Tourism venture Virgin Galactic sent its spaceplane into space for the second time this morning, qualifying all three people on the flight for their commercial astronaut wings. [Loren Grush, The Verge]
Gotta be impressed, two flights in one morning. Kudos to VG!
When the new furnace stenched the house up, we opened a window and put a big ol’ fan in it:
Maybe a different angle will make it look better.
Maybe not.
Remember the Spectre software security hole? There’s some bad news, according to NewScientist:
A critical security flaw affecting computers the world over is here to stay, and there isn’t any software that can properly safeguard against it. That is the conclusion of engineers trying to fix a vulnerability in processing chips known as Spectre – and it is leading to a rethink of the way that computers are designed.
The exact nature of the vulnerability isn’t disclosed, but here’s a hint:
Spectre takes advantage of a feature of computer chips known as speculative execution. To speed up processing, chips make guesses about future calculations, which are then discarded if incorrect.
We still don’t know exactly what information can and can’t be stolen, so while software fixes have seemed to work well so far, it is impossible to know whether they are actually effective, says Paul Kocher, a cybersecurity researcher who initially helped find Spectre.
Possibly the discard of the result of a calculation. But then you’d expect it’d be fixable in hardware. The report makes it sound like it’s a fundamental vulnerability, though. I’m a little too busy to dig into the technical literature.
Perhaps future chips will come with an option for using the vulnerable optimization. Nothing like confusing end users just a little bit more. Or perhaps the vulnerability can be monitored for utilization, and if a maleficent actor seems to be using it, the optimization is turned off, and the operating system notified.
When your workmanship isn’t quite what it should be.
Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958) is one of those uneasy explorations of humanity’s arrogant intrusion on the territory of the divine, and the inevitable pushback in reaction, all in the incongruous context of 1950s America. We open on elderly, independent researcher Carter Morton’s lab, where he’s working on some ill-defined project with the assistance of supercilious Oliver Frank, who hardly gives him any respect. When Morton leaves to steal some Digenerol from a former employer, though, we learn that “Frank” is actually the grandson of the infamous Dr. Frankenstein, and his assistance of Morton is a cover for his own research, in which he’s assisted by the gardener and long time friend of Frankenstein, Elsu. Elsu’s task?
To bring fresh bodies. After all, Dr. Frankenstein can’t work without raw materials.
Some people tolerate caffeine better than others. Like Trudy.
Morton has, of course, a young and nubile niece, Trudy, and she likes to host parties of other young men & women, which make for a bit of a meat-market effect, at least for Elsu. Fortunately, the storytellers exercised restraint and so only two or three bodies, oh maybe four, pile up, while Dr. Frankenstein, in between bouts of monster-construction, tries to inflict his flaming passion on any nubility that happens to come his way. These efforts have predictably morose results, but not as morose as what passes for his final project, a truly hideous yet cheesy resulting mismash of man, woman, and maybe too much makeup, which I found unsettlingly vulnerable to suggestion from anyone who wanted to shout at it. Him. Her.
In the end, Trudy and her fiancée manage to hold off both the monster and the good doctor long enough to find the trusty vial of acid, and soon the doctor is dead and the monster in flames, leaving us with the saccharine couple playing tonsil hockey, despite all the dead bodies.
I suppose, if we wanted to lend this movie some credibility, we could talk about how this is one of those stories which seeks to execute a rear-guard action against the oncoming ogre of science. After all, the creation of life is traditionally the realm of the divine, not the mundane. Nor is Dr. Frankenstein a do-gooder who happens to stumble into quicksand, but rather a repulsive picture of arrogance, an egotist who only seeks to prove his family’s superiority, and thus it should come as no surprise that some divine creature has basically ground him under her heel as a comeuppance. Perhaps it’s more vivid to say that she has held him upside down in the quicksand until the bubbles of air ceased to rise. Your pick.
Self-indulgent? Sure. Did he deserve to die from a face full of acid? I’ll let you decide. But you may regret those 90 minutes of your life if you do choose to watch this modest addition to the monster horror genre.
I’ve mentioned the race for the Representative’s seat for NC-9, which has yet to be filled from the mid-terms because of alleged misdeeds by operatives for candidate Harris (R-NC), who claimed victory but was not certified as the victor. The North Carolina election board has decided to throw out the result and rerun the contest:
The North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously on Thursday in favor of holding a new election in the 9th Congressional District after an investigation into absentee ballot irregularities.
The decision comes shortly after Mark Harris, the Republican leading in the contested race, said a new election should be called. He told the state board he does not condone the activities that have come to light after testimony this week and he feels that the public’s confidence in the process is shaken.
The control of one seat in the House of Representatives isn’t going to mean much in terms of legislation, but I expect to be flooded by mail from at least the Democrats on this. For one thing, it’s a lever to get more money out of party members. Not being one, I do not feel obligated to do the cultist thing.
But, potentially more importantly, this is the contest in which the winning side will get to do a big dance of victory. If the Republicans win, they can declare that it doesn’t matter if there is an appearance of corruption in the race, their voters will come out and vote for them anyways. In essence, there’ll be little need to change their behaviors, so like any bad child, they’ll continue.
For the Democrats, a victory speaks to the ability to beard the lion in the lion’s den, a flag they can wave to excite the partisans, and an incumbent who’ll have an even greater chance of victory in less than two years – and any possible halo effect which might come with that victory. It’ll suggest to party members that their brothers and sisters in that other party might be finally waking up from their long, long nightmare.
Which I doubt is a proper conclusion.
So the next few weeks (election date doesn’t appear to be set just yet) should prove interesting.
Axios‘ Harry Stevens has a fun new table concerning the characteristics of the ambassador corps of various recent Presidents:
Stevens makes the easy point:
Why it matters: The data undercuts Trump’s campaign claim that his personal fortune places him above the influence of donor cash — and shows how campaign contributions can help secure jobs for people with relatively weak diplomatic backgrounds.
But let’s take this a step further. This chart also shows that Trump only knows money as a metric. It’s not just that he loves it, mind you, but it’s really all he knows about measuring the competence of, well, anyone. It’s become the tie that binds him to his incompetence.
And it demonstrates the crass folly of believing excellence in business (if one chooses to believe that of Trump) translates to knowing anything about running government. For him, if you can afford to buy yourself an ambassadorship, well, that’s enough for him.
At least, apparently, Reagan, another conservative, understood the difference, or at least those who served under him did. Then again, he’d been governor of California, so he had some basis for understanding.
Following up on the Timbs v. Indiana civil asset forfeiture case mentioned on this thread, some good news has been handed down by SCOTUS:
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that the Constitution’s prohibition on excessive fines applies to state and local governments, limiting their abilities to impose financial penalties and seize property.
The decision delighted critics of civil asset forfeiture, who welcomed it as a new weapon in their war against what’s been labeled “policing for profit” — the practice of seizing cash, cars and other property from those convicted, or even suspected, of committing a crime.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on her second day back on the bench after undergoing cancer surgery in December, announced the court’s decision , saying the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause protects against government retribution at all levels.
It’s not an outright ban on this inherently corruptive practice, but it’s a step along the path to the holy grail of a ban. No, let me retract that, because holy grails are never attained, and I believe that if the ACLU and allied organizations continue to pursue this goal, they can achieve a complete ban on this practice.
And that would be a good thing.
Politicians need to think about metrics and tying compensation to those goals, not just willy-nilly turning the police off on their own insofar as funding goes. If society wants a police force, then it should fund it properly through appropriations, not by forcing the police to forage for themselves. While I know that at least some of my conservative friends would just call it corruption which needs to be corrected, I think the proper label is mismanagement by the politicians.
And I don’t care if I’ve just dissed Democrats or Republicans, or pissed in either group’s holy water. Utilizing civil asset forfeiture is an error in judgment.
Note the unanimity of the Court as well. This isn’t a political matter, this is a matter of proper justice.
This sort of behavior is really beginning to sour me on, well, I suppose unlimited personal freedom. First consider this (all bolds mine):
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned that climate change remains a national security threat.
“Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond,” Coats said in the U.S. Intelligence Community’s annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment” report. “Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. [Yahoo! Finance]
And then this:
Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. Global climate change has already resulted in a wide range of impacts across every region of the country and many sectors of the economy that are expected to grow in the coming decades. [U.S. Global Change Research Program]
And in response, the Trump Administration is leaping into action by … convening another panel.
The White House is working to assemble a panel to assess whether climate change poses a national security threat, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a conclusion that federal intelligence agencies have affirmed several times since President Trump took office.
The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security, which would be established by executive order, is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, has said that carbon emissions linked to climate change should be viewed as an asset rather than a pollutant. [WaPo]
Really? Another panel? And apparently run by a non-expert who happens to have an odd view on the subject.
If, as I expect, we continue to see a worsening of the climate, as predicted by the climate scientists, which hurts just about everyone in the world, I hope that the US electorate embraces this litmus test for all future high political office candidates: Do you approve of the science denial practiced by the Trump Administration? If the answer is yes, no vote for that candidate.
Once again, Chief Justice Roberts has sided against his more conservative colleagues in deciding a case, this time concerning whether or not a death-row inmate is eligible to be executed or, due to mental deficiencies, not eligible. Here is The New York Times report, and here is the opinion, including the dissent by Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, while Kavanaugh’s position is unknown.
The case revolves around a factual finding, which is an unusual facet for the Court to decide upon. In fact, that appears to be the basis of the dissent:
Having concluded that the Court of Criminal Appeals failed to apply the standard allegedly set out in Moore, the Court today takes it upon itself to correct these factual findings and reverse the judgment.* This is not our role. “We do not grant a certiorari to review evidence and discuss specific facts.” United States v. Johnston, 268 U. S. 220, 227 (1925); see also Salazar-Limon v. Houston, 581 U. S. ___, ___ (2017) (ALITO, J., concurring in denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 2) (“[W]e rarely grant review where the thrust of the claim is that a lower court simply erred in applying a settled rule of law to the facts of a particular case”). If the Court is convinced that the Court of Criminal Appeals made a legal error, it should vacate the judgment below, pronounce the standard that we failed to provide in Moore, and remand for the state court to apply that standard. The Court’s decision, instead, to issue a summary reversal belies our role as “a court of review, not of first view.” Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U. S. 709, 718, n. 7 (2005).
But Roberts wrote a concurrence to the majority:
When this case was before us two years ago, I wrote in dissent that the majority’s articulation of how courts should enforce the requirements of Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U. S. 304 (2002), lacked clarity. Moore v. Texas, 581 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2017) (slip op., at 10–11). It still does. But putting aside the difficulties of applying Moore in other cases, it is easy to see that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals misapplied it here. On remand, the court repeated the same errors that this Court previously condemned—if not quite in haec verba, certainly in substance. The court repeated its improper reliance on the factors articulated in Ex parte Briseno, 135 S. W. 3d 1, 8 (Tex. Crim. App. 2004), and again emphasized Moore’s adaptive strengths rather than his deficits. That did not pass muster under this Court’s analysis last time. It still doesn’t. For those reasons, I join the Court’s opinion reversing the judgment below.
Frustration with a bullheaded Texas court? Or more legacy work? Probably the former.
First, we’ll finish the poker hand. Then we’ll go back on set and finish this crummy movie.
Blonde for a Day (1946) is one of a series of murderous whodunits featuring Michael Shayne, PI. Unfortunately, while Hugh Beaumont may have made a great Ward Cleaver, when it came to hard-boiled PIs he had nothing on the originator of the Michael Shayne role, Lloyd Nolan. Without Nolan’s charm as a not-quite competent PI, the plot holes actually matter in this mediocre head-scratcher in which even the name is a trifle dubious.
Obloquy:
New word to me. Noted in “New Hope and New Danger on the Left,” Andrew Sullivan, New York:
If the Democrats want to fight the next election on the need for a radical rebalancing of the economy in favor of the middle and working class, for massive investment in new green technology, for higher taxes on the superrich, and for health-care security for all Americans, they can win. If they conflate those goals with extremist rhetoric about abolishing everyone’s current health insurance, and starting from scratch, as the Green New Deal advises, not so much. If they insist that men and women are indistinguishable, that girls can have penises and boys can have periods, as transgender ideology now demands, they’ll seem nuts to most fair-minded people.
If they echo the anti-Semitism of the far right, they’ll deserve obloquy. If left ideology seems to be overruling practical good sense — like ruling out nuclear power as an option for tackling the climate crisis in the Green New Deal, they’ll seem unserious purists. If they insist on calling our multicultural and multiracial democracy a manifestation of “white supremacy,” they will empower real white supremacists. If they call a border wall an “immorality” and refuse to fund a way to detain and humanely house the huge surge of migrant families and children now overwhelming the southern border (up 290 percent over the same period in 2018, with a record 1,800 apprehensions on Monday of this week alone!), they will rightly be called in favor of open borders.
Andrew talks a lot of sense, but he seems as short-sighted about the illegal immigrants at the southern border as do most Republicans. Shutting them out rather than investigating root causes merely kicks the can down the road.
And that can may be a helluva lot larger in a couple of decades.
I’d noticed the news report that obscure Congressman Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), age 76, had broken a hip in a fall, gone through surgery, and then been moved to hospice; it turns out he also had ALS. As I grow older, 76 doesn’t seem as old as it once did, so I felt sad for the man and his family on a personal level. A week or two later came the notice of his passing, which of course will bring up questions about his successor. But there was little notice about his qualities.
Thankfully, Andrew Sullivan, who is a conservative who has little use for the Republicans in general, celebrates the man’s life in the third part of his weekly tri-partite column:
But he also had a conscience and an independent streak, and when it became clear that the Iraq War had been based on phony intelligence, he actually changed his mind. More than that: He took moral responsibility for his vote for the war, and rethought a great deal of his previous views. Ashamed of what he had done — and the lives lost because of the war — he went on to write 12,000 letters to family members of service members killed. “In terms of his skepticism of authority and power in Washington, I think part of his wiring changed,” Congressman Mark Sanford, told the Washington Post. “He started looking at leadership’s claims with a skeptical eye, and that’s led to the independence you now see on a regular basis.”
I wonder how many people, such as my reader and myself, would actually take moral responsibility for a mistake of this magnitude, and how many of us would shrug it off and hide. This is the sort of behavior best termed exemplary, and I’m thrilled to see it in a Republican, a member of the party that houses such politically craven creatures as Ryan, Nunes, and Graham.
He was that very rare creature: a true Republican fiscal conservative. Because of this, he voted against the Trump tax cut, which is even now adding exponentially to $22 trillion in debt. Pressured by Tom DeLay to vote for some of the appropriations bills that bankrupted the country under George W. Bush, because “these are Republican bills now,” as DeLay explained, Jones replied, “Yes, Tom, but you’re spending more than the Democrats did.” For being this kind of constitutional and fiscal conservative, Jones was denied any significant committee roles during his 12 consecutive terms in the Congress as a Republican.
I mentioned measurement in the post title. If you have some concerns about a leftist friend, tell them about the late Rep. Jones. Maybe pull out the significant parts of his column and make them read it. If they celebrate his passing because it’s an opportunity for the Democrats to pick up a seat, well, you may have a political cultist on your hands.
Treat with caution.
Arbitrary picture capriciously selected and inserted here, regardless of your wishes.
While perhaps not quite so punctuated, in terms of idiosyncratic language, as the novel, the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) has great fidelity to its source material, with not quite the emphasis on Tralfamadore and its inhabitants as the novel, but better music. If you’re not familiar with the novel, well, it’s a little hard to describe the plot. I could tell you that it follows Billy Pilgrim’s consciousness as he swoops from World War II prisoner to a married, then widowed, optometrist in Ilium, NY, to prisoner of the alien Tralfamadoreans on their planet of Tralfamadore, where he’s to mate with Playboy Playmate Montana Wildhack, for their edification, or perhaps to satisfy their prurient interest. This is linear, yet non-linear: it is what Billy is experiencing in linear fashion, and we’re just along for the ride.
But it all doesn’t really make any sense, and that may be the point of it. In a way, the story is fractal in essence. The Tralfamadoreans, in concordance with (allegedly) thirty or so other worlds, endorse a philosophy which has discarded the idea of causality in favor of viewing the Universe as a random collage of incidents. They embrace the idea that the bad incidents should be ignored, while the good ones enjoyed. Despite their command of time & space, they lay helpless in the hands of the Universe, well-aware that it’ll all end because of a panicked mis-decision by a Tralfamadorean space pilot working with an experimental power source. They’ve viewed the moment a hundred times, and disclaim any ability to actually prevent the outcome: their doom is inevitable.
In Billy’s life as an optometrist in post-World War II Ilium, he has the illusion of control, but when he’s lying in a coma following a plane crash, his wife manages to kill herself through incompetent, panicked driving, and Billy can find no way to stop the incident. His son’s misbehavior, his daughter’s poor selection of husband, and his wife’s chronic obesity, which she eternally proclaims she’ll beat for the husband she loves so much, all come together to emphasize his helplessness in controlling the circumstances of his life. Much like the Tralfamadoreans, he knows how it’ll all end – and can do nothing more than be a puppet to that ending.
And in his life in World War II, he’s a mere leaf, blown hither and yon. Men fall dead from gunfire, disease and malnutrition, yet he persists, clothed in ludicrous garments meant to humiliate him. He’s exposed to the madness of his own countrymen, and his best friend, a schoolteacher, is labeled a looter in the wreckage of Dresden, and shot with little notice. He cannot take control of his own circumstances, and only survives the same way a feather survives, so sensitive to the forces that would destroy it that they cannot catch up with him – but through no will of his own.
Perhaps this is the message: the horrors, the incomprehensible hatred exhibited in World War II, all that mad energy is necessary to rip the bandage off the raw chaos of the Universe, letting us glimpse for a few horrid moments the madness lying just below our veils of illusion that allow us to believe there is such things as Justice, fair play, or any of a host of other concepts which, in reality, are at best vestigial.
There’s little of pleasure in Slaughterhouse-Five, but perhaps a lot to meditate upon.
The rattling of the machine coming apart in the wake of Brexit may be having some positive effects on Brit politics. Consider this report in WaPo of defections from Labour Party ranks, the current opposition and home to Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who wants to return to the 1950s, when government controlled much of industry, and a man accused of anti-Semitism – an accusation of which I have no idea as to its truthfulness.
At a morning news conference, Parliament member Luciana Berger said she had become “embarrassed” and “ashamed” of the Labour Party, which she said was “institutionally anti-Semitic.” Berger, who is Jewish, added she was leaving behind a culture of “bullying, bigotry and intimidation.”
Chris Leslie, another breakaway lawmaker, said the party had been “hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left” and that Labour’s “betrayal on Europe was visible for all to see.” While many Labour party members support a second referendum on whether to leave the European Union, Corbyn has been cold to the idea of a do-over. …
“The pursuit of policies that would threaten our national security through hostility to NATO. The refusal to act when needed to help those when facing humanitarian distress, preferring to believe states hostile to our country rather than believing our police and security services — these are all rooted in the Labour leadership’s obsession with a narrow, outdated ideology,” Leslie said.
Corbyn speaks of the gains his party made in the 2017 elections, but this does not absolve the party of the sins of which it’s accused – and past performance is no guarantee of future gains. He apparently dislikes the idea of a do-over referendum, now that the monster is at the shore and ready to wreak disaster on the nation. He may not like the idea of foreign constraints on his activities if he were to gain the position of Prime Minister. But, perhaps most importantly, is how the article ends:
Vince Cable, leader of the Liberal Democrats, a small center-left party, told the BBC he was keen to work with the new group, which he speculated could grow in coming days.
“We shouldn’t forget the Conservatives are also very badly split and there are quite a few of them who no longer see a future in the Conservative Party,” Cable said. “So I think this is the beginning, rather than the end, of something rather important.”
Have the old majority parties crystalized so much that it’s time for them to shatter? This is not unusual, as the power-brokers, often light on principle but heavy on self-involvement, maneuver themselves into a position in which none can resolve problems, and they simply entrench blindly, never envisioning that the way to break the impasse is through destruction of the machine, rather than adjustment. They never imagine a mass movement away from what they purvey.
Keep an eye on those Brits. The breakup of a major political party across the pond may presage similar incidents in our neck of the woods.
Another dry bit of humor? Or the big reveal?
The House of the Arrow (1953) falls into the category of dry little whodunit. Madame Harlowe, a sickly invalid, has passed away suddenly in the night. The adopted daughter, Betty, stands to inherit the fortune, which galls Madame Barlow’s brother-in-law, Boris. He eventually accuses Betty of murder, thinking he’s seen her paying a visit to the shop of a herbalist suspected of dispensing killer drugs. But when the French detective Hanaud orders an exhumation and examination of the corpse, nothing to support the contention is found.
But Hanaud is not done, because anonymous letters that know more than they should have been circulating. Why is there a necklace missing from a secured room? Why are the ashes in the secured room’s fireplace still warm, despite three days respite? Why is Betty’s friend Anne trying to escape France?
For those who like intellectual puzzles, there are some interesting twists and turns, and there may or may not be enough clues to discover the identity of the murderer, and how they did it. But, while plausible, there’s a certainly failure to connect with these characters. Hanaud may have a playful personality, but he still feels like a stereotype (and he looks like Clouseau’s boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, which is dismaying given the comedic incompetence of Clouseau and Dreyfus of the Pink Panther series). The various suspects are not given enough material to become real people, nor are the supporting characters.
So it’s mildly intriguing, but even as I type this they are fading away before my eyes. It makes for disappointing drama.
The final appeal of Domineque Ray, convicted murder, was rejected by SCOTUS a couple of weeks ago, and he was put to death. He did not dispute the conviction nor the penalty, however, but who might be present. The State of Alabama’s rules of execution permitted only a cleric employed by the State on the “execution team” to be present in the room at the time of execution, and the only such cleric was Christian. Ray desired an imam of his Muslim faith to be present, but was denied by SCOTUS in a 5-4 decision.
Justice Kagan, joined by the balance of the liberal wing of the Court, dissented, arguing that this is a clear violation of the Establishment Clause, and the majority’s brief, unsigned argument that the appeal was filed too late is, well, bullshit. Read it in full here (starts near bottom of first page). David French of the conservative National Review concurred in the dissent as well.
Ian Millhiser at liberal ThinkProgress:
… it’s still hard to read Ray as anything other than a failure of empathy. The Roberts Court tossed out longstanding doctrine to rule in favor of Christian conservatives who object to many forms of birth control in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. And it seems destined to hold that conservative Christians may defy many anti-discrimination laws. It’s hard to imagine that they would have ruled the same way in Ray if the facts of the case were reversed.
If a Christian inmate were told that he could only have a spiritual adviser of a different faith present during his execution, the court’s Christians would have almost certainly been livid.
Nor is Ray an isolated case. To the contrary, the court’s “religious liberty” cases stand as a monument to its conservative members’ lack of empathy. When religious liberty was primarily invoked by minority religions seeking equal footing an a majority Christian society, the court’s conservatives often looked upon these claims with great skepticism. Yet, when religious liberty claims are brought by the Christian right, the court’s right flank views those claims as transcendent.
I’m not sure I’d call it empathy. It’s hard for anyone to step out of their cultural shoes and truly be dispassionate, and perhaps the conservative justices just couldn’t do it, unless you take the argument that the appeal was too late seriously – which their colleagues did not.
Will Baude at conservative The Volokh Conspiracy is also uncertain as to whether or not the suggestion that the appeal was filed too late was true or a fallacious pretext:
But there is another peculiarity. The district court, who is usually the court in charge of making factual determinations, had concluded that the claim was indeed brought too late, that:
Since Ray has been confined at Holman for more than nineteen years, he reasonably should have learned that the State allows only members of the execution team, which previously has included a state-employed chaplain, inside the execution chamber. Indeed, it was the state-employed chaplain who facilitated Ray’s involvement with an imam for spiritual advice regarding his impending execution.
The Eleventh Circuit second-guessed this determination, concluding that the state had “offer[ed] only the barest assertions about common knowledge in the prison.” But still, it was the district court who held a hearing and who usually makes credibility judgments and factual determinations.
So it seems to me that the execution really hangs on a set of factual judgments and procedural rules — should Mr. Ray have known (or did he know) about the prison’s policies earlier, and what is the Supreme Court supposed to do when the district court and a court of appeals disagree on a factual question like that in a case of thin evidence? I am not sure what the legal answer is, and that makes it an easy case in which to indulge one’s own priors about who are the bad actors here. And that is troubling whoever is right.
(Finally, speaking as a departmentalist, not every responsibility should end with the federal courts. Even if the Supreme Court forbids intervention, I think the state ought to try harder to accommodate the religious needs of the condemned.)
His last observation strikes me as a little blindered. If the state is descending into theocracy, wouldn’t this “rule” that only members of an execution team can be present, and then only employed a Christian cleric, be congruent with the hypothesis at hand?
Let’s simply contemplate a Christian cleric as part of an execution team. We can more or less assume that Jesus would spit on such a cleric, no matter how much he averred that he was there to comfort the condemned, and I say that as an agnostic. This only works in a nascent theocracy which is using the moral authority of the predominant religion in its bid for legitimacy.
Ed Whelan at the conservative National Review notes how this could affect officially out-of-favor Christian sects:
It is very lamentable that the prison did not alter this policy when Ray objected to its obvious religious favoritism. (The policy disfavors not only Muslims and other non-Christians but also, given the internal conflicts within Christianity, many Christians. I wonder how a Catholic inmate’s request that the chaplain pray a Hail Mary with him would be received.) The simplest way to abolish the favoritism would have been to bar the chaplain from the execution chamber. Had the prison made that policy change, the execution of Ray could have proceeded exactly as it did, but not under an Establishment Clause cloud.
Which is the pendulum effect: who’s in power today? The English monarchy, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, exhibited this phenomenon to horrifying effect, as I discuss in my Pillars essay. Whelan also notes the imam viewed the execution from a room with a glass window, meaning Ray could see the imam. He tends to believe too much is read into the decision, especially as he believes SCOTUS has given Islamic appeals several victories of late – a statement of great irrelevancy in that we don’t know if those were open and shut cases, which do make it to the Court from time to time (as I interpret 9-0 decisions). To illustrate through contrariness, suppose a case in which the appellants appealed through the system to SCOTUS for a case which they claim should be resolved through the application of sharia law. When SCOTUS rules against the appellants, do we shake our heads at the injustice of it all and mark one against them? No, the case is prima facie ridiculous. Whelan’s assertion would require, as a disproving assertion, that some SCOTUS decisions result in breaches of the law while enforcing anti-Muslim discrimination. That is unnecessary. Let us ask this question: If a Catholic was told that only a Protestant cleric could attend his execution, and he appealed this rule 5 days after being so informed, would a hypothetical SCOTUS with Catholics in the majority reject the appeal? I find it difficult to take Whelan’s appeal to statistics seriously.
Matt Ford tries to inject another argument into the mix in The New Republic:
The near-unanimity of this criticism is remarkable by the Supreme Court’s recent standards. By letting Alabama execute Ray without equal access to the clergy of his faith, its conservative justices highlighted two disturbing trends in its recent decisions: the unequal treatment of Muslims who have faced religious discrimination, and an unyielding desire to preserve the death penalty. …
Perhaps the main reason the conservative justices rejected Ray’s claims was because they oppose to what Samuel Alito once called the “guerrilla war against the death penalty.” The justices have criticized the abolition movement in the past. In 2015, they upheld Oklahoma’s use of a sedative tied to two botched executions after complaining at oral arguments that the state only used it because an activist-led embargo had cut off other supplies. The majority opinion summarized itself with circular reasoning: “Because capital punishment is constitutional, there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.”
The connection of this case to the abolition movement is tenuous at best, but illustrates how someone can see a broken down jalopy missing a wheel as a Formula-One racer. This is pure speculation, meaning Ford has a political agenda he’s trying to inject into what is properly a debate about the Establishment Clause.
For my part, it’s clear that, subject to security considerations, an imam should have been present, or all clerics should be banned. The law should be blind to the theology of the cleric, but not to any fell intentions. It doesn’t require a great long argument, to and fro, to be convincing. It’s simply disappointing that the conservatives cannot see this and hide behind an argument rejected by their colleagues.
The modern way to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage.
It’s a tidy little superstition vs science horror show. Die, Monster, Die! (1965) is somewhat more sober than its frenetic title. We’re introduced to Stephen Reinhart as he arrives at a small English village in which none of the locals will talk to him or give him directions, once he mentions the Whitley place. This is a little tough on him, as he’s here to ask for the hand of Susan Whitley in marriage, a woman he met and courted in college, where he trained in, ah, science.
The captive audience, don’t you know.
Her father, Nahum, is the lord of the local Whitley manor, and Stephen eventually finds his way to the rundown old estate. Here he finds unhappiness: Mother Letitia won’t leave her bed, but entreats Stephen to take Susan away; father Nahum is confined to a wheelchair and wishes to send Stephen away; servant Merwyn appears to be on his last legs. And where is servant Helga? Is she hiding in the mysteriously glowing greenhouse, locked.
Slowly, all is revealed: that green stone they find buried at the roots of the absurdly large tomato plants is radioactive. Merwyn disappears in a puff of smoke, as it were, while neither Letitia nor Helga meet happy endings. And when Nahum finally faces the truth, that his belief that the stone that fell from the heavens wasn’t the means sent by God to restore the fortunes of the proud Whitley family, but simply a poisonous curse that could have been voided by science, he screws up his own attempt at destroying the stone.
And then his monstrous hunt is on.
Not as horrific as one might wish, and the science is no more than a gesture. But Boris Karloff always brings a certain ambiance to a movie, and the plot is admirably parsimonious with information. It’s a fairly mundane addition to the genre, but kept us mildly, tiredly intrigued from the beginning.
Clade:
A clade (from Ancient Greek: κλάδος, klados, “branch”), also known as monophyletic group, is a group of organisms that consists of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants, and represents a single “branch” on the “tree of life“.[1]
The common ancestor may be an individual, a population, a species (extinct or extant), and so on right up to a kingdom and further. Clades are nested, one in another, as each branch in turn splits into smaller branches. These splits reflect evolutionary history as populations diverged and evolved independently. Clades are termed monophyletic (Greek: “one clan”) groups. [Wikipedia]
I’ve been hearing about clades for decades, but don’t really know much about the concept. Noted in “Human or hybrid? The big debate over what a species really is,” (sheesh, ending a sentence with “is” seems ugly), Colin Barras, NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall)
Perhaps, instead, the ultimate solution is simply to remove the word “species” from the scientific lexicon. In 2018, [Brent] Mishler [at UCB] and John Wilkins at the University of Melbourne, Australia, set out this argument. They suggested that we should focus on another division of life, the “clade”, a group sharing a common ancestor and so comprising a separate twig on the tree of life. They say we could classify organisms as the Smallest Named and Registered Clade, or SNaRC, rather than as species. So, for example, Neanderthals, Denisovans and living humans would be three distinct SNaRCs. There is nothing intrinsically special about SNaRCs, according to Mishler: they might interbreed or not, and the groups that fit the classification would vary across the tree of life, forcing us to accept that there is no common currency. By abandoning “species” and turning to “SNaRCs”, he argues, biologists would have a blank slate for thinking about biodiversity.
Which leads one to wonder, into just which SNaRC does a snark belong?
And just because it caught me by surprise, in the same article is this:
In the past century, scientists have redefined what a species is time and again, heaping confusion upon confusion (see “Parsing nature”). [Frank Zachos at the Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria] identifies no fewer than 32 competing definitions in his 2016 book on the subject, Species Concepts in Biology, and notes that two more have been added since then.
32?! No, 34!? Sometimes Nature doesn’t cooperate with our categorization schemes.
Fatberg:
THE fatbergs are coming. These huge lumps of cooking oil and wet wipes lurk beneath UK streets, threatening to block sewers and put everyone off their lunch.
And they really are huge. In 2017, a 250-metre-long, 130-tonne monstrosity was found under Whitechapel in east London – a piece of it still resides at the Museum of London. Last year, another rivalling it in size was found south of the river Thames and later analysed on a TV programme called Fatberg Autopsy, while in December, a whopping 800 tonnes of fat were removed from sewers in Cardiff. Even a relatively modest 64-metre blockage in Sidmouth, Devon, made national headlines last month. So is this a new problem, or do Brits just have a new-found love of talking about it? [“All you want to know about fatbergs but are too disgusted to ask,” Kelly Oakes, NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall)]
The romantic interest of the heroic astronaut: the lady with microscopes in her eyes.
Perhaps a bit too earnest, Mutiny in Outer Space (1965) is a chronicle of the discovery of the first hostile pathogen in space – a fungus carried on specimens of ice retrieved from the Moon. It grows rapidly once exposed to the warm atmosphere of a human space station, and soon the crew is fighting for its collective life against a … hairy growth. Throw in a romance, a space station commander afflicted with the “space raptures” which has driven him into the arms of paranoia (rather than Lt. Connie), and who therefore believes the crew of space station is plotting against him, and there’s sort of half a plot here. The special effects are a disaster, but while the science is sometimes dubious, at least it’s not a complete joke.
But outer space horror requires more bang to the buck, and while the space raptures was a nice go, it’s a little abrupt to really work. Think of Alien (1979). The initial horror is the idea of little monster spawn insinuating themselves down your trachea and bursting forth from chest, right? Yet, what really put Alien over the top was the discovery that the owners of the ship, the Company, deliberately sent the crew into danger purely in the pursuit of a bioweapon which will generate more profit for the Company. In fact, the science officer, Ash, is revealed to be a cyborg, controlled by the Company rather than by the crew, and tasked with ensuring a specimen Alien makes it back to the Company labs.
In short, the crew has been abandoned by the Company, leaving them in a desperate situation in which most do not survive. The physical threat is shocking on its own, but the horror comes at the realization that mere profit has motivated the Company to abandon them. And that throws the humanity of the Company itself into question.
We don’t see that in Mutiny In Outer Space. Ground control does all it can to help, ultimately saving the day, but it means that the story is not as horrifying as one might hope. In fact, it turns into a “solve the problem” story, which is not as interesting as other forms of outer space horror have proven to be.
But that’s not to say it’s completely boring. The story has a few moments, and even throws in some cute wordplay. But it’s more of a dated curiosity than anything else.
We had the pleasure today of taking in the 2019 Shen Yun performance at the Ordway in St. Paul.
Full of color, it consists mostly of stories told through dance and music, with two solo singing performances. Full of color, choreography, and Chinese tunes in traditional modes, it also contains more than a bit of Falun Dafa, and some fairly pointed commentary on the current rulers of China.
We had a good time; my Arts Editor was particularly fascinated with the costumes. On top of all that, we were interviewed during intermission by a representative of Epoch Times, which let my Arts Editor gush about the beautiful clothing designs and color choices.
A super Valentine’s Day treat, albeit a day late!
For those readers who loathe Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), they should probably bury their heads in the sand for the next few months, because, with her sweet smile and mastery of American politics, she’s about to rain hellfire down on the Republican Party in the wake of this morning’s declaration of a National Emergency by President Trump. I’ll let Gary Sargent explain:
Republicans have good reason to be deeply nervous. Here’s why: According to one of the country’s leading experts on national emergencies, it appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can trigger a process that could require the GOP-controlled Senate to hold a vote on such a declaration by Trump — which would put Senate Republicans in a horrible political position.
Trump reiterated his threat to declare a national emergency in an interview with CBS News that aired over the weekend. “I don’t take anything off the table,” Trump said, adding in a typically mangled construction that he still retains the “alternative” of “national emergency.”
But Pelosi has recourse against such a declaration — and if she exercises it, Senate Republicans may have to vote on where they stand on it. …
But Pelosi has a much more immediate way to challenge Trump’s declaration. Under the National Emergencies Act, or NEA, both chambers of Congress can pass a resolution terminating any presidentially declared national emergency.
Elizabeth Goitein, who has researched this topic extensively for the Brennan Center for Justice, tells me that if Pelosi exercises this option, it will ultimately require the Senate to vote on it in some form as well. The NEA stipulates that if one chamber (Pelosi’s House) passes such a resolution, which it easily could do, the other (McConnell’s Senate) must act on it within a very short time period — forcing GOP senators to choose whether to support it.
Alternatively, Goitein notes, the Senate could vote not to consider that resolution or change its rules to avoid such a vote. But in those scenarios, the Senate would, in effect, be voting to greenlightTrump’s emergency declaration.
And then there’s the little problem of the future, as the Speaker herself notes:
“I know the Republicans have some unease about it, no matter what they say,” Pelosi told reporters at the Capitol. “Because if the president can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency, an illusion that he wants to convey, just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people.”
Even many Republicans don’t want to see a national emergency declaration, according to polls – although a majority are OK with it.
So it’s time to start popping the popcorn and buying the milk duds. President Trump keeps tapping in the wedges in his efforts to divide the Republican Party satisfy his base, and each of these taps is driving more moderate Republicans away, and disaffecting more and more independents. Although, to be fair, the latest Gallup Poll is disconcerting.
But that is the past. Here comes the future.
Via NewScientist (26 January 2019, paywall) I learn something new about the pharma patent wars:
… when a pharmaceutical firm’s patent on a drug expires, it may still hold patents on many of the chemical steps to create it. In other words, rivals that are able to copy a drug after its patent ends often have to pay the original firm to use the still-patented recipes.
So why haven’t the patents on the steps expired? But this is part of a larger article on how this profit-strategy is being obviated by the generics manufacturers:
[AI program Chematica] learned hundreds of patented reactions then devised recipes that avoid them (Chem, doi.org/czs4). “Pharmaceutical companies spend billions making sure there are no loopholes and people think these patents are bulletproof,” says Grzybowski. “But actually it seems quite possible to get around them.”
Chematica caused an earlier stir in 2012, when Grzybowski and his colleagues used it to find ways of making the nerve agent VX from readily available chemicals including water, table salt and sulphuric acid. This earned him an invitation to the Pentagon, he says, where he called for better regulation of chemicals that can be used to make weapons.
So having written the post title before finishing the article, I find out that War is even more apropos than I intended, which makes me a little sad. Nor is it an idle question to ask when a terrorist group will gain access to Chematica or similar program, for after all Chematica isn’t going to have the moral agency to tell them No. So long as Chematica lacks anything resembling moral agency, it’s just like any other tool – it can be used for good or for evil.
But, from a computer science perspective, I can’t help but wonder if this is a brute force approach, or if there’s some real ML (Machine Learning) application going on here, and, if so, what rules it learned on its own. (I’m a zero when it comes to chemistry, though.)
Pretextual:
done or used as a pretext (= a pretended reason for doing something that is used to hide the real reason):
The reasons given by defense counsel were not genuine and were pretextual.
The explanation for her firing was pretextual and influenced instead by a retaliatory motive. [Cambridge English Dictionary]
Noted in “Obama warned us about the Supreme Court we have right now,” Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress:
This reasoning is highly dubious. As Kagan noted, the prison did not deny Ray’s request to be accompanied by his imam until January 23 — so Ray filed his lawsuit just five days after he was officially denied the relief he sought. The brief explanation the Republican majority offered for its decision is so wildly out of touch with the facts of the case that, as I wrote shortly after the decision came down, “it appears very likely that the majority’s claim that Ray waited too long to file his suit is pretextual.”
