Manner Vs Substance

I must admit I don’t know a great deal about AG William Barr, but I’ve seen him on a couple of videos and been impressed simply by his manner. He gives the impression of methodical thought and intelligence.

However, former AG Holder analyzed a recent speech he gave and points out a number of intellectual misinterpretations which trouble Holder, and I find troubling as well. Here’s his analysis in WaPo:

Last month, at a Federalist Society event, the attorney general delivered an ode to essentially unbridled executive power, dismissing the authority of the legislative and judicial branches — and the checks and balances at the heart of America’s constitutional order. As others have pointed out, Barr’s argument rests on a flawed view of U.S. history. To me, his attempts to vilify the president’s critics sounded more like the tactics of an unscrupulous criminal defense lawyer than a U.S. attorney general.

When, in the same speech, Barr accused “the other side” of “the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” he exposed himself as a partisan actor, not an impartial law enforcement official. Even more troubling — and telling — was a later (and little-noticed) section of his remarks, in which Barr made the outlandish suggestion that Congress cannot entrust anyone but the president himself to execute the law.

Which may sound initially plausible, but such a viewpoint collapses once the implicit, but ridiculous, assumption that the President is incorruptible is identified and removed. It then becomes inevitable that law enforcement cannot be vested in a single person, because a corrupt person will not investigate – and impeach – themselves. Not only does it make the concept ludicrous, it also brings into sharp focus the term limit, enforced by law, on the Director of the FBI, after the salutary tenure of the initial FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, and his dubious practices. While the term limit on Presidents was not created for the same reason, it incidentally serves the same purpose.

In Barr’s view, sharing executive power with anyone “beyond the control of the president” (emphasis mine), presumably including a semi-independent Cabinet member, “contravenes the Framers’ clear intent to vest that power in a single person.” This is a stunning declaration not merely of ideology but of loyalty: to the president and his interests. It is also revealing of Barr’s own intent: to serve not at a careful remove from politics, as his office demands, but as an instrument of politics — under the direct “control” of President Trump.

And may betray a person who looks to others for direction, a person of the hierarchy, as it were. That is not an appropriate personality for the head of the Department of Justice.

Not long after Barr made that speech, he issued what seemed to be a bizarre threat to anyone who expresses insufficient respect for law enforcement, suggesting that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.” No one who understands — let alone truly respects — the impartial administration of justice or the role of law enforcement could ever say such a thing. It is antithetical to the most basic tenets of equality and justice, and it undermines the need for understanding between law enforcement and certain communities and flies in the face of everything the Justice Department stands for.

Naturally, this is an utterly repugnant utterance by AG Barr. The explicit threat that everyone who doesn’t dance to his tune should expect to lose their police protection is the message of a bully who needs to know that everyone knows their place in society, and is nestled obediently in it[1]. This hierarchical command fits in perfectly with the demands of the man he seems to consider his boss, President Trump.

And it’s worth noting that placing the blame for societal ills on the convenient goats who aren’t doing his dance is a standard hierarchy-oriented person’s response. The hierarchy represents stability and all that’s good, in their mind; it’s the reason many religious organizations are hierarchical. But when the hierarchy itself is poison, well, what’s to repair it? It’s difficult to even overcome the mindset, and thus the recent agonizing travails of the Catholic Church, in particular the Irish Catholic Church. Members of hierarchical organizations with a tradition of obedience and a claim of eternal goodness are particularly vulnerable to reaching fallacious conclusions such as this.

Holder suggests that Barr is, or perhaps was, a highly respected lawyer. How this all plays out in the years ahead should be an interesting study in pathological behaviors.


1 Which reminds me of an article I read in Whole Earth Review – or possible REASON Magazine – some thirty odd years ago, which I’ll paraphrase:

The strength of Japanese society is that everyone knows their role in it; the strength of American society is that no one knows their role in it.

Belated Movie Reviews

Sadly, this was the only movie role Fred ever got. He died ten years later in a Hollywood back alley, drunk on nectar and decaying flesh.

Monster From Green Hell (1958) gets off to a fair start, as two biologists experimenting with putting life into outer space lose track of one rocket load full of wasps. Fairly lackadaisically, they wait six months to start looking for their lost vessel, motivated by reports out of Africa indicating something is upsetting the wildlife.

We then get a fairly nice tramp through the wilds of Africa, dealing with the weather and hostile natives, and it’s not too badly done, even in black and white. Eventually, nearly dead but still heavily armed, they win through to the area where a local European doctor has made it his life’s work to minister to the natives, only to find that he’s gone down before the monster in an area known as Green Hell.

Sadly, things slowly go downhill as the special effects are not up to the task of showing how the monsters are destroyed. The actors do their best, but while the cinematography up to this point was rather good for the era, it falls apart when faced with monsters, volcanoes, and hand grenades.

But it’s all good, because there really wasn’t enough conflict to make it worth the money to do good special effects. This script needed a couple of more drafts. While the first half of the movie is rather pleasant, the second is disappointing.

They Have A Man At First, Can They Get Him Home?

It appears the era of the electric plane is off and running:

This morning a small Canadian regional airline made history on a quiet stretch of the Fraser River in Richmond, B.C., just south of Vancouver, when its top executive took the controls of a classic Burrard Beaver floatplane retrofitted with a new electric motor, and lifted off to the cheers of an assembled crowd of media and well-wishers.

Harbour Air founder and CEO Greg McDougall completed the five minute test flight without burning a drop of fossil fuel. In doing so, he moved a big step closer towards realizing his long-time vision of creating the world’s first all-electric airline.

“That was just like flying a Beaver but a Beaver on electric steroids.” McDougall told a crowd of reporters immediately following the flight. “It was such a great performance we had no way of knowing how it would perform until we flew it, and it was amazing.”[Canada’s National Observer]

I think it’s great they retrofitted an old pillar of the flight community, rather than going through the entire rigamarole of designing and manufacturing a brand new – and expensive – airplane. I was complaining to a friend just the other day that, if the United States really considered that we face an emergency when it comes to climate change, we wouldn’t have gone the Tesla route – instead, we’d have researched, designed, and built electric-motor drop-ins for the most popular makes and models of cars, and then trained the car mechanics to perform those drop-ins.

Instead, I suppose we still supply the fossil fuel industry with subsidies. Oh, yes, we do, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Back to the plane, I also found this tidbit from CEO Roei Ganzarsk of the supplier of the batteries, Magnix, even more exciting than this first flight:

For the airlines operating those planes, like Harbour Air, the technology has advantages beyond the carbon footprint. “The operating cost per flight hour will be anywhere between 50% to 80% lower,” says Ganzarski. Flying a traditional nine-passenger plane for an hour costs around $1,200, he says, but a plane retrofitted with an electric system costs around $400 an hour; a plane designed from scratch to be electric costs around $200. The savings come both from the cost of fuel and the fact that electric motors are simpler and therefore require less maintenance. [Fast Company]

That’s the sort of numbers that makes airline executives positively wet their pants. The airlines may begin to peel away from the fossil fuel industry by financing further battery research as they think about the profit enhancements that could come with technology like this. Even if it shortens flight routes, it could be a game changer.

Let’s Get Logical, Logical, Ctd

A reader comments on the anti-abortion bill introduced in Ohio:

Imputing personhood to a fertilized egg on theological grounds is a recent (20th century) invention by those with political and power aspirations. Historically, churches had no such belief or policy.

Nor have I seen much in my readings until the 19th century; the suggestion that abortion has been an ongoing practice for centuries has been an ongoing thread, but the information’s sources are not something I’ve ever evaluated, so I hesitate to use it. I’ve seen on the Web claims that the there’s no biblical basis for an anti-abortion stance, but it’s clear those are pro-choice sources and so, again, I hesitate to use them, and I don’t have time to read the Bible in search of the claims myself. Nor am I much interested in them, anyways.

They’re Getting Awfully High Up That Cliff Face

Steve Benen conveniently summarizes GOP reaction to the release of the report generated by the investigation of the FBI investigation of the Trump Campaign as conducted by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz:

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham appeared on Fox News, for example, and said the Horowitz report pointing to “a government trying to overthrow a president,” which is the opposite of what the Horowitz report actually said. RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel argued that the inspector general’s findings proved that the FBI “spied on” the Trump campaign, which again, is the opposite of what the Horowitz report actually said.

Similarly, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said his takeaway from the inspector general’s findings was that partisans in the Justice Department “spied on a political opponent,” which is the opposite of what the Horowitz report actually said. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who happens to be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went so far as to describe the FBI’s investigation into the Russia scandal as a “criminal enterprise,” which in no way reflects what the Horowitz report actually said.

I skipped over President Trump’s commentary. In case you missed Benen’s opinion in the above, here it is:

We’re left with a dynamic in which Republican leaders, en masse, have examined our reality, found it politically inconvenient, and replaced it with an alternate reality they find more satisfying.

I haven’t read the Horowitz report yet. Perhaps I shall during my Christmas vacation. Perhaps I won’t. Why? Because I’ve found that in the few spot checks I’ve had time to perform, such as with the Mueller Report, the GOP and conservative media has a far, far worse performance in interpreting the reports and events than do the mainstream, traditional media sources.

That’s not to say the traditional sources are always right, but if you don’t have time to read these sometimes huge reports, it’s best to go with the organizations with the best track record, and who will print corrections and retractions when necessary. Democratic sources, in this case, I’d consider to be directed towards their partisans and not towards serious observers.

But my real point here is this: Aren’t the GOP leaders who persist in misinterpreting and spinning the various results getting farther and farther out on that spindly limb called

M E N D A C I T Y

and when it breaks they’ll discover they were hanging over a cliff’s edge called

R E G R E T S ?

With each lie, spin, and manipulation, conservative (or what passes for conservatism these days) becomes less and plausible, believable, and trustable. Perhaps the GOP leadership should consider the future of its movement, if it even believes this is an ideology rather than a cover for raking in the dollars, and maybe put out the word:

B E   T R U T H F U L .

Same, of course, goes for Democrats – but it may not sting so much for them.

But can they? Or are is the GOP so caught up in winning – fighting the internecine war, as Professor Turchin might put it – that they see no value in simple truth? That’s my bet. McConnell and his fellows will throttle any efforts to make Trump pay for his rampant mendacity, they’ll celebrate their immediate victories – and if anyone ever lays out for the base, in convincing detail, how they were scammed, the current GOP leadership may never recover their effectiveness or reputations.

Belated Movie Reviews

So earnestly not-blonde.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, by Thomas Hardy (1891), roiled British society because Tess, a young woman, is raped and stalked by a man who she may be destined to marry. She eventually kills him and goes to the gallows for it. She was not portrayed as a temptress or in any way liable for what befalls her; instead, Hardy places the blame implicitly on British society. The resultant backlash discouraged Hardy from writing another novel.

Pitfall (1948), despite its setting in an American city after World War II, evoked similar thoughts for me. This involves primarily four characters.

John Forbes is an insurance company executive, overseeing the attempted recovery of stolen property for which the company has already paid out. By auctioning it off, they can hope to cover part of their losses. He’s good at his job – and bored. And, yes, there’s a Mrs. Forbes and little boy Forbes.

MacDonald is a former cop and an independent detective who works for Forbes’ company, tracking property and people.

Bill Smiley, now in prison, had been embezzling from his employer in order to buy gifts for his girlfriend.

Mona Stevens is Smiley’s girlfriend – or, perhaps, former girlfriend.

Forbes has dispatched MacDonald to find Stevens on the theory that she may still have recoverable property, and MacDonald succeeds. Forbes pays Stevens a visit, and she is cooperative; she had not realized Smiley was embezzling to buy her favors, and she is sickened. But, over the course of two days, her sadness and vulnerability charm the married Forbes into a brief affair, which they both regret and mean to put behind them.

But MacDonald is enraged by the tryst. Mac has gone beyond smitten with Stevens and is now in the land of creepy stalker. Mac tries to take the direct, fist to the stomach approach with Forbes, but discovers a granite rock lives at the center of the ambling, laid back Forbes.

But Mac is devious. He contacts the jailed boyfriend, Smiley, and baits him into a rage over Forbes. When Smiley’s probation date comes up, Mac hands him a gun and an address, and after a brief stopover with the horrified Stevens, he’s off to visit Forbes.

But Forbes, forewarned by Stevens, gets the drop on Smiley and kills him; the police descend upon him.

Meanwhile, Mac invades Stevens’ apartment and announces plans for their shared vacation, no doubt to be followed by a marriage, when he’s finally convinced her of his charms. As he’s packing for her, though, she produces a gun and severely injures him.

How does it all end up? Forbes, about to set the record straight with the police, is informed by Mrs. Forbes that he’ll do no such thing. Betrayed, she’s nearly ready to dump him, but their young son takes precedence over her outrage at Forbes’ behavior. He needs a father, and she considers his record to be spot-free, up to now. He feeds a story to the cops portraying Smiley as being completely at fault, perhaps wanting nothing more than revenge for all of his gifts being retracted by the insurance company, in the person of Forbes. Forbes suffers nothing more than guilt.

And Stevens? Whether or not Mac dies from his wounds, she’s doomed to jail and societal contempt. Shooting a former cop? A man paying attention to her?

She had no way out.

It’s a well done story, and the necessary-but-squirmable scenes were blessedly short and to the point. Technically competent and with well-drawn characters, it’s not a bad way to spend an hour or so.

A Light Comes On

I’d been surprised at the vehemence of Representative Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) probable opponent in the 2020 elections, Daniella Stella, who is reported to have lost her Twitter account permanently due to this:

Twitter permanently banned Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Republican opponent on Friday after she accused the Minnesota congresswoman of treason and wrote on the platform that Omar should be hanged.

Danielle Stella, a candidate hoping to challenge Omar for her Minnesota seat in the 2020 election, tweeted earlier this week, “If it is proven @IlhanMN passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged.”

The post that followed included a crude drawing of a body hanging from gallows with a link to a right-wing website on her belief that Omar should be hanged if a conspiracy that Omar provided sensitive intelligence to Qatar and Iran were true. [NBC News]

And then she’s all sweetness and light and reasonable when she gets bounced:

“Breathe, think this through, logically. To clarify, I said, ‘If it is proven ____ passed sensitive info to Iran, she should be tried for #treason and hanged,’ Stella wrote on Facebook, leaving a blank space where Omar’s Twitter handle had been. “Treason is the only thing mentioned in the constitution for the death penalty, punishable by hanging or firing squad. I believe all involved should be thoroughly investigated. I did not threaten anyone.”

Mmmmmmm. Never mind the picture of the gallows, eh? Still, unless she was really taking a deep drag of the conspiracy toke, it didn’t entirely make sense.

Then I decided to read Lawfare’s take on the strategy behind the writing of the Schiff report, aka the House Intel’s report on its investigation of Trump for the purposes of impeachment. This is important:

It might seem strange that the Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee wouldn’t take the opportunity to definitively rebut all these conspiracy theories. But doing so is a complicated proposition. One of [the two authors of this article,  Jurecic and Schulz] has written about the “cycle of distraction” created by House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member (then Chairman) Devin Nunes’s efforts to raise questions over alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process in the context of the Russia investigation. What was true then is true now: Nunes and his colleagues’ arguments are more about generating distrust and confusion than they are about exonerating the president or proving wrongdoing by his enemies. Focusing on debunking a specific claim risks playing into this dynamic by giving the falsehood additional attention that prolongs its lifespan in the news cycle.

What’s more, a debunking can also add to the confusion it seeks to clear: In order to explain why the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory is false, one needs to explain CrowdStrike, the Russian (not Ukrainian) national origin of the company’s co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch. One also needs to explain the nature of a physical versus a cloud-based server. And by the end of this process, the conversation has moved far from the core story about the president’s abuses of power in Ukraine. For House Democrats, there’s a risk that the long-winded explanation necessary to debunk the nonsense could lead members of the public to tune out impeachment because it’s “too complicated.”

There are other risks, too. Research suggests that the more a claim is repeated, the more likely people are to believe it, even in the context of a debunking.

Which brings it all together: Republican Stella, whether on her own initiative or on orders from on high, is just injecting a meme into the media ocean while playing li’l miss innocent.

It’s not exactly an honorable approach to campaigning, and the fact that Omar’s seat is considered quite safe should be an inducement for Stella to be more circumspect, not less – although during the Republican primary for the Jeff Sessions’ Senatorial seats one of the eventually failed Republican candidates, Rep Mo Brooks, was accused of being a Pelosi ally and a supporter of the Islamic State.

Restrained in their rhetoric, they are not.

My inclination, if I was on Twitter, would be to take Stella’s Tweet, change all the occurrences of Omar to Stella, and repost it. If she squawks, ask her why her ass is burning when she proclaimed such innocence before.

And then maybe extend it to other far-right GOPers. Just for giggles.

News We Already Knew

Or at least everyone should have known. In The New York Times Magazine is former InfoWars staffer Josh Owens:

[InfoWars host Alex] Jones told us to file a story that accused the police of harassment, lending credence to the theory that this community contained dangerous, potential terrorists. I knew this wasn’t the case according to the information we had. We all did. Days before, we spoke to the sheriff and the mayor of Deposit, N.Y., a nearby municipality. They both told us the people in Islamberg were kind, generous neighbors who welcomed the surrounding community into their homes, even celebrating holidays together.

The information did not meet our expectations, so we made it up, preying on the vulnerable and feeding the prejudices and fears of Jones’s audience. We ignored certain facts, fabricated others and took situations out of context to fit our narrative, posting headlines like:

Drone Investigates Islamic Training Center

Shariah Law Zones Confirmed in America

Infowars Reporters Stalked by Terrorism Task Force

Report: Obama’s Terror Cells in the U.S.

The Rumors Are True: Shariah Law Is Here!

It’s an fascinating article, and it’s also interesting in that Jones’ lawyer, in a divorce proceeding battle over kids, claimed the Jones persona and information site was nothing more than “entertainment.” Owens article puts a real dent in that assertion; it also suggests InfoWars is an early pioneer in the dubious, but pervasive, weaponizing of information in the digital age. For us old-timers, that would be propaganda, a practice best advanced by the Soviet Union and its successor, Russia.

If you were an audience for Jones and his InfoWars and took it at all seriously, well, welcome to the club, for I daresay that all of us, consumers and producers, have occasionally swallowed weaponized information – lies, half-lies, removal of context, other manipulations, etc – without realizing it. Some information sources try to catch, correct, and notify their audience of the mistakes made. Mainline media is best known for this. Others, like InfoWars, don’t consider standard journalistic practices, seeing this as all about making an ideological case, regardless of reality – or just making money.

How do your sources stack up?

Word Of The Day

 Snottites:

Fewer studies have investigated microbial communities growing on the walls of sulfidic caves. Among these, most of the studies investigated the geomicrobiology of snottites, which are extremely acidic biofilms clinging to overhanging gypsum cave walls or ceilings. [“Geomicrobiology of a seawater-influenced active sulfuric acid cave,” Ilenia M. D’Angeli and Daniele Ghezzi, PLoS One]

Noted in Why the hunt for alien life is under way far beneath Earth’s surface,” Donna LuNewScientist (16 November 2019, paywall):

On the day I join them, [Heidi] Aronson’s mission is to collect clear, teardrop-shaped secretions that hang from the walls and ceilings of the cave. Geologists call these snottites, and their resemblance to the dripping tip of a runny nose is uncanny. Because the snottites are full of bacteria and extremely acidic, Aronson hopes they will contain the sulphur producers.

Yep, that’s four WotD entries from one magazine article.

The End May Be In Sight For Jeremy Corbyn

If you believe, as I do, that what roils America’s closest ally, Great Britain, should be of interest to Americans, then you may want to scope out Andrew Sullivan’s latest in his Intelligencer column. He dispenses with his usual tripartite diary entry to write an in-depth investigation into Britain’s current Prime Minister and one of Sullivan’s successors as President of the Oxford Union, the eponymous university’s legendary debating society, Boris Johnson, and it’s quite an interesting piece. At this point, he’s discussing the most recent polling as Britain approaches a new election, as Johnson promises Brexit will occur after the election:

So far, the gamble appears to be paying off. A huge poll of over 100,000 Brits by YouGov last month, using the same methods that had rightly predicted a hung Parliament in 2017, showed a possible Tory majority of 68 seats. In the poll, the Tories held on to their traditional base in the South but made striking gains in the North, turning long-held Labour seats into Tory ones overnight. It is the same dynamic that saw the Democrats lose the Rust Belt swing states in 2016. The poll shows Labour at 32 percent with the Lib Dems at 14, while the Tories have 43 percent support and the Brexit Party has collapsed to 3 percent. Boris’s strategy destroyed both the former U.K.
Independence Party and then the Brexit Party — the two parties of the far right. Divide and conquer was how Thatcher won three times in a row in parliamentary seats despite never having majority support in the country as a whole. If Boris wins, it will be by the same strategy.

Jeremy Corbyn is the current leader of the Labour Party, the rival of Johnson’s Conservative Party. His positions include nationalizing various industries; Sullivan has previously reported that anti-Semitic rumors have followed Corbyn around. To my eye, he appears to be a firm believer in returning to a Golden Age which was only golden for those in charge. If he leads Labour into an abyss of public disapproval, he may be out on his ass.

Sullivan’s outlook on Johnson has certainly picked up over the last few months, going from “second-class mind” to a grudging admiration, but then Sullivan’s often able to see both sides of a coin at once – a capability only rarely seen in ideologues and even pundits.

But I remain concerned that this may weaken Europe as a whole with regards to Russian ambitions. Brexit may be necessary for the Brits to assess where they want to be in regards to their big neighbor across the Channel – in a few years, we may see a re-entry on terms deeply informed by their first wedding to, and divorce from, Europe. But how far will Russian ambitions advance in the meantime, especially with a Russia-friendly Trump still in the Oval Office?

Ummmm, No, Ctd

Just about a year ago I ranted about a cashless food court at our local, and, might I irrelevantly add, quite vibrant mall. Well, I win.

There’s a sign at the entrance prominently noting they accept cash now – I should have grabbed a pic. They also changed their name to the far more Minnesota-nice-like Potluck, and – I think – now use independent vendors, rather than a single vendor operating multiple counters. Here’s an article on what was planned at the time they temporarily closed; on our walk-through yesterday we saw a Grand Ol’ Creamery counter (presumably associated with the eponymous store on Grand Ave in St. Paul), and counters selling specialty hummus, Nordic waffles, burgers, lobster, and a bar. And some place that slips my mind.

Belated Movie Reviews

Arts Editor: Beautiful pen & ink work.

Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird (2013) is a documentary look into the origins, outlook, and production of the famed and recently passed cartoonist. If you’re a cartoonist or a fan, it’s certainly interesting, as Wilson comes off like several friends of my own: a gentleman with a distinctive and, in some ways, child-like take on life around him. He takes a moment to explain where some of his ideas come from: how adults look to children.

We are also shown how a cartoonist gets published, including a cattle-call (not their terminology) at The New Yorker (I think – my apologies if my memory slipped), the weekly cartoonist’s lunch, and that sort of thing.

And the fan interviews are fun as well, from his publishers at Playboy and other magazines, to a very young Stephen Colbert, to composer/performer Randy Newman, to Wilson’s various colleagues, as they let the audience in on the reactions of allied professionals to the man’s work. I was disappointed that Gary Larson didn’t show up, but perhaps he’s not a fan. The connection between Larson and Wilson in terms of shared themes and outlook appears to be obvious.

If Wilson and his work interest you, and you haven’t seen this, scurry right out and see this. I’m not a particular fan, but, post-viewing, some nascent urges to put together a cartoon series from years ago came surging back up.

I’m busy stamping them to death. Again.

Does Anyone Else Find This Creepy?

Subject line of email:

Let [name blurred out] know you are thinking of him on his birthday today!

Yeah, people thinking of me can leave me a little worried.

Or even better, as it appears in my gmail account:

Let [name blurred out] know you are thinking

Like a lead-in to a horror movie. Not a good horror movie, maybe, but still…

I’m Writing Too Fast To Get It Write

Horses reigned supreme among Stone Age artists

Title of an article found in the print version of NewScientist (23 November 2019). I eagerly await my Arts Editor’s rendering of the concept of a horse with opposable thumbs. This isn’t it:

Source: www.bradshawfoundation.com via the Rock Art Blog, Peter Faris.

When the article hit the NewScientist website, it had been retitled, which they often do:

Stone Age artists were obsessed with horses and we don’t know why

Which isn’t nearly as much fun. I think.

Word Of The Day

biovermiculation:

biovermiculation, frequently called bioverm,is a microbial community exhibiting a patterned growth within an extreme environment. Bioverms are of interest in overlapping natural-science disciplines such as geomicrobiologyspeleology and astrobiology[Quotes & Notes]

Noted in Why the hunt for alien life is under way far beneath Earth’s surface,” Donna LuNewScientist (16 November 2019, paywall):

The [cavern] adjoins a grey-black pool of water and the walls are covered with slimy, worm-like patterns called biovermiculations, created by slow-growing microbes.

Belated Movie Reviews

Remembering the Wizard of Oz, where the Cowardly Lion flew into a windmill and was shredded by a chicken. He tasted so good!

We saw a TV version of Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) the other night, and maybe they cut out the parts that would have made me sit up and take notice, but honestly it felt like nothing more than a framework for Allen to tell some dated jokes, make fun of some of the personalities of the day, and not really say much at all about the human condition.

Unless it has to do with sex and the inclination to take the fun out of life, then perhaps.

The eponymous character, Miles Monroe, was cryogenically preserved in 1970 after a simple operation goes tragically wrong, and is awakened hundreds of years in the future as a possible aid in the battle against the authoritarian government which substitutes hedonism for freedom. Monroe escapes when the safe house is raided by those government forces, more or less due to the farcical incompetency of the police forces, and from here he’s on a whirlwind tour of society as he masquerades as a robot, discovering veganism is no longer in vogue, sex happens via machine, and, well, it just sort of goes on and on.

It was only mildly interesting, but maybe it’ll appeal more to you.

Untidy Corner Cases

As a software engineer, I occasionally get the uncomfortable task of investigating and remedying a corner case: a scenario unforeseen by the original designers, not easily remediable with a simple bug fix, sometimes requiring a complete redesign, sometimes fixable with a disreputable hack. Usually, it means the problem was not completely analyzed.

So I was fascinated by this WaPo article on the legal question of whether an American civil officer, moments before conviction occurs, can actually resign and evade all punishemtn, and the allied question: can a former American “civil officer,” such as the President, can be impeached?

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Dec. 4 in the impeachment inquiry of President Trump. [Representative] Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump ally, suggested at one point that former president Barack Obama should be impeached.

He’s not the first to float such an idea. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania once suggested that former president Bill Clinton could be re-impeached for pardoning Democratic donor and fugitive Marc Rich on his last day in office. Clinton had been impeached on different charges and acquitted while in office.

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, says, “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Article I, Section 3, says, “Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”

Oh, what fun[1]! They queried a collection of legal scholars and received a real mix of responses, from NO NO NO! to ummmm, yeah, maybe. Gotta love it. And while it seems a little mad to consider this possibility, I have to admit to being outraged at the Marc Rich pardon by Clinton; Bill himself later admitted to being mistaken. He really needed his hand slapped for that blunder.

Putting aside the insipidly foolish rants of Rep Gaetz[2], we should expand our intellectual horizons and go a little further with this. My new concept is pre-impeachment. Analogous to the Gaetz suggestion, I suggest we also recognize the possibility that before someone attains status as a civil officer[3], Congress should be able to preempt the campaigns of truly hated or feared rivals before they can even get started.

Recognize someone as a threat to the Nation? Or at least one helluva lot smarter than you? Then pre-impeach them! I detect a thriving new legal specialty in the making!

Or, we can just ignore Gaetz and the whole idea, and instead fix the Constitution. I suggest the following Amendment:

Upon the institution of the proceedings of Impeachment, the civil officer who is subject of the proceedings is deprived of the right of resignation; they may step away from their responsibilities, turning them over to the duly considered successor, at their option; but for purposes of punishment if a conviction is obtained, a resignation by the civil officer is not permitted.

See? Problem solved.

Quite honestly, pre- and post- impeachment seem quite Roman, and not in a good way.


1 No, really, I’m not kidding. Exploring the weird outer reaches of a designed system teaches us more about the essential stability and correctness of a design than does the everyday boring stuff. Even if the latter is more important.

2 He who suggests that President Obama should be impeached shouldn’t be throwing stones at glass figurines when your favored leader happens to a bloated, cannibalistic, unmoving toad who appears to more than deserve it. Reminding everyone that they can still impeach Trump even if he resigns is … really dumb.

3 A civil officer appears to be President, VP, but not a Senator, according to the Free Dictionary’s legal section on civil officers.

When Fringe Freaks Make It To The Top

… and Stacey Newman is pointing and shouting:

Top Missouri GOP strategist Gregg Keller tweeted last month that he and former Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones “will not stop until Missouri is literally the Handmaids Tale.” Yes, that was a positive reference to the fictional series where women are enslaved, ceremonially raped and treated as breeding vessels. In real life, the GOP is attempting to reduce women to faceless handmaids without bodily autonomy.

[Missouri state health director Randall] Williams and the entire GOP entourage seem to have gone mad. [Kansas City Star]

And, as Newman points out, this is in the wake of …

In short order, Williams mandated that abortion patients have two medically unnecessary vaginal exams. A national public outcry, led by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, erupted. Abortion providers stopped performing the invasive exams, citing their oath to do no harm. Then Williams walked back his order to insist on one single vaginal exam, still cruel and invasive.

So a bunch of gibbering right wing freaks[1] have climbed to the top of the Missouri GOP pyramid and are indulging in some mad fantasies. Welcome to the error of team politics, but fortunately that is a stricture which the GOP member may, as they mature from cultist to responsible member of the electorate, cast off at a time of their choosing.

That’s what Newman’s calling for, for the women of her party to quit following along in the steps of whoever’s on top, to evaluate, shake their heads, and say NO! Will this bit of bizarre ugliness awaken them? I hope so. Newman is doing the necessary work of revealing the freaks for what they are, and it’s up to the voters of Missouri to recognize that the madness must end at some point.


1 I hasten to add that there are certain left-wingers engendering a similar response on my part, but it’s the GOP which has control of most of the State legislatures, and also seems to have the lead in spewing misogynistic, well, gibberish.

Word Of The Day

Abseil:

British
the practice of descending a steep slope by a rope secured from above and coiled around one’s body
The first time I went abseiling it was a weird feeling. [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in Why the hunt for alien life is under way far beneath Earth’s surface,” Donna LuNewScientist (16 November 2019, paywall):

Thanks to the rope-rigging skills of two Italian cavers, we abseil down, slippery with mud, into a long cavern.

Hiding The Law

In the era of digital communications, pointing at a pile of dusty law books when it comes to the law really isn’t enough, so when Georgia put its law books behind a paywall, that caused a bit of an uproar as non-profit Public.Resource.Org (PRO) paid to fetch it from LexisNexis, a for-profit company, and re-published it for free and without seeking permission to do so.

Georgia screamed foul and won the initial skirmish, but PRO won the appeal. Now it’s at SCOTUS, argued yesterday. Ars Technica picks up on the story:

You might think that PRO could just publish the un-annotated version of Georgia’s code. The problem, as PRO’s Supreme Court brief pointed out, is that Georgia doesn’t publish an un-annotated version. The annotated version is the only official version.

An obvious solution would be for Georgia and LexisNexis to separate the two works. Georgia could publish an official, un-annotated version of the state code that would be in the public domain. LexisNexis could independently produce and publish an annotated guide to the state code, keep the copyright, and charge customers for it. Indeed, Westlaw produces its own copyrighted annotation of the Georgia state code.

But the state of Georgia argues that the intermingling of statute and annotations is necessary to finance the creation of the annotations in the first place. LexisNexis covers the costs of producing the annotated code, then it recoups its investments by charging for copies of it. If the Supreme Court holds that the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is in the public domain, this business model wouldn’t work any more.

But intermingling copyrighted and public domain works creates headaches for third parties wanting to make use of the code.

Georgia’s position is that only the legally binding portions of the state code are public domain. But legal documents almost always contain a mix of binding and non-binding elements. If the Supreme Court buys Georgia’s argument, it will create a legal minefield for organizations like PRO, since the line between copyrightable and non-copyrightable content will get fuzzier. Anyone wanting to republish an official legal document will have to hire legal experts to go through the documents with a fine-tooth comb trying to determine which portions of the documents are in the public domain and which ones might not be.

PRO argues that the court should sidestep this whole thicket by declaring that state-published legal documents are always in the public domain, whether or not they’re legally binding.

The biggest obstacle to victory for PRO is a pair of 19th-century precedents that opened the door to copyright protections for some legal documents. In an 1834 ruling, the high court allowed a court reporter—a court employee who compiled judicial opinions and added his own annotations—to retain copyright protections for his contributions. The Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in an 1888 case.

The real hinge on this case, to my mind? The Georgia defense:

But the state of Georgia argues that the intermingling of statute and annotations is necessary to finance the creation of the annotations in the first place.

That’s a load of rot. That’s someone saying, Oh, no, in order to provide acceptable services, we’ll have to raise taxes! Wait, I have a better idea …

And now the citizens end up paying for it anyways, but in an unequal manner. Hell, I wonder if the State itself ends up paying for access to its own laws … !

This is what comes from an allergy to paying, upfront, for what the State needs to provide to its citizens, just because of an unhealthy fear of taxation.

It seems to me that, in order to accommodate the reasonable expectations of copyrights on the annotations, SCOTUS should order Georgia to quit being a pack of cheap bastards and publish the laws, sans annotations, for free on a website, and as a book at perhaps a nominal charge. In this case, keeping taxes low is nothing more than a political position, not a principled stand.