Category Archives: Uncategorized

With regard to the best response to the Khashoggi now-admitted murder, I advocated the extreme response of demanding those responsible, and those who conspired to do so, be delivered to Turkey for trial. I have my doubts that’ll happen.

However, I forgot one important point. When it comes to Princes eligible for the throne, those of us in the West are not accustomed to a large selection. Two, maybe three princes or even princesses, but inevitably, like bad produce, one will have worms be crazy as a loon. But when it comes to the House of Saud?

The family is estimated to comprise 15,000 members, but the majority of the power and wealth is possessed by a group of about 2,000 of them. [Wikipedia]

Not all of those 2,000 will be eligible for the throne, but a sizable chunk will be. And while I know there are rules of succession and a council of Saudi princes who are supposed to select successors, it’s a monarchy. The King gets what he wants.

And if he has a lot of princes to choose from and a sense of responsibility towards the future of his kingdom, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), thought to be responsible for this plot, may find his head on the chopping block, metaphorically or literally, even though MBS is the son of King Salman. There are lots of potential successors, and King Salman may regard MBS’ performance as Crown Prince as an audition of sorts. And, along with the failing war in Yemen, this may be viewed as a failure.

My advice to President Trump? Go all in on demanding justice. You are, after all, in a role where you are to advocate for justice, not to protect economic advantage at all costs. There are reports that MBS is sacrificing aides and allies to divert responsibility, so he may be wobbly, giving the King the option of sacrificing the Crown Prince.

That would leave both the King and Trump smelling damn good, and that’s what Trump desperately needs – a good point with the independents with elections coming up.

But we know he won’t. He’s cunning, but not bright.

And that’s my thought of the day.

In response to my FB post announcing that I have already voted in the midterm elections, a reader writes:

I refuse! Earlier voters in my county found that, when they went to enter their ballot in the machine, it didn’t work. “The State sent us the wrong software.” Riiiiiiight….I’m waiting til November. So they can also tell me I need a photo ID. Please. Tell me.

The process for Minnesota early voting was simple: fill out an application, show them a driver’s license or other form of identification. They give you a ballot, you fill it out with your choices, put it in an envelope, put that in another envelope, and dump it in the box. The counting will occur at a later date.

The only computer involved was the one verifying we live in Ramsey County.

All that said, it’s regrettable that our country has polarized so much that what might otherwise be a simple, honest mistake has been transformed into a grim suspicion of incompetence or malevolence. Examples include my own writing with regard to Secretary of State Kris Kobach of Kansas and SoS Brian Kemp of Florida, candidates for governor of their respective states.

If & when the Republican Party is burned to the ground, metaphorically speaking, and rebuilt, hopefully honor will be part of the foundation of that new Party, along with a commitment to truth.

A few days ago Katrina vanden Heuvel asked an important question in WaPo:

Why isn’t the media covering climate change all day, every day?

She ventured a few of the standard answers:

So why isn’t the media covering this story all day, every day? There are several reasons, including the collapse of local daily newspapers and excessive conglomeratization. But the biggest reason right now is distraction. As [Margaret] Sullivan put it, “There is just so much happening at every moment, so many trees to distract from the burning forest behind them.”

And the Internet is the primary contributor to this. As the cost of disseminating information, true or false, has fallen, we’ve been inundated by the stuff. It’s like the locusts, not only in numbers, but even in their operationality. In case my reader didn’t know, locust swarms are about as you’d expect from the phrase, but the reason that they move en masse isn’t that they’re looking for something to eat so much as they’re trying to avoid being eaten. One locust will happily make a meal out of another, given the opportunity, so they’re all on the march in order to stay out of the maw of their cousin. Similarly, news comes fast and furious because each is pushing the others out of the way to get your attention.

Worse yet, the outlets have become ubiquitous. I don’t use “outlet” in the traditional meaning, such as a newspaper office, but, to select a concrete example, a device. It used to be that all the news was word of mouth; then came the printing presses, which permitted the creation of newspapers, dedicated, ideally, to the collection and dissemination of local news. The discovery and mastery of radio waves permitted their use as a new medium, and that led to its cousin, TV stations and televisions.

Now it’s the Internet age, and that 50 pound device sitting in the corner of the living room is now a 5 ounce smartphone in your pocket. Turn it on and it will ceaselessly blare “news” at you until your eyes cross and you get the jitters.

Literally. Metaphorically, literally.

As Andrew Sullivan has noted on several occasions, this may be the greatest damage the Web has inflicted on the United States, the near costlessness of information transfer cheapening and even blurring the information until we can’t truly evaluate whether information is true or false, trivial or monumental.

Speaking of, back to climate change. Heuvel (and her colleague Margaret Sullivan) want climate change to be on the front page of WaPo every day, but …

The corporate media seems to prefer distractions and even capitalizes on them. At least, that’s what veteran journalist Ted Koppel suggested in a recent conversation with CNN’s Brian Stelter. “CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump,” Koppel said.

Stelter rebutted later in a tweet that the cable news business is “more complex than he makes it seem.”

Is it? In corporate media, ratings are prized above all else. So, the president gets his reality show because scandal plays better — and pays better — than substance. Then-CBS chief executive Les Moonves admitted as much in 2016 when he said that Trump’s political ascent was “damn good for CBS” and bragged that “the money’s rolling in.”

Which is a fantastic affirmation of two things. First, it marks President Trump’s instincts concerning the news media and his election leading to great profits as being top-tier^[1], although some may argue this was obvious.

Second, it’s an affirmation of an observation and argument I’ve been developing and making for years, namely the transfer of processes and goals from one societal sector to another results in sub-optimal results, see here for more details. In this case, Heuvel and Sullivan would argue that the news media is not giving sufficient coverage to literally the most important topic in the world, climate change, while Moonves provides the description of the private sector process which motivates coverage selection and results in a sub-optimal selection.

Enough chest-thumping.

However, it would not be intellectually thorough to stop here. In this specific situation, it’s worth noting that the participation of the concerned individual common citizen or corporate entity, uncoordinated and possibly burdened with information of dubious quality, will be hesitant and possibly wrong. We’re facing a situation that, despite the Pentagon labeling it as a national security threat,

… has been described as a “catastrophe in slow motion.”

That is, it’s subtle, difficult to understand, and is larger than us.

That means we need the Federal government involved in a leadership position. EPA scientists have already sounded the alarm, in concert with scientists world-wide, fulfilling a critical function of government in detecting future disasters. But the balance of our government, with the exception of our vigilant military, is shirking its duty with respect to climate change. Elected officials run about with their hands over their eyes, shrieking No! No! No!

And this is where the dominance of the Trump Administration in the news cycle comes in. Through the constant drumbeat of negative results from the Administration and a GOP-dominated Congress across a spectrum of subjects, we’re becoming more and more aware of the necessity of replacing them. Clearly, the GOP has already rejected the science behind climate change, and so the paradigm behind putting climate change on the front page of all major newspapers every day is invalid – the responsible leaders^[2] have already demonstrated their ideological loyalty to the “talking point” that climate change is a hoax.

The dominance of brand-destroying news from the White House and Congress should, in an ideal world dominated by honest news services, result in the expulsion from their positions and disgrace of every elected member of government who engaged in these activities which has enabled a national security threat. Today? That’s where the rubber will hit the road. Will the conservative news outlets, convinced that climate change is nothing more than a liberal hoax, win their propaganda war and retain enough of Congress to continue to forestall action on this very difficult and existential problem? Or will their base, which is just beginning to be chastened by physical evidence of climate change that smacked them in the nose, begin discarding those news sources that continue their allegiance to ideology over reality, and return to questions of news quality as their standard for selecting news sources, rather than the intellectually inferior method of merely finding a source that suits their predilections?

Or, in other words, if your news source isn’t making you uncomfortable, maybe you need a different news source.

So, in answer to Heuvel and Sullivan, the dominance of news other than that covering climate change isn’t an unalloyed negative; it is, instead, a necessity if we are to address climate change effectively. It may feel like the old observation concerning democracy,

The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.^[3]

It’ll leave us more badly damaged than if we had acted wisely in the first place, but if we measure up to being the best Americans we can, every one of us, then we’ll find a way to get through this.

¹ I may consider Trump’s Presidency as one of the greatest incompetencies and calamities to ever grace the United States, but underestimating the true competencies, if any, of an opponent or adversary is the mark of the amateur buffoon.

² That is, those leaders who will be held responsible when all is said and done.

³ Legend gives credit to the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but apparently this is not true.

Antefix:

From the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal Volume 24 / 1996

A painted terracotta antefix, a covering at the end of a building for the joints of a tiled roof, once decorated the shrine of Mater Matuta [in the ancient Italian town of Satricum]. [Noted in “All Roads, Eventually, Lead to Rome,” Roger Atwood, Archaeology (November/December 2018, print only).]

The provided image is not from the magazine article, but appears to be the same artifact as pictured in the magazine.

When glaciers are old hat.

You just know that someone, somewhere, will try to turn this into the world’s biggest musical instrument.

Gotta wonder about this plan:

Southwestern China’s city of Chengdu plans to launch its illumination satellite, also known as the “artificial moon”, in 2020, according to Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co., Ltd.

Wu made the remarks at a national mass innovation and entrepreneurship activity held in Chengdu on Oct. 10.

The illumination satellite is designed to complement the moon at night. Wu introduced that the brightness of the “artificial moon” is eight times that of the real moon, and will be bright enough to replace street lights. [People’s Daily]

First thing that came to mind was to wonder if Chengdu is on the equator, but that’s not really necessary. A geostationary orbit should be possible so that the artificial object appears over the Chengdu at night and disappears over the horizon during the day. It might appear over Korea on its way to and back from the Indian Ocean, if my informal understanding of orbital mechanics is sound.

So it’s possible.

But why would you want to inflict so much more light on the city? People need periods of dark and light, our bodies evolved to expect it. Is Wu planning to force everyone out of the city? Maybe someone needs to show some ego?

It just seems weird.

On Lawfare, Elaine Korzak and Herb Lin are pushing a proposal for the computer industry, or, er, the world:

This article proposes the creation of an international organization modeled after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to provide assistance and relief to vulnerable citizens and enterprises affected by serious cyberattacks. Companies that have signed onto the Tech Accord principles would form the core of the organization, thereby filling an important gap in an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment. In this article, the term “cyber-ICRC” is intended to be suggestive of the role that such an organization might play but not to imply any kind of formal connection to the ICRC. Moreover, we emphasize that the proposal outlined in this article has not been vetted by anyone at the ICRC and is not endorsed by the ICRC in any way.

I’ve been going back and forth on this proposal in my mind. Why not let private industry continue to provide relief services? This is basically a socialization of the costs of cyber-attacks, and the responsible entity can be public or private.

That said, what about a corrupt private entity which provides relief services – for a price – and then engages in malicious attacks? Illegal and unethical, but also a special problem for the victim, as they may not have the technical smarts to detect that sort of activity.

Which suggests that a cloud computing solution may be a way around the problem, as that permits the concentration of qualified technical personnel who can repair and defend the computing system. But since we’re talking corruption, wouldn’t it make financial sense for a cloud computing organization to actually attack non-customers in hopes of chasing them right into their customer list?

Obviously, I got up a little too early this morning.

But corruption could certainly invade the hypothetical Digital Red Cross as well, and while some of the details will differ, as I suspect national governments would be more likely the malicious actors in our little dramas, the results may be the same.

So I’m fairly ambivalent. But I do note an implicit category error, which Korzak and Lin do not address. The ICRC saves lives, and life is an absolute necessity before we can do anything else. Computers and computing? They may seem like necessities.

But they’re not.

Just when you thought we were done with pictures presaging the barren wasteland of winter…

A couple of posts ago I ranted a bit about the GOP bubble mixed with the certainty that God is with them, and how that leads to an ossified Party that may seem strong, but is dangerously inflexible.

It’s rather like a badly infected cut on your finger.

The cure? It doesn’t appear to be reasoned arguments, because reason is no longer a respected part of the Republican Party.

But there are hints that there is a cure, or at least a treatment, and, while it’s not what I should hope for, it’s at least more likely to work than shouting at them.

It’s reality.

The first notable incident of reality deflating at least a few Republican members was the Kansas taxation and budget debacle, as I referenced in the rant, above. The executive summary is that the GOP dropped tax rates like a rock into a pond and expected the resulting tsunami to lift all boats into resultant economic miracle.

They waited around for several years, and while their state Party Leader Sam Brownback remained faithful to the vision, the resulting budget deficits and anemic growth persuaded enough of his cohorts to band together with state legislature Democrats to return tax rates to levels somewhere near which will restore the State’s budget.

Thus did the Holy Tenet of Lowering Taxes Is Always Good take a hit for Kansas Republican Party members.

The second incident, which brings me a sort of tired, just how big a bat will it take to beat some sense into these idiots?, hope is reported in WaPo yesterday, and concerns the recent spate of hurricanes battering my favorite toxic state, North Carolina:

It took a giant laurel oak puncturing her roof during Hurricane Florence last month for Margie White to consider that perhaps there was some truth to all the alarm bells over global warming.

“I always thought climate change was a bunch of nonsense, but now I really do think it is happening,” said White, a 65-year-old Trump supporter, as she and her young grandson watched workers haul away downed trees and other debris lining the streets of her posh seaside neighborhood last week, just as Hurricane Michael made landfall 700 miles away in the Florida Panhandle.

Of course, anecdotes aren’t worth much.

An Elon University survey taken in early October, after Florence hit, showed that 37 percent of Republicans believe global warming is “very likely” to negatively impact North Carolina coastal communities in the next 50 years. That is nearly triple the percentage of Republicans — 13 percent — who felt that way in 2017.

The percentage of Republicans who felt climate change is “not at all likely” to harm the state’s coastal communities dropped by 10 points over the past year —from 41 percent in September 2017 to 31 percent now.

“That suggests to me that there’s a very large minority within the Republican Party who are at least open to the first steps to accepting that climate change is a possibility,” said Jason Husser, a political science professor who directs the Elon poll. “It signals some sort of tipping point.”

Good old-fashioned polling is more interesting, not only because it’s statistical, but because it bypasses the leadership, which is naturally heavily invested in the ideology, or Holy Tenets, and goes right to the base. Furthermore, this contrast with the balance of the Republican base nationwide really drives the point home, doesn’t it?

Nationally, a wide partisan chasm remains, with only 11 percent of Republicans describing climate change as a “very big” problem compared with 72 percent of Democrats, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.

Remember, from years ago, North Carolina Republicans banning the use of climate change theories in formulating State policies, laws, regulations, etc?

Moreover, nearly half of Republicans surveyed said that incorporating findings from climate-change scientists into local government planning is a good idea and three-quarters said real estate development should be restricted along flood-prone areas.

This is the start of a story of painful hope. Hope, because people really can learn and change. Painful, because it’s going to take hurricanes and rising temperatures and possibly a lot of preventable deaths and misery to get their attention. And really painful because so many of these folks want to lazily put it in God’s domain.

Plenty of residents in North Carolina’s southeastern corner still reject the science, attributing changing weather patterns to God and the cycle of nature. A group of college students fishing off a pier on the barrier island of Wrightsville Beach last week called climate change a “load of crap.” A surfer taking advantage of Michael’s turbulent waves dismissed it as “propaganda.” A sunburned construction worker said it’s not worth worrying about because “God takes care of it.”

It doesn’t matter that I’m agnostic, the above attitude is laziness even if I’m a (insert favorite religion here), because we caused this. That’s what anthropocentric means. The scientists may have stopped using Anthropocentric climate change in some of their reports, but it’s the proper terminology for the phenomena they’re measuring and trying to understand. To blame it on a problematic supernatural creature about which nothing is known is simply a symptom of someone giving up on a hard problem.

I suspect a good cultural historian of the United States could point at a number of historical inflection points in which religious fervor swept regions of the United States, only to have it all fade away as reality impolitely intruded. Just think of all the Final Days cults we’ve had to endure, or, if we’re not personally injured by them, laugh at.

So know hope. It’s better than living in constant despair.

While reading conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin’s latest on the Kashoggi tragedy, in particular this part:

Trump told Fox Business Network on Wednesday: “We’re not going to walk away from Saudi Arabia. I don’t want to do that.” Is that because he foolishly built a Middle East policy based on a misreading of Saudi Arabia, or is it because he hates to walk away from Saudi money? In any event, he’s already signaling he doesn’t want to find out if Saudi leaders knew something. (“I hope that the king and the crown prince didn’t know about it. That’s a big factor in my eyes.”) Gosh, if he found out the unvarnished truth, he might have to react appropriately.

It occurred to me – as it did too many other Americans, I’m sure – if we weren’t addicted to oil and all of its products, this murder wouldn’t be such a tense drama for all concerned.

We’d conduct a due investigation, possibly in conjunction with Turkey, and, if as expected the Saudis are found to be responsible, we’d have a sane assessment of the best way to punish them. It might involve sanctions, it might involve demands that those who executed the deed be handed over for trial, and if President Trump was feeling particularly ballsy – which he wouldn’t even in this fantasy scenario – he’d demand those guilty of conspiracy also be  handed over, even if that included Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

Instead, we find ourselves in a bit of a hard place because the Saudis supply a great deal of the oil we, and our allies, consume. Yes, there really are consequences if we try to punish our uneasy ally in the Middle East.

Yet, in my opinion, shirking that duty would have knock-on effects down the line as well. International assassinations would increase. Maybe they’d even knock off actual American citizens of some importance, rather than just American residents of foreign origin. How would we feel about that?

Well, it wouldn’t matter because we’ve already rolled over for the Saudis. At least until Trump is chased out of power. Then we’ll have the unpleasant task of rebuilding our moral position in the international order. Not that it was all the strong after the Bush debacle, but Trump is making it far, far worse.

All that said, I can’t help but notice that this is also a bit of a hit on free trade. One of the results of free trade in which transport is cheap, as it is now, is that nations tend to specialize in what they do well and efficiently, and let other industries fade away as other countries take over in those areas.

In the past, as many of my friend will attest, I’ve advocated for strong trade ties via free trade because I believe the chances of war are lessened when there’s so much to be gained through free trade.

But a situation in which we become dependent on that free trade, a term which may be almost oxymoronic in some ways, places us in unpleasant situations when a strong trade partner indulges in repellent, immoral behaviors – such as murdering journalists residing in other countries.

Free trade certainly has some advantages, but, at the national level, it can also have some distinct disadvantages. Something to keep in mind next time you’re debating free trade – it’s neither an unalloyed good or evil.

When you’re absolutely committed to the premise that your Party and Leader are always right, you often get lead into the realm of surreal intellectual confusion. Consider WaPo’s absurd partisan columnist Marc Thiessen, who I only read when prompted, and his confusion about simple definitions:

Donald Trump may be remembered as the most honest president in modern American history.

Don’t get me wrong, Trump lies all the time. He said that he “enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history” (actually they are the eighth largest) and that “our economy is the strongest it’s ever been in the history of our country” (which may one day be true, but not yet). In part, it’s a New York thing — everything is the biggest and the best.

But when it comes to the real barometer of presidential truthfulness — keeping his promises — Trump is a paragon of honesty. For better or worse, since taking office Trump has done exactly what he promised he would.

There is a clear and easily understood difference between honesty and promises.

The former has to do with the deliberate assertion of facts, true or untrue. It requires a knowing use of deceit, or not; the stringent personality would demand that deliberately presenting an assertion as a true fact, despite knowing your own ignorance of the actual situation, also qualifies as dishonesty. Your mileage may vary.

A promise is an assertion concerning the future. It often concerns an action, sometimes that of the one making the action, sometimes others.

It’s possible to assert that a promise is made with no intention to fulfill it, but a dishonest promise is not in the same category as being honest or lying.

And what’s going on here? Thiessen is striking a blow in defense of his Leader in hopes of convincing voters who value honesty that honesty is promises kept, rather than simply being true assertions concerning the world. He’d like us to forget that candidate Trump claimed we were in the worst crime wave the United States had ever seen, when the honest fact, taken from FBI statistics, was precisely the opposite – our crime stats were, and are, down to nearly historical lows. He’d like us to forget so many allied lies, so many deceits, and so many instances of the lies’ dirty cousin, the taking of credit for others’ work, that major newspapers keep statistics on them, noting them on an incident per day basis.

Think about that. If those statistics could be credibly rebutted, it might be worth dismissing them, but they’re not. I’ve read a few. How many other politicians have made it worth the newspapers expending resources on counting the mendacious utterances of a politician? I can’t think of any, frankly.

And, as a deft bit of dog whistling for the Republicans, he inserted this little blooper:

… he did not pass his signature legislative achievement on the basis of a lie (“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it ”) — which is clearly worse than falsely bragging that your tax cut is the biggest ever.

Yep, Obama made a promise, and then broke it. But is that as bad as out and out menial lying? (Note the category error on Thiessen’s part as well.) Really? Or is it more reasonable to consider Obama’s promise to be in the same class as Trump’s promises – things he’ll damn well try to do, but not all political promises can be kept, because we’re all adults here and know that sometimes someone promises to do something and finds it beyond them.

But, absent evidence that Obama knowingly didn’t plan to fulfill that promise – and I’ve never heard of any such evidence – it’s merely a promise that he advanced but couldn’t fulfill. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made it. Perhaps he should have clarified that as something he’d attempt but couldn’t guarantee. Nuance like that rarely flies well with voters.

But I don’t think it was a lie. I think Thiessen merely wants to cloud the thinking of the voter predisposed to dislike Obama. Clouding the issue is a standard tactic for those pundits with a claim to advance they know to be dubious.

So let’s be entirely clear here. He’s trying to confuse voters who dislike Trump for lying by suggesting that promises kept, or attempted, should really be the currency of honesty, rather than the misleading lies that Trump is told. Is this the reasoning that adults should buy into?

Or should voters become even more suspicious when the defenders of a known liar decide to try to change the meaning of the words involved?

Addition 18 Oct 2018: I’ve noticed quite a few views of this post, but I have no idea how readers are coming upon it. I’d appreciate it if readers could let me know how this particular post came to your attention. There’s a mail link to the right, at the top of the page. – Hue White

Steve Benen confesses to perplexity when it comes to the mid-term election strategy of GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

A week ago, for example, McConnell spoke out against congressional oversight of Donald Trump’s White House, dismissing presidential accountability as “presidential harassment.” Earlier this week, the Kentucky Republican said he hopes to address the deficit he grew by cutting social-insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security.

And yesterday, the Senate GOP leader told Reuters that if his party can hold onto power after next month’s congressional midterm elections, Republicans are likely to try again to repeal the Affordable Care Act …

In a separate interview with Bloomberg News, McConnell also expressed support for a GOP lawsuit that would gut protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions.

It does seem like madness, doesn’t it? But I think you have to remember, or at least assume, that as the Republican Party has fled rightward, it has also fled deeply into the arms of earnest religious absolutists. These are folks who have chosen to believe their religion’s precepts without exception and without notice to the problems they raise.

I am not suggesting that any particular sect’s theology has an opinion on the ACA or social entitlement programs. It’s not nearly that simple.

Rather, the culture of those sects pervade the great majority of the Republican base. The attitude in particular is that God is with us, so we are never wrong. This has infected the Party and now lends its weighty authority to

1. The free market is always right.
2. Taxes are evil.
3. Regulations are evil.
4. Democrats are evil.
5. Big Government is evil.
6. America is great and doesn’t make mistakes. (A bit of a
7. etc

So McConnell is showing his plans as a clarion call, confident they’re based on the Holy Tenets of the Party, and, because of that, the true Americans will flock to the Republican banner.

This is the ossification of a political party, rendering it deeply inflexible, which may sound appealing until we realize that circumstance does change, and that requires changes in response. Just as morality is not the timeless set of inflexible dictates that many might like to believe, so must political parties be willing to change their specific responses to contextual changes, such as war & recession, as well as embrace the simple fact that their tenets just might be wrong. So far, the Republicans have shown only limited awareness, insofar as I can tell, of these facts: when Kansas’ budget deficit became unmanageable, the moderate Republicans overthrew extremist Governor Brownback’s strategy, but the Governor didn’t go down apologizing.

He called for President Trump to replicate his disastrous approach to taxation and budgeting in the Federal budget. Unrepentant, he was. It’s worth noting he has a strong religious background, beginning with an Evangelical church, before moving on to Catholicism.

When God is with you, you’ll scrabble for any interpretation of the results which will show that you, and God, were right. Don’t think so? From the same Kansas City Star article linked to above:

Kansas cut taxes in a move Brownback celebrated as a “real-live experiment.” It was the move that could have cemented the legacy of a man who once ran for president.

The Kansas cuts slashed income tax rates and created an income tax exemption for the owners of limited liability companies and other pass-through businesses.

What followed were revenue shortfalls and budget cuts. School funding became even more difficult. Brownback’s standing among Kansas Republicans deteriorated.

Yet he continued to stand by the tax cuts. He bemoaned the policy’s death when the GOP-dominated Legislature rolled it back in June.

He was still championing his policy on a recent trip to Washington, saying “it actually worked for our target.”

“Our target wasn’t revenue, it was growth,” he said. “And it did that.”

If you’d had the meteoric growth you were expecting, the revenues would have followed. Neither happened. And Kevin Drum has a helpful chart on comparative employment growth in Kansas and its neighbors:

That’s fairly much full & final condemnation.

Corbel:

a support for an arch or similar heavy structure that sticks out of a wall and is usually made of stone or brick [Cambridge Dictionary]

“Sticks out”? Sticks out? Come on, guys. “Protrudes” is far more graceful.

Noted in “Reimagining the Crusades,” Andrew Lawler, Archaeology (print only, November/December 2018):

While conducting research in European archives, [archaeologist Elisabeth Yehuda of Tel Aviv University] found examples of stone houses of similar design in urban Europe also dating to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Though not quite as fort-like as the Crusader structures, they reflected the growing prosperity of artisans and merchants through their sturdy construction and careful attention to detail. She then focused on the decorative corbelled fireplaces in the main room on the first floor of many of the Frankish dwellings.

[All typos mine]

Yet more pics of a frosty Sunday morning.

From Science Direct, which is channeling the Journal of Theoretical Biology, comes some work on theropods of the Mesozoic – or, more precisely, on their feet:

You get a purple cat.

Artist Alexander Reben fed the contents of a few thousand fortune cookies into an artificial intelligence learning algorithm, and then told it to print out philosophical statements. Here’s one of my early favorites.

More here.

Some more from Sunday morning.

Remember Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA), recently indicted on theft of campaign funds? Well, it turns out that he’s really more or less an unprincipled bastard, at least from this corner of the United States. Via NPR:

A Republican congressman who should have waltzed to re-election is now in the fight of his career. Duncan Hunter, who has represented an inland Southern California district for a decade, was indicted in August on charges of using a quarter of a million dollars in campaign funds for personal expenses.

As the race grows tighter, Hunter is attacking his Democratic challenger for his Palestinian heritage. A controversial television ad accuses Ammar Campa-Najjar of trying to “infiltrate” Congress. It says that Campa-Najjar changed his name to hide his family’s connection to terrorism. It points out that his grandfather was part of the deadly attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Campa-Najjar never knew his grandfather, who was killed by Israeli agents 16 years before the candidate was born. This is just one of the commercial’s questionable associations. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave the ad its worst rating: 4 Pinocchios, which it defines as “a whopper.” …

“He changed his name from Ammar Yasser Najjar to Ammar Campa-Najjar,” said Hunter, “so he sounds Hispanic. … That is how hard, by the way, that the radical Muslims are trying to infiltrate the U.S. government.”

Actually, Ammar Campa-Najjar is Christian. And Campa is his Hispanic mother’s family name.

Here’s a commercial giving many of the same claims. Notice the music, which should engender a rapid pulse and System 1 thinking.

Sad times for a Republican Party that wants to believe it holds the moral high ground.

The latest eddy in the cultural wars has been caused by Senator Warren (D-MA). She has claimed there are stories in her family of an American Indian, which led to President Trump nicknaming her Pocahontas, and offering to pay $1 million to a charity of her choice if she took a DNA test and it showed her having an Indian in her heritage.

So she did, and the test came back positive for an Indian heritage. Will President Trump be paying off on his impromptu bet?

[tweet https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1052168909665824769]

Of course not. This is causing a bit of an uproar, but I’ll shun the usual psychological bullshit explanations for his failure to honor his promise, and suggest just one thing:

Mr. Businessman doesn’t have the cash.

Most of Magellan (2017) concentrates on the personality of astronaut Roger Nelson. When the radio telescope at Arecibo detects not one, nor two, but three radio transmissions locations of extra-terrestrial origin on the moons Titan (of Saturn) and Triton (of Neptune), along with the small planet Eris (very roughly out around the same orbit as Pluto), NASA selects Roger Nelson as the best fit as the human component of a probe to investigate these phenomena (sadly, they don’t go into deep detail as to why he’s the best, which would have been interesting for the science geeks out there).

This movie isn’t interested in easy answers. Using stasis to keep Nelson from going stale over the few years it’ll take to make it to the three targets, Nelson must struggle with his ship, the possibly-compromised Artificial Intelligence (AI) who runs the mission while he sleeps, the perky AI pilot of the lander, and, most sadly, his wife, who, despite her own scientific training and participation in Mission Control, has a very hard time losing her husband for a decade.

Nelson is successful in retrieving the artifacts, but, in perhaps the most realistic part of the story, the answers they provide lead to far larger and more important questions, not only of scientific and exo-political nature, but of a personal nature as well. When a fourth radio source comes online, possibly in response to Nelson’s examination of the first three alien transmitters, that source is out in the Oort cloud, the “cloud” of comets which circle the Sun nearly a light-year out. There is no magically quick way for Nelson to reach this target: it’s a 38 year trip with his technology, and Earth has no new technologies to help him.

Nor does the story let him summon that source to him. That leaves him with the simple, disturbing question – will he abandon his wife to pursue one of the most important discoveries ever made, or will he return to Earth?

We just stumbled into this movie and found it quite gripping. Not that there aren’t areas that couldn’t have used more work, but, for a movie which concentrates on just the single character, it’s rather well done. In the same class as The Martian (2015), Magellan may have not been quite so tense, but it asks deeper questions than did The Martian.

It’s not quite recommended, but it’s worth a watch if you’re a science fiction fan. But, if you are, you’ve probably already seen it.

A reader writes concerning the missing journalist Khashoggi:

Why is he a “Saudi journalist?” Do we call Trevor Noah a “South African entertainer” whenever we mention him? Yes, he was a Saudi citizen. But he worked for the WaPo and lived in Virginia, did he not?

I think it gives important context, given that the Saudis have been accused by the Turks of murdering Khashoggi. That he lived in Virginia, I cannot say, but WaPo has certainly claimed him as a columnist; that his fiancee was Turkish and he was in Istanbul adds to the information surrounding him.

And, yes, I’ve heard Noah referred to as a South African comic.

Anyway, I suspect Carrot-faced 45’s male younglings, both blood and non-blood, of giving Saudi Arabia the go ahead to do this.

Could be. Trump claims there’ll be very big trouble if the government of Saudi Arabia is found to be responsible, but who knows what that means? Or if Trump will ever admit that his close ally and now good customer are responsible, given the his endless denials of Russian involvement in our election, despite our intelligence agencies repeating in concert that Yes, they are.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia may possibly be thinking about coming clean, according to CNN:

The Saudis are preparing a report that will acknowledge that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s death was the result of an interrogation that went wrong, one that was intended to lead to his abduction from Turkey, according to two sources.

One source says the report will likely conclude that the operation was carried out without clearance and transparency and that those involved will be held responsible.

One of the sources acknowledged that the report is still being prepared and cautioned that things could change.

And, if the Saudis come clean, this may give Trump the out he probably wants. By admitting fault and punishing the underlings who did this “without clearance,” everyone with skin in the game will be able to nod, say that justice was done, and move on with the important work of money flowing one way and arms flowing the other.

Of course, a real President would demand insight into the entire process, with no scapegoating to protect important personages who may actually be important, such as MBS. Admittedly, such access might be hard to arrange, especially in an authoritarian state such as Saudi Arabia, but it’s really the ideal for which we should strive.

Unfortunately, the siren song of greenbacks cries loudly in the ear of our President, so don’t expect much real punishment out of this. Color me red if MBS is actually extradited to a Turkish court.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the King discreetly dismisses him from his position as Crown Prince in the near future. The King is responsible for finding a good successor, and so far MBS is failing to impress with results. All he seems to have is boundless energy.

From a West Virginia Supreme Court decision (written by a temporary replacement) in which it invalidated the West Virginia Senate from impeaching the remaining members of the West Virginia Supreme Court for overspending:

Our forefathers in establishing this Country, as well as the leaders who established the framework for our State, had the forethought to put a procedure in place to address issues that could arise in the future; in the ensuing years that system has served us well. What our forefathers did not envision is the fact that subsequent leaders would not have the ability or willingness to read, understand, or to follow those guidelines. The problem we have today is that people do not bother to read the rules, or if they read them, they decide the rules do not apply to them.

That sounds familiar.

A reader writes concerning the voting situation in Georgia:

how bout that Georgia voter purging!

It appears to be just one small part of the current state of Republican politics, which is to find there’s virtually no floor to which they won’t stoop. If it were an isolated incident, then I’d shrug and hope it’d get straightened out, but within the context of the national political scene, it’s disappointing that alleged adults would stoop to shit like this. It’d be one thing if voter fraud had any sort of plausibility, but to the best of my knowledge, outside of the concerns of statistician Professor Clarkson, who has never gotten access to the records she wanted^[1], there’s so laughably little voter fraud that the alleged concerns of the Republicans are frivolous. I know the Democrats claim they are really voting suppression tactics by making demands on voters that minority voters are less likely to be able to meet, and so far these claims seem to have some merit – although I’m not sure that’s conclusively proven.

WaPo reports that the voter roll purge can be circumvented by determined voters:

[Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy] Abrams added she is confident that the election will be fair because the 53,000 whose registration applications were flagged will still be able to vote — although they will be at the mercy of “subjective” verification by thousands of precinct poll workers across the state.

“We are creating another set of hurdles for people who simply want to exercise their right to vote,” Abrams told NBC News’s Chuck Todd. “But . . . we have national organizations that are also paying attention [to voter protections], and I think we can make this work.”

I suspect the lawyers are clearing their calendars for November 6 and the days following.

Incidentally, in that same report is a note on Senator Perdue (R-GA), in Atlanta to campaign for the star of this little drama, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, and how he reacted when he ran into someone willing to ask uncomfortable questions on the campus of Georgia Tech:

An attempted conversation between a Georgia Tech student and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) ended abruptly with the lawmaker snatching the student’s cellphone away while he was being asked about possible voter suppression in the state. The senator’s office has said the exchange, part of which was captured on video, was a misunderstanding.

On Saturday, a student member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at Georgia Tech approached Perdue, who was visiting the Atlanta campus to campaign for Brian Kemp. …

That was as far into the question as the student got. Before he could continue, Perdue snatched the phone out of the student’s hands, as evidence shows in a video [omitted].

“No, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that,” the senator can be heard saying in the cellphone recording.

“You stole my property,” the student tells Perdue. “You stole my property.”

“All right, you wanted a picture?” the senator replies.

“Give me my phone back, Senator,” the student repeats.

That, apparently, is how you cover up the attempted theft of someone’s not-inexpensive smartphone. On role reversal, the student would be sitting in a jail cell, but Perdue just walks away free.

But I highlight this to suggest that Senator Perdue may be fully aware of the strategy of Kemp. I’m hoping that if he continues to campaign in Georgia for Kemp, citizen after citizen will continue to raise this question with him.

¹ As I recall, the unsettling patterns were actually in primary data from Republican contests, suggesting certain candidates were being aced out for nominations to statewide offices by their own Party. Not particularly shocking, but of course entirely unethical.