Category Archives: Uncategorized

While reading this editorial by John Blake of CNN I had a thought.

The National Rifle Association has actually grown weaker in part because of a “Trump slump.” Gun sales have slowed dramatically because no one is worried about Obama taking their guns anymore, and Trump is seen as gun-friendly. And the religious right has lost credibility because of white evangelical Christians’ steadfast support for Trump.

It occurred to me that, if the Democrats win the Presidency, we can expect right-wing media to swing into full fear mode, and then the left-wing will notice and spew out their views, and it’ll be cacophony all over again. Meanwhile, the gun companies will reap profits on the back of the fears of gun enthusiasts.

Just like the Obama years. He was unable to do anything because of a recalcitrant Congress, and yet the gun enthusiasts were goaded into spending to the point that ammunition became scarce.

If you think you want to make money off the gun enthusiasts, investing in gun stocks might not be a bad idea. Not that I’d do it myself, though. That’d be a bit of a moral lump to swallow.

It’s a fierce battle. Vehicles overturned and lost, tents disappearing in the middle of the night, fire threatening their very existence, warriors cursing as they struggle against the odds, and those damn fucking backers. I’ll tell you what, they need to be more free with the króna, eh?

Wrath of Gods (2006) is all about conflict, the conflict between man and man, man and Nature, man and his art, perhaps even man and Odin. This is a documentary about the making of the aforereviewed Beowulf and Grendel (2005), wherein they filmed in Iceland, a land by turns sunny, windy, snowy, and dangerous. Between the landscape, the water, and the people, the actual shooting of the movie makes for a hairy adventure, and the audience gets an interesting look behind the scenes of an indy pic, the stresses over finances, threatened walkouts, scheduling slowdowns, injuries, and general mayhem that might be unusual for most films.

It’s more gripping than the actual movie, because we know it’s real. Between weather that starts out all polite and descends into the depths, claiming vehicles, amity, and nearly the movie itself, and the people reacting to that stress, it hovered between interesting and fascinating.

If you have an interest in the making of movies, Wrath of Gods might be just your cup of tea. Very cold tea.

Senator Cory Book (D-NJ) is one of the Democrats who has thrown his hat into the Presidential ring. Politico is reporting that during his tenure of Newark, NJ, this happened:

A longtime friend and adviser to former Mayor Cory Booker allegedly directed the head of Newark’s troubled watershed to solicit political contributions from agency contractors in the late 2000s, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.

The previously unreported allegations of unethical behavior, included in a 2015 FBI memo, represent the newest twist in a decade of political turmoil surrounding the city’s water system, and come as New Jersey’s largest city grapples with a massive lead contamination crisis that has forced tens of thousands of residents to rely on bottled water for drinking and cooking. The allegations were presented in April as evidence in a separate criminal case.

While Newark’s lead contamination crisis began in earnest under the city’s current mayor, Ras Baraka, Booker — New Jersey’s junior senator who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president — presided over major administrative problems within the city’s water system that were further exacerbated by his appointees, according to interviews and the documents reviewed by POLITICO.

There are, of course, denials by those involved, disputes about the accuser being someone with a gambling addiction, etc. Politico emphasizes Booker does not appear to be involved.

However, if he appointed those in trouble, it at least points to a weakness in selecting leaders. If he hands out technical leadership positions to political allies as rewards, well, that strikes me as incompetent. Consider this from the local Sierra Club:

“When you turn your water company and your water corporation into a dumping ground for political hacks, this is what happens,” said Jeff Tittel, senior chapter director of New Jersey’s Sierra Club. “This is the kind of stuff that’s gone on there for far too long. And the outcome is we’re poisoning our children.”

Under Booker, the watershed corporation’s executive director was Linda Watkins-Brashear, a one-time campaign volunteerwho pleaded guilty in late 2015 to accepting nearly $1 million in bribes and kickbacks from contractors as well as an employee of the corporation. She was sentenced in 2017 to eight years in federal prison. Eight other officials were charged in the scandal.

The watershed’s corporate counsel at the time was Elnardo Webster, a friend and former law firm colleague of Booker’s as well as the treasurer and finance chairman to his mayoral campaigns.

Neither Booker nor Webster was charged with wrongdoing, but the unseemly tangle of patronage hires and kickbacks at an agency responsible for maintaining safe drinking water for Newark was a stain on Booker’s tenure as mayor, which ran from 2006 to 2013.

So far, Booker has not begun climbing the polls, so it seems more likely he’ll be following Gillibrand off the nomination stage. But it’s a real lesson that who you pick for important agencies had better be qualified, and not just be someone you owe a favor. Does Booker understand that?

Evidently my camera was out of control at the fair:

A trifle cladistic, wouldn’t you say? Maybe it’s an incomplete clade, but there’s definitely an ancestor / descendant thing going on here.

Please don’t make love to it.

I read Beowulf once, but I don’t really recall it, so the fidelity of Beowulf and Grendel (2005) to the original is quite beyond me, and perhaps that is just as well, as I thought Beowulf fairly boring.

This version, too, felt more like a wave and a tap on the head to a story, as segues are nearly non-existent, as is explanation or much character development. We might say that Beowulf and his men have been called in as an exterminator of the troll known as Grendel. The troll, motivated by the murder of his father years before, is focused on vengeance upon those who ran his father off a cliff. In fact, he’s so motivated that he won’t battle with Beowulf and his men until they engage in their own bit of mischief, desecrating the remains of the troll’s father.

Along the way we have an outcast witch, a great deal of rough swearing, something swimming around in the harbor, long soulful looks from Beowulf, and some beautiful shots of the wild lands of the Danes. But a sense of urgency never descends on the audience, even in the midst of a veritable slaughter of villagers. At best, it never quite reaches the point where we turned it off, but rather we watched just to see where it might go next.

That didn’t turn out to be all that interesting.

Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA) is resigning at the end of the year due to health concerns, and I wish him all the best.

That said, it’s worth analyzing how this affects the national political scene. Immediately following his resignation will come, I’ll guess, an appointment, which will no doubt be of a Republican, but that will be followed by a special election, the timing of which I’m unsure.

Isakson is, I’d say, mediocre in terms of loyalty to President Trump, having a current TrumpScore of 91.7%. It’s safe to assume his appointed successor will be no different.

But his elected successor? Isakson won his last election in 2016, Fellow Georgia Senator Perdue (R) ran in 2014, so the temper of Georgia voters statewide isn’t all that well known. For what it’s worth, Isakson won his last race by 12+% points, but at the time the Republicans were riding relatively high. The anger at Trump has been building ever since, and if Isakson’s seat comes up for election when the economy is in recession, the Democrats may find themselves handed a silver platter with a Senate seat on it. After all, Democrat Doug Jones won a Senate seat in 2017 in a special election in neighboring Alabama.

The Democrats would be well-served to recruit a strong candidate. For example, Georgia is the home of Stacey Abrams (D), who lost the race for Governor by a little over 2 points to the sitting Secretary of State, a situation many called a conflict of interest. She is intelligent, widely read, and articulate, If she chooses to run for the Senate, she might just win.

This may be the first big opportunity for the Democrats. Or at least a hurdle.

Megan McArdle isn’t entirely sure she likes the Business Roundtable vow to put investors not-first: In fact, she’s going to try to defend the investor-first approach:

Or, rather, let me highlight the answer that Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, offered in the New York Times in 1970, when corporate social responsibility was much in vogue.

“In a free-enterprise, private-property system,” Friedman argued, “a corporate executive is an employe [sic] of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”

This entire question has been bothering me, off and on, since I wrote that last post, because it seemed to be an unresolved question. But I think I’ve resolved the conundrum, at least to my satisfaction.

Friedman’s point implicitly places on the investors the kudos for providing the means for starting a business, and from that he concludes, implicitly, that without the investors, the corporate concern would not exist. He’s right, this is true. And, at least judging from what McArdle quotes, that’s where he stops.

If we’re going to make this a question of enablement, then we, and Friedman, must go the entire way and assign credit where credit is due. That is to say, are the investors the only entity responsible for the existence of the corporation?

No.

A free market corporation, in an ideal world, must have at least two more credible entities, two entities which will be familiar to those who read the Business Roundtable declaration: Customers and employees. If you don’t have someone to purchase your widgets, services, or whatever you’re selling, then, as the buggy whip makers will tell you, your company has no future. If you don’t have employees, those folks who make the widgets or provide the services which are desired by the customers, once again, you have no business.

None of this is new, of course. Now we call them stakeholders. But the simple fact of the matter is that these two other entities are just as important as investors in keeping the corporation alive and productive. It is, metaphorically speaking, a three-legged stool; mistreat one and you imperil the corporation. So when the Council of Institutional Investors becomes alarmed that investors may lose their current primacy, perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt.

McArdle also suggests that there’s a difference between social responsibility and the Business Roundtable declaration:

I’m not talking about the kind of “corporate social responsibility” that ultimately benefits shareholders. Treating employees decently often means lower turnover and higher profits; investing in community schools might lead to a better-trained workforce; and strategically supporting social causes might be good public relations. But if those steps benefit shareholders, moralistic appeals aren’t necessary to justify them, nor are pledges to ensure that the CEOs follow through.

First, I’m having trouble seeing any difference. Improving the world around oneself, whether or not you’re a corporate entity, will redound to your benefit. But let’s assume I lack imagination and McArdle is correct that there is a difference. She still has a problem in that she’s assuming the recognition of corporate social responsibility is a simple matter. It’s not. The history of the private sector is replete with examples of poor recognition of corporate social responsibility, from strike-breaking to pollution.

I think she commits a sin that I would ordinarily approve: she tries to partition these responsibilities into those for the private sector and those for the public sector:

Unlike corporate social responsibility efforts, the tax code actually targets the affluent, rather than anyone who happens to own shares in a company — which, if you have a pension, or a 401(k), or a life insurance policy, includes you. Also, unlike corporate social responsibility initiatives, redistribution through the tax code is democratically accountable.

This results in sins being committed by those in charge, investors and their representatives, senior management, and having to be cleaned up, rather than being prevented. No, as much as I like to divide responsibilities and assign them to different entities, there is an overwhelming benefit to corporate C-suiters thinking and acting on the realization that investors are not the only group critical to a company’s survival. Think of the Lehmann Bros disaster. I’ll quote myself to save the reader the trouble of digging through that rather large post:

A few years after the Great Recession that started in 2008, I read an article on the demise of Lehman Brothers. For younger readers and those who don’t recall, Lehman Brothers was more than just an obscure name appearing in Despicable Me (2010), it was one of the monster investment banks of Wall Street. One might write, Lehman Brothers (1850-2008), because it was the distressed institution that was not rescued by either the Bush or Obama Administrations during the Great Recession. The article, which might have been written by Morgan Housel of The Motley Fool, but I cannot recall with certainty, purported to recount one of the last meetings Lehman Brothers exec had with investors, and the theme of the meeting was how Lehman Brothers was dedicated to making profits for those investors.

Sounds harmless, even typical, doesn’t it? Yet, a few days later Lehman Brothers was dead, the victim of its own mad financial machinations, ripped to pieces when those knotted messes were ripped apart by the inertia of a falling market and a world wide recession.

I would contend, as did the author of that article, that it was a primary symptom of a foundational illness that ultimately doomed Lehman Brothers. Look, from a societal point of view, companies do not exist to make money. I know the general wisdom of the private sector would differ with me, but if you think it through, it becomes obviously right. The proper formulation is, Companies provide specific services thought to be useful to their consumers, and the best ones are profitable because they have the right combination of efficiency and service content.

They forgot about their customers and their stool fell over. No more Lehman Brothers. It’s a lesson writ large, and one worth learning. No doubt top execs will continue to ignore it and still make their companies work, but I have to wonder how much better their companies would have done if they had been trying to properly balance all three groups, rather than just satisfying their investors.

One or two more tractors from the Minnesota State Fair:

Dr. Austin Frakt and Gilbert Benevidez, MPH, present their research on the intersection of economics and medicine, namely prices, in an article at news@JAMA:

Price transparency has been touted as a way to reduce health care spending, but there’s one big problem: it has rarely worked. That may have more to do with how it has been implemented in the past rather than a fundamental problem with the concept itself.

The idea behind price transparency is that informed consumers can price shop for medical services that have widely varying prices, like elective surgeries or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The concept is very popular, both in the United States and abroad.

But do they work?

A study published in the American Journal of Managed Care surveyed more than 140 million health plan members across 31 different commercial plans who had access to price transparency tools. Only 2% used them. Many members did not know the tools existed at all.

Sunita Desai, PhD, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston set out to measure the association between employer-provided price information and outpatient spending. In a 2016 article in JAMA, they reported that they found that employees rarely used the information, nor was it associated with lower spending. Aetna offers a website with real-time, personalized price estimates that is used by only 3.5% of its members. Perhaps these tools can be effective in reducing health care spending, but evidence shows that low overall use is a significant bottleneck to achieving that goal.

One can argue, however, that the tools are not good enough, or that augmentation is required. That gets us to the meat:

… a recent article in the American Journal of Health Economics by Christopher Whaley, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, examined pairing price transparency with reference pricing for Safeway employees. Here’s how it works: payers set a maximum reimbursement threshold for shoppable health care services, which is the reference price. Patients who use providers with prices above the reference price pay the difference out of pocket. Under properly designed programs, members are given price transparency tools that help them find lower-priced care.

The study watched for employee health care behavior changes over 2 years, looking at laboratory and imaging test prices. After the first year, during which only price transparency tools were offered, the authors confirmed the findings of previous studies: health plan members rarely shopped.

But when the reference pricing information was added in the second year things changed. Shopping picked up and prices decreased. Specifically, laboratory test prices dropped 27% and imaging test prices decreased 13%. The authors concluded that price tools will capture the attention of consumers only if the consumers have strong financial incentives to shop in the first place.

But disappointingly they mention, but do not expand, on one of the most important, but difficult to measure, obstacles to lowering health costs in a free market setting:

… quality is crucial in health care—where bad quality could cause serious harm. Although quality is important for other products, bad quality is typically just an inconvenience. But judging the quality of care is much harder than sizing up other products or services. Because of this, patients may use price as a proxy, assuming higher prices mean better quality. Consequently, even if patients have price information, they may not choose the lowest price available.

And it’s difficult to get quality information on doctors and facilities. Who wants to go to a second-rate facility when a mistake can worsen your condition, or even kill you^[1]? But finding that information out can be difficult, and when it’s a medical emergency, between the time requirements of the situation and the aggregation of disparate medical groups, the entire concept of price shopping recedes into irrelevancy.

The quality issue implicitly brings another issue to the fore: medicine is not a commodity. Price shopping is at its best in commodity situations, which can exist either for an entire market, or within a price point of a market.

But that doesn’t apply when your life is on the line.

I’m not saying there are bad doctors and good doctors, or bad hospitals and good hospitals. Although there are. I’m just saying that experienced doctors may bring more tools to a problem than inexperienced doctors, while fresh out of school doctors may be more informed on the tools and medicines becoming generally available than the experienced doctors, and they’re all working in one of the most complex subjects humanity has ever studied: biology.

My gut feeling is that studies such as this one are somewhat beside the point, as interesting as reference prices and that sort of thing may be.

¹ Known as iatrogenic medicine.

Kevin Drum expresses frustration that people just don’t get how hard it will be to even start fighting climate change – and our own natures:

Human beings aren’t wired to [make the changes necessary to reduce climate change]. You aren’t doing it. I’m not doing it. Europeans aren’t doing it. No one is doing it. We’re willing to make modest changes here and there, but dramatic changes? The kind that seriously bite into our incomes and our way of life? Nope.

When I mention this to people, a common reaction is disbelief. You really think people will let the planet burn before they’ll give up their cars? That’s exactly what I think, because it’s happened many times before. Over and over, human civilizations have destroyed their environments because no one was willing to give up their piece of it. They knew exactly what they were doing but still couldn’t stop. They have overfished, overgrazed, overhunted, overmined, and overpolluted. They have literally destroyed their own lifeblood rather than make even modest changes to their lifestyles.

Anybody who’s interested in constructing a realistic plan to fight climate change has to accept this. It’s the the single biggest obstacle in our way, and it can’t be wished away or talked away. As frustrating as it is, it has to be addressed on its own terms. Anyone not willing to do this simply because they don’t like it needs a very deep gut check about what they really think is important.

To amplify, this is the evolutionary drive humans, as well as most live entities, are burdened with: the drive to increase our numbers. Historically, one group could overwhelm another through sheer numbers; nowadays, technology enables weapons that lessens that advantage, but evolution drives us on.

In addition, we’re seeing what economists call the tragedy of the commons, and it’s the greatest commons of all – the biosphere. We’re savagely using it for our individual and group purposes, unable to conceptualize the idea that the world as a whole is so overpopulated that the biosphere itself is affected on a global scale.

But we cannot directly perceive it, so it lacks urgency; and, meanwhile, the evolutionary drumbeat goes on: the other groups are growing bigger, we must too!

Population biologists often talk about how different species populations change through time in response to predator or prey populations, and I’m sure they also study how subgroups within certain species also see their populations vary through time in relation to each others’ aggressions and misfortunes.

If we cannot find our way out of this conundrum, humanity’s going to see a drop in population that will be very unpleasant.

The Color Out Of Space (2010) is a truly puzzling creature. On the one hand, it’s quite well made, featuring excellent and cinematography, and while the pacing could have been improved, it wasn’t awful.

On the other hand, the story falls into the What The Hell? category. My Arts Editor may have summed it up best: aliens fly down from outer space, dine on some human, regenerate, and leave.

Yeah, that’s about as good as it gets. Really.

Based on the story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft, it didn’t try to help the audience much, and in a way that sort of aesthetic decision, similar to that of Arrival (2016), is admirable. It forces the mind open in order to try to understand just what’s going on, rather than providing a framework from which to watch the story, an inevitable part of most stories, and yet an element that must be handled with delicacy.

But this movie fails to hook the audience early, and rather than flopping around in the storytellers boat, we speed away from the story, little understand, and less caring.

And a few more tractors from the Minnesota State Fair:

Nope, not that Joe Walsh.

I’ve always enjoyed that song, though.

Former Rep Joe Walsh (R-IL) has declared for the GOP Presidential nomination:

Conservative radio host and former Illinois US Rep. Joe Walsh will challenge President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020, he announced Sunday.

“I’m going to run for president,” Walsh said on ABC’s “This Week,” also telling host George Stephanopoulos, “I’m going to do whatever I can. I don’t want him (Trump) to win.”

Walsh had said Thursday that he was “strongly, strongly considering” entering the race.

“I’m not trying to be cute or coy. I’ve told you before — if somebody’s going to get in there and go after him … it’s got to be done soon,” Walsh told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day.” “You’re running out of time. But more importantly, these are not conventional times. Look at the guy in the White House. These are urgent times.”

Walsh had previously called for a Republican to challenge the President, calling him an “unfit con man” who is “bad for the country” earlier this month. [CNN]

It’s difficult imagining anyone mounting a serious challenge in the Republican primary to President Trump, but it’s still interesting to look at Walsh and try to understand the chemistry he’s hoping to build. WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin provides an very short overview:

Joe Walsh, the former Illinois congressman turned radio talk show host, said some pretty outrageous things in his day. But unlike those who have admitted no wrong and have drunk the Trump Kool-Aid, Walsh has apologized. “On more than one occasion, I questioned [President Barack] Obama’s truthfulness about his religion,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There’s no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them.”

On The Issues has this graphical representation of Walsh’s ideological position:

To the right, for your reference, is the On The Issues graphical summation of President Trump. Based solely on these measurements, it appears there’s little to differentiate the two. Of course, there’s far more to winning a nomination than ideological position, and while I favor such mundane observations as competency and sobriety, many folks on both right and left are susceptible to charisma. While I don’t personally see it, the energy and size of President Trump’s base indicates that he has a charisma that appeals to, and, in my view, overwhelms the rational faculties of a sizable percentage of the American electorate.

Can Walsh crack that charisma? I’m dubious. Certainly, he’ll attract a few Never Trumpers, but that won’t be enough. He needs to evaporate much of the 80+% of Republicans who approve of Trump. Simply shouting every day of the campaign that Trump is a “con man,” to use his own words, an incompetent, a fool who is endangering the country, is in itself a foolish approach. Trumpists will simply cover their ears and proclaim to each other that Walsh was never, as he admits, a fellow Trumpist, merely an anti-Clinton voter. Such will Walsh be dismissed, even if he manages to enlist Fox News on his side.

Walsh would need to adopt a subtle approach designed to show how Trump is basically someone whose loyalties are fickle, not least to the principles on which this country was founded and nominally operates, that he is inconstant, exclusively self-interested, and incapable of wise, deliberate governance. There are numerous examples of these points from which Walsh can select. By asking his base why they adhere to someone who betrays their own principles constantly, he may be able to engender some cracks in that foundation.

But will he? I guess we’ll find out. Walsh is not the first challenger to Trump; former Governor William Weld of Massachusetts, an old-line Republican and former candidate for Vice President from the Libertarian Party, has also entered the field. I have not discussed him. But it shows there’s a little life in the Republican Party that worries about the traditional values of a President, and how Trump is a miserable failure when it comes to those values.

Remember that WaPo piece in which a couple of high ranking Log Cabin members endorsed President Trump? It appears that other Log Cabin members simply couldn’t abide such a terribly reasoned endorsement:

Robert Turner, the former president of the D.C. chapter of the national LGBT group Log Cabin Republicans, announced in a Facebook message on Aug. 15 that he has withdrawn his membership in the organization after it announced in an op-ed column in the Washington Post that it endorsed President Donald Trump for re-election in 2020.

“It saddens me greatly to say that today, I am ending my association with Log Cabin Republicans, an organization I’ve been heavily involved with for the last decade – including serving as president of the D.C. chapter for three years,” Turner said in his Facebook post. …

“But for me,” Turner continued, “there’s no more fight left. The national board’s endorsement of Trump, and their subsequent and hollow WaPo op-ed, is a step too far. And this leaves me sad.” [Washington Blade]

It makes me wonder just how much of clinging to power syndrome motivated that ill-considered endorsement. Granted, being a conservative LGBTQ+ person is a bit of a solitary path to walk, although Andrew Sullivan has done an admirable job of it for 20+ (or is it 30+ years, Andrew?), but allowing one’s emotions to dictate one’s moral choices is a dangerous move to make. People lose respect for you.

Like Mr. Turner basically just said.

Amidst the wailing of economists, Democrats, and farmers concerning the incompetent, amateur maneuverings of President “Trade wars are easy to win!” Trump, it’s worth taking a step back and considering that, despite the indisputable evidence that Trump is flailing and possibly in the grip of dementia, he may be on the right side of history. Here’s David Von Drehle in WaPo:

I’m talking about soft power — the use of international organizations, moral suasion, foreign aid, trade, compromise, alliances and salesmanship to achieve a nation’s aims. Brutally adept with hard power — from tanks and machine guns to concentration camps and starvation — the Chinese Communist Party has little experience with soft power. Xi is getting a crash course, with one test after another.

Hong Kong is the most immediate. More than 20 years after the former British colony was returned to Chinese sovereignty, the proud and wealthy city refuses to submit to Communist control. A law that would allow Beijing authorities to extradite dissidents from Hong Kong provoked a backlash of protest that grows larger with each effort to quell it. Close to 2 million people, according to organizers, participated in a peaceful demonstration on Sunday — arguably the biggest challenge to party authority since the 1989 student protest in Beijing, which ended in a massacre.

China is by no stretch of the imagination a democracy. The Communist Party has power and, constitutionally, will not peacefully relinquish it. The Army has been and could easily once again be used to coerce citizens into doing Communist Party bidding, and minorities such as the Uighurs face cultural and ethnic extinction.

So limiting trade with China is not necessarily a bad thing, no matter what free trade advocates and libertarians may think. Of course, there are arguments on the other side, that making China dependent on trade may limit their aggression. It’s a fine and valid argument to have.

I have little use for Trump’s methods, his claims of authority to order companies out of China, for his entire China debacle dating right back to before he was inaugurated. But with concerns about Chinese power combined with Chinese lack of scruples, and credible reports of illicit technology transfers from the West to China, it’s worth contemplating that Trump has the right idea.

He’s just a flaming idiot about how he implements it. He may end up getting pitchforked by American farmers. Which would not be a bad thing.

As North Carolina’s GOP continues its tradition of shenanigans, until just a couple of days ago, the North Carolina GOP had a web site up called Vote.GOP. EQV Analytics took a look at the site and came to a few conclusions:

The exact same service – without any of Vote.GOP’s privacy concerns – is already available at the North Carolina State Board of Elections website itself, so Vote.GOP actually delivers no value to the voter, while proving valuable indeed to the GOP by collecting the voter’s detailed personal identifying information.

They use their brand name as a way to collect private information from trusting voters.

But our analysis of Vote.GOP finds it worse than merely useless. It can, in fact, actually cause innocent voters to be purged from the North Carolina poll book, disenfranchising them.

See their analysis for the how of it, but it’s certainly a good fit with GOP voter suppression tactics nation-wide. But …

But why would Vote.GOP treat the voting rights of what are likely to be its mostly Republican users with such obvious disregard? Our review of the site’s Javascript code offers a likely answer.

Every visit to Vote.GOP peppers the user’s browser with tracking cookies, web beacons, and data-harvesting code, including code attributed to a division of Tremor International, an Israeli advertising technology company whose RhythmOne subsidiary touts its ability to harvest web users’ “demographics, psychographics, shares (including dark social media), interests, purchase behaviors, and browsing habits.” Linking up that sort of profiling with the highly personal identifying information that Vote.GOP users give away is the holy grail of campaign advertising. It enables precision micro-targeting of just the right message to exactly the voter most likely to be persuaded by it, just as Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign in 2016.

Knowing that, it’s easier to understand why Vote.GOP’s developers paid only cursory attention to building a functional voter assistance service: because it’s really all about capturing vulnerable voters’ personal data.

I notice that EQV Analytics discusses how RhythmOne is trying to emulate the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, and yet may be skipping over a far more serious concern^[1]. Because the user is now identifiable, specific activities can be connected to that user. And if those activities are in the least questionable – a dark social media site, a visit to a porn site, or any other site which is questionable in the reader’s context, and now there’s leverage. It’s illicit, morally dubious, and fits right in with the North Carolina GOP’s game plan.

It may seem unlikely that extortion could be used on such a scale for either monetary or electoral gain, but don’t be so sure. Computers are great for automating these sorts of things cheaply, so who says this sort of data collection couldn’t be turned into a stream of blackmail dollars? Some relatively simple work on the end-result collection end to isolate any damage done by victims who call in the police, and even a rupture of the scheme might be contained without rupturing the balance of the scheme.

A morality-free couple of operatives could set this up, using some technical help which is already available.

¹ And I do not take the Precision Messaging facet lightly, either. Precision messaging should be renamed to Precision, Personal, & Private Message (PPPM), because that enumerates the important facets of the operationality of this technique. What does this mean? Precision means the message can be personalized to the profile of the intended reader; Personal means the reader is identifiable; and Private, the most important of all, means the message can be anything at all, unlike a public message which is subject to immediate analysis and comparison to previous messages. No connection to honesty or consistency is required. You may receive a PPPM that says the Candidate is for A, while your neighbor, who hates A, receives a PPPM that says the Candidate is against A. Now, obviously, if you talk to your neighbor, you may detect that inconsistency. Or you may not.

And that’s how you steal votes.

I personally believe PPPM should be made illegal.

Continuing the theme of elderly farm equipment:

Perhaps ‘elderly’ is a trifle hyperbolic, but old is so mundane. Is there a better term?

A bull and his rider. Will it soon be a bull and his runner?

A movie from another era, Becket (1964) moves along at is own, leisurely pace, which nevertheless breeds tension and anticipation. Why? While battles are ignored and avoided, an early signal of the nature of the story, the political and moral evolution of one man is closely examined.

Thomas Becket is advisor and close friend to the undisciplined and volcanic King Henry II of England (reigned 1154 – 1189) when he persuades several French towns to submit to English domination, much to the dismay of others of Henry’s cohort who dream of pillage and rapine. For this, he is awarded the position of Chancellor of England. But in a world of Normans, Becket is (ahistorically) a Saxon, a member of a defeated ethnic group, and as an advisor to the leader of those who defeated the Normans, a collaborator and traitor. This gnaws at him, and all the worse when a woman under his protection is taken from him by Henry; her choice of suicide, rather than lay with Henry, merely sharpens the point that digs at Becket’s conscience. Where should his loyalties lie, with the king of the group which defeated his own, or with his sullen fellows, now victimized by the conquerors? Or is there a third way?

The Church in England is an important political player in this era, causing King Henry political heartburn, and when the current leader, who occupies the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, dies, Henry arranges via the Pope in Rome for his close friend Becket, who, as it happens, is an arch-deacon, to be consecrated a priest one day, and Archbishop of Canterbury the next, despite protests from local bishops. This is a political move designed to protect Henry’s metaphorical flank, and it is unwelcomed and discouraged by Becket. He recognizes, if dimly and incompletely, that with positions of power come responsibilities, weighty responsibilities, that may change the nature of his relationship with the King. The King is the illuminating contrast, a grasping man whose main constraint may be only Becket’s good sense; it’s certainly neither the King’s mother nor the King’s wife, who Henry both despises, nor his toadying loyalists. Henry is the absolute monarch, hemmed in only by other absolute monarchs and painful realities on the ground.

Becket, now Archbishop, is met with the immediate conflict: a priest, accused of debauching a woman in his parish, is arrested by the temporal authorities. Becket is faced with the question of whether he should permit the temporal authorities to punish the man, or if this is a matter for the ecclesiastical courts, as the senior local Bishop demands. Before Becket can act, more word arrives: The priest attempts to escape, but is apprehended and, in the presence of a Lord Gilbert, put to death.

In a time in which the Church saw itself as a peer or even a master of absolute monarchs, this is a match to the conflagration in Becket’s mind. It’s a fire that burns away the thicket of desires of the temporal world, bringing into focus the role and position of the Church in society, of which he is now a high leader, and his pointed responsibility as such a person.

Becket’s demand that Gilbert surrender himself for judgment and punishment are rejected by Henry, both for practical and theoretical reasons. Henry, lacking Becket’s good counsel, concocts a scheme to remove Becket from the position that Henry put him in, accusing him of embezzlement of funds while Chancellor. Found guilty, Becket foils an attempt to inflict immediate and potentially fatal punishment through the use of holy threats and sheer personality, and then manages to escape, with the help of a confederate, to sanctuary with the King of France.

For the next several years, Becket lives in various sanctuaries, and eventually the Pope arranges a meeting in which both Becket and Henry agree to concessions. Becket can now return to his position in England, but Henry’s rage builds until, one drunken night, his incoherent utterances are interpreted by his toadies to be an order to murder Becket, and off they troop to do so.

If you’re looking for a period piece with lots of action, sword waving and that sort of thing, this is not the movie for you. With the exception of the final murder scene, there is no action in the sense of today’s era. This is not about actions, but about transformations: from temporal concerns to spiritual concerns, of loyalties from Kings to God, even of the transfer of loyalties from ethnic group transcending to the “other” and the “outsider”, or how to live together without slitting each others’ throats.

And this is primarily an internal transformation, the willingness to change and accept different thought patterns than were previously in use. This movie is about portraying those changes, the costs they exact of those who attempt them, the advantages they can bring, and the mental anguish that can accompany these gymnastics.

And, sometimes, the temporal costs of same.

This movie, technically well done and with a flock of Oscar nominations, repays careful attention with insight into the moral construction of two important, historical men.

Recommended.

Cisheteropatriarchy:

A socio-political system in which cisgender heterosexual men have authority over everyone else. Also, the way we describe society as fundamentally based on heterosexism, cissexism, sexism, and male dominance. Here, all actors are presumed to be heterosexual, cisgender, and operate in alignment with strict gender binary roles. Patriarchy is reliant upon ideologies of domination and the exploitation of all things related to the feminine, queerness, and transness. [LGBTQA+ Glossary, Michigan State University]

Noted in the second party of Andrew Sullivan’s weekly tri-partite diary entry for this week, New York Mag:

Now comes a proposed K-12 curriculum in California that would enforce these new orthodoxies on the high-school population. It would teach kids in an ethnic studies course how to “critique [sic] empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression.” The aim is to “connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice.” Children will learn to spell women as “womxn,” and be versed in what critical race theorists call “misgynoir.”

We trotted over to the Minnesota State Fair yesterday, and I took pictures of some old farm machinery.

This, I think, is a thresher.

And here is a tractor, I believe.

And another pair.

Beautiful in big, ugly ways.

It strikes me that the recent contretemps between President Trump and his hand-picked Fed Board Chairman, Jerome Powell, is illustrative of the competing priorities of Trump and the Fed Board. Here is Chairman Powell announcing an interest rate cut of .25% (25 basis points), to the 2 – 2.25% range:

In the video, he states this is intended to support an economy that he views as still in good shape, continue to support the hot job market, and in general attempt to benefit the American people.

And President Trump’s response?

Germany sells 30 year bonds offering negative yields. Germany competes with the USA. Our Federal Reserve does not allow us to do what we must do. They put us at a disadvantage against our competition. Strong Dollar, No Inflation! They move like quicksand. Fight or go home!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2019

And

….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

President Trump wants a big drop of 100 basis points or more, despite the fact that would preclude the Fed from maneuvering if the bottom drops out of the economy, because the fact is that the interest rates the Fed are using, as it is, are preternaturally low.

President Trump knows he’s facing political disaster if the economy falls apart, but that’s his catastrophe, not the Fed’s. The Fed’s catastrophe is when the economy goes belly-up, but they have the long-term responsibility, unlike Trump. And Trump’s bad-faith promises are coming back to bite him, because he claimed the economy was a disaster when it wasn’t during his campaigning days, and that only he could rescue the economy. Now he’s President, and he claims to be the only one who can keep it going.

All self-serving, craven lies, but the problem with them is if the economy goes into recession, he’s the guy responsible, even though Presidents have limited control over the economy. They’re really more a function of Congress, and that becomes a complex metric of measurement involving not only growth, but protection of natural resources, national defense, and other factors.

Trump’s getting desperate as his rash promises of easy to win trade wars have come home to nest and crapped all over his tie. If the Fed were to so-rashly drop interest rates by 100 basis points, no doubt it would juice the economy, just like eating a tablespoon of sugar will juice my good reader, but a little later you end up cranky on the couch – if not fast asleep as the cats pisses on you.

But that’s all Trump needs, that little sugar rush. His catastrophe is a bad economy during election season. If he can get over that hump, he thinks he’s home free.

The Fed’s is the long-term depression which leaves us at 20% unemployment – or worse. They approach this interest rate setting business with sober care, especially given the novelty of a trade war.

So we have two similar but different catastrophes to be avoided by the two actors in our drama. A drama that’s all about ego, power-seeking, and the holy tenets of the far-right wing.

Hang on, folks. This ride could get very bumpy.

A few days ago we had our very own monsoon in Minnesota: 1+ inches of rain in about half an hour at our home here in Falcon Heights, more others. I decided to take some pictures, lit by grow-lights. Here’s the best.

Archaeology Magazine has an article on the tomb of the Griffin Warrior, which is dated to the period in which the Mycenean and Minoan civilizations were intermixing. It includes several fascinating images, including this one:

(griffinwarrior.org, Jeff Vanderpool/Courtesy of the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati)The Pylos Combat Agate, found in the Griffin Warrior’s grave, is an extraordinarily fine seal stone measuring only 1.4 inches wide. It depicts the final moments of a battle among three warriors.

And, yes, GriffinWarrior.org does exist and is about the tomb. An amazing image, above. It fills me with wonder.

There’s a tension in democracy between the citizens and their decision-making power in terms of the greater good, and those they elect to Congress who are directly responsible for the greater good of the nation. There’s a lot of room for discussion and honorable dissension in that tension.

Still, I jumped when I read this this quote from the CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp. Palantir supplies software used by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for managing the process of apprehension of undocumented persons in the United States. As noted here, a number of computer technology companies have run into problems when supplying competing software, as employees are uncomfortable with and may even refuse to work on such products.

But Palantir?

In an interview with Bloomberg News this week, Karp said the government should be responsible for answering difficult questions about how technologies may be used to surveil citizens.

“I do not believe that these questions should be decided in Silicon Valley by a number of engineers at large platform companies,” Karp said in the interview.

It’s interesting how one individual – or perhaps a small team of C-suiters – can make that decision, but a much larger number of engineers should not.

Think about that for a moment.

Of course, there are various caveats, such as foreign engineers not having a right to make that decision, and the engineers in question could simply leave their jobs for more morally agreeable jobs. In the latter case, though, I’d dryly observe that a corporation should really be a cooperative venture, and if large numbers of your employees are concerned that your business strategy has run over your moral standards, perhaps you should think about it.

But it really comes down to engineers who are members of a democracy being told to shut up and not have an opinion on a moral issue of the day. It’s one thing to have an opinion and express it forcefully, but to tell others that they should just sit down and work: I think that’s a problem.