Category Archives: Uncategorized

When it comes to North Carolina’s GOP, the charges are almost drearily to be expected:

Federal prosecutors have unsealed an indictment charging North Carolina State Republican Party Chairman Robin Hayes and three associates in an alleged bribery scheme involving campaign contributions to the state insurance commissioner.

Hayes, along with political and business figures Greg Lindberg, John Gray and John Palermo, made initial appearances in US District Court in Charlotte Tuesday.

“The indictment unsealed today outlines a brazen bribery scheme in which Greg Lindberg and his co-conspirators allegedly offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in exchange for official action that would benefit Lindberg’s business interests,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski in a news release.

The March 18 indictment charges Hayes, Lindberg, Gray and Palermo with wire fraud as well as bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds and aiding and abetting. Hayes also has been charged with making false statements. …

The alleged scheme was to pay the commissioner of the North Carolina Department of Insurance at least $1.5 million in exchange for making staff changes, among other things, the court documents say. [CNN]

The little cesspool of North Carolina politics may have just had a filter put on it. I look forward to hearing how this turns out.

I keep wondering why I added my name to an email list AL Monitor uses to send mail concerning lobbying in Washington. Then I run across something like this from last Friday:

This newsletter reported last week that Saudi-owned alfalfa farm Fondomonte Arizona recently hired the Rose Law Group out of Scottsdale to lobby on “agriculture and employment issues.” Now the Guardian sheds new light on the issue with an in-depth look look into Saudi efforts to exploit loose water regulations in the drought-stricken American West to grow food for Saudi cows.

Which leads to this Guardian article:

Four hours east of Los Angeles, in a drought-stricken area of a drought-afflicted state, is a small town called Blythe where alfalfa is king. More than half of the town’s 94,000 acres are bushy blue-green fields growing the crop.

Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.

Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.

The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.

Each month, Fondomonte Farms loads the alfalfa on to hulking metal shipping containers destined to arrive 24 days later at a massive port stationed on the Red Sea, just outside King Abdullah City in Saudi Arabia.

The efficiency of the global transportation system continues to amaze me. More importantly, the ability of the Saudis to export the ruination of an ecological system, while not uncommon, is quite troubling, and speaks to the current position of royal agency the dollar has achieved in the American system – much to our unconscious (mostly) distress.

Much like The Day Of The Triffids (1962), the story Night Caller From Outer Space (1965) is an attempt by the British to infuse an essentially silly story with professional effort. Here we have a monstrous meteorite entering Earth’s atmosphere with neither an explosion or a crater left at its landing point, but just a small silicon-covered sphere. Found by the military in the company of a leading science team, they soon discover the sphere is actually a matter transceiver – but at the cost of the science team’s leader. Worse yet, the creature that comes through escapes the military compound with the matter transceiver in tow.

But it’s the connection to Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, which is most puzzling. A number of young women in London and neighboring towns have gone missing, and somehow it’s connected to the creature – but how?

The police not accounting for the impossible, and a couple of bodies, and in the end, the creature escapes with the women. His goal? They will become the mothers of a new race of Ganymedeans, a race that is fatally damaged by their own hubris. As he leaves the horrified police behind, he shouts they needn’t worry about their safety.

Call it dark if you like.

This story has a few things going for it. The science, outside of the one incredible part allocated to it, doesn’t do too badly most of the time, although there’s a few head-shakers in the bunch. The lead female character is quite strong, and I liked her a lot – I wish she’d had more lines and scenes.

But the motivation of the Ganymedeans was more than a little difficult to take seriously. Perhaps if we’d spent a little more time with the creature, we’d have more empathy for the antagonist – but that would have shattered the tension the moviemakers are at pains to build.

In the end, this is not as good as The Day of the Triffids, and that’s too bad. It was a solid professional effort, undone by the script.

In NewScientist (16 March 2019, paywall), Donna Lu notes that our smartphone cameras have been enhanced so much that, well, they no longer record reality any longer, but replace it:

THE phrase “the camera never lies” has never been so wrong. Artificially intelligent smartphones are now editing pictures in real time to create images that can’t be produced by conventional cameras. These enhancements, known as computational photography, are changing the way we view the world.

The goal of digital photography was once to approximate what our eyes see. “All digital cameras, including ones on smartphones, have always had some sort of processing to modify contrast and colour balance,” says Neel Joshi, who works on computer vision at Microsoft Research.

Computational photography goes beyond this, automatically making skin smoother, colours richer and pictures less grainy. It can even turn night into day.

These photos may look better, but they raise concerns about authenticity and trust in an era of fakeable information. “The photos of the future will not be recorded, they’ll be computed,” says Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab.

The endangered activity that is not mentioned, I noticed, was citizen proctoring of police activities. After all, smartphones are the primary device for recording police misconduct by citizens. Is there anything to stop a policeman from arguing that the photography of his conduct cannot be introduced as evidence because it’s so easily modified?

Of course, this defense is less likely to work if there are more than one recording device employed, but it’s not hard to argue in this Age of the Network that the devices merely coordinated their modifications.

This will not be far in the future, I predict.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1962) is actually a play written by Joseph Kesselring, but we saw it in its movie form. This reminds me a little bit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in that both are about the unsuspected, shocking secrets we keep from even our closest friends and family. Drama critic Mortimer Brewster’s surviving family consists of his delusional brother, Teddy, who believes he’s T. Roosevelt, currently President, occasional digger of canals, and someday to go on a famous safari in Africa (his sense of time is remarkable); his unmentionable and, well, loathed brother Jonathan, unseen for years since his eviction from the family home; and his spinster aunts, Martha and Abby Brewster.

He’s hoping to add a new member to the family in the form of Elaine Harper, asking her to marry him, and she is joyful to answer yes. But while hunting for some papers at his aunts’ boarding house, he discovers a body hidden in the windowseat, a discovery which doesn’t perturb his aunts, since, you see, they stored the body there after poisoning the poor man.

One might say Mortimer’s hair becomes a trifle undone at the revelation, but it nearly flies from his head when he learns that Teddy digging his “canals” means the digging of graves, and there’s eleven more, or is it twelve, down in the basement. (I feel a little as if I should be doing Dr. Seuss rhymes at this point.)

Distressing as this is, it’s merely a warmup, for it turns out that long-lost brother Jonathan may not be sentimentally missed, but neither is he lost. The aunts Mabel and Abby are distressed at his unexpected return and his desire to make their home his on a long-term basis, but they soon become absolutely furious. Why?

Well, his count of kills rivals their’s, for one thing. This is intolerable, now isn’t it?

The plot continues on, to Mortimer’s distress, as he tells his beloved that he cannot possibly marry her because of unnamed defects in his family. But as the police descend on them, albeit for a chip and a sandwich, who will end in the lead in their morbid little race, and where, geographically, in their midnight travels? And about that story-ending twist…

I thought this was a lot of fun, if not quite as agile and slick as The Importance of Being Earnest. The script had been slightly modified, I assume, for the presence of Boris Karloff, and the mods gave it a little bit of an extra kick. The only real problems are the production values, as there’s quite a bit of glare and occasionally the sound is a bit off. But if you like farce, this is not a bad one at all.

A reader sends in a link to some more climate change that seems a bit contradictory, published in Snow Brains:

A major glacier in Greenland that at one point was one the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study reports and is covered by ABC.

In 2012 the Jakobshavn glacier was retreating about 1.8 miles and thinning nearly 130 feet every year. But that has reversed and in the past two years, it has started growing again at the same rate, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary. …

There’s indeed a cold spot around Greenland – but it’s merely a day’s measurement, and isn’t measuring the ocean’s temperature. The scary part is all the red down around the equator. Sea Surface temp is more interesting in our case:

Again, a mere day’s measurement. But what I think is interesting is the connection to the North Pole. Could this be a result of the cold normally locked into the ice cap flowing down to Greenland, analogous to the recent breakdowns in the polar vortex? I hope to hear an answer to that unvoiced question some day.

You may remember the last, failed appeal by Dominique Ray to have a representative of his faith tradition (Muslim) be present at his execution, and that SCOTUS voted 5-4 along strict party lines in that decision. But now another such appeal has come along, this time involving a Buddhist – and SCOTUS voted 7-2 to uphold the appeal. So what the hell is going on? Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy explains the situation and has a guess as to the reason for the decision:

… the Supreme Court stayed an execution in a Texas case in which the defendant, a Buddhist, was denied the right to have a Buddhist priest join him in the execution chamber, even though Christian and Muslim prisoners were allowed the company of spiritual advisers of the same faith, in like circumstances. The facts of Murphy v. Collier are very similar to those of Dunn v. Ray, a recent ruling in which the Court allowed an Alabama execution to go forward, even though the prisoner, a Muslim, was not allowed to have a Muslim imam in the execution chamber with him, while Christian prisoners were allowed to have a Christian minister present. …

Why then, did Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts rule in favor of Murphy despite previously ruling against Ray? We cannot know for sure. But it is possible to make some educated guesses. …

A more likely reason, in my view, is that the justices saw the extremely negative reaction against their decision in Ray, and belatedly realized they had made a mistake; and not just any mistake, but one that inflicted real damage on their and the Court’s reputations. Presented with a chance to “correct” their error and signal that they will not tolerate religious discrimination in death penalty administration, they were willing to bend over backwards to seize the opportunity, and not let it slip away.

And, whatever can be said about the procedural question, it’s a good thing that the justices have taken a major step towards clearing up any confusion over their stance on the substantive one. Whether in death penalty cases or elsewhere, it is indeed impermissible for the government to discriminate on the basis of religion.

I’m a little conflicted. It’s dismaying to see the Court swayed by public opinion (or pundit prattle, if you prefer), since Courts are ideally in the business of interpreting the law & Constitution regardless of the whim of public opinion. They provide a stable pillar to how government works.

On the other hand, given the reaction from across the political spectrum to what appeared to be religious bigotry on the part of the conservative wing of the Court in Ray, it’s a little reassuring that at least Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts were willing to admit a prior mistake and have backfilled where they can, assuming that Somin is correct in his guess.

But then how do we evaluate the Gorsuch and Thomas votes? They may have reasoned that making this a 9-0 vote for the appellant in Murphy would have suggested they had made a mistake in Ray; or it might have suggested inconstancy in their judgments between the two cases. Neither looks good for their legacy. On the other hand, their vote in Ray is an equally outsized blemish on their legacies. It’d be interesting to know if any of these guesses truly are accurate, or if they’d put forth yet another reason for their stubborn position.

And for the long term? I’m not sure. That Chief Justice Roberts screwed up the Ray case is appalling and disappointing. Somin has already pointed out in text I did not quote that, if anything, the reasoning applied by the majority in Ray applied with even more impact in Murphy; yet three conservative justices did not accept that reasoning.

These two cases, although as I understand it not precedent-setting, may generate painful and logically twisted legal arguments for years to come.

For this dinosaur geek, this is actually a little sobering:

In a paper to be published April 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences an international team of authors, including University of Washington Provost Mark Richards, share the discovery of a site that tells another piece of the story from the day a meteor strike is thought to have led to the end of the dinosaurs.

“It’s like a museum of the end of the Cretaceous in a layer a meter and a half thick,” said Richards, who is also a professor in the UW Department of Earth & Space Sciences.

This unique fossilized graveyard – fish stacked one atop another mixed with burned tree trunks and conifer branches, dead mammals, a pterosaur egg, a mosasaur and insects, the carcass of a Triceratops and seaweed and marine snails called ammonites – was unearthed over the past six years in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota by lead author Robert DePalma.

“This is the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with the KT boundary,” said DePalma, curator of paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida and a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. “Nowhere else on Earth can you find such a collection consisting of a large number of species representing different ages of organisms and different stages of life, all of which died at the same time, on the same day.” [University of Washington News]

Associated with the Chicxulub meteor crater off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, the pictures that can be seen at the link above are a graphic illustration of the uncaring forces of Nature which could drop on our heads at any moment. These ancient creatures are not the unfortunate victims of predators, or predators who took a wrong step into a sinkhole and never made it out – they are the evidence of mass, instantaneous death.

A sobering thought.

A fully wooden car, the Toyota Setsuna, was displayed at the 2016 Milan Design Week.

I was led to this by an article in NewScientist (16 March 2019, paywall) on the replacement of concrete and steel with processed wood:

… as cities grow, the potential of CLT [cross-laminated timber] does too. Around 65 per cent of the urban infrastructure that will be needed in 2030 has yet to be built. If it is constructed with concrete and steel, we have little chance of keeping temperatures down. CLT does not eliminate the old materials completely, but reduces them by up to 80 per cent. “We still use concrete for foundations,” say Shah. “But a wood building is about a third of the weight of a steel and concrete building. That means we require less deep foundations so it reduces the amount tremendously.” Wood also improves a building’s insulation, further cutting its carbon footprint.

In the not-too-distant future, wood could even be used in place of glass in windows. A few years ago, scientists at the Wallenberg Wood Science Center in Stockholm, Sweden, invented a way to extract the pigments from wood. The result was a transparent material that can be used like glass, but with better insulating properties – another small step toward a zero-carbon future.

They even go on to observe lasers have been built using deconstructed wood. Long time readers will recall I’ve talked about wooden buildings made from CLT, so this is all very interesting. Do we really have the wood-growing resources to switch to an economy in which CLT is the primary construction material world-wide? It’ll be interesting to see.

Bon Appetit!

Amateurish drek.

That’s the label I was going to apply to Planet of Dinosaurs (1977).

But, after a little wretched setup to explain why this group of people are running around a savage planet, came the dinosaurs. And I had to admit that, for the stop-action era of special effects, they were not at all bad.

So it’s just drek. But I have to admit I laughed when mama dinosaur registered a forceful protest about making her eggs into omelettes. If you’re a fan of movie stop-action dinosaurs, this piece of drek contains some of the best.

One of you was cheating at pinochle, but I’m not sure who!

If you’re going to watch Up In The Air (1940), you’d best be prepared for a little racism, as Mantan Moreland plays his usual role as the terrified menial help, and it doesn’t help that there’s a blackface scene – although it doesn’t end well for the guy doing the deed.

But other than that, Up In The Air is a pleasant little murder mystery. When the lights go out during rehearsal at the radio station, star singer Rita, who proved to be a real bitch in her few minutes in the story^[1], is shot dead. Who did it? The mysterious stranger who was quietly enjoying the show? One of the musicians? Hyper-kinetic page Frankie, eager to move up in the world?

The police eventually release everyone for want of evidence, and Frankie and his helper, Jeff, who together have been working on a comedy act, take it upon themselves to further the investigation. The mysterious stranger is the next to take it in the neck, just as the investigators discover he’s from Cheyenne and has a connection with a ‘Gladys Wharton,’ but who’s she? The dead singer? Her up and coming replacement, too-innocent Anne? Some floozy back in Cheyenne?

Things move along perhaps just a little too quickly, and the characterization was a little too scant so that when the murderer is finally fingered, I couldn’t remember who it was, so this is definitely a mediocre presentation.

But my Arts Editor said, considering the poor audio, the replacement singer Anne had a more than passable alto voice.

¹ Although, to be honest, her employers were no gems themselves. The word defenestration actually crossed my mind during the one scene with her and the radio management.

This is one of those fascinating physics tricks. NewScientist (16 March 2019, paywall) has the story on laser light and black holes:

A BLACK hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that it bends light around it like a strange cosmic mirror. Interstellar spacecraft could make use of this effect to steal energy from a black hole and get a speed boost without needing extra fuel.

We already use a version of this energy-stealing. Spacecraft heading from Earth to the outer solar system slingshot around Jupiter for a gravity assist, speeding up by ever so slightly slowing the planet in its orbit.

Spacecraft could theoretically perform the same trick with a black hole for an even greater boost in speed. It is a risky manoeuvre, however, as the craft risks falling in to the eternal clutches of the black hole.

Luckily, David Kipping at Columbia University has found that you don’t need to use the spaceship itself for the slingshot: you can use light as a sort of proxy.

If you fire a laser at just the right angle to travel around a black hole that is moving towards you, the light will return with more energy than it started with. Catch the beam as it hurtles back and this extra energy could be used to power your ship.

And don’t forget the initial boost you’d get just by shooting the laser. I wonder how many SF writers ran right to their tripewriters word processors and came up with a story incorporating that phenomenon when they read this?

And now I’m thinking that’s just what Larry Niven did in The Borderland of Sol. It won the Hugo Award for Novelette in ’76, so don’t sneer just yet.

Steve Benen tees off on President Trump’s nomination of Stephen Moore to the Fed Reserve Board:

But even putting that aside, Stephen Moore isn’t just another unfortunate selection for the amateur president. He is a uniquely ridiculous choice – quite possibly the least defensible of the Trump presidency to date.

To say it’s difficult to know where to start with Moore’s c.v. is to be quite literal. It matters, obviously, that he’s not an economist and knows very little about what the Federal Reserve does. But it also matters that Moore has been wrong about practically everything for many years. It matters that he appears to be a Trump sycophant. It matters that Moore has had a hand in some spectacular economic failures. It matters that Moore’s economic opinions tend to echo Republican talking pointswhile “flying in the face of economic theory.”

It matters that Moore has a reputation for misstating basic factual details. It matters that his economic views tend to vary based on the party of the president at the time. It matters that the White House has made the finance industry nervous with this nomination. It matters that actual economists have been apoplectic about Trump’s selection of Moore, (One scholar argued, “This is truly an appalling appointment. An ideologue, charlatan, and hack. Frankly so bad the putatively serious economists in Trump administration should resign as matter of honor.”)

It matters that Moore has embarrassed himself on television over and over again. It matters that Moore, at the height of the Great Recession, turned to “Atlas Shrugged” as an economic guide. It matters that Moore’s own finances are a mess – why the White House refuses to vet its nominees in advance is a mystery – owing $75,000 in unpaid federal taxes, interest, and penalties.

Slate’s recent summary struck me as notable: “Stephen Moore is a living embodiment of the sucking intellectual void at the core of conservative economics, an inept pundit who has spent his career evangelizing the supply-side dogma that tax cuts pay for themselves while shilling for Republican officeholders, all from well-paid perches at think tanks and in the media.”

I think we may see Mr. Moore confirmed, despite his apparently glaring deficiencies, because he appears to be an acolyte to the Holy Economic Faith of the Republican Party: tax cuts, Laffer Curves, and trickle-down economics. This is important because such unreasoning beliefs are difficult to rebuff. Reason has little effect on them. They have theoretical underpinnings, much like theology, which gives them an air of respectability for all concerned, including the leaders. Witness the smoking disaster of Brownback’s Kansas. He should have known better.

No one’s really peeking behind their curtain.

So I fear we’re really going to have to go through another recession in order for the Republicans to even consider revising their faith, not belief, but faith in these Holy Economic Tenets.

And, in the meantime, I fear Mr. Moore will get his seat on the Fed Reserve Board. His lack of economics training may be the only thing that’ll hold him back, and I don’t know that’ll stick in the Republicans’ craw enough to stop his ride.

Lagerstätte:

A Lagerstätte (German: [ˈlaːɡɐˌʃtɛtə], from Lager ‘storage, lair’ Stätte ‘place’; plural Lagerstätten) is a sedimentary deposit that exhibits extraordinary fossils with exceptional preservation—sometimes including preserved soft tissues. These formations may have resulted from carcass burial in an anoxic environment with minimal bacteria, thus delaying decomposition. Lagerstättenspan geological time from the Neoproterozoic era to the present. Worldwide, some of the best examples of near-perfect fossilization are the Cambrian Maotianshan shales and Burgess Shale, the Devonian Hunsrück Slates and Gogo Formation, the Carboniferous Mazon Creek, the Jurassic Solnhofen limestone, the Cretaceous Santana and Yixian formations, and the Eocene Green River Formation. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Daily Kos Science: A discovery in China could add extraordinary details to the history of life,” Mark Sumner, The Daily Kos:

Lagerstätte may not be a word that many people run into in their daily lives, but for geologists it’s an extremely exciting term. A lagerstätte is an area were rocks have preserved evidence of ancient life—with extraordinary fidelity and in great numbers. Unlike most fossils, which are generally only reflect bones and shells—the ‘hard parts’ of vanished organisms—the remains found at a lagerstätte may include the delicate sweep of a brush-stroke-thin antenna, dangling representations of a jellyfish’s tendrils, even the internal organs of tiny creatures.

I see there’s another uproar caused by religion leaking out of its home and intruding where it is explicitly unwelcome:

State Rep. Stephanie Borowicz was on the ninth “Jesus” of her opening prayer in the Pennsylvania statehouse when other lawmakers started to look uncomfortable.

Speaker Mike Turzai, a fellow Republican, glanced up — but Borowicz carried on, delivering a 100-second ceremonial invocation that some of her colleagues decried as an offensive, divisive and Islamophobic display shortly before the legislature swore in its first Muslim woman.

This is ridiculous, a clear abuse of a dubious privilege. If we’re going to have an Establishment Clause, we should simply eliminate opportunities to privilege religion in a governmental context, as this most certainly is.

But Borowicz has her defenders, including the prominent (but intellectually doubtful) Franklin Graham:

“She doesn’t need to apologize,” Graham wrote on Facebook. “We don’t change who we are or what we believe because someone who is present may believe differently than we believe. I know Stephanie Borowicz would appreciate your prayers and encouragement. I always appreciate anyone who has the guts to stand up for Jesus.”

So why didn’t she use her time to defend democracy? After all, the statehouse is not a church, it’s a place where governmental business in a democracy is conducted – and certainly over the last couple of years, it’s had its abusers. Where is her loyalty to the Constitution, Graham, if she has to use a government facility to promote her religious views?

And that last sentence is, of course, hysterical, the remark of a wannabe theocrat who has decided to don the hood of the victim in order to advance his cause. It’s quite shameful, backing someone illicitly using her governmental position to attack someone else’s religion. This is another reason not to accord Graham any respect.

Hemiplegic:

Pertaining to hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of the body.) [MedicineNet]

Heard used by a friend a couple of days ago.

This speech by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has the political world abuzz:

If you don’t want to sit through it, there’s also a transcript. On an aesthetic level, I suppose the Senator did an OK job, although that’s not really his area of expertise. I’m sure his staff enjoyed this assignment. I was vaguely amused. I also saw mention of this on Colbert last night, and, on review, I think Colbert was a somewhat unfair to the Senator.

However, and I believe the Senator is no longer being satirical at this juncture, I was horrified at his conclusion. I suppose I shouldn’t be – his training is in law, neither climate science nor demographic analysis nor ecology nor, since he mentions he believes this is an engineering problem, an engineer. When he calls for, in very libertarian language, more people:

And problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, but by more humans!

More people mean bigger markets for innovation.

More babies mean more forward-looking adults – the sort we need to tackle long-term, large scale problems.

American babies, in particular, are likely going to be wealthier, better educated, and more conservation-minded than children raised in still-industrializing regions.

As economist Tyler Cowen recently wrote on this very point, “by having more children, you are making your nation more populous – thus boosting its capacity to solve [climate change].”

he’s calling not for a solution, but for an exacerbation of the problem. At it’s root, climate change is not about burning fossil fuels or even mass consumption – tragically, it’s about too many people. If we had only a third, or even half the population we actually have, and they were steady state, and our technology more or less the same, would we be facing a climate change problem? Almost certainly not. In fact, the Spring 2019 issue of American Archaeology, not yet online, has an article which inadvertently makes my point for me. I plan to publish a post using material from that article when AA’s publisher, the Archaeological Conservancy, gets their act together and puts it online (if they do – some articles don’t make it online). It has to do with the severe reduction in North American population when the diseases of Europe were let loose among the Indians, and how that affected the climate.

But back to the point, his call for more people and a magical creation of a solution is rather like, after jumping out of an airplane sans parachute, calling for everyone else to jump out as well and we’ll develop a solution before we hit.

She keeps showing up at the most unexpected functions.

Roger Corman is a B-Movie legend as a director & producer – but what’s interesting is who’s worked for him. A short while ago I reviewed Galaxy of Terror (1981), and didn’t mention that the now-legendary James Cameron worked as Production Designer, and was responsible for many cheap, yet effective, special effects.

Here’s another one: Corman served as producer for Dementia 13 (1963), but who was the director? Now-legendary director Francis Ford Coppola. In this early Coppola-written psychodrama, an Irish family living in a castle is being slowly sucked into the black hole that is the young daughter’s death by accidental drowning. Why is her mother still so distraught? Who’s the chap with the axe who’s taken a dislike to the family? What of her three brothers, and their two spouses? Bodies start to pile up, but so do the psychotic attributes of these people, as the family fortune comes into play, as does the devilishly handsome doctor who’s paying almost unseemly amounts of attention to the mother.

And if the interesting effort isn’t enough, our Arts Editor vouched for the quality of the sculpture.

It’s an erratic but interesting effort. There are some plot holes here for sure, but when the little girl’s toys starting floating up from the back yard pond, well, that was a little creepy. Sure, the seams of the plot show here and there – character narrative is always a red flag – but there’s also well-done bits that keep the interest flowing.

Not that I recommend it, but it’s not beyond the pale to say that the devoted Coppola fan wouldn’t enjoy this early production of his.

Since the release of A.G. Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report, there’s been a concerted effort to run the Democrat in charge of the House Intel committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA), out of town:

The House Intelligence Committee was a center of partisan fighting over Trump’s alleged Russia ties even before Mueller began his investigation, developing a reputation for discord and sniping during the GOP-led Russia probe that determined there was no evidence Trump colluded with Russia.

Republicans see Schiff’s recalibration as proof he was wrong to challenge Trump.

“He essentially spent 22 months lying to the country,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in Congress.

Gaetz said that in seeking Schiff’s ouster as committee chair, Republicans were following the example set by Democrats, who in 2017 sought to remove Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) when he chaired the committee. [WaPo]

The idea is that Barr’s Summary has been mistakenly interpreted to “exonerate” President Trump of obstruction of justice charges, when it explicitly does not do so, and not finding enough evidence of collusion to prosecute, especially since the DoJ frowns on prosecuting sitting Presidents. The misrepresentations of the content of the Barr Summary have been discouraging to see in my fellow Americans.

But what’s caught my eye, the dishonest error being committed by Republicans who are frantic to be seen as being on the same moral plane as the Democrats^[1], is this: the House investigation and the Mueller investigation are independent of each other. As we all know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Let’s suppose Mueller found not a spec of evidence of collusion by then-candidate Trump. Does this prove that Trump is innocent of the charge? Does it prove Schiff’s investigators will find nothing because there’s nothing to find?

Of course not.

Mueller’s investigators may have been incompetent, hamstrung by regulations, unable to access proper sources of information, or even just unlucky. After all, there is much circumstantial evidence of said collusion, including Trump begging the Russians, live on TV, to help him, if they could, with stolen Clinton email. Quite properly, that’s collusion right there, the kind of evidence that no one in their right mind can ever deny.

My point is that the Republican assault on Rep Schiff is unreasonable, dishonest, and a betrayal of their oaths to the Constitution. If Schiff says he’s seen evidence, uncovered by House investigators, of collusion, then that should be treated with sober concern by all members of Congress, because that’s an attack on our core institutions.

Yeah, those institutions that got all these Trump-defenders their jobs.

They should think about that, if they can’t raise themselves to the moral level of worrying about their country.

¹ And with a dead immoral weight like Trump swinging from their necks, they aren’t likely to achieve that height of rectitude any time soon.

They were so bad, he just up and had a heart attack.

Murder with Pictures (1936) suffers from a lack of attention to detail. This is a murder mystery in which the defense lawyer of a gangster dies of a gunshot wound during a photo shoot after the gangster has been cleared of a recent murder. There’s a selection of possible murderers, most of them news photographers, along with a mystery woman. The lead is a young, poverty-stricken newsman looking for his big story, but having to wade through quite the shit storm, from veiled threats from the gangster to a woman who claims he signed a contract to marry her or pay her $5,000 – in 1936 dollars, it’s quite a headwind.

And it all feels a little artificial.

Throw into the blend the fact that the mystery woman is apparently shot in the back, yet can bound up out of bed and drive around in cars with notoriously stiff suspensions, who also takes a shot to the jaw, and is yet not kidnapped while she lays unconscious, a killer who appears out of nowhere, and a really flawed soundtrack (at least on Amazon Prime, where the captions were also at least 30 seconds behind the dialogue), and it was a difficult story to enjoy, despite the cleverness of the crime.

In the end, I think the unbelievable character responses damaged the show. But I still like the title.

The snapback of the Republicans in the wake of the supposed “exoneration” of their cult leader, President Trump, has been something fierce – and quite possibly an overreach, if the Democrats are willing to take advantage of it. I have in mind the statements of Kellyanne Conway:

Kellyanne Conway calls for new investigations of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton.

"'Why are still talking about Hillary Clinton?' Because folks, you wouldn't let the 2016 election go… There should be a reckoning, because our democracy bears nothing less." pic.twitter.com/pUbdjEqah0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 25, 2019

And then there’s Senator Graham (R-SC), who has his plans for retribution:

“When it comes to the FISA warrant, the Clinton campaign, the counterintelligence investigation, it’s pretty much been swept under the rug,” Graham said. “Those days are over.”

But this is all fairly laughable; in fact, it’s marketing material, not serious governance. Each of these were investigated by the Republicans themselves in the previous Congress – and while they sometimes made shrill cries of victory, they all proved to be rotten at their core. For those paying attention to these matters, Graham is a laughingstock. A laughingstock who is, however, assuring his own re-election, by satisfying his own base.

But he won’t have much of a legacy. I don’t envy him his retirement years, when the realization of the character his allies is forced upon him.

But I must say, there are days I’d love to be the interlocutor of these clowns. Let’s take Kellyanne for an example, as I make up a scurrilious conversation:

INTERLOCUTOR: Kellyanne, you said, “There should be a reckoning, because our democracy bears nothing less,” and I completely agree. As I’m sure you would agree that each side should be equally well-examined, let’s begin with Clinton. In the last decade or more, she’s been thoroughly examined by Congressional committees, most of which have been run by vengeful Republicans -”

KC: That’s not true, young man –

I: I refer, of course, to Rep Kevin McCarthy’s open admission to same, Kellyanne, so please desist from spreading further lies.

KC: <sputter>

I: … but to continue, Clinton has been investigated half a dozen times and more, often led by seasoned former U. S. Attorneys, such as former Rep Trey Gowdy (R-SC). She been raked down one side, up the other. She’s been given a virtual full gynecological examination, a look right up the ol’ vagina by Republican-backed investigators, not only into her finances, and the Clinton Foundation finances, but all her activities as Secretary of State and as candidate Clinton.

KC: Where there’s smoke –

I: There’s fire, yes, yes. And even – arson. But I stand quite in gratitude to Republicans for proving, well beyond any reasonable doubt, that Hillary Clinton stands guilty of nothing worse than mismanaging an email server.

KC: But –

I: Now, Kellyanne, it’s necessary that President Trump be equally forthcoming. Before you try to sell some line of tripe that he has already done so, has he released his tax returns for the last ten years? Has he released the contents of his conferences with President Putin of Russia, which he has so unwisely held back from his intelligence leaders? We’re not asking for the results of his proctology examine, nothing nearly as invasive and unfair as has happened to Clinton, but just simple, old-fashioned American honesty and fair-dealing. Is that too much to ask of an American President? We haven’t seen that as of yet, now have we?

If the Democrats recognize that Conway and Graham have made rhetorical errors, then they should retort and publicize those retorts. Clinton has been their favored target, even if Clinton keeps slapping them silly during hearings, so use that treatment of her against the Republicans. If the Republicans are competent investigators, then declare that the Republicans have proven she’s clean, and that now it’s time for Trump to come absolutely clean – and, if he declines, politely inquire as to why he can’t be bothered to measure up to the Clinton standard.

Prick him with the thought that Clinton is much better than she has. Make it clear he’s not making it over the bar, yet.

Trump’s wasn’t even exonerated by Mueller. You can’t let him and his party get away with taking control of the agenda. This is when it’s necessary to use their own efforts against them.

On-set nickname: Miss Grumpycakes.

Earth is a danger to all of the Universe, so some Federation of civilizations sends a glowing, radioactive woman to, well, interfere with a kidnapping. She touches the bad guys and they fall down dead from radiation poisoning.

The title of this whopper is so much better than the actual story: The Astounding She-Monster (1958).

Oh, and we get to the end of the movie, and the message left by the alien is … “Come join our Federation.” Wait, what? Continuity!

Oh, this was dreadful. Please do not waste your life on this one.

Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes, etc, evaluate Attorney General Barr’s letter concerning Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign:

The brief letter sent by Attorney General William Barr to congressional leaders on Sunday afternoon summarizing Mueller’s findings is a complicated document. In key respects, it contains very good news for President Trump about a scandal that has dogged his presidency since before he even took office. The determination of just how good the news is—whether it amounts to the exoneration Trump claims on these points or whether we’re dealing with conduct just shy of prosecutable—will have to await the text of Mueller’s report itself. But for those who quite reasonably demanded a serious investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and of cooperation and coordination with it on the part of the Trump campaign, it has to be significant that Mueller, after the better part of two years of investigating, has not found that anyone associated with the Trump campaign knowingly conspired with Russia’s efforts.

In other respects, however, Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report is ominous for the president. While Mueller did not find that Trump obstructed his investigation, he also made a point of not reaching the opposite conclusion: that Trump didn’t obstruct the investigation. Indeed, he appears to have created a substantial record of the president’s troubling interactions with law enforcement for adjudication in noncriminal proceedings—which is to say in congressional hearings that are surely the next step.

Which is to say, the President may have committed criminal acts when it comes to obstruction of justice, but Mueller did not feel he had the freedom to prosecute those in view of DoJ policies. He leaves that to  Congress to consider.

If you’re depressed Trump wasn’t marched away in handcuffs, it’s worth recalling that we have, on record, an amazing collection of falsehoods and braggodocio which should eliminate him from consideration for a second term – even if his base continues its insane love affair with him. We have indications of character defects, crimes committed prior to his election to the Presidency, and many other defects.

But, perhaps most importantly for the health of the Republic, is the Lawfare conclusion:

Whether this proves the beginning of the end of L’Affaire Russe or the prelude to a series of additional disclosures about activity on the part of the Trump campaign and the president himself that are disturbing but happen to fall just short of criminal activity, it is important not to lose sight of the significance of the investigation having been completed. That Mueller was able to complete his probe into a sitting president without having his investigation blocked—despite ongoing presidential braying against the probe and menacing of the Justice Department’s leadership—is no small thing.

That Mueller was able to write his report, to document his findings in a fashion that can allow for transparency and, if necessary, accountability, is of immense value. The question of what to do with the record Mueller has compiled will ultimately fall to Congress.

It’s not an impregnable Presidency. Names such as Manafort & Gates will ring forth as emblematic of a sick, corrupt campaign that has led to one of the most corrupt and swamp-driven Administrations in a very long time.

I also liked Wittes’ approach in another post:

The end of a criminal investigation is thus a funny moment. While the subject will generally claim vindication, it actually does not mean that you cannot judge her conduct morally. It does not mean that she cannot be held accountable in myriad non-criminal fashions. She can be ridiculed. You can campaign against her on the basis of the unindicted conduct. You can write histories of the scandal that denounce her behavior. You might even be able to sue her successfully. The end of the investigation only means that the state will not punish her using the specific instrumentality of the criminal law. It means only that the we won’t “lock her up.”

This is another post well worth reading.

Democratic candidates for President have been noising about the idea of increasing the number of Supreme Court Justices, along with possible changes to how appointments are made, all in the hopes of reforming the Supreme Court. Candidates O’Rourke, Buttigieg, Harris, Gillibrand, and Warren have all mentioned it as a possibility.

I think this is a mistake.

It’s necessary to remember that a sizable number of Americans do not pay attention to the minutiae of government. For those of us who watch politics, the denial of a confirmation hearing to Judge Garland was a sickening symptom of the rot at the core of the current conservative movement. The subsequent awarding of the open seat to Neal Gorsuch, followed by Kennedy’s retirement and then Kavanaugh’s nomination, subsequently confirmed, was the height of dishonor for Senator McConnell, who orchestrated the tactics to retain the seat in contravention of all law and tradition, even as he and his compatriots lied about it.

But most Americans have already forgotten about these events, or, at best, they have to be reminded about them. And then they’ll just shrug about them.

So when Democratic candidates talk about changing the Supreme Court around, it’s not perceived as a matter of correcting a structural problem, but as pure & bitter politics. SCOTUS is not perceived as broken by most of America, and in politics, perception is all. This seems to be more of a matter of playing to a Democratic base that is rightfully outraged at McConnell’s dismal tactics of total war against his fellow Americans, but it’s necessary for the Democrats to remember that they have to play to the independent and moderate Republican voters, or they will continue to lose elections.

There are plenty of issues which need attention, from climate change to trade to immigration, and they need to bring innovative approaches to those problems to the voters. There’s no reason to risk alienating voters by bringing up a change to an institution which has not yet pervaded the public consciousness as needing reform – and may never do so.