastards!

Landing in the morality tale category is Whistle Stop (1946), a dour tale condemning all the usual sins, with the usual rewards for those who stay on the path. I’ll skip the usual details and simply note that Kenny, our clinical subject, smokes, drinks, gambles, and plays pool, which, of course, leaves little time for working; he’s bitter and has the personality of a sponge; he’s not particularly good looking; and, finally, he has no money.

And apparently all of this is meaningless to the local ladies, who flock to him regardless.

All of this renders this tale of mobsters and the virtues of working with one’s hands, rather than being shot at by the cops, a bit hard to take.