Category Archives: Uncategorized

Rep McCollum is the second of my three Congressional reps to respond to my suggestion:

Simpatico:

congenial or like-minded; likable:
I find our new neighbor simpatico in every respect. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “‘Chuck and Nancy’ present a united front in challenging Trump on border wall,” Seung Min Kim, WaPo:

No two principals in the shutdown fight have presented a more united front than “Chuck and Nancy,” as Trump has dubbed them. The two leaders have refused to make any key strategic moves in the shutdown fight without consulting each other and have become so simpatico that their staffs regularly joke that the two finish each other’s sentences.

He read it in a Chinese Fortune Cookie:
You will one day become a blue floating head.
And, lo! So it came to be.

When it comes movies with elements of disparate quality, Battle Beyond The Stars (1980) is right up there with the best of them, and it’s all enough to make this audience member’s teeth itch. A quick overview: the planet Akir is menaced by Sador and his minions, who give the peaceful inhabitants two choices: submit to enslavement, or be blown up by Sador’s “stellar converter.” The one warship on the planet, an obsolete boat with an artificial intelligence named Nell, is used by the heroic young man who goes in search of allies to help defend the planet, and he returns with a motley collection of spacefarers, each with their own reason to sign up for certain death. Their sacrifice saves the planet. Sounds familiar? Akir is the clue.

On the bad side: a story that is almost totally awful and stilted. Why are the bad guys mutants who are overly incompetent? Not that it’s wrong to suggest the bad guys’ competing self-interest often leads to their collective self-destruction, but this level of incompetence suggests their very first opponent, no doubt a Valley Girl from some obscure backwater planet, could have destroyed them while painting her fingernails.

The space battles. Not the ships themselves, but the story-tellers did a horrible job portraying these battles in any sort of plausible terms. Remember the battle between the Millennium Falcon and the Tie Fighters in Star Wars (1977), how it took your breath away? Not so much here. The overwhelming odds are not conveyed, there’s little scope for cleverness, and the repetition just makes the visuals look cheap.

Disturbingly biological. I’m guessing it’s based on human female reproductive organs. Since those are guns on the outriggers, I’d guess it’s a snide swipe at feminism.

On the good side? Speaking of the battles, the ships themselves, no doubt plastic models on strings, were actually rather charmingly detailed. I enjoyed them for the most part.

More importantly, though, was the cast. I rarely discuss the cast of movies, but from the A-list comes Robert Vaughn as a hard-edged, yet sad mercenary, George Peppard as  a romantic from another age who finds himself drawn into this fight against his will, and (perhaps debatably not quite A-list) Richard Thomas in the lead role as the dewy-eyed young protector of the planet, tasked with finding more defenders. From the B-list is John Saxon, as the evil, one-armed Sador, leader of the bad guys, and Sybil Danning, playing an enthusiastic and buxom mercenary. All deliver competent performances that try to lift this shambling story out of the pits it falls into; they fail not due to poor acting, but due to the poor script with which they’re stuck.

My new favorite assassination squad.
“We always carry a spare.”
But which one is it?

While I said the story is awful, there were a couple of fun bits to it, of which my favorite was an inventive approach to assassination which, sadly, fails, but amused me. If the story-tellers had set it up better it could have been more effective, but they don’t tell us how the good guys knew Sador would order the arm of a captive to be sawed off and attached to himself.

So this is a weirdo movie. I almost didn’t survive the first couple of minutes, but it improved just enough to hold my attention during meals and whatnot. If you’re an aficionado of any of the actors listed above, then you have to watch this.

It’ll take a bit of teeth-gritting, but you’ll get through it. And marvel that actors of this quality agreed to participate.

Readers continue to react to my analysis of the recently terminated shutdown:

I say we shouldn’t reward 45’s behavior of taking the country hostage til he gets what he wants. What will be next? He shuts everything down til ACA is repealed?

I’ve seen this remark in a number of venues, and I completely agree.

But there’s more: the loss of tethering our government to rationality. The article referenced in this post talked about the slashing and even abolition of research offices in the federal government, and now we’re reaping the wind blowing out of that major mistake. In a sane world in which Rep Newt Gingrich (R-GA), responsible for that slashing, was laughed out of Congress, rather than made (failed) Speaker of the House, Trump’s Wall would have been subjected to an analysis by entities inside and outside of government, an intellectual debate would have ensued, and eventually a conclusion reached. The Wall would have been retired from consideration and we’d be moving quietly onwards towards better solutions to the illegal immigration problem.

I do love my delusions.

Instead, the Republicans killed off the government research centers that came up with “liberal conclusions” (read: answers they didn’t like), and then pursued discredited ideas such as the Laffer Curve. Fortunately, the Republicans have left their fingerprints on all their mistakes, and the voters do have some memory. To take what sounds like an extreme example, but isn’t, if we lose Miami to climate-change induced flooding in the next few years, the Democrats need to pin it on the Republicans. Not for political advantage, but because without that assignation of responsibility to a mode of thought (a word I type with some trepidation), our nation is doomed to ruination and dismemberment.

And I’m quite serious about that.

Another reader:

They [the Democrats – HW] need to respond with their position. No we will never fund a wall, but here is what we will do.

This dick measuring Pelosi is doing with Trump, with her cult cheering her on is just ego, and of course a waste of time.

Trump won’t accept their offer of course, but they at the very least need to do this for optics, because in time the public is going to see the shutdown as the result of both parties, instead of the toddler in the oval office.

The shutdown is, shall we say, in abeyance at the moment, because it was terminated not by the signing of appropriations legislation, but by a continuing resolution. I don’t agree that Pelosi is grandstanding for ego’s sake, but I suppose that’s a judgment to be made by history. To my eye, she’s taking down a dangerous opponent using the tools she’s honed for a decade or so – or possibly when she was raising her five kids.

But I agree with my reader, the Democrats need to put together and message a strong alternative response. Readers know my suggestion from earlier on this thread, which I’ve sent out to my reps.

So all that said, what does the next three weeks hold? I expect the Democrats to work on appropriations legislation sans funds for the wall, but with higher allocations for general border security. In addition, they may work on an alternative solution to illegal immigration and present it to the electorate.

The Republicans will blather about, waiting for Trump to lead them.

And Trump? Supposedly, he carries grudges for years, but this is new territory for him, and he’s an old man. He may decide to quietly sign the appropriations legislation brought to him in the next three weeks and use his “national emergency” powers to move money from the military to border security for building the wall. Democrats will scream, Republicans will reply that Obama did the same.

And in two years, voters will pounce and Senate Majority Leader Senator McConnell (R-KY) will lose his big-title job, and perhaps his other job as well. Years of irrationality will shred the Republican Party, and Trump’s base will feel betrayed by their country.

The dangers of letting irrationality dominate the country comes to the fore.

As the UK spins and spins in the grip of the powerful Brexit vortex, there’s been some interesting things happening, beyond the already observed possible Russian entanglements. For example, businessman James Dyson’s strange move:

The decision by British technology firm Dyson to move its head office to Singapore has prompted a predictable backlash in its home country.

The British press seized upon Tuesday’s announcement as further evidence of hypocrisy on behalf of the firm’s founder, James Dyson, who has been vocal in support of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit), yet – according to some – appears to have hedged his bets when it comes to his own business. Dyson’s latest move follows the firm’s announcement in October that it would use Singapore as its base for its ventures into the electric car market. …

Still, despite Dyson’s denials, there are hints that Brexit and its possible effect on the firm’s supply chain is an accompanying factor behind the shift.

Dyson’s chief executive Jim Rowan has been quoted as saying: “If your supply chain is in Asia, and you are manufacturing in the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia, then obviously you don’t get badly affected with those changes post-Brexit.” [South China Morning Post]

It’s more than a little disturbing that a Brit citizen and business owner who advocated for the exit of the UK from the EU has chosen to move an important part of his business, and necessarily some good jobs, out of the UK, now that his Brexit plan has nearly come to fruition. Presumably, if he was honest in his advocacy, he should believe that benefits, including those of an economic nature, coming from Brexit should be on the horizon, and he should be staying to reap them – or, if he was wrong, to stand strong with his country, to accept responsibility by having his company accept the repercussions.

The fact that he doesn’t, for those of a paranoid nature, suggests one of two possible conclusions. One, he’s been compromised and promoted Brexit at the behest of his handlers. Or, two, he felt that Brexit would improve his company’s position in the world, but only if the company moved out of the UK.

Neither conclusion is acceptable for a man of honor.

But Mr. Dyson isn’t the only interesting development. From the Independent:

Prominent Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg has defended the move by a City firm that he helped to found to establish an investment fund in Ireland ahead of the UK leaving the European Union.

The Conservative MP faced questions when it emerged that Somerset Capital Management (SCM) had launched a new investment vehicle in Dublin amid concerns about being cut off from European investors.

A prospectus for the new business, which was registered in March and will be governed by EU and Irish rules, listed Brexit as one of the risks, as it could cause “considerable uncertainty”.

The disclosure is potentially embarrassing for Mr Rees-Mogg, who has been one of the most vocal advocates of a clean break from the EU through his role as chairman of the European Research Group (ERG), a powerful Eurosceptic group of backbench Tories.

Again, one is left wondering how much his heart is in the UK, and how much it is in profits and more profits. Perhaps he has no control over the firm he founded, as such things often happen, but it’s still very bad form and reflects poorly on him – at best.

Waiting for more to emerge.

The fall of Bitcoin appears to be continuing. Bloomberg reports on the latest sign of impending apocalypse for those who hold Bitcoins:

The production-weighted cash cost to create one Bitcoin averaged around $4,060 globally in the fourth quarter, according to analysts with JPMorgan Chase & Co.

With Bitcoin itself currently trading below $3,600, that doesn’t look like such a good deal. However, there’s a big spread around the average, meaning that there are clear winners and losers.

Low-cost Chinese miners are able to pay much less — the estimate is around $2,400 per Bitcoin — by leveraging direct power purchasing agreements with electricity generators such as aluminum smelters looking to sell excess power generation, JPMorgan analysts led by Natasha Kaneva said in a wide-ranging Jan. 24 report about cryptocurrencies spearheaded by Joyce Chang. Electricity tends to be the biggest cost for miners, needed to run the high-powered computer rigs used to process data blocks to earn Bitcoin.

Of course, if Bitcoins surge in value relative to the dollar, then they become worth mining again, or if power becomes cheaper, yada yada yada.

But I think it’s worth noting that we’re not seeing standard economics here. That is, it’s not competition impacting the Bitcoin mining industry, but rather the external factor of the cost of electricity. While the amount of energy in use to mine Bitcoins is nothing to sneeze at, it’s still not a large enough factor that a few miners dropping out will drop the price of electricity. BTW, here’s the latest chart of estimated Bitcoin energy consumption:

Too bad that chart doesn’t include estimated value of a Bitcoin in dollars vs the cost to mine a single Bitcoin. I would expect that the two would meet right at or before the 30% drop in energy consumption.

So what does it all mean? Depends on what drives the value of a Bitcoin. It’s not an absolute value as recent years have demonstrated, between outright fraud and speculative investments. It doesn’t appear to truly serve any necessity. It’s power consumption is significant in a world which is damaged by each joule consumed.

If I were significantly more risk-prone, I’d short Bitcoins with a big chunk of cash. But I think there are better investments out there, so why indulge in taking advantage of someone else’s failure?

But I’m sure glad I never tried to invest in buy Bitcoins, as I discussed earlier in this thread. I’d have lost most of what I ventured, I suspect.

Earlier in this thread a reader suggested Democrats in Congress should look into my suggestion that they should pitch focused foreign aid as a replacement for the Wall. I sent mail off to Senators Klobuchar and Smith, and Rep. McColllum. Senator Smith is the first one to reply, which I received yesterday, and here’s the text:

Thank you for contacting me about the government shutdown. I appreciate hearing from you regarding this critical situation.

A shutdown isn’t good for anyone. In December, senators on both sides of the aisle came together on a reasonable budget deal that would have kept the government open, but after the President rejected it, it was not passed by the House of Representatives. Now, as a result of the partial government shutdown, Americans are being denied some vital government services and hundreds of thousands of federal employees have had to go without a paycheck. People are suffering, and we must come together to reopen the government and remedy the harmful impacts a shutdown has on workers and their families. We can and should have a debate on border security, but we need to open the government first. Then we can sit down and negotiate over immigration policy and border security more specifically.

We must also do everything we can to support the workers who have been denied pay during the shutdown. I supported legislation to ensure that federal workers are fairly compensated for lapses in their pay due to a government shutdown, and I am very pleased that that bill has now been enacted into law. I have also authored a bill to help another group of workers denied pay during the shutdown — federal contract employees who continue to go without pay. My bill is about helping this group of people who are often invisible — people who work in the cafeterias, who clean offices after everyone else goes home, security guards who keep our buildings safe overnight. These low- and mid-wage federal contract workers have gone without pay for weeks, and in past shutdowns, they haven’t received back pay. That’s wrong and that’s what my bill is trying to fix.

We must come together to open the government and make sure workers receive the back pay they deserve. And we can then work together to help fix our broken immigration system. But we must reopen the government immediately.

Again, thank you for contacting me about this issue. Please do not hesitate to do so again in the future.

Sincerely,

Tina Smith
United States Senator

Clearly boilerplate, but that’s fine. I don’t expect to engage in any sort of back ‘n forth with a US Senator.

According to the media, the shutdown may be coming to an end, if only temporarily:

Negotiators are moving toward an agreement on a deal to re-open the government, but it has not received final sign off from all sides, two sources familiar say.

Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is in direct talks with the White House over finalizing the language.

What’s in it: The deal would be a CR for three weeks, which would include the current level of fencing and wall repair money ($1.3 billion for the year.)

There are still issues over the backpay provisions that any agreement would include, one source says. Once it’s passed, lawmakers would have three weeks to reach an agreement that addresses President Trump’s border wall funding request.

If they don’t reach a deal, Trump is expected to say he’ll invoke a national emergency.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s preference is to voice vote any deal announced today. Senators were told today in an email, but that is not a sure thing until every senator has signed off.  [CNN]

The Democrats claim the President caved. I think it’s exceedingly vacuous of them to make such claims, as it’ll tend to enrage the fellow and shows them to be intemperate as well. Schadenfreude is not an emotion that wears well in Washington, since you end up having to work with the same folks the next week.

Since I’m here, I’d like to note the following bit from yet another Trump family member:

Lara Trump said the issue is that without the shutdown, the president has “no hand to play.” [WaPo]

My problem with this is that the President is the Executive, not a (or “the”) lawmaker. Thus, his hand is restricted to Executive functions and foreign relations.

Yes, I am aware that Obama took a similar role when it came to the Dreamers. The primary difference between Obama’s and Trump’s emergencies? The public agreed with Obama, not with Trump. The Republicans refused to deal with an incipient emergency, and Obama finally moved on it.

Leah Crane covers a fascinating intellectual property question for NewScientist (5 January 2019, paywall):

As artificial intelligence algorithms play an increasing role in media production, questions of ownership are becoming fuzzy.

Creating something with an AI takes three steps. First, someone codes the algorithm itself, then it must be fed masses of data to teach it to recognise and mimic patterns, and finally the AI produces some sort of output.

When it comes to copyright, the big question is who owns that output: the person who built the algorithm, the person who picked the training data or the person who selected the specific output?

In some ways, this isn’t a new conundrum: think of bands arguing over who should own the rights to a particular song when one member wrote the chord sequence and another the solo, says Tom Lingard, an intellectual property and technology lawyer.

Elevating current AI systems to the status of bandmate is probably going too far. Both artists and lawyers say they are more like word-processing programs: if nobody types into one, there can be no essay. The software might check your spelling, but the thing that makes an essay unique is the writer.

This is really all about the definition of Art, isn’t it? That’s a notoriously difficult subject, as exemplified by the American judiciary’s travails in defining the difference between art & porn. The name of that case is Jacobellis v. Ohio, and it’s my impression that the case revolves around the end product, production methods considered irrelevant.

Nor can this article decide if the end product controls, or if the process matters. I ran across this same divide in a BBS debate decades ago, in which a student of guitar (flamenco, if memory serves) was debating with a synthesizer musician concerning the nature of excellence in music, and neither would gave way. The former was fixated on the performance experience, while the latter was concerned about the final product.

So which really defines art?

Is it a product, tangible or intangible, of little appreciable functionality, which expresses an idea? Or is it how the artist creates that product? Or some combination?

I dunno.

I’m tempted to take the mechanical approach. Is an “AI” (insert tirade about how it’s not AI because there’s no independent agency involved, it’s ML or even something less definable) a tool of the artist who’s choosing to create this piece of art, akin to a paintbrush? A super paintbrush? This pushes aside the dubious thought that the “AI” owns it, and pushes it on the agent motivating the actions that create the art. The writer of the algorithm, assuming they are separate from the motivator, also is deprived of ownership rights. This would make sense as the maker of the paintbrush also has no ownership rights to the art made using the paintbrush^[1].

But there’s a problem with this reductionism, as Crane points out:

It is likely that the question of AI copyright will be answered by some future lawsuit that sets a precedent and trickles through the courts. If the ruling is that AI art cannot be copyrighted, it could kill the genre entirely as artists refocus on work that can pay their rent. Yet if the law decides that such art can be protected, it could damage other methods and industries as AIs flood copyright offices with millions of applications and simply wait for someone else to infringe them.

I’ve often said that computers are multipliers while people are merely adders, but I hadn’t envisioned this particular sticky wicket. Although I’m not sure why anyone would wish to sue the typical artist, whose net worth is often negative. On the other hand, would all this art be salable? The economics and legal seem to be twisting before me on this subject, which may, in itself, mark good art.

I suppose one approach is to ask whether a specific piece of art was produced with the knowledge of another piece of art, and, if so, it’s infringement, otherwise not. Another approach is to simply acknowledge that art produced via “AI” is not copyrightable. While Crane suggests that this will kill the industry, I’m not convinced. I think a lot of people buy art because it’s pretty, not because it was done by any particular artist. Oh, I’m not denying the existence of collectors who use authorship as their criterion of collection, but I’m not convinced that they are a majority of the market for art.

But, unless one is willing to create parallel copyright systems for art produced with and without the assistance of “AIs”, this appears to be quite the intellectual puzzle.

And, yet, it pales against the problems that would be brought about by the true AI artist. Keep in mind that, by AI, I mean the entity has self-agency, that is, it prefers to direct itself in its activities. Now, assuming that such a capability does not impair its abilities to create great masses of art, and I think that’s a fairly large and problematic assumption to make, this could really bring hell to the art and copyright markets of the world. Think of someone OCD, with no need to sleep, and practically swimming in its medium.

¹ This reminds me of the odd story I had from the late Jeff Prothero, aka Cynbe ru Taren, concerning a kerfuffle he had with the creator of a computer language, name unremembered, who claimed ownership rights to the programs created by others to be compiled by the compiler for his language. Cynbe claimed he took him to court over the ownership rights and won. Thus, a compiler is a paintbrush.

CNN/Business has a depressing report:

Wednesday served as a harbinger of what’s in store for the industry, with HuffPost’s parent company Verizon announcing a 7% cut to staff in its media division, a portfolio that also includes Yahoo and AOL. Within hours of that news breaking, BuzzFeed confirmed that it will lay off 15% of its staff. And journalists at Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, shared grim stories throughout the day on Wednesday as the company shed dozens of staffers throughout the country.

In all, the media industry lost about 1,000 jobs nationwide this week.

Amidst the wailing of other members of the free press and the sadness for those affected, it occurs to me:

If there’s some billionaire who wants to run a media company, this might be an opportunity. Experienced personnel who want to succeed, geographically distributed, and a chance to start from the ground up. It sounds like a step on the ladder to me.

I just don’t happen to have the sort of cash sitting around. But if I did?

My thanks to my Arts Editor who whipped this right up. She’s also volunteered to revive the position of copy-editor.

Epigone:

A less distinguished follower or imitator of someone, especially an artist or philosopher.
‘the humdrum compositions of some of Beethoven’s epigones’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

From “Why do people such as Lindsey Graham come to Congress?” George F. Will, WaPo:

[Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)], who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.

Whatever you think of Will’s opinions, you gotta love his word choices.

CNN is reporting that Pelosi is victorious in the State of the Union tug of war:

In his latest skirmish with Pelosi, Trump effectively admitted defeat late Wednesday and conceded that he would not be able to give his State of the Union address until after the shutdown ends. Earlier in the day, he had publicly thrown down a gauntlet and tried to force the speaker to back down over her refusal to let next Tuesday’s showpiece speech take place in the House chamber.

Pelosi’s victory came ahead of a pair of Senate votes due to take place on Thursday on dueling Republican and Democratic plans designed to end the shutdown. Neither is likely to break the deadlock, and may simply underline that Trump’s hopes of a win remain slim.

The President is trying hard to reshape a political battlefield that is stacked against him, as sources suggest he is increasingly mystified that his tactics have not turned the tables on Democrats. Throughout his life, in business and in politics, Trump has leveraged his domineering personality, flair for showmanship and an unshakable self-belief that often defies the facts of a situation to get his way.

I’m wary of declaring quick victory in political spats like this one. Experienced politicians who are full of bitterness, rather than wisdom, sometimes lie in wait for another go at the victor, reducing the battleground to rubble.

But whoever wrote that Trump is “mystified” (the article has multiple authors) seems to be in line with my thinking on the matter. With no invidious comparison meant, Trump’s story arc, from entering the Republican Presidential nomination process to today, has a strong resemblance to Adolf Hitler’s. No, I’m not saying there is any moral correspondence between the two, but rather a tactical correspondence. Hitler recognized that the traditional military approach to invading France, which would be a costly long grind against the Maginot Line, or wall, would be costly; but using what we came to know as blitzkrieg tactics (fast moving air, tank, and infantry tactics), then only tested in a limited way during the Spanish Civil War., would be effective. His war tactical insights, in combination with a German population that was, to a substantial extent, deeply resentful of their diminished position in the world due to the foolishness of Kaiser Wilhelm II and, just as importantly, the punitive Versailles Treaty, and led by a man possessing a modicum of charisma and a willingness to feed their egos as well as alleviate their economic distress, led to his early successes.

Similarly, Trump’s daring tactical insights during the Republican nominating process, based on his recognition that the small towns and rural areas of America felt disrespected, neglected, and were in economic distress, distinguished him from the more conventional field. It didn’t hurt that, despite media reports that the Republicans had a “deep bench”, they were by and large a pack of power-grasping second- and third-raters, with the possible exception of Governor Kasich of Ohio. Their general anti-Obama-anything message and little differentiation in message, accomplishments, or personality made them relatively easy prey for Trump, because he was willing to say things that rode the line on xenophobia. He would tell any lie that would conform to the personal conceptions of his target voters, whether it be xenophobia, their perception of being patronized by the “bit big city folks” (the progressive wing of the liberals didn’t help matters), or a perception that crime was sky-high under Obama, rather than the FBI’s report that crime was reaching historic low points. On that latter point, as ever, local information is more important to most folks than comprehensive information, i.e., the senses out-vote the intellect.

We engage in analogies in order to draw conclusions, and the better the initial conditions of an analogy are in correspondence, the more believable the predicted conclusion. At this point, it’s worth meditating on a point of this analogy concerning norms. Aggressive war is a wholesale violation of those norms that recognize peace as a more probable path to prosperity and enrichment, while and aggressive war, with all of its moral violations, is repudiated by moral personalities, within established norms. But those established norms had failed the German people. They faced rampant inflation and a failing economy – obviously, something was wrong. And Hitler, who had witnessed and survived the horrors of World War I (the ‘Great War’), was willing to transgress those norms and lead them towards what he claimed would be a return to glory, paved as it was with the bodies of the Jews, the Allies, and, as it turned out, their own military.

The Trumpists display a similar hunger for breaking norms, although there are notable differences. In the governmental arena, Trump and his aides have long displayed a tendency to ignore and damage norms that has been delineated by anyone who values them, including myself, and my long time readers are aware of this, so I shall not belabor the point. For his supporters, the norms are not as strong as those for peace. Gay marriage, transgendering, and other social issues, which are notably recent breaks from traditional American morality, are used to gather up the Trump voter, not a hunger for war, and given their recent debuts as norms, they’ve not necessarily been accepted by the Trumpists. There are similar scenarios of economic distress, and in this the analogy’s correspondence is stronger. However, the corresponding true cause of the German economic depression, which was the past war and the Versailles Treaty, has as its corresponding motivation free (that is, governmentally unconstrained) trade, far better and economically (if not environmentally) cheaper transport mechanisms, and a better information mechanism; it’s significant that the Trumpists have not raised significant principled objections to the trade wars or modifications to NAFTA, and, if they do, they do not remain Trumpists.

I’d also argue that, like many people, the Trumpists have dug in their heels on economic as well as social change. They want to believe that change cannot happen to them, that change is bad. Just consider the coal workers who have continued along in the industry long after its glory days have been consigned to the dust-bin of history. They consider it a a deeply ‘honorable’ occupation, even though it’s terribly polluting and contributes heavily to climate change – which is then denied by those miners. ‘Clean coal’ is trotted out, but this is a myth, according to experts, and even Senator McConnell (R-KY), an industry ally, admits the industry is finished in a free market. Only government interference, anathema to Republicans, can save it, and indeed this has been attempted, but has not yet been emplaced as an actual government policy.

The Germans, on the other hand, wanted, even needed change, under the weight of the Versailles Treaty. The Trumpists violently reject change, and Trump is their standard bearer. So there are differences in the substance of the two subjects, but in the end they may not be terribly significant changes.

I’ll omit the comparisons of the reactions of world leaders, prior to Churchill’s ascension to leadership of Britain, to Hitler’s moves, to those of the Republican establishment and, to a lesser degree, the Democratic establishment. Suffice to say the shock at the abrogation of norms is similar.

But it’s worth noting when Hitler failed. After the successful implementation of the blitzkrieg against France and the Low Countries, isolating Great Britain from the rest of the world, and the partition of Poland, Hitler then attacked Russia, his ally of convenience and the rock upon which the ship of Nazi Germany would founder. He was a fool to do so; he might have forced a peace at this moment, instead, and avoided the imminent entry of America of war, not to mention the disastrous siege of Stalingrad which essentially broke Germany. He was a fool and demonstrated his amateurism, as his generals had long warned him not to go into Russia. He then descended into madness, believing that destroyed armies still existed, and sending them orders that could not be executed. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt hemmed him in and he finally failed.

Trump has had his successes, but in Pelosi he has met an experienced political warrior, unencumbered by the demands of the Trumpists, and he may have met that defeat that heralds his eventual removal from power. He’s ‘mystified’, they claim in the above report, and this is consistent with the amateur who has tried to ride his initial tactical insight to continuing success and power. He lacks the wisdom to recognize how to maneuver in waters strange to him, and, assuming what works in his old world will work in the new, now looks like a weak old man in his mistake. It’ll be an interesting challenge for his propagandists and apologists to rationalize this failure.

Onwards to analogical conclusions, then. While there’s little enough to say about the general disaster that befell Germany, it’s worth noting that examination of the individuals involved in leading Germany down this path, whether or not the Versailles Treaty made it inevitable, reveals personalities driven by greed, hatred, and even insanity. Whether the name was Hitler, Goering, Hess, or a host of others, their belief that the old norms against theft, rape, and large-scale murder did not apply to them is notable. The Trumpists, while not matching the Nazis in sheer magnitude of norm abrogation, have committed some notable transgressions, such as those of separating families at the border. Will Trump and his movement end up on trial and be condemned, in some sense of the word? That remains to be seen.

For the moment, the drama will continue.

Sometimes Watson, on the left, could be so sweet with Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (1962) is a sloppy, substandard entry into the Sherlock Holmes canon. It was made originally in English, and then dubbed in English with voices that don’t always match the faces. What were they thinking?

But, worse yet, while it’s derived from an authentic Holmes story, the derivation is distant, at best, and it is not clever. Instead, it’s about the ephemeral tension of a Holmes hunting Professor Moriarty hunting Holmes, and while that’s fun and all, it doesn’t match up well with the best the canon can offer.

Add in that Watson is once again a buffoon of little real interest, and this one’s a dud.

Readers react to my suggested counter-offer for the Democrats in the wake of President Trump’s feeble offer:

Agreed 100%. This, or something very similar, ought to be sent to (and read by) every Democrat in Congress.

I had not seriously considered sending that one off to my reps. Maybe I should. Aaaand done, McCollum, Klobuchar, Smith. Another:

The poor liberals under their lousy leadership can’t even come up with a responsible reason not to sit down and negotiate the situation. If they think their going to get the President to open the government before they settle the border situation they have some more bad news coming their way, The Trump hate train is slowly going off the tracks and just maybe things will get a little more positive as far as the press goes,

Let’s look at the situation objectively. What did President Trump do, or more properly what was he manipulated into doing? To borrow a phrase, he took the government hostage and demanded that he be given all $5.7 billion he had requested, or he wouldn’t sign any legislation. Not a reduced amount, not other offers, simply Gimme everything I want or I’ll pout and whine and whimper about it!

In his latest offer, he finally progressed a little beyond that, with a temporary 3 year extension of the right to stay in the United States for “Dreamers,” aka the DACA program . Unfortunately for him, SCOTUS did not choose to listen to his appeal of a lower court ruling that his remaindering of DACA was illegal, so that offer turns out to be nothing:

The Supreme Court is not likely to review during its current term the program that shields young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, leaving in place the Obama-era initiative that the Trump administration has tried to end.

The justices on Tuesday took no action on the administration’s request that it review the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected nearly 700,000 people brought to this country as children, commonly known as “dreamers.”

If the court sticks to its normal procedures, that would mean that even if it accepts the case as a later date, it would not be argued until the new term starting in October, with a decision likely in 2020. [WaPo]

It is quite plausible to state that the liberals, who have been the responsible financial guardians of the government for something like the last quarter century, have once again stepped up to the plate to safeguard government finances, which is to say, my readers’ tax-money. I have stated numerous times that it does not appear the wall would be effective in stopping illegal immigrants or drugs, while the $5B is really just the beginning, not the ending of such funding.

But on a more fundamental level, this use of government shutdowns really needs to stop. This one was brought on by a Republican President; the others by Republican Congress, all as demands for this, that, and the other thing. Rather than continuing to pursue irrational policies at the expense of the public, we need to step away from this nuclear weapon of an approach to policy making and return to sanity. This time the Democrats, the liberals, appear to be the sane ones, but I don’t put it past them to do the same thing in pursuit of a pet insanity of their own.

And I don’t like that idea.

So I think the Democrats, having pinned this rightfully on Trump, who helped them along by taking gleeful responsibility for a potential shutdown just prior to causing it, are going about it mostly right. Public polling, last I heard, agreed as more than half the electorate blames Trump and the Republicans, and does not want to fund any wall. I just ran across this from WaPo:

Recent polling indicates that the government shutdown has caused skittishness among parts of Trump’s base, which has been one of the most enduring strengths of his presidency. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, conducted Jan. 10 to Jan. 13, found that his net approval rating had dropped seven points since December.

One of the biggest declines came among suburban men, whose approval rating of Trump fell a net 18 percentage points, while support from evangelicals and Republicans dipped by smaller margins. Among men without a college degree, the downward change was seven points.

We may be seeing the inevitable pendulum that comes from The grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Now that the Trump voters are beginning to suspect it’s all crab grass and poison ivy, they’re slipping away – at least those who aren’t too heavily emotionally invested in him.

Sure, Pelosi and Schumer, or other Democrats, could screw this up, but right now they have their spurs in Trump’s flanks fairly securely, and Trump is showing himself to be poor at flinging off riders when he’s not the one in a commanding position. Time will tell, but right now the smart money is on the Democrats, just as I’ve said before. Pelosi’s forgotten more about politics than Trump has ever learned.

I recently began Professor Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War: The Rise And Fall Of Empires (2006), and while I’m only a couple of chapters into it, one of his early themes is the importance of asabiya, which

… refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. [p. 6]

In other words, cooperation, generally in the face of an external threat. Contrariwise, hinted at in the introduction is that the Fall part of the title comes about as divisions appear and are nurtured within the empire. Whether they’re about power or some superfluous definition of Other or, more precisely, the degenerate, they churn the empire and end up breaking it – or so it appears in my early meeting.

Keeping this in mind and noting that the United States is certainly a variety of empire, the actions of President Trump with regard to transgendered military personnel and aspirants certainly falls into the category of division, wouldn’t you say? Defining some Americans as degenerate and denying them the opportunity to serve the country, along with the direct damage done to units dependent on their skills, also damages the country in that it sows dissension and emphasizes what makes us different and labels it as somehow wrong. It’s long been true that often our differences strengthen, rather than weaken us, because, despite the bald exceptions such as the racism displayed in the two World Wars, we’ve learned to ignore the differences that don’t matter, and embrace each other.

Trump’s embrace of the white nationalists, his failure to condemn Rep. King following the latter’s remarks in favor of white nationalism, and now his attacks on American transgendered military personnel and aspirants may just be the cloying maneuvers of a President trying to preserve the political allegiance of a bloc of Americans who’ve lost their moral path, i.e., the evangelical movement, but it’s also congruent with the theory that President Trump is an asset of a foreign power who understands that American ascendancy is dependent on Americans clearly seeing what matters and what doesn’t. By dividing Americans on such trivial grounds due to the demands of an increasingly irrelevant and repellent religious group, our ability to pursue our goals is decreased, and our reputation crumbles in the eyes of the world. Except, of course, Russia.

It’s important to understand that the SCOTUS ruling today is a technical ruling concerning whether or not the Trump Administration may pursue implementation of their anti-transgendered policy while the appeals courts continue to wend their way through the Trump Administration appeal of lower court ruling that the policy is illegal. They rejected some other Administration requests, and therefore we’ll still await the appeals courts ruling, and the inevitable SCOTUS appeal. Let’s hope SCOTUS doesn’t bow to the cries of the irrationally intolerant.

The idea of synchronized dancing came after these folks left Atlantis for a moon of Jupiter.

It’s so hard to know where to start with Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956). Meaningless, lingering shots on a secretary going up and down a staircase. A trip to Jupiter’s system that takes only three weeks, implying fabulous technology, yet they’re surprised by a meteor shower during takeoff (and those are big honkin’ meteors!)? Five guys on this expedition who can apparently withstand liftoff and landing while seated in their office chairs?

A single switch that appears to control everything from the magnetic gyro to the engines? OK, we’ll allow that the radio seemed to use a different set of switches.

And then … the Fire Maidens! Who were immediately pronounced by our Arts Editor as “not that attractive, really,” and, yeah, she’s right. Later on she remarked they “walked funny.” Oh, and the dancing, oh the dancing. Yeccccch. As there were ten or more of them for the crew of five, it was a bit of a flock, yet, in retrospect, I’m now wondering if there’s a word for a group of, well, preying mantises. Not that they consumed any of the crew, it was just their attitude.

Answer: he’s an escapee from the next studio lot. He can’t be hurt by guns shooting blanks, and grenades merely startle him. But the shrieking of the Fire Maidens does hurt his feelings.

And how the hell did this group move from Earth to Jupiter when Atlantis sank into the sea? Why didn’t they just return by the same means? And what’s this awful creature that menaces them? He never is explained.

And there’s more. And more. I can’t imagine why my Arts Editor wanted to see this dud.

My commentary on the Shutdown Showdown attracted some reader comments:

Good points. Keep in mind Pelosi is second in line to the presidency. Could this be posturing to establish the legitimacy of her leadership qualifications and style?

I doubt it. I think Pelosi excels as Speaker of the House, and she knows it. Some politicians simply have blind ambition to reach the highest political office, but some are more interested in making substantial contributions, rather than sit in the big chair and discover you ain’t God after all. My reader continues:

My inclination is to give 45 his $5.7 billion for border security but attach so many codices that he would be hamstrung on using any of it to fund a wall. The mere logistics of wall along the entire southern border would involve years, perhaps decades, to complete. The design, engineering, land acquisition, bidding, material sourcing, contract letting, and other considerations will extend far beyond 2020 when, I hope to god, 45 will have faded to obscurity or find himself a resident of some federal gray-bar hotel.

Yeah, no snapping the fingers and having it done.

Another reader:

He never said he was going to build a solid wall the entire length of the border as I recall. There are facts to prove the wall where it is in place has reduced illegals from coming over the border.

I think, at least in his early days, he sort of implied a wall from ocean to ocean, but I also think it started out as a symbolic remark that was more meant to attract undecided voters than be an actual, tangible promise. Once it became clear that the wall was a touchstone for his supporters, I seem to remember him admitting that certain natural features would function just fine as obstacles on their own.

All that said, the totality of his remarks concerning the wall come out to be a big, fat zero. The midterm caravan that was just about to breach our borders and invade us, but ended up peacefully at a port of entry; the criminal gangs flooding in over the border; the flood of drugs coming over the border will be stopped by a wall; illegal immigrants have higher crime rates; illegal immigrants take jobs away from Americans; and that the wall will stop illegal immigrants in their tracks. The rest have proven lies; is the last as well?

There’s no denying that smugglers do smuggle people over the border. But most come through ports of entry in rigs; those who don’t come through those ports are running significant safety risks, ranging from rape by the smugglers, to death from human or environmental factors. But will a wall somehow stop them? Will the immense cost of a wall, which Trump initially estimated at $25B and those with actual expertise estimate at closer to $50B, really be worth it? Or should we continue to use border agents and invest in these nations to help them stabilize their economies and do whatever else is necessary to make those countries worth staying in? This graph is slightly out of date but I think helps aid thought on the matter, and is from Pew Research:

The illegal immigration rate for Mexicans has dropped quite a lot since 2000, if we’re willing to take arrests by the Border Patrol as a reasonable proxy for illegal immigration in general, without Trump’s wall, but due to Obama policies. Does this drop invalidate the need for a wall? I think it does. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I think the entire wall idea is short-sighted and a very bad investment.

I’ve occasionally discussed the social factors of higher college tuition, which, to summarize, conservatives and libertarians prefer as this moves the costs of education onto the student, who they see as directly benefiting from that education, and thus should be responsible for covering the cost. My view, which I may not have stated quite this succinctly before, is that the benefits to society of an educated populace, both in vocational training (targeted training) and in liberal arts (the ability to think effectively), are such that a good conservative or libertarian should, on principle, require that society subsidize the costs of such training. The rationale that the student’s immediate benefit is substantially more is only accepted because measuring the value to society of an educated citizen is far more difficult than conducting a statistical study of the earnings potential of a medical doctor or a plumber.

Just because you can’t measure the value of something, or even understand the proper metric to use, doesn’t mean value doesn’t exist. To my mind, living in a society in which only the wealthy can afford the education which can make them wealthier is completely unacceptable and un-American. By the evidence, many people agree with me: witness the educational grant and scholarship communities (but not the educational loan community, which exists purely for profit).

But another cost of our current style of requiring students to pay more than substantial amounts for their education, of which I’ve never considered before, is the emotional burden it places on the student. Consider the study, “Suicide among veterinarians in the United States from 1979 through 2015“, Suzanne Tomasi, DVM, MPH, et al, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. From the abstract:

398 deaths resulted from suicide; 326 (82%) decedents were male, 72 (18%) were female, and most (298 [75%]) were ≤ 65 years of age. The PMRs [proportionate mortality ratios] for suicide for all veterinarian decedents (2.1 and 3.5 for males and females, respectively), those in clinical positions (2.2 and 3.4 for males and females, respectively), and those in nonclinical positions (1.8 and 5.0 for males and females, respectively) were significantly higher than for the general US population. Among female veterinarians, the percentage of deaths by suicide was stable from 2000 until the end of the study, but the number of such deaths subjectively increased with each 5-year period. …

Male and female veterinarians who worked in clinical positions had higher than expected PMRs for suicide. One potential contributing factor associated with this finding is exposure to occupational stressors. Veterinarians working in clinical medicine, particularly companion animal medicine, are exposed to high levels of occupational stress related to long working hours, client expectations, unexpected outcomes, communicating bad news, poor work-life balance, high workloads, rising veterinary care costs, professional isolation, student debt, and lack of senior support.

These stressors, in turn, can negatively effect the work of the veterinarians, so it’s a self-reinforcing problem.

Of course, a cold-blooded statistical study can fail to impart the proper momentum to an issue on its way to a possible appropriate, if partial, resolution. WaPo provides an antidote:

On a brisk fall evening in Elizabeth City, N.C., Robin Stamey sat in her bed and prepared to take her own life. …

The path to rock bottom was an unexpected one for Stamey. A chipper animal lover who went back to school at age 36 to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a veterinarian, she had previously worked in a few small clinics before eventually opening her own.

Pulling this off wasn’t easy; Stamey graduated from veterinary school with more than $180,000 in student debt. Her first vet jobs paid about $40,000 a year, forcing her to work long hours to scrape together enough money to get by.

These financial troubles were compounded by the strains of the job, which is known for taking immense emotional, physical and mental tolls on its professionals. But like many people who work in medicine, Stamey had always thought of herself as a caretaker and was afraid to ask for help. Instead, she swallowed her frustrations and soldiered on, ignoring the creeping depression that began to cast a shadow over her life and her work.

$180,000 in debt. That’s a lot, and yet for many of the top professionals, it’s not particularly high. I came out with no debt, and about $50 to my name – but that was 35 years ago, it was a Bachelor of Computer Science, not a DVM, and I had some help from my parents. I probably should have been more adventurous and run up some debt in the process.

But don’t let me get off-point here. When our professionals are so burdened with debt that they can’t hardly hope to live in the cheapest apartments available, does that presage positive or negative outcomes for society in connection with those professions? Are such educational debts really desirable?

And is society really benefiting in its frantic urge to reduce taxes by moving the costs for its own benefit on to the students, when society as a whole actually benefits from it? This is societal cheapskating, and while I understand that many consider the taxes onerous, it’s my contention that those individuals who benefit from higher education contribute far more to society than those taxes they consume.

If you’re in charge of soliciting donations for a charity, you may want to consider this:

The researchers sent letters to more than 12,000 alumni asking them to donate to [Harvard University].

The letters started with one of two sets of words to appeal for their support: “Sometimes, one person needs to come forward and take individual action” or “Sometimes, one community needs to come forward and support a common goal”.

Among the 4 per cent who donated, those who received the message that focused on individual action gave an average of $432. In contrast, those who got the more community-minded appeal contributed $270 on average (PLoS One, doi.org/cx4m).

Thus demonstrating the power of individual marketing. It’d be even more interesting to characterize a collection of schools based on the strength of the various academic departments, and then repeat the above study on each school. How the results vary across schools might be instructive.

When toads go for a ride on a python?

The Guardian reports:

A huge storm in Australia’s north on Sunday flushed out a sight which either fascinated or horrified those who saw it – 10 cane toads riding the back of a 3.5m python. …

“The lake was so full it had filled the cane toad burrows around the bank and they were all sitting on top of the grass – thousands of them,” he told Guardian Australia.

“He was in the middle of the lawn, making for higher ground.”

“He” was Monty, a 3.5m resident python also fleeing the rising water, only with a band of cheeky travellers on board.

“He was literally moving across the grass at full speed with the frogs hanging on,” said Mock.

“I thought it was fascinating that some of the local reptiles have gotten used to [the cane toads] and not eating them.”

All the rest of the world has seen it, but I’m so easily amused….

Concerning captioning atrocities, a reader reports:

Years ago we were watching a Godzilla movie, recorded in Japanese, that didn’t have English subtitles. Right in the middle a subtitle popped up. It read, “F…k you! (In Japanese)”. The only subtitle in the entire movie.

In a related development, my Arts Editor reports that, if you look closely at some Godzilla movies, you can actually see the running-for-their-lives Japanese laughing like mad. I may have seen that once, myself.

It seems oddly apropos.

I see the WaPo Editorial Board thinks the Democrats should consider accepting the President Trump deal concerning the government shutdown, which is …

President Trump on Saturday offered Democrats three years of deportation protections for some immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding, a proposal immediately rejected by Democrats and derided by conservatives as amnesty.

Aiming to end the 29-day partial government shutdown, Trump outlined his plan in a White House address in which he sought to revive negotiations with Democrats, who responded that they would not engage in immigration talks until he reopened the government.

I’m not a member of a political party, I’m an independent, and as an independent and someone who longs for rationality^[1], I’d advise the Democrats in charge of negotiations to respond with a warm No.

They should welcome the fact that President Trump made a real counter-offer, which shows he’s making progress on learning how to make a political deal. It’s a start. They might cautiously consider acknowledging that he’s making this progress. In a way, it’s an insult to Trump, one which he acknowledges only at his own peril. It’s a way to make him stop thinking and start reacting, so it’s a tactic to be used with a great deal of care.

But the answer should be No, and not because it’s inadequate, but because it’s a denial of the logic of the Democrats in refusing to build the wall, namely because it will be ineffectual. By answering Yes, they would destroy their own position. Even a Yes accompanied with some statement suggesting the Wall will be ineffective is to show intellectual and moral weakness.

I think they should do the following:

1. Acknowledge the concerns about illegal immigration are real, even if the southern border crossings have been dropping for years. Andrew Sullivan has gone into this in great detail.
2. Reiterate the ineffectiveness of a wall.
3. Suggest that, instead of a wall, we investigate the causes of these illegal immigration, and that the funding request for a wall instead be dedicated to research of those causes.
4. Require this be a joint legislative / executive operation. I am concerned about ideological influences on conclusions, so either Congress gets oversight of the process, or it be delegated to a neutral and respected third party.
5. Suggest, ever so delicately, that in some way Trump’s name could be attached to this research project. Appealing to his vanity is a proven approach with President Trump.

This is not without risks. For example, some shallow “analysts” will conclude the other countries suffer from gang violence, and recommend we eradicate the gangs without having the wit to ask why the gangs exist. Accepting such a conclusion will result in a lot of wasted money, time, and effort.

But a deeper, more effective analysis will also have its own risks. After all, the causes of Central American immigration are not necessarily independent of the big kahuna to the north. Suppose one of the conclusions is that American farm exports have destroyed the local ag economy. Will we be willing to even publish such a conclusion, much less act on it by restricting our ag exports? Tell an Iowa farmer that the Central American market is now closed. Or a zealous free marketeer libertarian who has no experience with the real world. Think of their reactions.

Still, I think this is the direction a rational country should go. Pursuing permanent solutions to these problems is how a mature country should pursue its business. Keep out the barbarians immigrants! is the slick response of the grifter who understands the fears of his audience, and rather than lead them to a permanent solution, instead sells them the piece of shit solution that he can sell … and sell … and sell. And profit from.

Give Trump a chance to be a real leader, rather than this Fake Leader! we’ve been seeing so far. He actually suggested this idea once, himself. And, at the same time, give these immigrants a chance to see their home countries revived. If he accepts, wonderful. If not, it’s another hammer the Democrats can use when wooing independents.

¹ In both others and myself.

And drawing lessons from them is also nothing new. WaPo reviews not one, but two documentaries concerning the cleverness of two con-men, and the folly of those they conned, through the instrumentality of something called Fyre Festival:

The notorious Fyre Festival was promoted as an elite concert event in the Bahamas, promising its attendees beachside villas, top-notch cuisine and nonstop partying with celebrities and social-network influencers on sandy beaches over two weekends in the spring of 2017.

Instead, as most everyone knows, Fyre was a disaster, becoming Instagram infamous for serving up “a tsunami of Schadenfreude,” as one observer puts it. Most of Fyre’s selfie-obsessed attendees, who’d paid thousands of dollars to attend, were stranded on a gravel spit with little food, water or shelter, and worst of all, spotty Internet access. Their suffering was exquisite and, admittedly, a fine comeuppance. “White people love camping,” joked “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah when news broke of the festival’s utter failure. “Unless it’s a surprise.”

Now, for reasons that easily dovetail with the same anxieties and lessons of the Fyre debacle, there are two competing documentaries out this week on streaming TV. The first, released in a hurry Monday on Hulu, is co-directors Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst’s “Fyre Fraud”; the second, premiering Friday on Netflix, is director Chris Smith’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.”

Funny thing is, it’s just one of the oldest stories in the world, isn’t it? I’m reminded of the religious scammers who’ve operated from time immemorial, out of the most staid of orthodox churches to the Last Days folks to tent revivalists.

Image credit: FIBERSHED

While the shearers, the con-artists who operated at Fyre Festival and operate at tent revival meetings, have more or less the same goal in mind, collecting money and leaving the marks to their own devices, I think the sheep also share a connection: a desire to belong that has exceeded reasonable bounds. I’ve never had much interest in the celebrity culture which has been rampant for 50 or more years; I treat it as trivia, I might know a little bit and I might not. I don’t really understand that drive to be part of celebrity culture.

But the folks attending Fyre just had to have their celebrity fix, as if it means much. I have friends who treasure their chance encounters with celebrity, such as one who happened to encounter Cary Grant as Grant exited a limo; even I have a story which amuses me, which is hitting up the then-new Byerly’s, a sort of upper-end grocery store chain, in Chanhassen, MN, at some ungodly hour of the night, and walking past what appeared to be a startled Prince and lady friend. Or perhaps they weren’t. I just nodded and kept on going. Such is the life of the focused hacker.

Back to the point, though, those encounters were not pursued, and speak more to the power of chance than anything else, and ultimately to our shared humanity. I mean, a grocery store? Come on!

But the Fyre Festival attendees? Eager to attain their own trivial celebrity, they paid their shillings, looked forward to rubbing shoulders with actors or singers or podcasters or YouTubers, or, what’s popular today, maybe entrepreneurs? And were humiliated. They pursued the central motivating force of celebrity culture beyond all reasonable boundary and … clip-clip.

I think a parallel case can be made for those caught and sheared by the snips of religion. As an agnostic, I do not dispute that religion brings a number of positives to human life, mixed as they can be with the negatives which do accompany religion. But when folks are so obsessed with touching the divine, for that assurance that what they’re doing is, rather than right, but instead divinely blessed, even to the point where they share in the divine being, participate in miracles, etc.

And, given credulity, brain plasticity, and the cleverness of con-men, it’s not all that hard to do.

In the end, the two groups just aren’t that different – pursuing the central core of their cultures with such single-mindedness as to discard all common sense. All, perhaps, to escape the essential ennui they may fear to encounter in their lives.

Up here in Minnesota it’s been unseasonably warm until the last couple of days. But how’s the rest of the world doing? From ClimateReanalyzer.org this is the 2M Temperature Anomaly, which I believe measures substantial deviations from historical averages temperature:

Yeah, it looks like Australia’s experiencing brutal highs. From The Guardian:

It was 48.9C [120F] last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”

It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.

Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.

Unpleasant. More accurately, getting close to inimical to human life. Especially if you’re a climate change denier. The penguins have yet to register a complaint in Antarctica from that nasty spot I see, but perhaps they’re enjoying the respite, eh?

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) is another Harry Potter universe prequel movie, but much like its predecessor, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), it suffers from a dearth of sympathetic characters (contrast with the original Harry Potter stories, featuring Potter, a boy suffering from hatred brought on by ignorance, and his courageous climb from his under-the-stairs bedroom to a leading position as a student at a school for wizardlings), instead substituting wizards who are inscrutable, or are even indulging in acts of barbarity, such as the removal of the tongue of a prisoner.

And the one who essentially takes responsibility for the removal is allegedly on the side of the good guys.

And the sad part, in terms of story development, is not that such barbarity, even if it’s reversible, has taken place, but that the story-tellers didn’t realize that this was a pivotal moral moment for the story. Think about it: does any modern Western society condone glossectomy as a punishment? Even to stop a silver-tongued devil, as the victim, Grindelwald, of this procedure is supposed to be?

Thus an opportunity arises to argue an important moral point concerning whether & when exceptions can be made to strong moral precepts, and that could have opened up the story immensely. Or perhaps some karmic recoil could have been rained down explicitly on she who authorized the procedure. Such action – reactions are the meat of a good story, and this opportunity was discarded like a dirty diaper.

Another problem is that the magic is basically free of boundaries. A wave of a wand, a couple of words, and something happens. Cool stuff, no? No. It’s too easy to pull a lion out of a hat every time a character runs into a roadblock, and that de-emphasizes the cleverness, wisdom, or (better yet) the sad tradeoffs the characters could have displayed and paid for.

In the original series (at least the movies, I never read the books), they get away with not discussing the rules of wizarding much because the characters were so compelling. They, in fact, moved the plot along, not the magic. But in this movie, the magic is too instrumental, so it should have been structured so that the characters had to do clever things to achieve their goals – which they occasionally do.

But, returning to the characters, there was little sympathy for them. Even the lead, autistic-like Newt Scamander, struggled to hold my interest, despite the adorable Chinese water dragon he eventually captures. I enjoyed the young Albus Dumbledore, and Johnny Depp, playing the evil Grindelwald, I think did a fine job conveying an entity convinced of its own rightness, and that did add to the story, not subtract. But after that the pickings are slim. It’s not the acting, which is fine except for the accents, which I often found impenetrable, but the characters’ words. Or perhaps the actors did fail to convey the essential humanity of their characters – but I am inclined to blame the storytellers, for it didn’t seem as if the characters really cared. An entire crop of good guys get wiped out, and yet I saw nary a tear wiped from a cheek over them. Glossectomy without controversy.

In the end, there’s too much convenient magic, and not enough struggle against overwhelming odds.