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Too often, systems of morality and/or ethics (which I’ll shorten to ethical systems to save the fingers) are often taken to be semi-arbitrary masses of rules, which are obeyed, or not, without a great deal of thought as to the reasons behind the strictures – and whether or not those reasons are truly timeless, or if they’re actually context-dependent. This is an important, and perhaps underappreciated, aspect of Artificial Intelligence development. I was recently struck by this in an article on the Trolley Problem in NewScientist (27 October 2018, paywall). The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment in which someone is given the choice between who, based on category, is to be killed by a runaway trolley, in order to save others.

This has become interesting for AI investigators as the somewhat silly development of driverless cars careers along, and someone decided to do a world-wide survey:

Overall, people preferred to spare humans over animals and younger over older people, and tried to save the most lives. The characters that people opted to save least were dogs, followed by criminals and then cats (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6).

Edmond Awad at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues think these findings can inform policy-makers and the experts they may rely on as they devise regulations for driverless cars. “This is one way to deliver what the public wants,” he says.

The team found that people in regional clusters made similar decisions. In an Eastern cluster, which included Islamic countries and eastern Asian nations that belong to the Confucianist cultural group, there was less of a preference to spare the young over the old, or to spare those with high status. Decisions to save humans ahead of cats and dogs were less pronounced in a Southern cluster, which included Central and South America, and countries with French influence. The preference there was to spare women and fit people.

Many technology researchers and ethicists told New Scientist they thought the results shouldn’t be used to set policy or design autonomous vehicles because that would simply perpetuate cultural biases that may not reflect moral decisions.

As if there is one universal moral system (and, irrelevantly, it can be applied at highway speeds in crisis conditions). And whose will it be?

Look, ethical systems don’t exist for giggles, but to facilitate societal survival. Generally, we see this as set of rules for inter-personal interactions, wherein we have rules for how we treat each other. However, some rules are not oriented on this basis, but rather on how to value the individual in a crisis situation.

Think of it this way: the potential, skills, and talents of an individual are the principal parts of the value that individual brings to the society. Those first three parts are obviously variable, and while, no doubt, many folks who think simple existence is miraculous are squealing at me now, the Universe has rarely, if ever, put much value on simply existing. And the point of the Trolley Problem exercise is to understand how a society values its citizens (among other, more interesting, questions).

But there’s a fourth variable in my observation, and that’s society. Yes, societies do differ, and are forced to differ, in so many ways, from geography, to natural resources, to the skill set of the average inhabitant, to the fertility of the inhabitants. Most of these are going to have an impact on the society’s ethical system, mostly subtle. Let’s pull out a coarse example.

Suppose Inhabitant A knows how to make bronze, an important part of the armaments necessary to defend this society from the predations of the barbarians on the other side of the mountains. Now let’s put him in the Trolley Problem. He’s gotten his foot stuck in the track, here comes the trolley, and on the other fork of the track is … a bunch of children in similar straits!

Do you sacrifice A or the kids?

Well, I left out some key information: how many other citizens know how to make bronze? Many? Save the kids might be the right answer. But what if only him and maybe his hermit half-brother know how to make bronze, and we’re not sure about the hermit?

Maybe those kids shouldn’t have been playing on the tracks, eh? “A” may be critical to this society’s survival.

If you obsessively attempt to apply your native society’s moral system to that situation and kill the guy with the knowledge of how to make bronze, you may have just doomed that society.

Ethical systems exist to help societies survive, and the context societies exist in can differ. So when I see these ethicists solemnly proclaim that you can’t use that survey to construct the moral system of your AI system, it tells me these ‘experts’ have persistent blinders. I’m not sure these ‘experts’ really even have a clue.

Maybe professional philosophers would be a better choice, although no doubt the ethicists think they are professional philosophers. But from this angle, I don’t see it.

And I shan’t even guess as to how to implement this moral system for the driverless car so it works acceptably well in various societies. Not even a fucking hand-flap.

Those of us who wish to see more science and technology trained folk in Congress should note the upset of the GOP‘s Katie Arrington by 314 Action’s endorsed Democrat Joe Cunningham, as reported by Roll Call:

Democrat Joe Cunningham’s win in South Carolina’s 1st District is a blow to Republicans who thought they’d hold on to the coastal seat even after South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford lost a GOP primary earlier this year.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Cunningham led GOP state Rep. Katie Arrington 51 percent to 49 percent when The Associated Press called the race.

President Donald Trump carried this Charleston-area seat by 11 points in 2016. But there were signs the race was becoming increasingly competitive this fall, with some internal polling pointing to a close contest. Offshore drilling — which Sanford opposed and Arrington said during the primary that she supported — became a central part of the general election contest.

Close readers will note the name Mark Sanford, who I’ve mentioned before as a somewhat more moderate Republican who had the temerity to criticize President Trump. He was upset by Arrington in the primary, who probably thought she’d won herself a job in that initial victory. Roll Call attributes Arrington’s own missteps for her loss:

In a moment of major significance for this race, Arrington said during the primary that she supported Trump’s effort to lift the ban on offshore drilling. She repeatedly attempted to walk back those comments, but it became fodder for Cunningham and his allies. Cunningham picked up the endorsement of several area Republican mayors because of his opposition to offshore drilling.

Cunningham avoided taking money from PACs and still outraised Arrington. He is an “ocean engineer,” which must be the item that attracted 314 Action’s attention, although presently he’s a lawyer. Or perhaps I should say that additionally he’s a lawyer. Having chops in both engineering and the law is no mean set of skills.

And this should be a lesson to all the Trump-clones that not all of the President’s plans, serious or not, will play well with general conservatives. When it becomes clear that some policy will damage them, Republicans are like everyone else – they bleed, too. There are times when self-sacrifice of economic prosperity is necessary for the greater good, but when it’s merely to benefit the fossil fuel industry, then it’s a bit nuts.

The real question is whether these Republicans who revolted also realize that the fossil fuel industry’s output is a menace in terms of climate change – and now that, too, is a menace to their communities.

Another winner from the science and technology sector was in Oklahoma, where surprise Democrat victor Kendra Horn from the space industry upset a long time Republican.

Naturally, everyone and their cousin has an opinion on the recently completed mid-terms. The trick, I think, is to treat it like a traveling email from a conservative friend: read with skepticism. Here’s Ed Rogers in WaPo, who I’ve not read before, but appears to be quite the apologist for Trump:

While Tuesday night was not a complete win for Republicans, there was no blue wave, either. By most measures, Republicans beat the odds of history and nearly everyone’s expectations, while Democrats were left disappointed as the fantasy of Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams and others winning fizzled. Not one new progressive Democrat was successful bursting onto the scene. It will take a few days to process the meaning of this year’s election returns, but the instant analysis is clear: Democrats may have won the House, but Trump won the election.

As I always say, in politics, what is supposed to happen tends to happen. I predicted in August that the Democrats would take the House but that alone was not enough for most Democrats. As much as this year’s midterms offered an obvious opportunity to rebuke President Trump, little of what the arrogant Democrats and members of the mainstream media expected would happen actually did. So much of what they said turned out to be wrong that it will take a while before the significance becomes clear. And if the 2018 midterms prove anything, it is that Trump is standing strong while Democrats and their allies who thought Trump would have been affirmatively rejected are in fact the ones who have themselves been denied.

Rogers has some problems to overcome if he’s going to convince readers of his thesis (Trump good, Obama bad). For example:

• “Democrats have underperformed in comparison with the historical markers and general expectations of a midterm cycle. The president’s party loses 37 seats in the House on average in midterm elections when his approval is below 50 percent — but Democrats aren’t projected to pick up nearly that many seats.” Sounds convincing, doesn’t it? But out of sight is that tricky devil, numbers shorn of context, and the context in this case is a nation that has been excessively gerrymandered, mostly by the Republicans (Maryland exception duly noted). As this has been getting worse and worse, this average number becomes less and less meaningful. In point of fact, it’d be interesting to see a graph of that average changing over time compared to the amount of gerrymandering occurring. Apples and oranges.
• “Let the message be clear: Voters had a chance to repudiate Trump and they did not.” No? It’s often a mistake that innumerate pundits indulge in, thinking that a binary result is the end of the question. But it’s not. Let’s take a single example which, I believe, represents most legislative seats defended by Republicans this mid-term: Representative Steve King. Representing the deeply conservative western heartland of Iowa, the 4th and, earlier, 5th districts, that state to my south which I visit most years (Sioux City, specifically), he’s been in Congress since 2003, and he won again in the mid-terms. Now, if Rogers’ thesis was impregnable, we’d expect King’s margin of victory to be comfortable, since it has been in the past, with margins ranging from 9 percentage points to 23.3 points in the recent 2016 contest (data from Ballotpedia seems a little fragmentary for the now non-existent District 5). Trump was a big winner in District 4 during the Presidential election, winning the district by 27 points. So how did Representative King do yesterday? Must have been a cakewalk, right?

  According to The Gazette, King barely won 50% of the vote. His margin of victory? 3.3 points. Remember, voters hate members of Congress – except their own. They typically get a break. So how did King suddenly fall apart? By clasping Trump tightly, he damn near sank himself in the lake. Like a number of Trump-endorsed or Trump-loving candidates, from Arrington in South Carolina to McDaniel in Mississippi, that big old Trump stamp on their foreheads was the stamp of doom. King managed to survive it, which I find more than a little puzzling – but, having driven through the district in campaign season, it’s not really surprising. The advertising was suffocatingly for King. (And this is a guy who’s been little more than a rubberstamp, BTW. But I’ll let you do that research.) The toxic power of team politics comes to the fore, I suppose.

  My point is that there are more to numbers than Thug Won, Thag Lost. Rogers should acquaint himself with the numbers behind the numbers, the stories that are flowering all around him – if he’s willing to look at them.

• Rogers is smart enough not to mention the Senate, because this time around the Senate was configured overwhelmingly in the GOP’s favor – which is why I’m mentioning it, for the benefit of the reader who only skims politics.
• In another instance of shorn context, and as Kevin Drum adroitly points out, the Democrats made large gains despite the heavy burden of fighting in an overall good to very good economy. This became a point of some contention, as President Trump proclaimed his holy influence over the stock market every time it jumped, and ran and hid from the big bad thunderstorm every time it tumbled. The Democrats, and some independents such as myself, on the other hand, noted that President Obama handed off a good economy to Trump, and that’s saying more than usual, given the turd that Bush had handed Obama. From there, and noting that Trump’s tax reform of 2017 has done remarkably little except balloon the deficit, it’s not hard to make a credible case that it’s still an Obama-inspired economy. If you’re really set on pursuing this somewhat dubious line of logic, the stock market jumped 2+% the day after mid-terms. Understanding why may require you to stand on your head without recourse to your hands, however.

  Of course, this entire topic deserves its own rant, which I’ve indulged in at least once. But the important point is that we’re asked to accept judgments that sound good, but have been cleverly made bereft of important context.

• “Not one new progressive Democrat was successful bursting onto the scene.” This should be a big red flag concerning Rogers’ willingness to dance with the liars. This only needs one example: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins NY-14 by 64 percentage points. But she’s not alone, as Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota won confirmation of her progressive agenda surprisingly comfortably, and Ilhan Omar, also of Minnesota, has burst onto the scene with a real shock for those of an anti-Muslim bent. And I’m not even bothering to research the question, I knew about these without a single search (except to get Ocasio-Cortez’s name). There’s probably more.

  But the point is that reality is misrepresented here. A storm came through and knocked over the trees, Rogers, and proclaiming it as nothing more than some showers is a waste of time.

Viewed with as much context as possible, I think the mid-terms have a lot to teach the Republicans, but it’ll be a lesson they can’t stomach: Trump is a metastasizing cancer. In some parts of the body politic, he’s still a rock star. But for others, they’ve recognized he’s a disaster, and they’re trying to find ways to get rid of him.

But perhaps most importantly is this pert little line, slipped in without trumpets nor support:

No liberal will want to admit it, but Trump is an asset to the Republican Party, while President Barack Obama was a disaster for the Democratic Party.

It’s not a misinterpretation, but a deliberate smear. And, most interestingly, it’s not a smear of President Obama, but of what he stands for: the old style of politics. Rogers, as an apparent apologist for Trump, dares not have any truck with the style of politics in which both Parties debate and create solutions to commonly recognized national problems through cooperative effort. This cannot be tolerated because it ruins the narrative that the Democrats are evil and out to wreck the United States. (If you think I hyperbolize, you need to research some of what Trump had to say in the last days of the mid-term campaign.) This is not a new narrative, though, because it starts with Newt Gingrich, and sweeps along to Lott and McConnell and many others.

By attributing doom and disaster to Obama, of which I, as an independent, didn’t notice a whiff, Rogers wants to bury that old style of politics and replace it with the single Party with its manly leader. And Rogers might have even made this work. If only Trump wasn’t such an ineffectual putz, and doomed to become recognized by more and more disaffected former supporters as that.

If you’re a Republican and want to save your Party, start a new one. Or kick Gingrich out, followed by Trump, followed by anyone who protests the first two. Then start listening to officials and former officials such as Warner, Flake, and Lugar. That’s the path back to an honorable political institution.

Getting away from this politics stuff for at least a moment, BepiColombo successfully launched  a couple of weeks ago. BepiColombo is a European Space Agency / Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency joint mission to Mercury. From the press release:

BepiColombo comprises two science orbiters: ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, or ‘Mio’). The ESA-built Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) will carry the orbiters to Mercury using a combination of solar electric propulsion and gravity assist flybys, with one flyby of Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury, before entering orbit at Mercury in late 2025.

So in seven years we’ll be seeing a bunch of mysteries solved, and bigger bunch of new mysteries generated, because that’s how this sort of thing works. Wheeee!

BepiColombo approaching Mercury.
Credit: spacecraft: ESA/ATG medialab; Mercury: NASA/JPL
(Presumably an artist’s work, but no name is given. Perhaps stitching photos and stuff together doesn’t count as artistry.)

Watching the coverage of the mid-term elections this evening can be a bewildering run through a spectrum of emotions, colored as they are by my current desire for a rational GOP to counterbalance the Democrats, which at the moment doesn’t exist – thus my desire to see the Republican Party burn to the ground, so that it may be reconstructed, preferably on lines that do not include such personalities as Pat Robertson and his ilk.

Democratic gains in Minnesota’s Representatives, as well as retention of both Senatorial seats by unexpectedly comfortable margins (in Smith’s case), has acted to restore, to some extent, my faith in local American citizens; on the national scene, the losses by Democratic Senators Heitkamp of North Dakota and Bill Nelson of Florida, as well as Democratic candidates Abram’s apparent loss to Kemp in the Georgia gubernatorial race and Gillum’s apparent loss to DeSantis in the Florida gubernatorial race, are dismaying as none of the victors are, in my opinion, of the high moral character necessary to be the leaders they must be in their positions. In a phrase, they seem to just be Trump sycophants, incapable of independent judgment.

Seeking more positive emotions, it may be tempting to note that Democratic Representative Conor Lamb, who just months ago had won a special election by a whisker, easily won re-election, but his district was redrawn between the two votes. It’s an apples and oranges thing. Don’t go there.

So for reassurance, it may be worth noting that current Kansas Secretary of State and GOP gubernatorial nominee Kris Kobach (R-KA), who has been mentioned before on this blog for his many claims of unsubstantiated voter fraud, seems to have lost his high profile gubernatorial run in traditionally conservative Kansas. Last I saw, it wasn’t even close. Is it possible that Kansas will become a Democratic stronghold? If one believes that we can learn from our mistakes, if pain can change our minds and our ideologies, then it’s not out of the realm of possibility, as Kansas hosted the Brownback debacle of the last few years. They have a new Governor-elect from the Democratic Party, and I noticed in the news chyrons that at one or two Republican Representatives from Kansas had lost their re-election campaigns. Now, these could be ephemeral signs, as perhaps those seats will flip right back to the Republican column at the next opportunity. One might argue that’s what happened tonight in Minnesota.

BUT if ruby-red Kansas becomes the historical crack in the Republican Party’s armor, I think we’ll know why and not be surprised.

Elections have consequences. That’s why we vote, and we vote thoughtfully, not in a rigid, ideological manner.

Know hope.

My Arts Editor draws my attention to this article on a novel form of battery technology in Science Alert:

Scientists in Sweden have developed a specialised fluid, called a solar thermal fuel, that can store energy from the sun for well over a decade.

“A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity, you put sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on demand,” Jeffrey Grossman, an engineer works with these materials at MIT explained to NBC News.

The fluid is actually a molecule in liquid form that scientists from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden have been working on improving for over a year.

This molecule is composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, and when it is hit by sunlight, it does something unusual: the bonds between its atoms are rearranged and it turns into an energised new version of itself, called an isomer.

Like prey caught in a trap, energy from the sun is thus captured between the isomer’s strong chemical bonds, and it stays there even when the molecule cools down to room temperature.

A fascinating bit of science – but is it technology? That is, can this be scaled up to be an industrial solution?

And then, a solution to what? Obviously, it’s a new and interesting form of battery, since it stores and releases energy, and it doesn’t appear to be difficult to use on release. How well does it transport? And can it be manufactured without polluting the shit out of the environment? The article mentions C, H, and N, none of which qualify as rare, so that’s a good sign – but what does it take to make the molecule? The fact that the power source is the local star is, of course, a very good thing.

And then the fact that it appears to absorb some spectrum of the incoming electromagnetic spectrum is interesting. Is it the same part of the spectrum which is instrumental in anthropocentric climate change? If so, can we use this as a stopgap measure while we continue to work on stopping the creation of carbon dioxide and methane, the two most worrisome climate change gases?

And for those of us who are especially paranoid, if this does prove to be a viable stopgap, have we just bestowed longer life on the fossil fuel industry? Since this stopgap has no effect on the growing percentage of CO₂ in the air, then the recent research concerning carbohydrates making up a growing percentage of the foods we harvest, I’d suggest that permitting the fossil fuel companies to continue to enable the pollution of our atmosphere would probably be a mistake from a body health point of view.

So many questions!

From an AP report:

Sean Hannity spoke from the stage of President Donald Trump’s last midterm election rally on Monday, after Fox News Channel and its most popular personality had insisted all day that he wouldn’t.

Hannity appeared on the podium in a Missouri arena after being called to the stage by Trump. Another Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, also appeared onstage with the president.

“By the way, all those people in the back are fake news,” Hannity told the audience.

And you, sir, are merely a propagandist, not a journalist. Your appearance and your dismissal of your “colleagues” permits viewers to dispense with any delusion that you have any journalistic standard – and any acquaintance with the truth.

Apparently the lack of a comet’s characteristic coma associated with interstellar object ‘Oumuamua is really annoying some astronomers, enough so that they’re beginning to explore more outré possibilities:

“‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization,” they wrote in the paper, which has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The theory is based on the object’s “excess acceleration,” or its unexpected boost in speed as it traveled through and ultimately out of our solar system in January.

“Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,” wrote the paper’s authors, suggesting that the object could be propelled by solar radiation.

The paper was written by Abraham Loeb, professor and chair of astronomy, and Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral scholar, at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Loeb has published four books and more than 700 papers on topics like black holes, the future of the universe, the search for extraterrestrial life and the first stars. [CNN]

Sounds a little crazy? Turns out this is a very small part of the scientists’ paper. Let Ars Technica straighten you out.

This is, of course, some pretty sloppy science news coverage. But in this case, most of these stories are not being written by trained science writers but rather online reporters who see the potential for a flashy headline. While it is not “fake news,” is is certainly a classic clickbait.

But there’s more at work here. Katie Mack, an astrophysicist and astute observer of scientists and the media, has noted on Twitter that the Harvard scientists knew perfectly well what they were doing. “The thing you have to understand is: scientists are perfectly happy to publish an outlandish idea if it has even the tiniest *sliver* of a chance of not being wrong,” she wrote. “But until every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don’t believe it.

“Some of us are more conservative, of course,” she continued. “And it surely varies by field. But in my area (astrophysics/cosmology), there’s generally no downside to publishing something that’s (a) somehow interesting and (b) not completely ruled out, whether or not it ends up ‘the right answer.'”

In other words, if you’re a researcher looking to create a media splash, you play the, “I’m not saying it was aliens…” card.

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Speaking as a software engineer, a good approach to solving a problem in an efficient and effective manner is actually congruent with the Harvard scientists publishing ‘crime’. Look, most any problem, absent essential evidence, can usually be explained by more than one process. While many times a good guess will yield a solution, an approach not based on intuition is to generate a list, exhaustive if possible, of all sources of the problem which are congruent with the current collection of facts. Using good ol’ Popperian philosophy of science, each potential source should come with a potential fact which would disprove that solution.

Then the process of problem resolution becomes a matter of focused fact collecting. At some point, your list of probable sources of the problem gets down to one, and you now know where to look and even know the solution, if it’s not one of those damn P=NP problems.

In the physical sciences, you may have several still left when all possible facts are collected, and then you’re just left with ranking them based on probabilities.

But the basic philosophy is sound, so I’m not sure I’d call what the scientists did clickbait. Did they list many other possible resolutions to this problem? Dunno, couldn’t find the paper despite the link. But, without a good visual inspection of the object, which is now impossible, we can’t really rule out the possibility that it’s an object from another civilization.

Politico notes a sudden surge of interest in joining the the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

Dozens of Republican and Democratic lawmakers are clamoring to join the House Intelligence Committee next year — for a chance to be part of a panel at the vanguard of the partisan brawl over Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The interest has veterans of the committee worried that a new class of lawmakers will reinforce the partisan impulses that drove the committee toward dysfunction the past two years. The politicization of the once sober, above-the-fray panel has undermined what some lawmakers and national security officials say has been a decades-long partnership with the intelligence community. …

Republican and Democratic leaders have been compiling lists of dozens of members — one Republican lawmaker recently suggested upward of 70 on the GOP side — who want to join the committee. The demand for spots comes amid the ongoing partisan fight over the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether any of President Donald Trump’s associates participated in it.

As Politico points out, partisan lawmakers are out in force to join what used to be a non-partisan, quiet committee. No doubt, some of this is the new profile members on the committee suddenly had because of Rep. Nunes’ incompetent leadership technique, by which I mean his frantic and very public attempt to use the committee to protect his Party leader, rather than monitor the President – the one and same man, in case you were wondering. Partisans, if they’re smart – in some cases, an undue assumption – must be uneasily aware that their continued presence in this ego-inflating chamber is often dependent on the independent voters in their districts or States, and if the Intel Committee is going to suddenly acquire profile, it may also acquire prestige.

But there may also be an interior reason to seek a position on the committee, and that would happen to be all about brown-nosing for the Republicans, because if they can gain the favor of President Trump, then they can move up in the Republican hierarchy. Of course, just being a member isn’t enough – one will have to find ways to obstruct the monitoring, leak strategic information, that sort of thing. The creative Republican committee member will find ways to get his Leader’s attention.

All in the tradition of the previously noted incompetent Representative Nunes.

On Lawfare Molly Reynolds gives a short history of the committee.

Having gotten on the Center For Inquiry’s (CFI) mailing list, probably when they combined with Skeptical Inquirer, I’ve recently been subjected to frequent mailings from them. For those readers unfamiliar with CFI, they are an organization carrying on the free-thinking tradition, aka agnostics and atheists. Part of that tradition is the view that one of the strengths of the United States is the Separation of Church and State, also known as the Establishment Clause, as bolstered by the Johnson Amendment, which forbids churches taking advantage of tax-free status from advocating for particular candidates.

As I noted here, the younger generations (you can insert a harsh, grating voice at this juncture if you’re so inclined) are showing less and less interest in organized religion. Now, I’m aware that this doesn’t make them all agnostics and atheists, but reports do indicate that youngsters are falling into that category with increasing frequency.

So, if you’re not aware of CFI, let me note that, while like most profit-free organizations they’re usually on the hunt for funds, and they’re not always above trying to inflate a point here or there to gain your sympathy, their latest missive impresses me as more than just the hunt for the nickel. I suppose that may be because they don’t actually ask for one.

Instead, they explain their very deep unease about tomorrow’s midterm elections. Perhaps my younger reader, atheist or faithful, doubtful as to voting, might want to read their concerns.

Dear Friend of CFI,

Please vote tomorrow.

We face a pivotal moment in our country’s history. The separation of church and state is suffering under the most withering attack in generations.

The Trump White House has embraced the religious right with open arms. The balance of the Supreme Court has shifted ever further in favor of religious privilege. Congress is our best, and perhaps only, chance to stop theocracy from calcifying in the federal government. It’s not an overstatement to say that our freedom from religion is at stake in this election.

And while theocratic activists batter at the wall between church and state, our government is becoming disconnected from basic facts. Career scientists are being driven out of federal agencies where their work informs life saving regulations. Propagandistic media networks spread wild conspiracy theories that become accepted knowledge in the White House. Trump lies so often and so outrageously that news outlets are struggling just to accurately cover his statements.

Your vote matters. Please vote tomorrow, and help others to vote if you can. If you’d like more resources for how to register, find your polling location, or join a last-minute voter registration drive, check out Secular America Votes.

As always, thank you for supporting the separation of church and state.

Sincerely,

Jason Lemieux

Director of Government Affairs

Center for Inquiry

Partisan readers will dismiss this as a partisan letter from an organization which they may despise.

I think it’s a bit more, though. Whether you’re religious or atheist, it’s a fair question to ask: Why is the United States secular? We may be a highly religious country, but our miscellany of religions makes it critical that the State remain secular and disinterested in religious affairs which do not infringe on our secular legal system.

By voting for the Republicans, who have been pursuing the policies concerning which CFI has expressed concern, we risk putting in place policies which favor one religious sect over all others. This road is unstable and has historically lead to terrible violence, tragedy, and backwardness. For more on this, see my thoughts at length here.

If you’re atheist or at least not a member of an organized religion, this should concern you. If you’re a member of a religious sect, which can mean anything from a Roman Catholic to a 10 member church out in the middle of nowhere, you should also be concerned, because, again, you may not find yourself in the proper group. Given the history of theocracies, this should leave you deeply uneasy.

And the whole religious strife drama is a poor way to run a country. See Iraq.

So give voting another thought, if you had decided against it. No snowflake has ever hurt anyone on its own, but an avalanche of them is a helluva thing to stop. Be part of one.

One of the more brazen displays of allergies to ethical systems is on display down in Georgia. It centers around Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, who decided to enter the primary for the Georgia governorship a few months back.

A person with an ethical system would have resigned or, at least, recused himself from any matter having to do with counting the votes of the primary. This is, I shouldn’t need to add, simple, basic, obvious: a conflict of interest shakes the confidence of the voters in the system, and for good reason, as there have been numerous occurrences of people in power manipulating the system to keep and gain more power.

Did Kemp resign or recuse? No.

Next came the general election, and the ethical requirements were the same: resign or recuse. Need I report that he did neither?

The man in power will be counting the votes that could move him along to another seat of power.

But he appears to have become nervous, because just a day or so before the election, he’s tried to assure his selection through what appears to be another dirty tactic, as NBC News reports:

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor, said Sunday that he was investigating the state Democratic Party for an attempted hack of the voter registration system — a claim met with a swift response from Democrats charging him with a shameless “political stunt” two days before Election Day.

Kemp, who is in a neck-and-neck race with Stacey Abrams, alleged that the state Democratic Party made a “failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system” and announced that his office was opening an investigation into the party. Kemp said his office alerted the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, but he offered no evidence to back up his allegation.

“While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes,” Candice Broce, press secretary for the secretary of state, said in a statement. “We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure.”

Since the FBI will supposedly be investigating any possible attempts to corrupt the electoral systems of Georgia, I’m left at a loss as to what Kemp legitimately thinks he’ll accomplish, because, of course and following in President Trump’s footsteps, he must despise the FBI – an institution once beloved of the ‘law and order party’. And, at least to those of us paying attention to computer crime, it should be no surprise there’s probably not a public computing system that has not been the target of hacking. So Georgia’s electoral computer logs show they’ve been a target? So does every other state’s.

But I think it’s more interesting to notice how being a public citizen, such as Kemp, means that your ethical system necessarily becomes a public statement. If your ethical system is strong, if you have that sense of being an honorable public servant, then there’s little to worry about insofar as honor goes. You may not achieve the electoral success you desire, but the electorate are a bunch of assholes, anyways. They’re private citizens and can betray their ethical systems on a whim.

But if it’s weak, as Kemp’s conduct proves his to be, then we see blatant disruptions of commonly agreed-upon norms.

It makes for one big old storm cloud for his opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams. The silver lining will be very little comfort if she loses: Kemp will run a high risk of leaving office in disgrace, and even handcuffs.

That’s what often happens to the unethical public citizen, as we’ve seen in a number of States.

And, just as importantly, while Kemp may win one for the Party short-term, long-term the Party takes another hit to its ‘brand.’ Do they understand this? Is it so important that they win through brazen underhandedness that the future doesn’t matter?

Or are they so confident in their ability to manipulate the voters through superior marketing techniques, as well as gerrymandering?

Inquiring minds want to know.

A while back I ran across some advocacy for better secure communications for consumers, which reminded me that this makes some law enforcement professionals uncomfortable, since that closes off a source of information. In particular, the suggestion that encrypted communications be the default, rather than an option. So I couldn’t help but laugh when I read this Lawfare article by Susan Landau:

Trump’s lax approach to security presents an unusually stark problem. But unsecured communications have long been a problem for U.S. national security. In 1972, for example, the Soviet Union’s eavesdropping led to the “The Great Grain Robbery”: the eavesdropping of communications on calls between American wheat farmers and the Department of Agriculture that enabled the Russians to covertly buy record wheat at low prices, thus causing a U.S. grain shortage eighteen months later. …

Imagine if instead of the U.S. government fighting the spread of strong cryptography, the NSA and FBI had pushed for cell phones that would always encrypt communications end-to-end. This would make it far harder to intercept communications. It would also mean that every legislator and legislative aide, every chief executive, every financial officer—indeed any person who had information that would be useful to an eavesdropper, whether it be China, Russia, an industrial competitor or a criminal organization—would necessarily use phones that routinely secured their conversations. And importantly, it would protect the president’s phone calls even if he refused to listen to the officials begging him to use a secure method of communication.

While end-to-end encryption would make it much harder for United States to listen in to what the bad guys were saying, such use of end-to-end encryption wouldn’t mean the end of wiretapping. High-value targets would still be the subject of targeted, sophisticated hacks. For high-value targets like the president, this is still a concern.

That weakening our weaponry against criminals and national adversaries would have paradoxically made us more secure in this particular nightmare situation just makes me laugh.

It helps that I’m mildly exhausted today.

These are some of the same leaves as those starring in the Happenstance Leaves post, but arranged by my Arts Editor. Think of her as the Director, storming at her players for not doing their part.

I’ve been meaning to post something on this, but with a computer replacement coming up and what may be a fan burning out on the old computer, it’s been a bit chaotic. But Trump’s inadequate response to recent incidents, such as the pipe bombs and shootings, indicate voters have once again been reminded of his inadequacies:

That’s quite a jump in disapproval, and drop in approval. This is also from 6 days ago. Tomorrow is the release of the next poll, which should be interesting.

But will it tell us anything about the Senate and House races? How important is he, and will his drop in approval also reflect in voting for those races? Trump, being unique as a Presidential demagogue who inspires love and loathing, is a bit of a cipher.

But we’ll see in a couple of days.

Long time readers know that, from time to time, for my own amusement I dissect propaganda email that comes to me (and isn’t diverted to Spam), but this one is actually easier than most.

A quick look at Snopes.com indicates they could find no indication that Thomas ever said that, and WikiQuote notes it as a possible misattribution.

If that’s where it ends, I’d not bother. The “scare” stuff at the end is childish. But in my minute of research, I did notice whoever sent this mail around in an attempt to scare the conservative base into line chose to strip out one interesting fact.

Thomas was a Presbyterian minister.

The religious angle on socialism has always been a troublesome aspect of the entire “free enterprise Christianity” embraced by many conservatives, extremist or not. As an agnostic, my impression is that Jesus Christ was against any economic or governmental system which resulted in injustice, and it’s not hard to make the case that free enterprise, pursued with single-minded zest and the misunderstanding that it’s all about the money, would be given unfavorable consideration by JC.

Your mileage may vary.

But the fact that Thomas’ status as a minister has been stripped out of this mail certainly is part of the entire “conservative” (aka right-wing extremists currently in charge of the GOP) narrative control which seeks to manipulate the thought processes, and thus opinions, of the conservative base, rather than serving up all the facts and letting them come to their own conclusions.

It’s dishonest, and it doesn’t matter if liberals or conservatives or right-wing extremists do it.

I just happened to stumble across this little composition of leaves while raking:

The beauty of detritus.

Gotta love this from run26two on The Daily Kos.

So inevitable, so awful you shouldn’t watch. But you do. I was weak this morning.

That’s Marc Thiessen.

But his latest WaPo column, in which he makes the mistake of trying to boost President Trump by comparing him with his own Party’s arguably biggest mistake, President Nixon, is useful in that it’s diagnostic of the many problems of the current iteration of the Republican Party. He even provides a lovely summary of some of its Holy Tenets:

So, in many ways the Trump presidency is like deja vu all over again. Except that Trump is, at least for conservatives, arguably a much better president than was Nixon. While Nixon had a mixed record in Supreme Court appointments, Trump has, so far, given us two of the strongest conservative justices in modern history. While the chairman of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, Herb Stein, bragged that, under Nixon, “probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy than in any other presidency since the New Deal,” Trump has given us a historic regulatory rollback. While Nixon boasted over dramatic cuts in defense spending, Trump has enacted historic increases. While Nixon’s 1969 tax reform increased taxes, Trump’s reforms have cut them. While Nixon withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam, Trump has unleashed our forces against the Islamic State and has halted the withdrawal from Afghanistan begun during the Obama administration.

Nixon also showed us that our constitutional system of checks and balances works, and that if the president crosses a constitutional line, the rule of law will prevail. And while Nixon resigned over Watergate, we still don’t know how the Russia inquiry will turn out. It may well be that there was no criminal conspiracy with Russia. Even knowing what we know about Watergate, the United States would not have been better off with George McGovern as president, just as we would not be better off today with Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Shall we extract the Holy Tenets?

1. A conservative XYZ is a good XYZ. A corollary to the entire cancerous team politics tenet which I’ve discussed at nauseating length, it’s wrong on so many levels in the SCOTUS scenario, as well as just about any other. I’ll list just a few for brevity’s sake: It suggests the judiciary should be politicized; that political orientation is far more important than judicial competency; and that, if you don’t like the judicial results, just replace the bleeding judges. That last is itself the result of the Holy Tenet that the Party Can Never Be Wrong Because God Is Behind It. So sorry, sometimes you’re just in the wrong. Fact is, liberals and conservatives can both screw things up, or get them right. A sober commentator wouldn’t actually be mentioning Gorsuch (IJ) or Kavanaugh for at least 5 years. Gorsuch has barely had a term, and Kavanaugh? Two weeks.
2. Regulation is always bad. It’s become the most dangerous refrain in American Republican politics, with apologies to Hillary. Regulation impairs corporate profit. Well, yes, sometimes it does. It’s helpful to return to the basics of society and remember that profit is a goal of the private sector, not the public (or government) sector. Government exists as a protective mechanism for society, from outside invaders, and, just as importantly, from internal mistakes. The are typically human behaviors which negatively impact other members of society. In the intentional category we can dump most crime, and in the unintentional category we can put a few crimes, pollution, and other behaviors such as reckless driving. In the broadest sense of the word, regulation is how government goes about its business in the internal mistakes category.

   Regulation, like any tool, is neither good nor bad in and of itself. Is a hammer good or bad? Depends on its use. Same with regulation. If Thiessen thinks regulation is always bad, let’s get rid of all murder statutes and see how well society works out in the long run. Yeah, nod along with me.

   But, as noted, Republicans use the word regulation to mean regulation of the private sector, and then claim that’s bad because it impairs corporate profit. The trick here is to refuse to accept the implicit metric of profit as the appropriate measure of regulation. It’s not. If you have the time and attention span – most of us don’t – go read my link concerning sectors of society. While I don’t think I ever addressed metrics explicitly in one place, it’s implicit. We often, mistakenly, judge the success of a company by its profitability. But here’s a good party (the one with horse ovaries) question for the businessman loudly opining what government needs him to run it right: What’s an appropriate profit margin for government? Yeah, he’ll sputter, because his metric – his favorite, all-important metric – has no application in the context of the government.

   I spoke of brevity earlier, so I’ll cut this short: discovering the metrics of government is one of the most important jobs of the citizen, because only then will they know if their elected officials and their functionaries are doing a good job. Strong military? Sure. An effective, uncorrupt police? Yeah. No regulation so all the companies are more profitable? Gotcha. Monitor and protect the lakes, the rivers, and, while you’re at it, CO₂ content of the air. That’s the duty of government.

3. The military needs more money. We’re used to the old trope, a Republican Holy Tenet, that Democrats are weak on defense and the Republicans are strong, but that’s just propaganda – and damaging propaganda at that. It’s a rare politician, wannabe or paid, that isn’t for more money for Defense.

   Defense serves an existential purpose, yes. But the military does not produce things of general consumer use, and the research required to develop new military war machines only develops useful things for the consumer by accident, and, at least as of 40 years ago when I did the research, not at the same rate, per $, as does the space program. My point? I recall in my libertarian reading that economists generally see Defense as a drag on the economy, not a general boost. Sure, start a new munitions plant and it’s good for the town its in – until it shuts down and its toxic waste must be found and dealt with. But that doesn’t translate as good for the country. Those people could have been making, say, smartphones, rather than bullets. Bullets that sit around and do little (but see fleet in being).

   So the trick is to determine the proper level of funding for the military, along with the composition of the military (Dreadnaughts? No. Best bombers? Yes.) For me, the fact that we outspend the next 7 countries suggests we’re overspending. China, three times larger than us, is #2, and has about a third of our budget.
   We’ve been at war for nearly 20 years now, and if you want to talk about drains on the economy, the military is a big one. Both Democrats and Republicans generally favor perpetually bigger military budgets, but Nixon understood that the military was a drag – and that’s why he celebrated being able to cut the Defense budget. Perhaps we should follow that example, rather than follow the Holy Tenet.

4. Taxes are evil. No, simply no. There’s the Kansas debacle. There’s the thought experiment – if taxes are evil, let’s drive them to zero and bask in the paradise of … ooops, you’re dead because a murderer got you. No cops or prison guards.

   Government services must be paid for, period end of sentence. At its heart, that’s a conservative (but not Republican) tenet. This has economic ramifications (see: Kansas debacle, above), for, if the services are inadequate, then corporations have trouble operating, and those that can will withdraw.

   Borrowing, to a point, works, but many economists are worried that the current level of Federal borrowing is distorting the economy, which makes it harder to predict and manage. I’m not an economist, but I know enough not to be captive to the “government budget” is the same as a “family budget” false analogy.

   I’ll stop here on this topic because the link above also discusses very briefly the application of bell curves to taxation levels, so go read that if interested.

5. We could have won Vietnam. Only if we wanted to be barbarians. ISIS, on the other hand, is relatively weaker, with a weaker ideology. Beware simplistic false comparisons. The military, under Obama’s direction, had them on the run, and fortunately Trump didn’t meddle overmuch. The real trick is to keep them extinguished.
6. Nixon was better than McGovern. An unanswerable question. Maybe McGovern would have been wonderful. But it betrays the Party’s own insecurity when it’s forced to claim its criminal President was better than a hypothetical President.
7. Hillary’s evil! Sad, sad, sad. She’s evil, and yet every investigation of her has turned up … nothing. Investigations led by hostile Republican leaders with prosecutorial chops … nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. She’s been investigated something like ten times. Nothing, wash, lather, repeat, nothing.

   Her real offense? Her husband, President Bill Clinton, was a better politician than all of them put together. I never liked Bill, though I voted for him twice as a political independent, but he was undeniably better than his opponents, be they named Dole or Gingrich or Bush.

   So when Thiessen claims we’re better off with Trump than Hillary, it pays to remember that virtually every professional group associated with the government, including national security groups, endorsed Hillary in the 2016 campaign, not Trump, and Trump has turned out to be a national security disaster.

   It pays to remember that Hillary has been a success at just about everything she’s worked at, with the notable exception of the Clinton health plan.

   It pays to remember that Trump has been a failure at just about everything he’s worked at, with the notable exception of his TV show, The Apprentice.

   So, if you’re an intellectually honest person, do you go with the guy with failure to his name and lies as his background, or the woman with success to her name and no scandals attached, despite determined efforts by the Republicans to attach them?

   Thiessen’s shallow intellectual roots are showing when he states this Holy Tenet.

A Party built, in part, on the above tenets isn’t viable over the long term. Ossified, paranoid, and using deceit to keep its members in line, the Republican Party will need to be burned down before it can be rebuilt into a respectable governance candidate.

And that’s bad for America. The leaders of the Republican Party have really let the Country down.

Let’s hope the rebuilding starts on Tuesday.

Mervert:

Man who makes unwanted sexual advances on a mermaid or actor-portrayed mermaid. [Paraphrased from The Latest Show With Stephen Colbert tonight]

Looking at the two sides in the imminent midterms reveals how each side is trying to portray the election to the best advantage. Representing the left is the unsurprising Kevin Drum:

The RNC created—and Donald Trump pinned to the top of his Twitter feed—an appallingly racist ad today that accuses Democrats of “letting in” Luis Bracamontes, a man who killed two Northern California deputies four years ago while in the country illegally. It’s widely viewed as Willie Horton 2.0, except maybe worse. So have any elected Republican officials denounced it? So far, I can find three:

• Sen. Jeff Flake
• Rep. Mike Coffman
• Gov. John Kasich

Don’t @ me if I got this wrong. Maybe there are four! Or even five!

The level of desperation this shows is palpable. Trump and the Republican Party keep pulling the race lever harder and harder, but it’s not working. Trump went from 800 troops at the border to 5,000 troops to 15,000 troops. He called the migrant caravan a thousand miles away an “invasion.” He claims he’s going to end birthright citizenship even though he knows perfectly well it’s part of the Constitution and he can’t do it.  …

Sadly, [the Republicans are] still going to get a lot of votes. But common decency, which took a vacation in 2016, is finally going to win on Tuesday. Trump is making sure of it.

On the conservative side, Kyle Smith on National Review has decided to play counterpoint to President Trump’s frantic attempts to stir up stark fear with a Fat, Dumb, & Happy routine:

Today is nothing like as fraught a moment, or it shouldn’t be. The U.S. is facing the usual, perennial problems such as dealing with the cost and availability of health care and massive entitlements-fueled debt, but problems specific to our moment are few. The main source of angst and anger appears to be the personality of the president. That’s hardly comparable to the importance of the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis or even an ordinary recession.

It’s an unpopular message, but 2018 isn’t a particularly eventful year. At the moment, things are more or less okay. Beneath the surface, there is bipartisan agreement on this. The Republicans don’t have a legislative agenda. The Democrats revealed in a breathless New York Times interview that their big plan after retaking the House is a package of political-process ideas aimed almost exclusively at bolstering the fortunes of the Democratic party, such as Voting Rights Act adjustments and more campaign-finance disclosure requirements. It can’t be the case that 2018 is both an apocalyptic moment for America and that these are the central issues.

He thinks – or would have his readers think, which can be a very different thing – that in a decade, historians will scratch their heads over this election’s uproar in puzzlement. He’s basically pouring oil on the water^[1].

There’s a couple of problems with his essay, though.

First of all, he’s fixated on the present. There’s no acknowledgment that the Presidential and Republican activities of today might damage the United States.

There’s not even a mention of it.

It’s difficult to understand this omission if you’re a thinking person of an innocent nature. I’ve had the latter surgically removed, so I attribute this to attempting to take the minds of the Republican base off the more disturbing aspects of the entire conservative movement.

But it is incumbent on the thinking person to be looking to the future, to be heading off disasters before they occur. Whether it’s anthropocentric climate change, environmental damage incurred while in pursuit of yet more corporate profits, or the next war, to simply make an assessment of how we’re doing now and claiming there’s nothing going on just doesn’t cut it.

If Smith were presenting a serious essay, he would have talked about at least some of the following: the suddenly mountainous national debt; the fact that our annual deficit went to zero during the Clinton years, and then roller-coastered back up during the years the Republicans dominated the Legislature, and what that may imply about the quality of the legislators involved; the future of our judiciary, with a collection of sub-par butts in judicial seats; the future of a democracy in which any media outlet reporting news in such a way as to infuriate President Irrelevancy (yes, I’m in a crabby mood) is demonized and labeled illicit; and documented Presidential mendacity, self-interest, and possible autocratic intents.

To name but a few relevant topics.

Smith also indulges in some convenient falsehoods. For example, “The Republicans don’t have a legislative agenda,” is fairly blatant, as Senator McConnell has stated, without obfuscation, that, should the Republicans control the Legislature again, the social-net programs will be on the chopping block.

“massive entitlements-fueled debt“: Blaming the debt on entitlements is long-time conservative kant which, unfortunately for Smith, doesn’t work when one considers, again, the Clinton achievement of a zero annual deficit. If entitlements, a serious subject, were the problem then that achievement would remain a Slick-Willy Wet Dream, but instead it exists, and is the elephant in the Republican Parlor.

And we all know this. It’s not hard to come up with this reasoning, really it’s not. Start with the Afghanistan war which, unavoidable or not, was irresponsibly financially managed by the Bush Administration, the completely unnecessary Iraq War, again irresponsibly financially managed by the Bush Administration, a notoriously spend-happy Congress of 2001, 2003, and 2005, “tariff wars”, and now the tax reform bill which is verifiably failing to perform as advertised, and we have a far more plausible scenario for skyrocketing deficits and debt: a failure to raise taxes responsibly. As has been noted time after time for at least the last 20 years, the GOP-dominated Congress has simply shrugged and “kicked the can down the road” when it came to deficits. Blaming a military-happy Congress on both sides of the aisle is far more accurate than faith-based blather about entitlements.

That’s why that’s a lie.

There you go, Drum and Smith. One believes this is a very important mid-term, if only the leftists can get the disinterested youth to vote, while the other thinks everything’s hunky-dory.

Curmudgeonly and Angry at all the lying, or Fat, Dumb, and Happy. Which works better for you?

¹ For those readers unfamiliar with nautical history, occasionally big ships with lots of oil reserves will dump that oil into the sea when the seas are too choppy for some activity. I doubt they do it very often these days, but I’ve read of it being done during World War II.

Megan McArdle says what I suspect a lot of people have been thinking:

When Rolling Stone magazine in 2014 published an account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, some reporters, including me, nursed private doubts about its too-cinematic details — but, like me, they were exceedingly wary of publicly casting doubt.

Even after Richard Bradley, the editor of Worth magazine, finally raised questions about Rolling Stone’s account on his personal blog, even the writers who declined to attack him for “blaming the victim” treated them gingerly. A lot more reporting was required before we were willing to state outright what we’d suspected privately — that “Jackie,” the alleged victim, had made the whole thing up. …

But we know that’s not possible. High-profile false rape accusations such as the ones in the Rolling Stone article reflect the reality that between 2 and 10 percent of rape allegations are provably false; the FBI says 8 percent of forcible-rape allegations are “unfounded.” The number of false accusations that can’t be proved false necessarily pushes that number even higher. To act as if this weren’t the case borders on wishful thinking, and it comes at a cost.

NBC wasn’t the only media outlet that seems to have relaxed its normal standards during the Kavanaugh hearings. The New Yorker, with exceptionally weak evidence, ran allegations of his sexual misbehavior in college. The reporters no doubt believed they were making it easier for victims to be heard. But airing insufficiently vetted allegations encourages the public to distrust the media. Actual victims won’t be heard if no one’s listening.

If it’s true that certain media organizations charged into the Kavanaugh mess without having all their ducks in a row, then it’s a lot of sinus-infection snot on their heads. But, as President Trump himself observed at the beginning of his term, I don’t think we have to make this into some “liberal media organizations” out to get Kavanaugh. No, Trump had it right at the beginning.

It’s all about the money.

Rather than insert my usual rant about the problems of importing other societal sector operationality into the free press, I’ll just point you at my dead horse.

But if this is true, someone should be fired with a big, high fastball.

Candidate Abrams continues her legal winning streak in the Georgia gubernatorial race:

A federal judge knocked down a motion from Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Kemp against a previous temporary restraining order that changes the way election officials handle absentee ballots in the state.

US District Court Judge Leigh Martin May rejected Kemp’s arguments point by point and concluded the “injunction ensures that absentee voters who are unable to vote in person and whose applications or ballots are rejected based on a signature mismatch will still have the opportunity to have their votes counted in the upcoming election.”

Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, also filed an emergency motion Tuesday with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. He argued, “the district court issued a preliminary injunction that requires 159 Georgia counties to make immediate, significant changes to those longstanding procedures right in the middle of an ongoing statewide general election,” which he said threatens to “disrupt the orderly administration of elections.”

Last week, May, the judge, ordered that Georgia election officials stop rejecting absentee ballots with voters’ signatures that do not appear to match those on record. [CNN]

I’m wondering about this “long-standing” claim of Kemp’s. PolitiFact seems to indicate the law is only a year old:

Under a 2017 Georgia law, a voter registration application is complete if information on that form exactly matches records kept by Georgia’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration.

If there’s no match, it’s placed on a pending status and the applicant is notified in the form of a letter from the county board of registrars about the need to provide additional documentation. It’s then up to the applicant to provide sufficient evidence to verify his or her identify.

But perhaps the reference can be twisted to mean something far more innocent, eh? There are days I get tired of the picky word shit.

When it comes to climate change, the eye candy is the big hurricanes coming in, and future visions of drowned cities. The real bell ringer, though, will be the quiet changes in the foundation of civilization.

Agriculture.

With that in mind, here’s a thought-provoking bit from WaPo on how viniculturists in Italy are experiencing climate change:

Season after season, he’d been growing and harvesting the same grapes on the same land. But five years ago, Livio Salvador began to wonder whether something was changing.

When he walked through his vineyards, he would see patches of grapes that were browned and desiccated. The damage tended to appear on the outside of the bunch — the part most exposed to sunlight. Salvador talked to other growers and winemakers in the region, and they were noticing it, too.

Their grapes were getting sunburned.

“It has almost become the norm,” Salvador said this month, after a torrid growing season that saw 10 percent of his fruit wither to waste under the sun.

In a region celebrated for the prosecco and pinot grigio it ships around the world, Italy’s particularly sensitive white wine grapes have become a telltale of even gradual temperature increases — a climate slipping from ideal to nearly ideal. Vintners and farmers are noticing more disease, an accelerated ripening process and, most viscerally, a surge in the number of grapes that are singed by the intensifying summer heat.

Even if Ag doesn’t go under and plunge us into famine, there are more subtle problems ahead:

In this part of northeastern Italy, wine production is the abiding identity, and the vineyards stretch for miles, interrupted by villages with church bell towers and by the occasional Palladian villa. One large producer says the region has been suitable for wine-growing “since ancient Roman times.”

Much like Pittsburgh losing its steel industry, or places like Flint and Cadillac, MI, losing the car industry. It’s a long way back when a cultural identity has been ripped away.

Think of it this way: Office workers aren’t really going to notice changes to the climate directly. The slow, impactful changes simply don’t hit them because they work on, well, office stuff. Even those who will look at the numbers describing climate change can always write it off as bad data collection equipment or even “natural cycles,” despite anything the scientists say.

But the Ag people, they will notice. They have to notice. When their choice bit of land becomes progressively less productive, they’ll notice. And they keep records, they know the long-term trends.

Sometimes we see them as tradition-bound conservatives, but in the end they may be that all important non-climate change scientist group that grabs the ideological deniers by the lapels, shakes them vigorously, and tosses them into the river of dishonorable obscurity.

Congressman Steve King’s recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate. We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior.

— Steve Stivers (@RepSteveStivers) October 30, 2018

Steve Stivers is National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman.

Representative Steve King (R-IA) isn’t a Democrat.

It’s stunning, to me. Not only the condemnation, but waiting until this late in the campaign season. Is this just a hand-wave at being outraged, soon to be followed by a sigh and an admission that, one more time, they’ll just have to work with him?

Or is this an attempt to sink King into a lake with a boulder tied to his ankles?

Maybe Stivers should consider switching parties.