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.
Comments Off on Shooting Ourselves In The Hand, The Foot …, Ctd
Concerning my dismay with regard to the WaPo report of some Democratic organization trying to use underhanded social media tactics, and the possible repercussions, a reader remarks:
Of course, the GOP hardcore already believes all of this and worse about the Democrats, so just how much black goo staining is occurring is highly open to question.
But I don’t think there is any delusions that the GOP hardcore is open to any persuasion. The group of importance are the independents, who make up just about 40% of the electorate.
The independents are the one that are fueling Presidential approval / disapproval polls such as thins one, showing Trump approval at an abysmal 37%. If they become disillusioned with the Democrats, perhaps they sit the next one out, and the Republicans, in all their third-rater glory, have a much stronger chance at both the state and federal levels.
A reader reacted quite a while ago to my post on decarbonization of the energy sector and the part nuclear power might play, with regard to Environmental Progress:
Environmental Progress sounds like a highly suspect group. California “could have mostly or completely decarbonized their electricity sectors had their investments in renewables been diverted instead to new nuclear”? In what crazy world of imaginative finance do they live? As you pointed out, new nuclear is crazy expensive.
I refer you to the last 2 subsections of the History section in the Wikipedia entry for Nuclear Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Nuclear_power_in_the_United…), titled “Competitiveness” and “Westinghouse Chapter 11”. Fossil fuels are way too cheap to make nuclear viable. The 4 nuclear reactions under construction have already lost billions of dollars, and they aren’t online yet.
So noted. Yet I’ve been unable to find dirt on Environmental Progress, although my time for such activities is extremely limited. The Founder / President of EP is Michael Shellenberger, who from his Wikipedia entry appears to be on the up & up – but, of course, Wikipedia is always a contingent, not definitive, source. Listed as an eco-pragmatist, nuclear power may, in Shellenberger’s evaluation as an environmentalist, make the grade.
Stipulating to the fixed and running costs of nuclear power tending to run over estimates, let me quickly present a contrarian argument to my reader’s comments. One of the facets of most, or even all, “green” energy sources is its effect on the energy environment. I use that term simply as a lowest common denominator, so here’s an easy example: a wind turbine. It converts the energy implicit in the wind into energy convenient to human beings. But if a wind turbine doesn’t exist, is that implicit wind energy wasted?
Only in the mind of the short-sighted human. The truth of the matter is that this wind is carrying moisture, it’s bending trees, its conveying that energy itself to somewhere else. Perhaps birds are riding on it – easy enough to imagine, yes? But so are spiders. And bacteria. In other words, all those creatures and substances, which all boil down to energy, that energy topology is being disturbed in an unnatural manner by that wind turbine. What are the long term implications? Similar remarks may be made with equal accuracy concerning hydroelectricity, tidal power, and solar power – each is removing energy from an active ecology.
Nuclear power is emissions free, once installed, for its operational lifetime. Its fuel, until removed from the ground, contributes little or nothing to the energy landscape, although the removal and processing does contribute quite a lot. That’s interesting, because that failure to disturb the energy landscape makes it close to unique. I can only think of direct human (or perhaps animal) exercise as also being relatively benign to the energy landscape, an idea explored at length in Norman Spinrad’s Songs from the Stars.
I don’t wish to deny that the costs of commissioning and decommissioning nuclear power plants are unimportant, as they present unpleasant and even disqualifying challenges. Perhaps the potential cost of a disastrous accident is even more disqualifying, compared to the traditional green technologies. But I think it’s important to note that those green technologies, while carbon neutral, do have their own side-effects, and some of those may turn out to disqualify them in turn.
Comments Off on That Darn Climate Change Conspiracy, Ctd
In the area of fighting climate change, I must confess I hadn’t paid much attention to the idea of just a simple carbon tax. I assumed it was simply a tax on how much CO2 each person or corporate entity generates. It turns out that the revenues generated can be used to reinforce the point of the tax, as some top economists explain in WaPo:
The tax would add to the price of any good or service that uses carbon, especially fossil fuels. It means energy bills, gas and flying would cost more, at least at first. But the economists call for the government to return all the revenue raised from the tax directly to U.S. citizens, with a goal of effectively paying people to help address climate change.
“There is a substantial rebate. It’s estimated that if we were to start with something like a $40 a ton carbon tax that would amount to $2,000 per family, so it is a very substantial rebate,” said Yellen.
By giving every American a “rebate,” it encourages people to cut back on their own carbon usage because someone can make money if, for example, they receive a $2,000 rebate check and only spend $1,800 on carbon-intensive activities.
“The majority of American families, including the most vulnerable, will benefit financially by receiving more in ‘carbon dividends’ than they pay in increased energy prices,” the letter states.
It’s classic social engineering, but when it comes to a menace that is generally difficult for the common citizen to detect, it may be necessary, even if it raises my hackles. And I do appreciate the circularity of the tax, using both stick and carrot to begin reducing the amount of CO2 we generate.
If & when the Democrats take control of both Congress and the White House, it’ll be interesting to see if they adopt this idea as rapidly as possible. The implementation details appear to be quite daunting, so I hope that at least some work is taking place at the moment on how to deal with them.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
This animated sequence shows the rotation of Ultima Thule (corrected for the changing distance) so that Ultima Thule (officially named 2014 MU69) appears at constant size but becomes more detailed as the approach progresses.
Intellectually, I understand the blurring. Emotionally, it makes me wonder, then it gives me wonder – that we made it out that far, hit the mark, took the pictures, and sent them back. Great stuff.
Remember quantum computing, about how computers built using memory using quantum effects, known as qubits, will be so much faster because a qubit can assume all possible values at the same time, thus making computations of various reality that much faster?
OK, that’s a weird lead-in to a political post, but who can resist?
I wish I could have simultaneous bugs on the walls of Speaker Pelosi’s office, and the Oval Office, aka President Trump’s office, in relation to this recent tit-for-tat imbroglio over the State of the Union address to Congress, or lack thereof, and Speaker Pelosi’s aborted trip to Afghanistan. What would we have heard, I wonder? I mean, besides a blizzard of misogynistic profanities from Trump, of course.
Chris Cillizza of CNN thinks this is a big counter-punch from Trump:
Pelosi’s decision, like Trump’s on the CODEL [congressional delegation traveling abroad], was within her powers to do. (The speaker of the House invites the President to address a bicameral session of Congress. The President’s only role is to accept or reject the ask.) But just because the two principals can do what they’ve done doesn’t mean they should do it.
As a reminder: 800,000 federal workers are either furloughed or working without pay today. And they have been doing so for the last (almost) month. Bills aren’t being paid. Sacrifices are being made. Real life is happening.
Amid that backdrop, the childish one-upmanship between Trump and Pelosi feels deeply out of touch. But, more than that, it’s actively detrimental to the re-opening of the government. No one can argue that the actions of Trump and Pelosi over the last 24 hours have brought us closer to compromise that would re-open the government. Hell, no one can even argue that what’s happened between two of the most powerful people in the country has had a neutral impact on the shutdown showdown. This is a bad thing for the country. Period.
Hah! That’ll show her! I can see in my mind’s eye Trump spending a couple of hours writing this letter and then adding little fillips to it. “Hey how about excursion? That’ll piss her off. Hee hee. And can we put public relations event in there somewhere? Oh man, this is so great.”
Me? I very much doubt that Pelosi was surprised by the return volley of President Trump. There are key differences between the two politicians, and perhaps the largest is Pelosi’s capacity for political planning. Speaker Pelosi is a planner. She has a reputation for getting major legislation through the House in a legitimate manner, and you don’t do that off the cuff. She makes alliances, persuades waverers, makes deals.
And she became the Speaker because she wanted the post. Her campaign to regain that post after the midterms is well known, and while pundits speculated that she might not attain it, in the end the election wasn’t even close, as many initially negative Democratic Representatives ultimately cast votes for her. Contrast that with former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who nearly had to be forced to take the prestigious post, and once in he utterly punted on some of the most important legislative opportunities, such as the Tax Bill of 2017, as well as the failed AHCA (replacement for ACA), passing straw-man bills and leaving it explicitly to the Senate to write them any way the GOP-controlled Senate pleased. Historians may disagree, but I think Ryan’s fumbling will leave him one of the most lowly-rated Speakers in American history.
And does Trump have the capacity for planning? By just about all reports, no, although one must remember the report that he’s deliberately attempted to discredit the mainstream media from the get-go, although it’s not difficult to link that stratagem to his hypothetical Russian handlers. It’s also worth noting that there’s a big difference between mass media planning and political planning.
Nor are most of his political advisors really up to the task. In my view, the Republicans, outside of their suddenly-suspect marketing machine, are a pack of third-raters, from the now-retired Ryan to the stripped-of-his-assignments Steve King (R-IA). There’s little reason to believe Secretaries Pompeo, Whittaker, Mnuchin, or any of the others in the Cabinet, along with the various political advisors, have much capacity for planning, for the game Pelosi is playing. Pelosi, on the other hand, is a shark who knows how to get what she wants. That her approval ratings nation-wide are considered abysmal is irrelevant, as that’s the result of the advanced social media attack she’s been under for nearly a decade, and perhaps more.
In a way, that’s been a compliment.
Pelosi’s played the game honestly. She’s supported legislation to reopen the government as specified by the then-GOP majority in the House, back before January. That legislation was passed by both the House and the Senate on voice votes, but was vetoed, whether officially or informally, by our weak President Trump[1]. When she took the gavel, she repassed that same legislation, presumably still Republican approved, but now the Senate, still under McConnell’s (R-KY) leadership, won’t even consider it. Having established her legitimacy, she then undertook to take the Congressional stage away from President Trump for the traditional State of the Union speech.
But now I suspect that Pelosi was unsurprised by the cancellation of her flight to Afghanistan. She may have even ticked it off her list of expectations yesterday. Trump raged and spat and hit back bigly, Pelosi may have been smiling and planning not her next move – but the one five more steps ahead. She’s like Obama, a planner who knows what she wants and is confident that it’ll be good for the nation, no matter how the Republicans howl.
Meanwhile, Trump is being shown as an intemperate child.
I don’t know how this will play out. The shutdown will eventually be ended, of course, and either completely on her terms, or a good political compromise. But does Pelosi care if Trump leaves through resignation or if he leaves through impeachment? Or will she be satisfied with having an impotent, torpid nobody in the Oval Office for two more years? Personally, I find the latter a little hard to stomach, particularly given recent speculation that Trump may be a Russian asset. But if that’s the best we can hope for, well, that’s how it goes sometimes.
But I think Speaker Pelosi is playing the long game, much like President Obama often did. I don’t see Pelosi as being surprised by the cancellation of the CODEL. I see it as part of a chess game being played by Pelosi. It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out, particularly since it doesn’t appear that the White House is up to the challenge.
1 I wonder if Fox News, the entity responsible for manipulating him into vetoing the funding resolution that would have avoided this shutdown, if impermanently, actually intentionally put him into the box called The Shutdown in hopes that he’d resign!
Comments Off on There’s Three In This Little Drama
One of the scandals du jour (it’s appalling that it’s not unusual to think this way these days) is the revelation that Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen paid a certain John Gauger to attempt to influence some online polls early in the primaries for the Republican Presidential nomination. Just to cover my bases, I’ll note that online polls are pathetic, Gauger’s efforts reportedly failed, and Gauger claims Cohen didn’t fully pay him for his efforts.
That’s two: Trump and Cohen.
But I’ve read three articles on this, in WaPo, Heavy, and Maddowblog, and listened to Colbert, and they all seem to be ignoring the implications of an interesting little bit, which Maddowblog provides but then ignores:
To execute the plan, Cohen reportedly hired John Gauger, the chief information officer at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and the owner of a small tech company called RedFinch Solutions LLC.
Bold mine. Sure, it seems reasonable to write him off as a techie with questionable morals. But Heavy contributes a bit more:
An article on Liberty University’s website says that Gauger was hired by the school in August 2012. Gauger’s first role as the Director of Specialized Initiatives. That piece says that Gauger is a Liberty graduate, as part of the class of 2009. Gauger gained an M.B.A. and a B.S. in business from Liberty.
Aaaaaaand we’re through with putting him off as a bit-part techie. He’s got the Liberty University imprimatur, and now we have him, along with his boss Jerry Falwell, Jr., engaging in ethically or intellectually dubious enterprises.
Of course, we all know online polls aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, if you’ll permit the bad joke. But does that excuse this sort of behavior? The point of any poll is to communicate to its sponsors, as well as anyone to whom the sponsors release it, an honest assessment of the opinions of the respondents, and use that information in an attempt to further characterize some part of the general populace. Attempting to game any such poll constitutes intellectual fraud and, therefore, moral depravity.
I shan’t belabor the point. I also have little patience for cries of sin, redemption, everyone makes mistakes, and the favorite of the age, But what about Hillary? An institution of such religious rectitude should instill in its graduates and employees an allergy to fraudulent behavior, and if the institute is going to press a claim to higher learning, it should also instill a yearning for intellectual honesty. In neither Falwell nor Gauger do we see these things.
Given the evangelicals’ Satanic love and devotion to Trump, is this another clue that the evangelical movement has really just been a fraud all along? Generally, I’m fairly happy that evangelicals don’t show up at my door trying to convert me, but these days I’d actually welcome a visit. It could be a lot of fun imperiously demanding that they improve their morals.
My condolences to the family and friends of Glen Will, an old, old friend of ours. He passed away a little earlier today after a short stay in hospice.
Glen was a retired artist and bon vivant who was an avid fan of the musicals of the forties and fifties. A Korean War vet, he was a good friend to many people, a casual critic of many entertainers in the more traditional modes of music, and a pithy curmudgeon when it came to the political scene: He had little use for Trump or most Republicans.
He will be sorely missed by us and all who knew him.
There’s been a lot of buzz over the inability of President Trump to even offer a true deal to the Congressional Democrats, as well as to the Congressional Republicans (which I cautiously differentiate from Trump’s Base, which has been called the Party of Trump, and who constitute yet another entity in this sordid little drama). By true deal I mean something where everyone gets a little bit of what they want, and no one is happy.
For those readers who’ve avoided learning much about this repulsive and damaging little dance, Trump has been offering a deal that consists of I get everything and you get nothing, or, more literally, I get $5.7 billion to start building my wall and then I agree to sign a bill that reopens government, but with nothing for Dreamers, etc.etc.. This unconditional surrender offer is only a deal in the broadest of senses.
While ruminating over whether this might be indicative of the deteriorating state of Trump’s mind, aka dementia, which I do think is quite possible, it suddenly occurred to me that I’m overlooking the obvious.
Long time readers are well aware of my hobby horse concerning the Sectors of Society, and how the importation of the processes of one sector into another can have sub-optimal, even deeply undesirable results due to optimization effects. See the link for more, especially if you’re completely lost, or better yet read this executive summary: each sector of society (private, public, education, medical, etc) has goals peculiar to itself, and the processes it uses in pursuit of those goals are also optimized to those goals. Importing a process from another sector is problematic if the goals of the originating sector are at odds, as they often are, with the receiving. Thus we see rampant profit-taking by Pharma companies at the expense of patients, because the private sector believes it’s all about the profits (in itself a critical misunderstanding of the function of the private sector in society, but that’s another rant), while medical exists to cure patients.
And deal-making is a sector process! When we talk about deal making in the public sector, we’re talking about give and take, each side giving a little to get a little. But Trump’s deal-making has rarely, if ever, consisted of this sort of deal making. I suspect it’s consisted of two categories:
Screw the little guy over. Trump contracts for and receives the goods, but refuses to pay the agreed on price. He pays partial price and dares the contractor to come after him in court, and if the contractor does, Trump spends him into bankruptcy. This behavior was well-documented during the campaign, and I suspect is the reason why Trump lost Manhattan, his hometown, so badly in the Presidential election: they’re very familiar with the bullying, edge of the line and often over it, tactics he employed, and they didn’t want to see that in the Oval Office.
Finding a way to build the next building. Think about this process a bit: figure out what will sell, get the financing, buy the land, get permission to build[1]. Maybe I’m missing a couple of steps, but my real point here is that this has no resemblance to political deal-making. None.
We might even put this down to insufficient English vocabulary. We should have understood there is no connection between private sector deal-making and public sector deal-making. Different words would enforce this idea with a certain finality.
But in the final analysis, we’re simply seeing amateur-hour all over again. Trump doesn’t know how to broker a political deal, because his concept of a deal has nothing to do with political deal-making. He’s assuming he’s in the position of power, as he always is in point #1 above, and that everyone should collapse or possibly take him to court, although exactly how that would come about wasn’t clear at the time[2]. He’s not winning this shutdown showdown, but, whether or not he has the ability to recognize he must engage in give and take, he cannot because that third entity in this scenario, the Party of Trump, won’t let him. He’s pumped himself up to be the winner, the winner all the time, without ever making a concession[3], and if he makes a concession now, that base may crack.
And the funny thing is, he’s already made a concession. His previous estimates were in the $20 billion range. Why isn’t he emphasizing this to the press? My guess is that he’s just not that savvy in the political realm. But I think he’s lost the messaging window that he needed to pursue to make that point work. The electorate is solidly of the opinion that the Shutdown is Trump’s responsibility, and it’s damaging America.
How Trump is going to resolve this without burning off his hair is an open question.
1 A friend remarked yesterday that the Trump situation had suddenly become crystal clear for him: Trump got into this in order to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and since he needs permission from Russian President Putin to do so, he’s putting himself through all these contortions to win that approval. He observed that Trump is really a simple man, driven by money and building, with no regard for his obligations to American society. I’d just say Trump’s a broken man.
2 Trump is now being sued by a group of Federal employees under the banner of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
Comments Off on Even If One Mouth Is Muffled, He’s A Hydra
CNN’s The Pointnotes that Speaker Pelosi is refusing to bring the necessary resolution to the floor of the House which would permit President Trump to deliver the traditional State of the Union speech to Congress (reportedly Majority Leader Senator McConnell has also failed to do so for the Senate), purportedly (according to other sources) because the shutdown has made security for the President a more difficult matter. Cillizza wonders if Pelosi’s taking a chance:
But the question is whether voters who may not like Trump but who just want the government to reopen and politicians to get back to working for the people who voted them into office will see Pelosi’s move to effectively cancel the State of the Union as an unnecessary provocation. And whether Trump, who is desperately in search of a life preserver in this whole mess, can seize on Pelosi’s decision as evidence that the left is trying to silence him.
My guess is he’s going to try like hell to make that case.
I really don’t see it. President Trump is in full possession of the “bully pulpit,” as President T. Roosevelt called it, and all he need do is announce that he’s going to give the State of the Union speech from the Oval Office, or in front of a campfire out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and the media will cover it. It’s not statutorily required that he deliver a speech to Congress, only that he deliver a description of the State of the Union to them. [Ten hours later, I see Pelosi actually said as much, if somewhat more temperately.]
Hell, I’ll just whisper it: He could deliver the whole damn thing via Twitter and it’d almost certainly be legal.
So I think Cillizza is worrying over something that’s irrelevant. He also quotes Presidential son Donald Trump, Jr.:
“Speaker Pelosi is clearly attempting to block my father from giving his State of the Union speech, not because 20% of the government is shut down, but because she is terrified of him having another opportunity to speak directly to the American people about her party’s obstruction, unfiltered and without her friends in the media running interference for her.”
Jr. is clearly off the rails. Anytime Trump wants to give a speech, it’ll get out on the media “unfiltered,” and there’s not a damn thing Speaker Pelosi can do but respond.
The real trouble for the President is that his ammunition is so wet, his position & character so weak, his failure to retain the House so obvious to everyone that gives a damn, that everyone outside of his completely committed base knows better than to take him in the least seriously. They’ll wait for their favorite fact-checking service to correct any fact or figure before evaluating, and their evaluations will, in the main, run against the President.
So I take Pelosi’s move as another quiet jab of disrespect from one co-equal branch of the government to another. Pelosi’s reportedly trying to reform the House, repairing the damage done to its processes and institutions by GOP leadership dating back to Gingrich’s days, and by implication she’s setting a very high bar.
And I think she’s telling Trump and McConnell that they’re expected to make it over that bar. They won’t. Trump won’t try, he’ll sit on the ground and cry about it, because that’s his style, and McConnell won’t bother, because he won’t do anything without Trump’s permission.
Pelosi’s brandishing a whip. Will Trump dance to her tune? Trump, Jr.’s first response suggests they know there’s a danger here, and they need to obviate it. The Trump problem? They have a history of fouling this sort of thing up.
I haven’t really run across a movie in this particular category before, which I’ll ad lib as dry farce. Castle In The Air (1952) concerns a Scottish Earl of Locharne who has been attempting to keep the family castle going by renting out its rooms as a bed and breakfast, even as the joint appears to be falling apart around him. Among his employees and family is the butler and handyman who refuses to accept a layoff notice, and also plays, or pretends to play, the bagpipe; the Earl’s manager, Miss Trent, who he calls ‘boss’; and the family poltergeist who provides a bit of entertainment for the guests, both day-only and overnight.
There are several guests, but two standout. The representative of the local coal board, Mr. Phillips, has come visiting to decide if the castle should be requisitioned for use by the local coal-miners, a precipitous event which the Earl dislikes intensely. Consequently, Mr. Phillips has been put up in the worst room in the castle. On the other hand, Miss Nicholson, Scottish through and through, has convinced herself that this Earl of Locharne is the true heir to the Scottish throne, and has thrown herself into proving this through her genealogy passion, not to mention quite the deep Scottish accent.
Into this mess strides long-legged Mrs. Dunne of Denver, CO. She claims to be a Locharne; even better, her portion of a restaurant chain that she won from her ex-husband sets her up in enough funds to buy the castle, if she wants it – and she thinks it charming.
It turns into a balancing act, convincing Mr. Phillips that the castle is a wreck, while showing Mrs. Dunne that it’s not entirely a loss. Meanwhile, Miss Nicholson is attempting to start a revolution to install the Earl into his rightful throne. And, ‘boss’ Trent alternates between yearning for the Earl (who’s not nearly as charming as she claims, at least to me) and being outraged at the hijinks she imagines him indulging in.
It has its moments, but the print we viewed was somewhat flawed, which was disappointing. I thought the lead, played by David Tomlinson, could have been more effective. Yet, the overall whimsy of this movie, completely lacking in any profound thought or emotion, was actually attractive, making for a restful night after a day of futile fencing at the local tournament. The cold of January in Minnesota is best left outside, and watching Castle In The Air was peculiarly restful.
Inaugurating a post title referring to an idea I’ve written about from time to time: events congruent with an undeclared war between Russia and the West. Of course, that’s all speculation on my part, and perhaps Special Counsel Mueller’s part, you understand. I’m thinking of events such as the Russian interference with the midterm elections, and the Brexit debacle being endured by the Brits.
But the official kick-off entry comes from Politico:
Members of the U.S. Congress have slammed a decision by the Trump administration to downgrade the diplomatic status of the EU embassy in Washington, saying the move and the way it was carried out “needlessly denigrate transatlantic relations.”
In a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, 27 Democratic Members of Congress say they are “deeply troubled” by recent reports of the downgrade.
The lawmakers also complain that “disturbingly, this step … occurred without Congressional consultation or apparent notification to the European Union.”
“Both the substance of this decision and the undiplomatic way in which it was carried out needlessly denigrate transatlantic relations,” the letter says.
Diplomatic relations are the bedrock on which international peace is founded. It’s not hard to imagine Trump obeying a directive from Moscow to direct this blow, as minor as it may seem, at an entity that is already under assault by the Brexiteers (who should be called nationalists, as that’s what they are) as well as by various nationalist groups in France, Germany, Italy, and other nations. As a giant bloc with little to block economic trade, the European Union is a formidable economic and military foe to Russia, and with the Americans to back them up, Russia is effectively held in check.
A Europe once again preoccupied by intra-continental rivalries, constraints on trade, and unable to move in a coordinated way is Russia’s dream, and so every blow that can be directed against the EU is a plausible candidate to be considered, in reality, another move by Moscow against its adversaries. Is it? Since no plausible reason for this American move has been offered, it remains a good candidate. The fact that the Republicans refuse to criticize this move doesn’t speak to their foreign relations experience, but to the implicit threat of retaliation by the Trump Election Machine. Remember, the Republicans effectively have no one with foreign relation experience in official positions, with one exception: John Bolton. Unfortunately, he holds to neo-conservative views, and they have been discredited because of their advocacy for the last two wars, and their barbaric approaches to them. Bolton may have experience, but he hasn’t the wisdom to learn from it.
Professor Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy has a short post out summarizing an article he’s written for the Duke Law Journal.
Introduction
How might artificial intelligence change judging? IBM’s Watson can beat the top Jeopardy players in answering English-language factual questions. The Watson Debater project is aimed at creating a program that can construct short persuasive arguments. What would happen if an AI program could write legal briefs and judicial opinions?
To be sure, AI legal analysis is in its infancy; prognoses for it must be highly uncertain. Maybe there will never be an AI program that can write a persuasive legal argument of any complexity.
But it may still be interesting to conduct thought experiments, in the tradition of Alan Turing’s famous speculation about artificial intelligence, about what might happen if such a program could be written. Say a program passes a Turing test, meaning that it can converse in a way indistinguishable from a human. Perhaps it can then converse—or even present an extended persuasive argument—in a way indistinguishable from the sort of human we call a “lawyer,” and then perhaps in a way indistinguishable from a judge.
It’s an interesting proposition. I’ve been thinking about Volokh’s summation (I haven’t read the actual paper), and I think my criticisms may center around his first point of evaluation:
[1.] Evaluate the Result, Not the Process. When we’re asking whether something is intelligent enough to do a certain task, the question shouldn’t be whether we recognize its reasoning processes as intelligent in some inherent sense. Rather, it should be whether the outcome of those processes provides what we need.
At first glance, this seems fairly reasonable. However, I think there’s some cracks in this thought, and they center not around technical problems (of which I’m not qualified to comment, having taken just one AI course 35 years ago, and been an interested reader since), but, I think, around civil society.
I think one of the charming aspects of democracy for most folk is that we’re not judged by divine or divinely-anointed creatures (aka, those idiot monarchs and their self-interested minions), but by everyday citizens who are judges and jury. People is the operative word, because that’s what we are. This comes from the idea, fallacious as it may be[1], that we share a similar theory of mind. That is, we think we understand how our fellow people reason, how they evaluate evidence, their general moral instinct, perhaps even ethical / moral theory, and the general importance of justice in our culture.
Crucially for Volokh, the odds of his hypothetical project’s complete acceptance by the general public may correlate directly with society’s (or perhaps that should be plural possessive) willingness to include artificial intelligence entities as part of the human social landscape, versus considering them as entities alien to our understanding – that is, entities which do not share our theory of mind.
Volokh’s third point somewhat addresses the issue, even as it’s at odds with his first point, above:
[3.] Use Persuasion as the Criterion for Comparison—for AI Judges as Well as for AI Brief-Writers. Of course, if there is a competition, we need to establish the criteria on which the competitors will be measured. Would we look at which judges’ decisions are most rational? Wisest? Most compassionate?
I want to suggest a simple but encompassing criterion, at least for AI judges’ judgment about law and about the application of law to fact: persuasion. This criterion is particularly apt when evaluating AI brief-writer lawyers. After all, when we hire a lawyer to write a brief, we want the lawyer to persuade—reasonableness, perceived wisdom, and appeals to compassion are effective only insofar as they persuade. But persuasion is also an apt criterion, I will argue, for those lawyers whom we call judges. (The test for evaluation of facts, though, whether by AI judges, AI judicial staff attorneys, or AI jurors, would be different; I discuss that in Part IV.)
Persuasion is, to a great extent, the sharing of the reasoning, the chain of logic, which proceeds from assumptions and facts to a final conclusion. This, in turn, is a reflection, warped in some ways, of how the mind generating the argument is actually working. Thus, this third point seems to be at least partially contradictory of his first point.
Let me speculate on why Volokh wrote point 1, above, in which he asks that only results be judged, not method. This is strongly reminiscent of a facet of Machine Learning (ML) in which the decisions made by algorithms which utilize ML are shrouded in mystery. That is, if an ML-based algorithm that selected whether or not a given applicant would be sold a mortgage was asked how it came to a decision concerning some particular applicant, yay or nay, it’d not be able to explicate its decision. This is a common problem, and it’s not necessarily impossible to fix, but possibly Volokh is aware of how hard this may be able to complete.
But that persuasive element is a key part of analyzing how another entity’s mind works, and deciding whether it’s compatible with our own, or not.
The lure of the objective and untiring “mind” is real, but the question is whether it’s something we can accept, or if it’s the notorious Siren song. To the extent that we can accept artificial minds, I have to wonder how much those minds have to share the same flaws that we suffer from.
And if those minds do cross the rubicon from merely machine-learning algorithms to full-fledged Artificial Intelligences, will they still remain trustable? I’ve discussed the semantic sloppiness of using the term Artificial Intelligence when the algorithm, no matter how sophisticated, exhibits no signs of consciousness or, more importantly, self-interest (for want of a better term).
I suspect that, as assistants to human judges, AI-based programs will be easily accepted, because they’ll remain tools in the hands of humans. But judge and jury are positions of authority and responsibility. Will automating such positions be acceptable to a citizenry accustomed to policing itself?
Time will tell.
1 I suppose President Trump is the outstanding example of the Age of someone who does not have a mind congruent with the general theory of mind, as I’ve noted elsewhere. How many of us are well-acquainted with a creature that lies, boasts, and aggrandizes himself at every opportunity? Not many. Still, we like to think that we understand somewhat how our fellow citizens think.
Comments Off on Are They Really That … Oh, Wait, The Mud Splash
Perhaps you’ve heard the reports that the FBI began an investigation of President Trump for inappropriate ties to Russia, aka he’s a Russian intelligence asset, or perhaps you’ve been living under a rock this week. Year. Two years. In case it’s the latter, here’s the fast summary from The New York Times:
In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.
This led to another example of what seems to be faux-outrage from Rep. Peter King (R-NY), as noted by Talking Points Memo:
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) seized on a White House talking point — that reports of the FBI investigating whether President Trump was working for Russia prove Trump was right about the deep state — and took it a step further Monday: “that’s almost like a coup.”
During an interview with Fox News on Monday, King called news of the probe “absolutely disgraceful.”
“From what I’ve seen and heard, if this is true, what the FBI did is absolutely disgraceful,” King said. “They have been investigating the Trump campaign from the summer of 2016. Absolutely nothing, zero has come up involving President Trump. James Comey told that to the president. The reason President Trump fired Comey was Comey refused to say that publicly, that the President was not under investigation.”
No, Rep. King, he fired him to stop the collusion investigation, as the President himself stated. This Reutersreport has both the admission and the later attempts by the White House to retract the admission on the grounds NBC fudged the tape.
But besides those trivial details known as facts, the question of why does Rep. King insist on ignoring the recent revelations which justifies the investigation calls merrily for an answer. If you’re wondering about these revelations, Steve Benen provides a lovely summation in connection with Trump’s inclination to destroy the most important bulwark against Russian aggression, NATO:
* Jan. 3: Trump publicly endorsed the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, arguing that the Soviets “were right to be there.” It was one of several recent examples of the Republican president endorsing Russian propaganda for no apparent reason.
* Jan. 10: The Trump administration tried to defend the idea of relaxing Russia sanctions. It didn’t go well.
* Jan. 11: The New York Times reported that after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey, the FBI began an investigation into whether Trump “had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” The article added, “Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security.”
* Jan. 12: The Washington Post reported that Trump has “gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations” with Putin, going so far as to take his own interpreter’s notes after one private discussion.
* Jan. 14: The New York Times reports that Trump raised the idea of withdrawing from NATO “several” times in 2018.
So what is the reason for King’s faux-outburst, his apparent idiocy?
Trump may not be desired by the Republican Party, but he is the result of 25 years of Republican Party culture. This is nearly definitional, and certainly undeniable, because the Republican base loves him. If King and his fellow Congressional members from the Republicans turn on Trump, they are also turning on themselves and each other, because just about all of them, now that the moderates have moved out of the party, or become irrelevant from illness, old age, or death, are also products of the Republican Party culture.
To condemn Trump is to condemn themselves and the very culture which got them elected to high office. Without the hardest of evidence of Trump being a Russian asset, they’ll only play around the edges of opposition: pass the occasional bill he opposes, and then only if the support is overwhelming and the arena is arcane. Once in a while suggest he settle down. That sort of ineffectual thing.
Because, for reasons of ego, they just can’t condemn themselves. Impeaching and convicting Trump risks the very Republican Party itself in its present form, and while the Republican base will still support Trump even if impeached and convicted, that is a small portion of the electorate; the 40% or so of the electorate that calls it independents, like myself, would consign the Republican Party to the ashcan of history, and down the toilet would swirl King and his colleagues.
If you are a visual artist who loves the big, sweeping tableaus, that is the big strength of Aquaman (2018), and you may want to see it. But if you’re not, if, like me, you’re a story junkie, then skip it. Bad audio, a mundane plot which is all about the action and only gives a superfluous nod to the question of how being a hero or villain affects humans, the plot bounds soggily from set-piece to set-piece, creating good guys, bad guys, and little kids caught in the middle as needed, rather than organically from the origins of the scenario. A whole lot of acting phoned in from home. Sure, the big ‘A’ has a sense of humor early on, but why is he impervious to bullets? And what’s with the pirate sub?
It didn’t help that during the battle scenes we spotted intruding Martian war machines (perhaps yet another version of War Of The Worlds was filming on the studio lot next door), and a big old kaiju that was guarding the sacred trident that Arthur, yes, Arthur (think of a good Brit accent, no less) has to take from his grasp in order to win his throne. Yeeeeccccch.
But here’s the big condemnation: part way through I started considering how this could have been improved in a surprising, yet logical, manner. That’s a bad sign. For the record, when one of the bad guys, clad in a suit that kept the water in so he could breath, crashes through the roof of a house on the island of Corfu, he earns himself a good old-fashioned death-glare from the grandmama who happened to be there, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if she turned into one of those old Greco-Roman Fates who snipped the strings of humanity, and really nailed him with a death glare?
Yeah, this was a bad, boring movie. Too little plot, too much fighting.
Comments Off on When The Experts Don’t Say What You Want To Hear
In WaPo Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) lays out how Congress has become a hollow shell since the years that Rep. Gingrich (R-GA) held the Speaker’s gavel:
Our decay as an institution began in 1995, when conservatives, led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), carried out a full-scale war on government. Gingrich began by slashing the congressional workforce by one-third. He aimed particular ire at Congress’s brain, firing 1 of every 3 staffers at the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office. He defunded the Office of Technology Assessment, a tech-focused think tank. Social scientists have called those moves Congress’s self-lobotomy, and the cuts remain largely unreversed.
Gingrich’s actions didn’t stop with Congress’s mind: He went for its arms and legs, too, as he dismantled the committee system, taking power from chairmen and shifting it to leadership. His successors as speaker have entrenched this practice. While there was a 35 percent decline in committee staffing from 1994 to 2014, funding over that period for leadership staff rose 89 percent.
This imbalance has defanged many of our committees, as bills originating in leadership offices and K Street suites are forced through without analysis or alteration. Very often, lawmakers never even see important legislation until right before we vote on it. During the debate over the Republicans’ 2017 tax package, hours before the floor vote, then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) tweeted a lobbying firm’s summary of GOP amendments to the bill before she and her colleagues had had a chance to read the legislation. A similar process played out during the Republicans’ other signature effort of the last Congress, the failed repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Their bill would have remade one-sixth of the U.S. economy, but it was not subject to hearings and was introduced just a few hours before being voted on in the dead of night. This is what happens when legislation is no longer grown organically through hearings and debate.
Of course, it’s important to remember that Pascrell is a Democrat criticizing his opponents. Nevertheless, he is one of the best situated Americans to describe how Congress has changed, particularly in its acquisition and evaluations of information, and his is an important contribution to the conversation. Republicans may assert their favorite argument, that it’s Big Government and Way Too Much Spending, but I think that’s become an argument with some holes in it, given the vast incompetence exhibited by the Republican leadership of the 115th Congress (that’d be the one just concluded a few days ago, when Rep. Pelosi (D-CA) assumed the Speaker’s gavel from retiring Rep. Ryan (R-WI)). Their inability to follow an appropriate process for creating legislation concerning the most important issues facing the nation was, speaking as an independent, simply appalling and inexcusable.
But it can be explained by deliberate actions to cripple our government. No doubt Gingrich would claim – and believe – that he was just rooting out liberals with a distorted view of reality, but in the following decades, it’s become clear that, instead, he and his adherents crippled our government. If lobbyists are indeed often writing legislation via their captured Congresspeople, and then forcing it down the throats of Congress before it can be properly read, much less debated and modified, then Congress has been failing in its duties.
Later in the article, Pascrell claims Pelosi, as the new Speaker, will be trying to repair at least some of the damage. Whether this works out or not, we shall see. I suspect, given the propensity of new generations to lean towards data analysis, the ideology and power fixation of Gingrich and his buddies may be rejected as foolish failure as the youngsters continue to move into government.
But they do have to wake up and start taking an interest in governance.
A reader thinks we need more data points concerning real wage growth, or its lack thereof:
That graph needs one showing income and wages for others. Considering that’s all wiggling around in an area less than 2% wide, it doesn’t really say much.
To my mind, it says it all: blue collar wages, in real terms and to the extent that our inflation measures measure something useful, have remained stagnant since at least 1966. One of the best ways to move up from blue collar is to get a college level education. But what if the cost of higher education is rising faster than the general inflation rate? And, if you believe the Edvisorswebsite, it has from 1977 – 2013:
That has pushed education further and further out of the reach of the blue collar segment. Of course, there are scholarships and grants and loans, but these are basically ways for various groups to control who gets to go to college, and who does not – rather than letting the students decide if they want to go to college or not. I suppose if your decision would be negative anyways, then it doesn’t matter so much.
So this is just one example of the problem of stagnant real wages for blue collar workers – they’re stuck in a hole that it’s difficult, even impossible, to dig your way out of.
Moreover, transplant Centers are managing higher risk transplant recipients that require more complex induction regimens and longer term use of such biologic agents in the context of desensitization or abrogation of de novo antibody mediated injury.
Yeah, I’m not entirely certain of that last bit, either.
The email bag once again has yielded up a bit of right wing propaganda (I get quite a bit of left wing propaganda, which I’ve recently covered), which this time around is rather more subtle than the norm. A good part of the reason is that it doesn’t delve into easily proven or disproven historical claims, but rather into the criminology surrounding our southern border with Mexico: that’s right, it’s pro-border wall propaganda.
I found, while researching the claims made, that criminology concerning these various claims is very underdeveloped. Some statistics are not kept at all, some are in fragmentary form, certain statistics cannot be collected because the victims do not choose to perform them, etc.
Against this background of uncertainty, these claims are made in a very positive format, which is to say, each is made, followed by an exclamatory FACT!, as if they are viable bricks in their unanswerable argument. But let’s talk about them, one by one, for evaluation purposes.
The propaganda itself is not text, but a video. While the mail I received attached it as an mp4 video, I also found it on YouTube, and will add it to the end of this post. I will transcribe the claims and answer them with the data, where available.
The section headers are mine, they are not from the propaganda, and are employed to increase readability. Any bolding in the quotes are mine, not the authors’, unless otherwise noted.
Crime Rates Of Illegal Aliens
… An illegal alien in the state of Arizona is twice as likely to commit a crime versus a natural born citizen.
The closest I could come to verifying this is a study by Dr. John Lott, Jr., who, according to the Washington Times, is President (and possibly the only employee) of the Crime Prevention Research Center. From the study’s abstract:
Using newly released detailed data on all prisoners who entered the Arizona state prison from January 1985 through June 2017, we are able to separate non-U.S. citizens by whether they are illegal or legal residents. Unlike other studies, these data do not rely on self-reporting of criminal backgrounds. Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans.
However, this report has come under heavy criticism. Alex Nowrasteh at the right-wing Cato Institute, for example, believes the entire paper was invalidated due to a data analysis mistake by Dr. Lott.
Lott wrote his paper based on a dataset he obtained from the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) that lists all admitted prisoners in the state of Arizona from 1985 to 2017. According to Lott, the data allowed him to identify “whether they [the prisoners] are illegal or legal residents.” This is where Lott made his small error: The dataset does not allow him or anybody else to identify illegal immigrants.
The interested reader should click through to see Mr. Nowrasteh’s analysis of the error.
Dr. Lott’s study was considered to go quite against the flow of other analyses. Non-partisan FactCheck.org’s characterization of the question of crime rates in the illegal immigrant population in the context of competing claims from Republican President Trump and Senator Sanders (I-VT) may be the most believable I ran across:
President Donald Trump said it’s “not true” that immigrants in the U.S. illegally are “safer than the people that live in the country,” providing several crime statistics he claimed represented the “toll of illegal immigration.” Sen. Bernie Sanders made the opposite claim, saying: “I understand that the crime rate among undocumented people is actually lower than the general population.”
Who is right?
There are not readily available nationwide statistics on all crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally. Researchers have provided estimates through statistical modeling or by extrapolating from smaller samples. One such study backs the president’s claim, but several others support Sanders’ statement.
FactCheck.org later cites Cato Institute research:
“Illegal immigrants are 47 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives.” (And legal immigrants are even less likely to be in jail or prison.)
All of which is based on extrapolations, estimates, etc.
This is one of those situations in which biased readers can read their own conclusions into the data, simply by refusing to believe, or disbelieve, in the research methods – and it’s easy to understand their reactions. But this simply reinforces the point I’d like to make, which is this:
Using Dr. Lott’s apparently deeply flawed study in such a positive manner as displayed in the pro-border wall propaganda is intellectually dishonest. The study is not generally accepted by Dr. Lott’s peers, insofar as I can see, and while his study may be congruent with the views of the zealots of the anti-immigrationists, this doesn’t make the study right to cite when it’s methods are flawed.
I might further note, in my own experience, that Dr. Lott’s results are often congruent with the right wing, most often in the area of gun rights, and yet those studies are often disputed and, supposedly, disproven, if I’m to believe my casual reading.
This is not to accuse Dr. Lott of publishing deliberately fraudulent research. Instead, I’d like to suggest that he’s suffering from a form of intellectual error called confirmation bias. This manifests, in my experience as a software engineer, as finding an expected result after developing some software, or an expected coding error when researching a bug, and STOPPING. That is, I found what I expected, I must be right, so let’s stop right here, proclaim victory, and go home. The proper intellectual approach for us flawed human types should be to ask, Where did I go wrong? and if you can’t find an answer to that, maybe you’re right. But, from time to time, there’s some end case you didn’t test that makes your software buggy. You didn’t find it because your test cases all worked – and you never thought of the end case that invalidates your conclusion of perfection.
I suspect Dr. Lott just isn’t as thorough as he should be.
Drug Smuggling Over The Southern Border
… 90% of all heroin and fentanyl come across the southern border.
My estimate is that between 90 and 94 percent of all heroin consumed in the United States comes from Mexico. My estimate is that a very tiny percentage now, perhaps as little as 2 percent to 4 percent, comes from Colombia. And the remainder, which might be somewhere in the 4 to 6 percent category, comes from Asia, the majority of that coming from Afghanistan.
Finding numbers for fentanyl is more difficult, but let’s just stipulate our propagandist has a true fact, because concentrating on whether or not these numbers are accurate leaves the reader open to the mistake of forgetting the context. And what is the context? The conclusion that the wall will help stem the flow of drugs into the United States. In this respect, WOLA, a human rights organization advocating for Central America (Mexico is part of North America, not Central America, in their view, I think), can help:
Misconception 2: “Building a wall would greatly reduce heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl trafficking.”
Proponents of a border wall often claim that it would help the United States solve its opioid addiction problem by blocking heroin smugglers from Mexico. This reveals a misunderstanding of how cross-border smuggling works.
The vast majority of the drug that enters from Mexico does so through “ports of entry”—the 48 official land crossings through which millions of people, vehicles, and cargo pass every day. “Heroin seizures almost predominantly are through the port of entry and either carried in a concealed part of a vehicle or carried by an individual,” then-U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske told a congressional committee last year. “We don’t get much heroin seized by Border Patrol coming through, I think just because there are a lot of risks to the smugglers and the difficulty of trying to smuggle it through,” he said.
“The most common method employed by Mexican TCOs [Transnational Criminal Organizations] involves transporting drugs in vehicles through U.S. ports of entry (POEs),” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reported in its 2016 National Drug Threat Assessment. “Illicit drugs are smuggled into the United States in concealed compartments within passenger vehicles or commingled with legitimate goods on tractor trailers,” according to the document.
The lesson here is that there are two components to evaluate in just about any argument: the data, and the logic. This propaganda, through its forceful presentation (“FACT!“), attempts a sleight of hand trick by using what does appear to be a true fact and a forceful presentation to force through a conclusion which actually doesn’t follow. The fact is relevant, but the omission of other critical facts, namely the methods for transporting the drugs, renders this propaganda fallacious and untrustworthy.
Finally, there is an implicit assumption to this argument which is, at least in my view, false, and that basis is that the problem is supply, not demand. I treated this fallacious assumption in this post here, but the argument is buried so deeply that it might discourage the reader, so permit me to quote myself for my final rebuttal to this “fact”:
Supply. [Hugh] Hewitt’s argument is that the supply of illegal drugs is the problem. Few economists will find this a reasonable argument, because the true driver is the demand. Demand, demand, demand, repeat it over and over and you soon realize that fentanyl is not the problem, it’s a symptom of a deeper malaise in our society. Whether it’s the inevitable stress of a society transitioning from the arbitrary strictures of divinities to reasoned debate concerning ethics, morality, and law, or the stress caused by manufacturing moving overseas, or the stress of a populace that often does not push itself intellectually and now finds itself in an international competition where intellect is the key to success, it needs to be explored. It may not be a resolvable matter, as sad as that makes me, but it’s important to realize that cutting supply does not eliminate the problem. It’ll be like squeezing an unpoppable balloon, the symptom will just reappear in some other form. The core problem, singular or plural, needs to be identified and, if possible, addressed.
Child Sex Trafficking
… Over 10,000 kids are illegally sex trafficked across the southern border every single year.
Whether the propagandist means the entire southern border, or the Arizona border is unclear. So are the numbers itself. Research on this topic is frustrating, and so I, once again, have a real problem with some dude shouting FACT! as if he has indisputable information. Here’s a chart from CNN on sex trafficking:
Note this isn’t child sex trafficking, this is just human trafficking, and, presuming the former is a subset of the latter, the numbers simply don’t add up.
Of course, an argument can be made that one case is one too many, but this would once again losing focus on the context. Whether or not the numbers are right, why should we believe a wall will be effective? We have reports of people being carried in 18-wheelers, which means crossing at ports of entry. Walls can be tunneled under, they can be climbed.
Even if it’s just one child, it’s a sad situation. But are we building a wall because it’ll stop people who are determined to supply a tragic demand here in our own backyards, or because it’ll satisfy the vanity of a President who promised to build one – and then couldn’t convince his own Party to fund it? This may be the strongest claim of the video, and yet it’s easy to question the facts and the logic it uses to support the wall. Indeed, if we were to build a wall, what would happen to those children who do encounter the wall? Left to die by the traffickers?
Federal Prison Populations
We have 56,000 illegal immigrants in our federal prison system.
The first real fact to remember is that most illegal immigrants do not tramp through the southern border. Most come in legally on visas and then do not leave when they should. This suggests that 56,000 – or whatever might be the true number – is grossly exaggerating the contribution of those who come through the southern border.
That said, Preston Huennekens of the Center for Immigration Studies (“Low-immigratin, Pro-immigrant”) reports, in an article entitled “DOJ: 26% of Federal Prisoners Are Aliens” …
At the end of the first quarter of FY 2018, there were 57,820 known or suspected aliens in federal custody. Within the report itself, the numbers are analyzed respective to the holding entity (BOP [Bureau of Prisons] or USMS [US Marshal Service]).
This is, perhaps, the source of the numbers in the propaganda. How many of them came over the southern border, rather than waltzing in on tourist visas? We don’t know.
Because of lack of reporting of relevant statistics, those in state custody is not known.
But because there are many ways into the United States, we can be fairly sure that 56,000 is far too high an estimate of the number of incarcerated illegal aliens from the southern border.
Federal Prison Costs
135 Billion dollars a year, that’s how much is the financial burden on U.S. taxpayers every single year that illegal immigrants drain from our system.
When it comes to the financial burden of these prisoners, it seems to me that the U.S. Government Accountability Office‘s statistics might be the best source of information. This particular report is dated July 2018, so it’s not out of date.
GAO’s analyses found that the total annual estimated federal costs to incarcerate criminal aliens decreased from about $1.56 billion to about $1.42 billion from fiscal years 2010 through 2015. These costs included federal prison costs and reimbursements to state prison and local jail systems for a portion of their costs. GAO’s analyses also show that selected annual estimated operating costs of state prison systems to incarcerate SCAAP criminal aliens decreased from about $1.17 billion to about $1.11 billion from fiscal years 2010 through 2015. These selected costs included correctional officer salaries, medical care, food service, and utilities.
This is so low that I actually wonder if it’s accurate, but keep in mind this is Federal cost and some State costs. But it remains plain that the experts’ estimate is two magnitudes lower than our propagandists’ estimates. Given the slipperiness with which his other claims have been delivered, a sober reader must give the benefit of the doubt to the folks who are professionals, paid to find the truth – not the propagandist with an agenda to push.
But much more importantly is the failure to bring the entire context to light. Sure, illegal aliens in prisons cost us money. But how about illegal aliens who are quietly working for a living and paying taxes? Our happy little propagandist somehow fails to present the balanced case, but PBS does cover it.
In general, more people working means more taxes — and that’s true overall with undocumented immigrants as well. Undocumented immigrants pay an estimated $11.6 billion a year in taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy.
Comments Off on Trouble In The Troubled Middle East
I’ve been distracted from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s troubles by our own, but his have been continuing without me. They may impact the United States, at least as a distraction from President Trump’s huge troubles. Ben Caspit reports for AL Monitor concerning Netanyahu’s recent nation-wide address, touted as a big announcement:
One minute after Netanyahu began to talk, it was clear that all the drama had been unwarranted. He did not announce peace, declare war or reveal a new existential threat. He presented no achievement in the battle against Iranian nuclearization. Instead, he faced the camera to complain about the way he was treated in the investigations and to demand the right to confront the men who turned state’s witness against him. He even suggested that the face-to-face meetings be broadcast live.
“He lost touch with reality,” one of Netanyahu’s ministers told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity after the broadcast. “He thinks this is a reality show and that he is the director.”
It’s one thing when the opposition claims you’ve lost contact with reality. But one of your own Cabinet ministers? Sounds like a former Secretary we’ve heard from. And with an election coming up very soon …
Netanyahu suddenly understood that he stands to lose the race he started just two weeks ago, when he brought the election date forward, between [Attorney General] Mandelblit’s announcement [of possible indictments on the charge of corruption] and the election. Netanyahu examined surveys that probed the influence of an indictment before the elections and concluded its political impact could be lethal. We’re not talking only about the election results — Netanyahu knows that even if he wins the elections after such an announcement, he would have a hard time assembling a coalition. He would need a miracle that would heighten the power of the far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties to give him a majority, with partners willing to serve under a prime minister who is struggling to prove his innocence in court. It is unclear whether other potential partners would enter a coalition under such circumstances. Even for Netanyahu, that miracle is likely unattainable. He also understands that he is fighting not only for his political life, but for his freedom.
What is especially interesting for me, though, is how this is affecting Netanyahu’s political party, the Likud:
The polls taken after Netanyahu’s appearance revealed that a significant majority of the general public does not believe his version of events or his claims that the proceedings against him are unfair. On the other hand, Netanyahu reaped success among Likud voters, his base, and got them to close ranks. A large majority of them believes him and swallows his version as absolute truth. Still, this limited achievement might not be sufficient for his political survival.
Indicating that, like Trump, Netanyahu has enticed a large number of citizens into placing their leader above truth. A precarious time for Israel, between hostile powers, a potentially corrupt leader, and an opposition that doesn’t appear to sport a plausible replacement for Netanyahu:
Despite all the above and the unprecedented drama, we must remember an important point: Netanyahu still enjoys a large lead in the polls. Even now, when his situation seems hopeless, it is too early to eulogize the man.
Mehmet Ali Buyukkara, a theologian at Istanbul’s Sehir University, said he was hardly surprised by the findings of the KONDA survey. He tweeted, “Those who are pious in terms of language, appearance and perhaps worship have failed the class in terms of morals, probity, sincerity and attentiveness to haram.” According to the scholar, public display of piety have become freer. But the change has not led to greater attraction to religion but to “alienation to a certain extent.”
We happen to have Amazon Prime, and we’ve been watching it via a TiVo unit. We stumbled across Great Greek Myths, and we’ve just been laughing our way through it. Not for the content, but for the consistently awful hash of a captioning effort. We don’t know if it’s being done by a computer tool of some sort, or some poor translator who doesn’t know English. Some of it’s consistently wrong, such as Thebes translated as Thieves except for once, while more difficult Greek names tend to be more variable.
And then there’s the occasional exclamation which correlates with nothing at all, such as “Hermes, No!”
Stipulating to the fixed and running costs of nuclear power tending to run over estimates, let me quickly present a contrarian argument to my reader’s comments. One of the facets of most, or even all, “green” energy sources is its effect on the energy environment. I use that term simply as a lowest common denominator, so here’s an easy example: a wind turbine. It converts the energy implicit in the wind into energy convenient to human beings. But if a wind turbine doesn’t exist, is that implicit wind energy wasted?
I haven’t really run across a movie in this particular category before, which I’ll ad lib as dry farce. 
