Category Archives: Uncategorized

I see that, in the wake of the United States’ fatal attack on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps‘ Qasem Soleimani, Iraq is taking action:

The Iraqi parliament has voted to obligate the Iraqi government “to work towards ending the presence of all foreign troops on Iraqi soil,” according to the media office of the Iraqi parliament. [CNN]

This may be an opportunity for my reader to evaluate their favorite “pundit” to see if they really are a pundit, or merely an ideological zealot, unworthy of your attention. Did your pundit attack President Obama for pulling most of the troops out of Iraq, using that to blame Obama for the development of ISIS? Even though Obama was legally obligated to do so?

Let’s see if your pundit begins screaming about Trump doing the same. If he does, then she’s a pundit – even-handedness is the definition, despite the fact that contravening Iraq’s parliamentary will is, in itself, problematic.

If, on the other hand, they remain amazingly silent on the topic, then you can guess they’re nothing more than an ideological water carrier for Trump, and really aren’t worthy of further attention.

My apologies to Kevin Drum, but I must point out a flaw in his history of the United States. During his analysis of the American killing of the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassim Soleimani, deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and a number of others, including four generals in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Kevin suggests …

Escalation of hostilities almost never gets the other guy to back down. It doesn’t get us to back down, after all. Why should we think it will get Iran to back down?

Except it has. In 1983, the United States lost 241 military personnel, and the French lost 58, in an attack by Islamic Jihad. The goal of the attack?

A group called Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombings and said that the aim was to force the MNF [Multinational Force in Lebanon] out of Lebanon.^[10] [Wikipedia]

The result? It may be questionable to use Wikipedia to connect action to result, but here it is:

The attacks eventually led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force from Lebanon, where they had been stationed following the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) withdrawal in the aftermath of Israel‘s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Credit: SSgt Randy Gaddo, USMC – DefenseLINK News, U.S. Department of Defense

And I recall observing at the time that President Reagan’s force had, indeed, been chased out of Lebanon.

My point is not that Drum forgot about this, really, but that, yes, sometimes the application of deadly force can cause another nation to back down – if it’s done properly. There is no generally applicable rule; it’s entirely dependent on the character of the attacked entity. As a colleague I met at the start of my career once noted, the Indians succeeded in chasing the Brits out of India using peaceful resistance because the Brits couldn’t stand the immorality of slaughtering the Indians en masse. There would have been no such moral compunction if the foreign invaders had been Nazis. The United States suffered mass casualties in the attack on the MNF, which was publicly unacceptable; another such incident would have damaged the GOP brand for a generation, because the casualties were a raw reminder of what happened in Vietnam.

So we left, because the GOP was in charge.

Of course, the problem with the current incident is that Trump and his Administration has not displayed competency. That doesn’t mean this won’t stop the Iranians from meddling in their neighbors business, but it really lowers the odds that this has been thought completely through, particularly since we have this report:

When President Trump’s national security team came to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, they weren’t expecting him to approve an operation to kill Gen. Qassem Suleimani.

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had gone to Palm Beach to brief Trump on airstrikes the Pentagon had just carried out in Iraq and Syria against Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia groups.

One briefing slide shown to Trump listed several follow-up steps the U.S. could take, among them targeting Suleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to talk about the meeting on the record.

Unexpectedly, Trump chose that option, the official said, adding that the president’s decision was spurred on in part by Iran hawks among his advisors. [Los Angeles Times]

AL Monitor’s Ali Mamour has a different viewpoint:

The scene was indeed set perfectly. Washington could not have chosen a better time, as after a series of protests from Baghdad to Tehran and Beirut, Soleimani had lost some public support and was seen as part of Iran’s suppression system against people and their free wills. The attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad had also turned the majority of Iraqi political forces and the international community against Soleimani as the highest — albeit unofficial — leader of the PMU. The location turned out to be perfect as well. The strike took place in Iraqi territory, raising questions among the Iraqi public about the reason for an Iranian general being present in Iraq, especially after accusations facing Iran-backed forces of killing Iraqi protesters and abducting many of them. Selecting a quiet place in the airport also prevented the killing of any civilians that might allow Iran to victimize themselves and demonize the United States.

But, in the end, I’m just picking a very important nit; I more or less agree with Drum:

A Talleyrandesque sort of devious statesman might—might—be able to handle the aftermath of this in a way that makes relative peace more likely. Unfortunately, Trump is an idiot who is doing this because he’s obsessed with Benghazi and wants to show his predecessor that, by God, a red line is a red line. He has no idea what he’ll do next.

How I felt while watching this one.

The Fantasticks (1995) is the story of a tutelary deity of love taking the form of a carnival in order to press two young neighbors to honor their mutual vows of love. This is a light, fluffy American musical, and it got off to a fast start but then fell apart, and if I made up parts of this review, that’s just too damn bad.

Nepantla:

The term, Nepantla is a Nahuatl (Aztec language) term connoting in between or a reference to the space of the middle. A number of contemporary scholars, writers, poets and artists have elaborated upon this concept, enhancing and/or adding on to the Nahua concept. (See Gloria Anzaldua, Pat Mora, Yreina Cervantez, Miguel Leon Portilla).

Most often the term is referencing endangered peoples, cultures, and/or gender, who due to invasion/conquest/marginalization or forced acculturation, engage in resistance strategies of survival. In this sense, this larger, cultural space of Nepantla becomes a postmodern paradigm or consciousness rooted in the creation of a new middle. [ChicanoArt.org]

Found on the sidewalk today.

Desiccated beauty?

A conservative friend sent me a YouTube, purporting (and probably is) from Australia, commenting on the current dire fire situation. I thought it would just be an interesting documentary, but it turns out to be a potent cocktail of facts and highly suspect assertions, which you can read as conspiracy theories. The video runs for 31 minutes, so you can watch it, or you can skip it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxHcBDp4J84 [link is now broken]

For me, the red flags are raised by these observations, chronologically ordered:

1. Doppler radar is used to keep the storms away. This was pushed so quickly I almost missed it, but there it was beginning @ 5:36. Then there’s this radar image @ 5:55:
   Impressive, no? Ignoring the issue of simple fakery, the problem, of course, is that if there’s any evidence of Doppler radar affecting the weather – pushing the clouds away, as this chap would have us believe – I can’t find it. Wikipedia doesn’t know about it^[1]. I can’t even find skeptical commentary on the subject; you’d think Skeptical Inquirer would have checked into such a claim, and I’ve been a subscriber for decades. I’m no physicist, but it’s my suspicion that Doppler radar could have an effect on the weather if the amount of power pushing the signal out was so outrageous that it burned out the transmitting elements of the apparatus. And possibly the power plant backing it.
2. The end of Australia (@ 14:00) is nigh due to the politicians. Perhaps my weakest objection, this dude asserts that a series of decisions made by popularly elected politicians were all taken in order to destroy Australia as it’s currently known. My problem with this is two-fold: (1) Does anyone really think a vast collection^[2] of elected politicians can coordinate such a conspiracy over the number of necessary years, (2) just to destroy the very thing that benefits them? Really? I’d grant the suggestion that politicians will make foolish decisions, especially if, like the American President Trump, they smell short-term gain and are quite self-centered or delusional, but to expect the politicians to cold-bloodedly destroy that which gives them value is just silly.
3. Chemtrail conspiracy mongering (15:37). The dude doesn’t actually actually call it that, but he remarks that aluminium, barium, and strontium have been sprayed on the country. Upon looking up barium spraying, I discovered this article in The Guardian, entitled My month with chemtrails conspiracy theorists: … But to Tammi, a 54 year-old organic farmer, it’s a “chemtrail”: a toxic cocktail of aluminum, strontium and barium sprayed from planes in a plot to control the weather, the population and our food supply. Chemtrails have been researched and found to be jet exhaust and condensation. While I didn’t view this dude’s other videos that concentrate on that subject, I’m willing to guess he’s gulped down the chemtrail conspiracy pill – or is at least willing to use it to manipulate his more conspiracy minded audience members.
4. His careful stirring of passions over reason (@16:45). He admits he’s no experts on forest fires, and yet he can’t help but use the chaos and fury of a wildfire to suggest that the forests have been salted, as it were, for a tremendous fire. That stirs emotional fury, the thought of someone planning to destroy the life on the continent through carefully planned fires. Is this rational? No, and it’s planned as a way to ensure the audience doesn’t start thinking for itself. He’s evoking the flight or fight reflex, and this strategy is often used by these sorts, as explained in The Persuaders, a book I recommend for those who want to understand how marketeers and dudes like the guy in this video try to manipulate audiences. A little later, around 19:30, he uses the term genocide to describe what is going on in Australia, another stir of the emotions.Why not consult with experts? Well, they might come up with inconvenient facts which would not support the tale he’s telling.
5. Climate change denial (@20:54). In just a single comment, he shrugs it off. It doesn’t support his narrative, so he doesn’t consider it important; he’s focused on his conspiracy theory that Australians are under attack by their own politicians.

In general, this is a skillful mixture of facts and dubious assertion, and the stir-stick is a gentleman with a very fine voice and foreign manner – a problem Americans in general have is that a good accent can cover a host of sins. Brit Andrew Sullivan observed that he could push the most outrageous stuff in class at Harvard, and most of his fellow students would swallow it all because, he said, of his authoritative British accent.

The problem for an audience member who does a bit of research, though, is that the video completely loses its value because of his reliance on discredited and/or deeply implausible conspiracy theories. For example, he suggests the government isn’t nearly doing enough. Maybe, I don’t know. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has certainly not impressed me with his mental acuity. But this dude doesn’t have any credibility, so I don’t know.

Similarly, his overview of MPs not being required to disclose whether they own water rights might be a good point. Australia is an arid continent, perhaps this is happening and is a serious matter. Maybe they are corrupt. If only I could take this dude seriously.

He’s entirely ruined any valid points by his inclusion of these conspiracy theories and his method of arguing. Ironically, he warns that some web sites have fallacious information or pictures; I’m not sure if he’s defending his territory by a bit of sleight of hand, or if he’s in earnest in his warning.

So, for the viewer who’s impressed by this video, be warned: it’s included conspiracy theories and employed communication strategies that render it quite untrustable. I rather enjoyed his delivery and manner, and I have to wonder if it’s rehearsed or comes naturally. It reminds me of Rush Limbaugh, although Limbaugh’s voice is warmer and more friendly.

But, in the end, that’s fluff: when you’re pushing sordid lies, your voice’s warm and friendly qualities are don’t matter. Anything this guy says has to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

¹ Which is not to suggest Wikipedia is the end-all, but it’s certainly a good place to start.

² A rabble, if you will, but a very dignified rabble.

As I noted in my very short review of Turchin’s War and Peace and War, asabiya is

… a critical concept and term from Ibn Khaldun, meaning the “capacity of a social group for concerted collective action.”

When a society – or empire, since that was Turchin’s focus – is in decline, its asabiya is running low. For those of us who like economy of expression, asabiya and societal health is correlated. And in a society in which the asabiya is running low and overpopulation is present, Turchin observes internecine war begins to break out in the upper levels of society which are involved in governance as they battle to stay in the elite, or even to become a dominant faction.

While Turchin suggests this is because of a burgeoning scarcity of resources, basically the commoners who do the work, he also notes that it can be caused by the cessation of an existential threat. We’ve seen the latter in the failure of the Soviet Union. China may be just as dangerous as the Soviet Union, but, unlike the Soviet Union in its hey-day, it doesn’t try to frighten the United States into submission; the leadership of the China, whether due to internal issues or due to craft, is very subtle in its adversarial relationship with the United States.

What brings this up? This AP report concerning the attacks of Trump’s allies on Democratic Presidential nominee-wannabe Joe Biden:

A video of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden that was selectively edited to falsely suggest he made racist remarks during a recent speech made the rounds Thursday on social media, raking in more than a million views on one tweet alone.

Experts have been warning about the dangers of selectively edited videos being used as a misinformation tactic ahead of the 2020 presidential election. They are easier to make and do not require the sophisticated technology needed to produce deepfake videos, which are fabricated to look realistic.

In the edited clip, which was less than 20 seconds long, Biden says, “Our culture is not imported from some African nation or some Asian nation.” Social media users paired the video with comments like “It’s almost like Joe Biden is a Racist.” Posts with the video surfaced across social media platforms on Wednesday.

For those of us who believe in the value of facts, truth, and fair play over the ethic (!) of victory at all costs, this is disheartening, especially when Steve Benen predicts this is only the beginning.

So let’s talk about the implications of high asabiya. Often acquired in the face of continual and severe threat, it is a recognition that, as a whole, we are greater than our aggregate worth as individuals. This is essence of teamwork, and so much more. But the binding has to go both ways, the potential members of the society to be bound together by asabiya must have motivations to join that society that are greater than the motivations to remain apart.

Those latter motivations, of suspicion and distrust, are often traceable to differences in color, religion, perceived value systems, politics, etc – and more subtle factors, such as affinity for dogmatism, or certainty that you are always right. These factors are more or less unconscious; one sees conscious, manipulative actions for socio-political reasons, which most often have to do with jealousy of position, as leaders who do not wish to become small frogs in big ponds exert themselves to keep their followers separate – keep the pond smaller so they seem bigger and more dominant. The latter can be, but are not necessarily, pathological; it certainly lessens asabiya.

Contrariwise, implicit in the increase of asabiya is the commitment to treat others in the bound community fairly, in all venues, from sharing food to competing for political position. Treating other members unfairly is the utter equivalent to dumping arsenic in the community water supplies in order to be rid of some hated personality, it’s really simple as that. There may be some short-term benefit, but in the long term, no matter how much the miscreant wishes to believe otherwise, it’s a loser for everyone.

That’s what I see happening here. Someone – I don’t know who, but probably plural – who is no longer worried about outside threats has decided that it’s time to tear the United States apart in their pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige. Nevermind that there are strong external threats, and Trump’s strikes against Iran-aligned Iraqi militias has made those threats stronger.

But what really bothers me is the fact that this is just another step on the path trod by the Roman emperors and Senate, the French nobility, the English nobility, and many others as population pushed up pressure on resources, foes were vanquished, the elite feared losing their status, and the personal pride and religious vanities of some all conspired to destroy the social cohesion which had brought them their eminence in the world. Not that eminence, in and of itself, is desirable, but the positive things that can be done with eminence, such as alleviating illness and suffering, suffocating the warlike instincts of others, and all that sort of thing, are lost when that eminence is lost.

Trump may not be aware of this problem in a direct way, but indirectly, through world-wide polls of confidence in American leadership and its importance to the American citizenry, he has some awareness. We know this because he lies about it. He says world confidence in America has soared since he took office. Wrong.

But, in the meantime, we keep walking this bloody, weary path of history, ripping ourselves apart, rather than operating as a team to face the immense challenges of today. Those who have become fixated on wealth, power, and prestige keep denying reality and use the political weapons of total destruction in their strategies to hold on and gain more of those things, no matter what the cost might be for the future.

It sounds depressingly like Turchin. The path leads down into darkness and disaster.

Tensions abound in Pamela (2020), which we caught on Amazon Prime but is listed in IMDb as a February 2020 release. This is a tight family-tensions thriller, set over a single dinner. As mother Pamela, daughter Vanessa, and son Matt order and ignore dinner and down far too many cocktails, the latter two reveal they know there’s a big, nasty family secret involving their late father and themselves. As they seek answers, each prods the other, but Pamela is the chief target of their thrusts, their hunger for answers to the questions brought up by their shared childhoods. Who is their father, after all, and why did he do as he did? And why is she defending him?

As we learn that no one’s perfect, we also discover how those imperfections interact with each other, and how that affects the characters, even those that aren’t there to defend themselves – and why deep, dark secrets can sometimes be problems with no good answers.

There’s no question this is well-acted, but the script might have benefited from another draft, especially as some pointed barbs might have brought out a bit more tension, a few more questions to chase around on the table with one’s fork. And I’m curious as to whether they tried to film this without that unnamed furry animal clinging to Matt’s face, and finally decided he looked better with it than without it. It was … distracting.

But this kept the attention of my Arts Editor and myself, and not out of morbid curiosity. Each actor knows what they’re trying to accomplish, and they do it well. As I recall, the movie poster was decorated with various film festival awards, and it earned them.

You won’t laugh much, but you’ll be drawn in.

Jason Campbell captures a prime specimen off of Fox News:

Trump campaign Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany: "In 2016, President Trump was the foregone nominee from the beginning. Never did anyone go up against President Trump. We loved our nominee." pic.twitter.com/9Q4aXLV0Lu

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) December 29, 2019

This is so Soviet it makes me mildly ill. Much like the Soviets airbrushed figures of disgraced high Soviet officials out of photographs in an effort to reshape history to their advantage, this McEnany character is trying to turn Trump into the eternal and obvious savior of the Republicans – in the face of one of the largest Republican fields ever back in 2016. In the face of a field which fought tooth and claw to beat Trump. It’s worth noting in the face of this blatantly false propaganda that Trump didn’t win all of the Republican primaries (in Minnesota he came in a paltry 3rd, behind Rubio and Cruz); in fact, he only began to poll more than 50% after the race came down to him, Cruz, and Kasich.

It helps to remember that McEnany is all of 31 years old. She has no experience with seeing this sort of damnable propaganda for what it is; she’d need to be 60+ years old. But her disregard of the facts remains inexcusable. An honorable campaign would fire her immediately and apologize; Trump’s campaign will give her a raise and the Medal of Freedom, because that’s how they operate.

But Fox News viewers do have memories. Will they disregard them in this casting of Trump as their last, great, eternal hope? Or will they growl a bit and take her with a grain of salt?

Hard to say.

Noted on Facebook:

Manhunt underway for couple stabbed in Riverwest

First stabbed, now you get hunted down. Tough life. Or the particular might even ask if the couple had body organs named Riverwest. The actual headline?

Manhunt underway for suspect who slashed Riverwest couple

Not quite so harsh on the victims of the stabbing. Makes you wonder if the translation from headline to FB news summary is created by the content provider or created by FB, or more likely an automated FB process (we shan’t make the mistake of calling it an AI).

And are these prayers for Mr. Bigfoot?

Fishing Naked (2015) is an oddball mixture of juvenile humor and self-aware screwing with audience expectations, the sort of movie that makes you wish it was better, but also worry that making it better would make it worse.

Young adults David and Rodney live at the intersection of American and Indian life in backwoods Oregon, raising some mild hell while fly fishing and messing with tourists using their Bigfoot suit. When two young women, Sarah and Amy, wander in, getting away from the big city after finishing school, they’re more than ready to jump when the ladies say hop – and Bigfoot gets a workout. The fun & games begin.

Meanwhile, David’s grandma happens to be pleasantly enthralled by the floating orbs she seems to be the only one seeing. But when a tourist manages to photograph something, blurry as it may be, that doesn’t belong, the juvenilia turns into the interesting. Grandma knows something they don’t, and when it comes time to do something about it – is it time to panic, or help out?

Sure, it’s silly and hormone-ridden, but just when it become painfully predictable, it isn’t, and that’s where the real fun lies. Sure, it could have been better in parts – but would that have detracted from the parts that turned out to be good? An indie apparently made on a minuscule budget, this survives on the enthusiasm of its acting and the mild cleverness of its script.

Ever wonder what lives at various depths of the ocean? Try neal.fun. I had no idea polar bears could be found, living one hopes, at 25 meters, or about 75 feet. I do see a claim that the bird name the Thick-Billed Murre can be found at 211m, while Wikipedia will only admit to 150m, so I’m uncertain as to its accuracy.

This did spark in me a question as to analogous situations, in the sense that, at least in me, the idea of going down deep into the ocean in a mere scuba suit leaves me with a sense of apprehension, even if the problems of pressure and nitrogen narcosis were solved – I dislike the thought of some hungry predator taking a chunk out of me. But any similar situations?

Caving, perhaps, although caves are not known for their predators.

But how about a hypothetical species based outside of an atmosphere? It is not unreasonable to suggest such a creature might have eyes sensitive to the electromagnetic spectrum that is filtered out by our upper atmosphere. Might they look at a planet like Earth as a dark and foreboding hole in space, possibly populated by similarly predatory creatures that create unease in me?

Following up on the use of Mechanical Turk in research, it turns out there’s more flaws to this approach than just bot-induced corruption, as NewScientist notes:

People seem to be answering research survey questions randomly on Amazon’s crowdsourcing website. The findings could mean that many academic studies are wrong.

Michael Chmielewski at Southern Methodist University in Texas and Sarah Kucker at Oklahoma State University recently revisited data they had collected on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform, a virtual labour marketplace where people are paid to perform short tasks. MTurk is often used to gather survey responses for social science research.

Since 2015, Chmielewski and Kucker had used MTurk to collect data on how a child’s language skills developed depending on their parents’ personalities. When New Scientist published an article in 2018 claiming automated bots were targeting the site and ruining academic studies, the pair revisited their data and found inconsistencies. But rather than bots ruining their data, it seems humans racing through possible survey answers and not reading the questions were causing the problems.

By performing a statistical analysis on their results, the team found that the responses just weren’t right. “The conclusions were just massively wrong,” says Chmielewski. “Well-established links between neuroticism and depression weren’t there. We were seeing links in the wrong directions. Things that should have been negatively related were now positively related.”

One of the most difficult elements of science is collection of data, and it appears Mechanical Turk was merely an illusion of a source of data. A worker elaborates:

Kristy Milland who does work offered on MTurk wasn’t surprised by the results. “MTurk is a labour platform, not a participant pool,” she says. “We signed up to make money, not to help science.”

Self-reporting and other sources that might be classified as secondary must always be treated with skepticism by researchers, even when that is the only available data. As Chmielewski & Kucker demonstrate, it’s possible, in many cases, to examine the data for consistency and plausibility, even though that might seem to be placing an otherwise unwarranted expectation on the data. In the future, more researchers should do the same.

Someone around here has to be guilty!

Shadows On The Stairs (1941) is a light and floofy story within a story, as a writer pursuing a woman to be his wife is prodded into writing a murder mystery, and soon a boarding house of victims and potential murderers are running around in hapless circles. While the actors make a go of it, the story is unconvincing and joyless. Especially the matriarch of the boarding house.

Or maybe I’m just a crab.

If you’re interested in digital privacy but not a techie, this WaPo article may be of interest to you. I liked this bit on ultimate goals:

There’s more: Amazon also keeps reports on appliances you connect to Alexa — in my smart home, every flip of a light switch or adjustment on the thermostat. Last week, Amazon reported that  Alexa users received “millions” of doorbell and motion announcements during the 2019 holiday season, “from carolers to delivery drivers and holiday guests.” Surveilling that many homes is a thing the company brags about. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, but I review all technology with the same critical eye.)

Amazon isn’t building its dossier on you just to be creepy. It wants your voice and your data to train its AI, the technology it hopes will rule our future economy.

“And I, for one, welcome our new Artificially Intelligent Overlords!”

Maybe my reader is copacetic with that, but I’m not. Especially given the inscrutability of AI decisions.

And I am planning to check up on the author’s recommended privacy service, Jumbo. It’d be a pity if it’s just a dodge for one more company to get its claws into my data, but it looks useful if it’s on the up and up.

Hey, we just caught Sneezy! Any other dwarves back there?

Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937) has the elements of a good story, but they don’t come together. Drummond, whose place in life is never made clear, makes a dramatic entrance by ignoring landing tower instructions and landing his plane in a dense London fog, ignoring reporters’ questions, and driving off towards the hospital where his longtime friend, Algy, is waiting for his wife to give birth. From there, he heads for home to meet with the Commissioner of Scotland Yard.

But before he gets there, a young & attractive woman appears out of the foggy darkness and collapses as he skids to a halt. Stopping as any chivalrous lad would do, he puts her in the car and then runs off to investigate a gunshot. Upon discovering a dead body next to a marsh, he dashes back to the car, only to discover it’s gone. Hearing a splash, he returns to the body, only to discover it is gone, too.

Resuming his journey by foot, eventually his car drives up with his butler, Tenny, at the wheel, who announces it was found in a ditch. Finding clues in his car, they continue to home, where Commissioner pleads with him to be quiet, as the Commissioner is on vacation. Meanwhile, at nearby Greystone Manor, an old friend of the Commissioner, Norman Merridew, is caring for the young woman, who we learn is Phyllis Clavering, and when Drummond follows the clues to the manor, Merridew explains the situation, proclaiming her driven mad with grief at the recent death of her brother, and a more distant death of her father.

However, when Drummond returns her handbag to her personally, she contrives to secrete a message in his hat; when he later recovers the message, it consists of nursery rhymes. The fun continues, between Algy, who joins Drummond at his call, leaving his wife to have the baby by herself and him hyperventilating over it, Tenny, who deliciously gets just about every good line in the movie and delivers them in the driest British manner possible, the bad guys, who are plausible and not buffoons, and the damsel in distress, who makes for a damsel who’s more than willing to take care of herself, yet finds Drummond irresistible.

The problem? It’s not the plot, it’s the presentation. Drummond, played by Ray Milland, shows little emotional range; it’s almost as if he’s bipolar and currently in the manic phase, an outgoing optimist who shows little concern about the artillery his opponents may be lugging about, and while his daring choices do make a certain sense, his insensibility of the chances he takes makes him a little hard to take. This is Milland comparatively early in his career, with only traces of his future trademark style (far as I can make out, it consisted of speaking through his nose, but an effective technique), and his features rarely remind the audience that This Is Ray Milland! The latter is a good thing, but his racy delivery of lines seems to be a mistake.

Algy, Drummond’s friend having his first baby, is painfully two note – either panicking over the baby, or a spear-carrier with no personality. Sidekicks are hard to respect if they’re not given a good backstory, and Algy is not.

On the plus side, Phyllis the damsel is, as I noted, given quite the personality for a lady of the era. Most damsels of the time waited around for someone to rescue them, and were little more than Wonder bread with saltless butter, but Phyllis, while happy to accept help, doesn’t shrink from helping the cause along. Her proactive approach to her dilemma, her spunk (to use my Arts Editor technical jargon) makes her an unexpected charmer.

But perhaps the best, if most limited role, is that of the butler, Tenny, whose wry observances of how the plot is going are unexpected gems of dry humor, to be gathered, cherished, and saved from Drummond’s blundering feet. Even with a black eye, he delivers every line with a spoonful of relish.

It didn’t help that the print we saw was quite muddy, both in its visual and audio qualities. But that just accentuated the problems with the presentation, and were not the source. It’s too bad, because the story actually has some fun twists to it, especially as the Commissioner gets the last laugh on Drummond. But Tenny’s gems are too infrequent to make the journey from plane to denouement worth the travel.

Maybe I’m just silly, but this app strikes me as a commentary on our approach to our digital lives:

Let’s be real: When you download a new app, you probably don’t bother to read its privacy policy first. I write about privacy as a journalist and even I rarely bother to read those policies. They’re written in eye-glazing legalese perfectly calibrated to make any normal human being want to stop reading as soon as possible.

Who can blame us for rushing to check that little box that says we agree to the terms of service?

Now, a new tool called Guard promises to read the privacy policies of various apps for us. It harnesses the power of AI to analyze reams of text, breaking down each sentence for the level of risk it represents for our privacy. [Vox]

Meaning we can’t find a better way to actually have agreements that are readable by non-lawyers. Instead, we have to employ a computer proxy which will read and evaluate these agreements, without having any idea if it’s doing a worthwhile job or not – and you can bet your booties it won’t come with some sort of guarantee or warranty as to whether it does anything more than take up bits in your computer.

It’s rather like asking a randomly selected stranger at a law conference to go over your last will and testament and pronounce whether it meets applicable legal standards or not. Maybe your stranger is a lawyer with the appropriate specialization, but then again, maybe not.

A reader sends a link to an interview in ThoughtEconomics with Ece Temelkuran, a Turk forecasting doom if we don’t all become socialists – immediately:

Q:  Why are nationalism and populism creeping back into our world?

[Ece Temelkuran]:  The Second World War taught us a specific aesthetic of fascism.  We always imagine that Nazi uniform, and the kind of futuristic authoritarian settings we see on Netflix and HBO.  In our culture, we see the uniform and the militaristic as the representations of authoritarianism and fascism.

Today, right-wing populism, authoritarianism and neo-fascism are coming from different places.  Reality TV stars, strange men, and people who otherwise would be considered national jokes.  Many of today’s right-wing populist leaders are political figures that nobody really took seriously from the beginning.  Nobody expected that neo-fascism could take hold with swagger, in such a laid-back manner.

To understand why these phenomena are creeping back into our world, you have to look for the roots.  Neoliberalism has- since the 1970s- imposed this idea that the free-market economy is the best (and most ethical) system humanity can come up with to organise itself.  Neoliberalism changed the definition of what human fundamental morals are, and what justice means – and it’s created a new kind of being.   It tends to be the extreme examples of neoliberal being that disgusts, appalls and surprises us – but those are also the people who have become the leaders of our world.

The neoliberalist model has been put forward as a solution to which there is no alternative; we’ve crippled the political spectrum, cut the left away, and shifted everything to the right.  Politics has become a competition, who can be further right – and who can further deliver numbing of the mind through consumerism – after all… people are only allowed to be free when they consume, and thus we are political objects, not political subjects…

Politics has become entertainment – and people feel like their opinions do not matter any more… this became clear after the Iraq invasion when millions of people took to the streets of Europe, and saw that their call for peace meant nothing.  Now? people carry this sense of being a political object as a badge of honour – they want strong powerful men to be in charge… they want bold action like the suspension of parliament…. There is an incredible willingness to be shepherded and that’s only because we’ve lost faith in democracy, in politics and ourselves as political subjects.

The de-politicisation of media has also emboldened all of this – the obsession with objectivity has become a substitute for neutrality.  The vast majority of the world’s mainstream media have become obsessed with being neutral, and have done so at the cost of forgetting their main job – holding power to account, asking questions to power, and giving a voice to the voiceless.  In many ways, the media have become their own class – an elite of sorts… that has cut ties with unions and politics…

This was interesting in that she virtually calls for the politicization of the media. But we’ve seen how that plays out here in the States with the megaphones of the fringe-right-wing, such as Fox News and Breitbart – anything from carefully manipulated reporting to out and out lies. Temelkuran may decry the loss of those links between unions, politics, and the media as diagnostic of the imminent failure of democracies, but for me those links lead to propaganda, and I’m allergic to that favorite organ of political zealots, regardless of the stripe.

If we – and I mean everyone, not just the socialists, or the communists, or the liberals, or anyone else who wants to spit on all of their political rivals – are to solve the problems facing the world, we need a commonly agreed upon collection of facts, and that is best provided by media which embraces the neutral^[1] stance in its reporting, though not necessarily in its editorial stance. Temelkuran, in this instance, reminds me of a lot of political zealots I’ve known who view the media as evil because they’re not on the side favored by the zealot in question. Their moral certitude makes me question their maturity.

Q: What are populism and nationalism?

[Ece Temelkuran]:  Today, there is less time to understand the differences between nationalism, populism and authoritarianism.  In Britain, democracy is literally crumbling at the hands of a strange guy with funny hair!  People simply aren’t recognising the dangers that lay ahead, so there’s not enough time to get into definitions

One truth is that you cannot really know what populism is until you experience it.  Populism is the act of politicising and mobilising ignorance to the point of political and moral insanity.  Nationalism as we know, comes from the phenomena of nation-states – and it’s quite ironic therefore that we are now talking more and more about the failure of nation states and the failure of supranational and international institutions as well… and meanwhile neo-nationalism is on the rise. …

Q:  How can we fight the growth of authoritarianism?

[Ece Temelkuran]:  People sometimes look to the Middle East to see where things are going wrong, but I must say… in Turkey, perhaps our democracy was stronger – it took decades for Erdoğan to achieve what Boris Johnson did in a few weeks… maybe we had a better resistance…

I have to say though, it’s difficult to find something positive to say about the fight against authoritarianism in the middle east but I am incredibly inspired by the fight of young women in Turkey and the Middle East – fighting for democracy with their lives… they are unstoppable…

When it comes to Europe and the Western democracies; we have to take to the streets and make ourselves heard – end of story.  We have to organise, mobilise and politicise… we have to use those good old-fashioned tools of politics, they’re the ones that count.  We have to show-up! We have to fight, we have to get out onto the streets and change things.

Since the 1970s it’s almost become a taboo to talk of conflict – we’ve become a society geared around consensus, and co-existence – and this has domesticated politics in a dangerous way.  The media have been too busy finding consensus with the Brexiteers and Trumpeteers to fight them.

This is a political struggle and there is no politeness or kindness in this.  It is very clear what one has to do if one has to defend her right.  It is to fight back when there is oppression.

I must admit I react poorly to rhetoric meant to inflame the passions, especially when I can start raising objections as I read. The Turkish collapse of democracy has been almost entirely precipitated by the Islamists in their calls for Turkey to be an Islamic State, and all that goes along with theocracies. What theocrats of any stripe rarely anticipate – because God is on their side! – is the moral collapse that accompanies the rule of those who believe they can do no wrong. We see this in Erdogan’s behavior, and while Trump was already morally collapsed before he was elected, it’s not difficult to see just about all of his religious supporters to now be in a similar state of moral collapse, in particular in the religious leaders who’ve refused to abandon him.

But Temelkuran tries desperately to draw a parallel to Prime Minister Johnson in Great Britain, and I must say I am unconvinced. He and his party are not, as best I can tell, in the grip of religious mania or ideological madness, a remark which might apply more properly to the defeated Labour leadership and their dreams of re-nationalizing industries. Expatriate Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, following a visit to his former homeland, that the Brits had some legitimate concerns about how their country was being run and that they didn’t like it.

It didn’t sound like religious mania. The appeal to nationalism sounds awful to those of us who have had to put up with the mendacious Make America Great Again slogan, but that word, nationalism, lacks nuance. Nationalism is not innately evil. It, in fact, serves to keep New York City from building an army and invading Philly. Oh, you think that sounds stupid? Think of Greece back when it was Athens and Sparta and all the rest, fighting with each other, think about how, as the Islamic State was taking over cities in the Middle East, each city would be used to move on to the next.

Nationalism is the name we use to explain why we don’t do that shit. Because we believe, from border to border, that we are a people sharing something important. Whether it’s a belief in freedom, or victimhood, or standing aloof from our neighbors on the Continent, nationalism is what keeps us from disintegrating into warring villages, or even feuding clans and even small families.

And, of course, when used to build a fallacious superiority complex, it can lead to war & brutality. Nationalism is, like most tools, morally neutral; the responsibility for its end result lies with the people who’ve used it for good or bad ends.

But we don’t have a good set adjectives to go with it. Turkish nationalism, American nationalism, British nationalism – these are not morally equivalent phrases. One cannot say Oh, they’re nationalists, they’re evil! So when she decries a strange guy with funny hair!, itself a red flag to the skeptical reader, for encouraging nationalism, it’s important to know and understand the particulars. Sullivan suggests the Brits aren’t motivated by xenophobia and religious mania, but concerns that their governance isn’t coming from the people they elected, but from the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Never mind if it’s an appropriate concern – we’re concerned about the roots, and these do not strike me as utterly irrational worries, unlike the America Christians who support Trump, or the Islamists in Turkey.

So when Temelkuran tries to lump them altogether in an interview that makes my pulse race, it’s a big blinking red light that something’s wrong. And speaking of factual concerns, the introduction to this piece struck me as rhetoric to be wary of:

Ece has seen this all before.  In her incredible 2019 book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, she notes, “We have learned over time that coups in Turkey end the same way regardless of who initiated them. It’s like the rueful quote from the former England footballer turned TV pundit Gary Lineker, that football is a simple game played for 120 minutes, and at the end the Germans win on penalties. In Turkey, coups are played out over forty-eight-hour curfews, and the leftists are locked up at the end. Then afterwards, of course, another generation of progressives is rooted out, leaving the country’s soul even more barren than it was before.”

It’s a lovely summary that really evokes a sense of persecution and victimhood, isn’t it? It serves to bond together everyone who considers themselves to be like-minded.

Here’s the problem:

After that last Turkish coup attempt, it was the military who suffered. As the punishments mounted for those military members even suspected to be sympathetic to the coup, or of being a Gulenist, former Turkish military members were recalled to their units in order to make their units operational again. Sure, the progressives might have been impacted as well, but they were not the sole, or even primary, victims.

Binding disparate people together requires they have some shared, or potentially shared, experience, along with a reason they’re special. The above paragraph provides the persecutive behavior inflicted on the progressives, and how much of an impact on the country’s soul their absence has. It’s just about perfect.

But when it omits facts, I become quite suspicious. The history of politics is positively full to the brim of manipulative slogans, rants, and any other form of communication you care to name, and I prefer to not be one of the victims.

¹ Long time readers might remember that I’ve treated the subject of neutral reporting before. It means being fair-minded; it doesn’t mean allowing idiots and liars onto the stage. It means calling Trump a liar every time he lies or misleads. It means ignoring people who run around with their hair on fire crying about chemtrails or the world is flat or any other completely discredited nonsense. And it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s really what needs to happen. Just a mention in the mainstream media can lend credence to a goofball’s viewpoint.

It’s just lovely.

Until you have to shovel it.

We just finished Season 4 of The Expanse, and we’ve been impressed with all facets of this show, from the writing to the dialog to the characters to the imagination required to bring a complete future universe into being. The only area skimped on is humor, and when it does appear, I inevitably point at the screen and scream, Hey, it’s humor!!!!! at my Arts Editor.

I think I’ve done that maybe four times now.

If you like science fiction, gritty drama, and a sense that there’s more going on than you can shake a stick at, take a peek at this one. And supposedly a Season 5 is coming.

A reader writes about student monitoring technology:

If I were a modern student, I’d try to refuse to install their damn app. And then I’d also turn off Bluetooth on my phone (actually, I already do that).

If I were young, I might go along with it; as an older student, I doubt I’d bother with their app.

I wonder about the specific objections to Bluetooth might be. On rare occasion, I use it at work to block out loud neighbors, in combination with my headphones.

In my quest to use independent experts to evaluate what I cannot, I turn to Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes, even though he does not much care for President Trump, for an evaluation of the reactions to the DOJ’s Inspector General Horowitz’ report on his investigation into the FBI investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election:

It is thus important to emphasize the degree to which the Horowitz report debunks the surrounding conspiracy theories. I don’t mean debunk in the way that the Mueller report is said to debunk the idea of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians. The Mueller report, after all, found copious evidence of contacts, interactions, and cooperation between Trump campaign officials and Russian cutouts and agents—just not enough evidence to prosecute anyone for coordinating with the Russian electoral interference efforts. No, the Horowitz report debunks the “Witch Hunt” conspiracy theories on a far different level—the level of finding that a whole bunch of things alleged to have been done corruptly were, in fact, done on the level, done in compliance with policy for perfectly good reasons, or not done at all. …

A few key additional points that bear emphasis:

• The investigation was properly predicated and began when the FBI said it began.

• The FBI did not improperly use confidential human sources.

• The FBI did not use confidential human sources to gather intelligence on the Trump campaign at all.

• There is no relationship between the conduct of the investigation and text exchanges between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

On some of these issues, the inspector general raises legitimate policy concerns, which I will discuss in a later post. For present purposes, the relevant point is simply that the behavior that has occupied hundreds of presidential tweets and countless hours on Fox News—and dominated innumerable ranting speeches by Republican members of Congress—did not happen. Not that these things can’t be proved or, in Mueller-speak, that the evidence “does not establish” them. They are just not true.

I would not dwell on this point if those who advanced these theories showed any sign of backing off of them. But they don’t. The day the inspector general’s report was issued, President Trump cited it triumphantly for a proposition it decisively rejects: “This was an overthrow of government. This was an attempted overthrow, and a lot of people were in on it. And they got caught. They got caught red-handed,” he said.

And etc. The point is that all the conspiracy theories put forth by Trump and his Republican cohorts were effectively disproven by Horowitz.

I should like Mr. Horowitz to be called in front of a Congressional committee yet again, and in his opening statement simply say,

Every time an elected official of our government uses my report to claim a conspiracy has existed, or continues to exist, to bring down President Trump, he or she is a liar. End of discussion. There are no nuances, no gaps to skate in, no pillars to hide behind. If you cite this report as confirming a conspiracy, you should be removed from office in disgrace.

It’d certainly clarify his findings.

Following on the heels of a positive view of the future of shipping comes a negative view of the current state of shipping. From The Independent:

Global shipping companies have spent billions fitting vessels with “cheat devices” that will allow them to pollute water while still satisfying new emissions legislation, environmental groups have warned.

More than $12bn (£9.7bn) has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel oil.

This means the vessels meet standards demanded by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) that kick in on 1 January.

The sulphur emitted by the ships is processed by the scrubber, which in turn discharges as a liquid which contains pollutant properties which have been found to pose a risk to sea life. …

A total of 3,756 ships, both in operation and under order, have already had scrubbers installed according to DNV GL, the world’s largest ship classification company.

Only 65 of these vessels have had closed-loop scrubbers installed only, a version of the device that does not discharge into the sea and stores the extracted sulphur in tanks before discharging it at a safe disposal facility in a port.

Wärtsilä Open Loop Scrubber.

“Cheat devices” is a loaded phrase when it comes to contraptions which satisfy a quasi-legal requirement, isn’t it? So I’m irritated; the fault clearly lies with the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the issuer of the standard. The standard rebuttal is that it’s the responsibility of the shippers to meet the standards, not to save the world; that’s the responsibility of the IMO, or even further up the chain, say, to the United Nations.

Wärtsilä Closed Loop Scrubber.

This tiresomely familiar argument ignores the simple fact that shippers, or their proxies, undoubtedly influenced the negotiations. As interested parties, or stakeholders in the current vernacular, they can legitimately argue – at least in most folks’ views – that they deserve a place at the table^[1].

However, this stakeholder argument ignores a simple fact about the shipping industry. In order to abstract this to more situations, let’s define concerned commercial entities (CCEs) as organizations whose primary purpose is to provide some product or service to a market in hopes of gaining a monetary profit. By both default and by societal design, they do not generally concern themselves with the impact, societal or environmental, of their service or product, although of course there may be exceptions. Such concerns usually run counter to their goals and methods, and thus get short shrift in the world of human desires.

When a CCE either overtly or covertly attempts to influence the formation of legislation meant to regulate them and improve the world^[2], it therefore does not share the goal of the legislation, and I have to wonder if the stakeholder argument really holds water. Unfortunately for me (but perhaps fortunately for a young political science or sociology researcher), that’d be the subject of a research paper, and I’m not in a position to be aware of any such research.

Another point illustrating the short-sighted nature of CCEs is this:

The ICCT [International Council on Clean Transportation] has estimated that cruise ships with scrubbers will consume around 4 million tons of heavy fuel oil in 2020 and will discharge 180 million tons of contaminated scrubber washwater overboard.

“About half of the world’s roughly 500 cruise ships have or will soon have scrubbers installed,” said Mr Comer. “Cruise ships operate in some of the most beautiful and pristine areas on the planet, making this all the more concerning.”

Assuming the article refers to the polluting open-loop scrubbers, I have to wonder at the quality of the cruise liners’ owners’ thought processes. They’re basically pissing in their very own product. Who wants to go on cruises in disasterized waters^[3]? Yet, here they are installing devices which will ultimately destroy one of the things they’re selling.

Perhaps they all worried that, if they installed the closed-loop scrubbers, they’d be disadvantaged by the cost. Perhaps they should have banded together and agreed that all would install them, and thus save the commons which they exploit. I wish I knew if that idea ever came up, and what really shot it down.

¹ In the general case, there are cases of covert proxy organizations being created by industries purely to influence legislation to the advantage of industry, without regard to the greater goals which the legislation was originated to accomplish. They often masquerade as “citizen organizations” representing popular opinion, when they are, in fact, no such thing. This is a tactic borrowed from politics; no particular brand of politics is implied, as tactics are rarely, if ever, restricted to any particular political stripe.

² Pomposity at its worst, yet I could not find a better descriptor.

³ Yes, yes, I know there is such a thing as Disaster Tourists. Work with me here, people!

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) follows a donkey named Balthazar as he moves from owner to owner, sometimes bought, sometimes stolen, sometimes discarded. Those in command of his life do various things to him, love some of the people in their lives, hate others, all with carefully expressionless faces. Eventually, the donkey is shot and dies, and the movie comes to an end.

The cinematography was excellent.

Now I’ve reviewed some other views of the film, and I see someone writing for Wikipedia states,

The story was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s The Idiot^[3] and each episode in Balthazar’s life represents one of the seven deadly sins. Bresson later stated that the film was “made up of many lines that intersect one another” and that Balthazar was meant to be a symbol of Christian faith.

Oddly enough, I’ve been reading The Idiot for about a year, now.

As I’m not Christian and certainly have not drunk deeply of that mythology, I may not be well suited to be an audience for it. Nevertheless, I must continue to insist I detested the illogical actions of the characters, and their expressionless faces continue to bug me. Perhaps it really is a fabulous movie, but it doesn’t get my vote for Best of All Time. J. Hoberman, quoted in the Chicago Reader, criticizes people like me:

“To not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it’s to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago.”

The article’s author, Drew Hunt, is a bit nicer:

Such a statement is funny and ultimately true, but it also places an unnecessary burden on watching a Bresson film. Ultimately, they’re really not that difficult to parse. There’s a reason adjectives like “spiritual” and “humanist” and “transcendent” are used so often when talking about his work: it isn’t as important to “get” a Bresson film—or any film, for that matter—as it is to simply experience one.

But then Hunt insists that Au Hasard Balthazar is the best Bresson has produced:

Bresson’s richest and most profound film, a parable of sin and suffering that considers the human cost of spiritualism with Dostoevskian complexity. Plenty of hyperbole has been lobbed its way—Jean-Luc Godard said “Everyone who sees it will be absolutely astonished, because this film is really the world in an hour and a half,” and Andrew Sarris paradoxically claimed “It stands by itself as one of the loftiest pinnacles of artistically realized emotional experience”—but none of it feels unearned. This is one of a kind.

I just feel sorry for the donkey. If he’s the stand-in for Christianity, then it’s not that he’s annoyed by humanity – he’s bloody well dead. I suppose that he dies in the commission of a smuggling crime might be meaningful, but by the end of the movie I’m too tired to make fun of it.