Category Archives: Uncategorized

I happened to run across an interview with Rep. Sanford, who recently lost a primary to a Trumpist, conducted two days after his loss and published in Rolling Stone:

How does the Republican Party pull back from this? Where everything is boiled down to are you for or against Trump?
The Founding Fathers’ admonishment that an educated citizenry was vital to the Republic. The systems that they set up which I’ve come to revere were really built upon the notion of the fallen nature of man. That we weren’t perfect. We oughta debate. Nobody has a lock on wisdom. That’s why I started my talk the other night with humility. We all ought to have the humility to say I don’t know what I don’t know. But I don’t even fully know what I think I know.

And there is such hubris that’s at times emanated out of the administration about “this is the way it is. Or let me demean somebody else as a way of advancing my point.” Or you can fill in all the blanks. But all I know – and this has been seared hard for me, given my implosion in 2009 and its aftermath and the reflection that comes with that, and was doubled down again in a different way with this latest experience – I’ve come to very strongly believe that a humility in one’s perspective is vital to listening to somebody else. And at the end of the day if we’re going to solve solutions in a collective sense, you better be listening pretty closely to that somebody else. We’re not doing that in the American political system right now.

Not listening and presuming you already have all the answers.
Correct.

Do you think the president sets the tone on that?
He does. One ought to have the courage of one’s convictions but one ought to balance that with some degree of humility in the courage of one’s convictions. And that ain’t a selling message right now. That’s just not where the political marketplace is.

My respect for Rep. Sanford has risen considerably based on the material in this interview. He’s clearly a guy who has thought long and hard about the difficulties of governance and epistemology, as one might hope for from a former governor (of South Carolina) as well as Representative – he’s seen governance from both the Executive and Legislative wings. While compromise is often characterized as a way to move forward when the opposition has roughly the same power as you do, it is more productively considered a way to wisdom when attempting to resolve a difficult problem or situation in which there are competing solutions and none are obviously correct. Compromise, evaluate, compromise, evaluate. For the ideologically and religiously driven, both of those words are blasphemy, because ideology and religion are a priori frameworks of belief which presuppose correctness without proof, a correctness which cannot be questioned.

The practical, humble person, on the other hand, acknowledges the possibility of error, not only in application but in the set of principles by which they operate. Compromise becomes a way to incorporate contingent wisdom from other groups, frameworks – what have you.

But such an action constitutes a violation in belief of ideology and religion, and a person to take such an action becomes an apostate in the eyes of the faithful. Vile, hated – and blamed for the failures original to the ideology. Thus do those who benefit from the blind allegiance of the group hold on to power.

Two final thoughts. First, I wonder if Rep. Sanford is exploring an Independent run. It would be illuminating of local politics to see if he could garner a substantial number of votes, and if those would come from the independents or the Republicans.

Second, I couldn’t help but notice a dialog play out in the back of my mind, in which I say to a group of Trump supporters,

No offense, but you are the most politically immature group in America. The Founding Fathers expected better of our citizens, so do hurry up and get better. In the meanwhile, stay out of the way.

There, I feel better for saying it. No doubt the childish antics of Corey Lewandowski contributed to that reaction as well.

Andrew Sullivan recently commented on how difficult it can be to stay “on point” with the Trump Administration, that the constant lying and stripping of context and general blurring of the truth of just about anything can leave the observer tipsy and burned out.

I’ve noticed just in the last day or two that anything the Administration says, whether it’s Trump or one of his minions Cabinet Secretaries, I will dismiss as drivel. I want to just say,

Thanks for your opinion, now will you please go sit in that corner while the adults resolve the situation. No, no, don’t try to tell me what you think, you lie so much that you’ve gone from good, firm meat to just soupy infected flesh that I want nothing to do with.

Every official seems to become infected, with perhaps the exception of Defense Secretary Mattis. It’s frustrating, it’s embarrassing, and it makes me just want to ignore their input, because I simply have started to assume it’ll be deceitful, boastful, ignorant, and biased to play to the Republican base that still adores Trump’s promises of an America of decades ago. Instead of placing truth first, it’s made politics the name of the day.

And there’s a reason most religions and parents make truth a high priority. I’m sure we can all figure out why that might be.

WaPo reports that Apple’s famed App Store is going to show up in the foyer of SCOTUS:

The Supreme Court on Monday announced that it would consider a case that asks whether consumers can sue Apple over the way it manages millions of apps for iPhones and iPads, threatening to expose not only Apple but also its tech industry peers to new antitrust scrutiny.

The new fight in front of the nine justices stems from a lawsuit initiated in California almost seven years ago. Robert Pepper and three other iPhone-owning plaintiffs allege that Apple has “monopolized” the market for iPhone apps because it has total control over the games, utilities and other offerings that appear in its App Store.

Sure, this is just non-specialized reporting, but I thought this was interesting:

The lawsuit could force Apple to rethink the way it manages its App Store, long considered one of the most highly curated platforms in the business. For one thing, Apple generally takes a 30 percent cut of all third-party apps sold through its portal. In the eyes of the plaintiffs, that fee ultimately hurts consumers, because developers pass those added costs on to iPhone and iPad users who purchase the paid apps.

Consumers “don’t like the fact that they’re being forced to buy apps only on the App Store and they’re forced to pay a 30 percent markup,” said Mark Rifkin, a senior partner at Wolf Haldenstein who represents the plaintiffs.

Which makes it sound like just a pre-emptory fee, doesn’t it? Yet my understanding, not being an Apple customer, is that Apple “curates” (to use a word from elsewhere in the same article) the App Store. The phraseology doesn’t acknowledge that Apple is apparently offering a valuable service via this curation, presumably minimizing the impact of malware.

It’ll be interesting to see how this comes out.

On the way home today, while listening to the gabble of outrage over the separation of children from illegal immigrant families, it occurred to me that this can be seen as smoke coming from the real fires, which are the motivations for these families to leave their homes. After all, most people, even Americans, would prefer to at least stay in their own countries; many prefer to stay in the state or city in which they grew up.

The reasons given on the radio involve fleeing from violence and poverty, and that, so far, has been where it stops. So I started wondering, what is causing those problems?

Then I recalled a report I read long, long ago, about how the agricultural sectors of Third World countries can be devastated by the agricultural policies of First World countries. My vague memory went like this: the excess agricultural output of the First World countries must be disposed of – profitably – in some manner. Export is the among the easiest ways to do that. In order to grow the market, the First World governments subsidize the farmers and their exports. Soon, food is flooding the market of some Third World country.

We grow food as a cash crop; our hypothetical victims grow it as a food crop. Soon, because of the subsidies, the native growers are priced out of the market, they lose their shirts and their farms, and now they’re poverty stricken.

And it’s not tractors and all the paraphernalia of modern farming left sitting in their fields – it’s the natives themselves, who worked the fields en masse, who are left with nothing at all. Because they’re not the United States, they lack both the political freedom and the technology of Americans. Finding new jobs or getting training is not easy – or even feasible.

What to do next? There’s nothing available at home, so, like so many Americans before them, honorably or not, they pursue what will help their family survive – moving to the United States.

So how do I prove this assertion? Honestly, I don’t. I don’t have the time, nor the expertise. But I can point. Here’s the numbers on American agricultural exports from the United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service:

Yes, that says $billions down the side there. $140 billion isn’t chicken feed. How about just to Mexico? This is from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture:

I wondered if there was another way to approach the problem, and there is, although it’s somewhat problematical – looking at trends in rural population. This is from Trading Economics:

Certainly one can argue about improved technology and that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t care to try to explain how the rural population of Mexico lost 3 points over 9 years.

The Trump Administration is being excoriated – rightly – over its behavior with regard to immigration, from simply ripping families to pieces to lying with statistics, as WaPo points out in this article^[1]. But this controversy, as important as it is since it illustrates the moral incompetence of this Administration and its allies, conceals the truly important question, which is How much is the United States responsible for these ills that are forcing the law-abiding foreign citizens from their homes and to the United States?

How much of this have we really brought on ourselves through ignorance, arrogance, and adherence to the capitalistic ideology?

I’m not a zealot on either side of the capitalism question. The benefits are unquestionable, but the potential for abuse is also unquestionable, and the tendency to plunge head-long into new ventures can rupture economies and societies which do not have the resources to be flexible in the face of a changing economy.

Not that this is even bad, for the forces of the status quo can result in their own special brand of misery if they repress economic wealth, or slow medical research, or pick your favorite societal good. But we need to be aware that stopping or even slowing the flow of immigrants may be bloody impossible until we understand – and possibly take responsibility for – the causes of the poverty and gangs in the various countries from which desperate immigrants originate.

¹Summary, they’re stripping context and playing the small numbers game. There’s a rant somewhere in here about government being an eternal search for truth, but I’ll not do that for now.

Rock, paper, scissors. Anything beat a pair of locusts?

It strives for nothing more than an evening’s light entertainment, and The Mummy (1999) achieves it and, perhaps, a bit beyond. No doubt inspired by the legendary Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) in its romantic archaeological facet, it concerns a woman, Evy, and her somewhat dissolute brother, Jonathan, both half-Egyptian, who stumble across some clues as to the lost Egyptian city of Hamunaptra, where the wealth of Egypt was reputedly stored, and the most evil dead buried.

How evil? The illicit lover of the mistress of the Pharaoh, 3000 years ago, was cursed with the mightiest curse, and buried there. But this is a curious curse, for if he’s ever released, his loss becomes his gain: he will become a plague upon mankind.

Evy and Jonathan need a guide, and find one in a man who has gone and returned, O’Connell. They find him literally at the end of his rope, the hangman’s noose strangling him as they bargain for his life. His redemption, for crimes unspecified, binds him to them and to ourselves, for in that bid for redemption we can all see ourselves.

There’s little point in recounting the plot, except to highlight one key difference between this story and Raiders Of The Lost Ark. While both dabble in matters divine and having to do with the afterlife, they are unlike in how the divine comes out. There is no doubt that, in the latter story, the divine remains the undefeated, even unchallenged, champion of reality. The evil faced by Indiana Jones & Co is complete and profound, yet it’s also completely human. When the divine is sufficiently annoyed by evil, it reaches out and squashes it.

But the eponymous antagonist of The Mummy, cursed as he is, has also made the transition from the mundane transgressions of humanity to enter the pantheon of the divine, and even if it’s one of the most uncomfortable transitions one can imagine (think of having your flesh stripped from your still breathing body by scarab beetles), upon his release he begins to assume the status of a God, an evil, crabby God who has missed his woman for 3000 years, and wants another stab at bringing her back from her own version of Hell.

But this transforms the story from scuttling about until the divine reaches down and executes a classic deus ex machina to the more assertive and aggressive Doing battle with a god. In a way, much like Ghostbusters (1984), it’s an announcement that the era of Gods is coming to an end, that human needs and goals are assuming a primacy. But by the same token, the mysterious ways of the Gods, their subtlety, perhaps in our interests, perhaps in pursuit of goals beyond our foggy comprehension, recede into the background. Sometimes mankind’s direct approach to life is less effective than that of the Gods’.

Even if all those Gods are imaginary.

Bah. Sit back and enjoy the movie. Good acting & chemistry between characters, good special effects, all that rot. I’m just having fun, shootin’ the breeze here.

Remember the hubbub about the Wisconsin special elections? Here’s what happened in the first State Senate district, courtesy Vox:

Wisconsin Democrats just picked up a Republican-held state legislature seats in a duo of special elections on Tuesday, serving yet another wake-up call to Republicans in the state.

Democrat Caleb Frostman, the former head of the Door County Economic Development Corp, won northeastern Wisconsin’s First Senate District, which voted for Donald Trump by a whopping 17 points in 2016. Frostman’s seat will be up for reelection again in November.

And the other? From Ballotpedia:

There was also a special election in Wisconsin State Assembly District 42 (AD 42) on June 12.^[5] Republican Jon Plumer defeated Democrat Ann Groves Lloyd and independent candidate Gene Rubinstein. Plumer received 53 percent of the vote to retain the seat for Republicans.

I wonder why Vox didn’t cover that, perhaps comparing the districts to see why they split. Granted, 53% is a majority of the voters, but not a large one. The Democrat won 40% of the vote, and the balance went to the Independent, who does not appear to have played much of a role in this election. A quick eyeballing of the district’s history indicates winning 53% of the vote is less than average, but not the sort of thing to raise the alarms – the last few elections were won by Republican candidates with less than 60% of the vote.

And that, more or less, satisfies my curiosity.

On Lawfare, Chibli Mallat presents an analysis of the leadership situation in Saudi Arabia which is a bit unsettling:

There have been hints of open dissent within the family, and the stakes are existential for [Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS)]. Last November, some of the most prominent members of Saudi high society were confined to house arrest at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, including 11 members of the royal family and the most prominent businessmen in the kingdom. Although billed as an anti-corruption crackdown, it certainly looked like the crown prince consolidating his power. Reuters reported at the time that MBS ordered the arrests “when he realized more relatives opposed him becoming king than he had thought.” Eleven other members of the royal family were arrested on Jan. 4.

The young prince is, by all accounts, determined to take over as quickly as possible. His father is 82 and suffers from a mild form of Alzheimer’s. King Salman could change his mind if his unhappy brothers and nephews get his ear. The opposition at large has grown also because of the setbacks of Saudi foreign policy, mostly ascribed to MBS’s impetuous character, in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. His commitment to the glitzy and increasingly elusive 2030 Vision plan has also drawn concern. There was far less money to go around in 2017 and far greater entitlement expected by the ruling family’s proliferating membership, dissenters of all kinds and the population at large. And there is the Arab Spring—the real, nonviolent one on the streets and in social media, which first emerged in preparations for a “Day of Rage” on March 11, 2011, that authorities prevented from being held.

As Saudi Arabia is our most important Arab ally, any sort of upset during a power transfer has to be of concern and is worth watching. And if MBS makes it a violent act, do we wish to remain allied with Saudi Arabia? The move from fossil fuel dependence to renewables would make this question much easier to answer. The current Administration is thus making that more difficult.

Today SCOTUS handed down a decision on the two gerrymandering cases of Wisconsin and Maryland by … avoiding the issue, as CNN notes:

The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped two major cases concerning partisan gerrymandering, allowing controversial district maps to stand and be used in this fall’s midterm elections.

The 9-0 ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts in a Wisconsin case is a blow to Democrats who argued the Republican-drawn maps prevented fair and effective representation by diluting voters’ influence and penalizing voters based on their political beliefs.

The Wisconsin case was returned to the lower court, while the Maryland case was turned down because no irreparable harm was shown.

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy:

Of course, some, both on the left and on the right, have argued that such narrow decisionmaking, or remand or dismissal on procedural grounds, are often a good idea, and that the Supreme Court should indeed often decide as little as possible. And perhaps these were indeed the right answers in these cases. But I just wanted to note that at least so far, a lot of the expected big bangs have fizzled (though of course some of the most-awaited high-profile cases, such as the “travel ban” case and the union agency fee case, still remain to be announced later this week or next).

And recall the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, another case of a big principle and a fizzle of a decision. I wonder if SCOTUS would really rather not become a football in the current political wars. This may be Roberts, conscious of legacy, steering the court down roads with guardrails, rather than forest paths where bears may savage the court’s reputation.

We may see similarly narrow decisions in the near future.

David French on National Review has a mix of good and bad points:

Benisek [the Maryland case] is largely meaningless. Gill [the Wisconsin case], however, is of some consequence. The case — while a “punt” on the merits — does have a clear purpose. It demonstrates once again that there’s no easy judicial path through what is (at its heart) a tangled political morass. When districting is delegated to the political branches of government, it will be — hold on to your hats — thoroughly political. States can choose different ways to district, but when a state chooses the political path, the Supreme Court’s default position should be to defer, absent clear and unequivocal constitutional violations. And, by the way, there is no constitutional right to a legislative composition that matches each party’s share of the vote.

An interesting remark, given fair representation is one of the pillars of our country. It’s probably worth a smack upside the head. However, this is a more cogent, practical point:

Moreover, while there is no doubt packing and cracking in any political districting process, we can’t forget that the American people are in the midst of their own, voluntary gerrymander. The number of “landslide counties” (where one presidential candidate wins by 20 points or more) keeps increasing. People are packing themselves, and this “Big Sort” means that no judicial decision can deliver the sweeping solutions that many activists crave.

So long as we use a geographical system for representation, which I think has more of a basis in political history than in political theory, and the population remains capable of changing its mind, it’s a fair point that looking to the judicial system to “fix” gerrymandering may be a fool’s errand.

Something Deb bought for the front yard.

And this is something called a nine-bark.

It was raining so hard he had to give her mouth to mouth resuscitation.
It was unsuccessful.

It’s the light touch and leisurely, respectful approach which makes Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994) a success. It concerns a small group of Brits, unmarried, and how one of their members, Charles, falls for an American named Carrie at a wedding they attend, as she does for him. After a night of charm and lust, she disappears and he is left confused, for he has never considered himself to be marriage material in view of his failures in the realm of romance. A few months later, Carrie appears at another wedding that the friends also attend, but this time with fiancee in tow. Eventually, Charles and Carrie end up in bed again, which simply confuses the situation the more.

At Carrie’s wedding, though, the group suffers a loss as one of them, Gareth, proclaiming that they should all be in pursuit of spouses, proceeds to collapse and die. The consequent funeral is the pivot of the movie, emphasizing that life is a temporary condition, a condition that must be taken advantage of while it exists. As Charles’ main interest is now married and off the market, he returns to a previous love and, not belaboring the audience with a painful courtship (at least not in the TV version which I witnessed), we are once again in a church, preparing for the inevitable wedding of Charles to an old love.

But when Carrie shows up, haggard and without a husband, the wedding, not to mention Charles’ none-too-stable temperament, is at immediate risk of the consequences of the differential between societal expectations and the inner human need for self-respect.

It’s light and fun, and I enjoyed it, mostly, even if I didn’t quite believe in the chemistry between Charles and Carrie.

Ever wonder about plagiarism in the field of academic philosophy? Yeah, me neither – but it does happen, and Retraction Watch interviews a leading light in the fight against just such plagiarism here. I found this bit interesting:

RW: What’s your typical procedure when you spot a potential publishing problem? When, if ever, do you contact the authors?

MD: In my experience, plagiarism in philosophy is typically serial plagiarism. When I happen upon a plagiarized article in my research, I treat it as an index case, and then I examine other articles by the same author of record. Cases can multiply very quickly. Also, colleagues now send me tips about suspected plagiarized articles in my field, and I am happy to assist them with advice or to send retraction requests myself if the evidence is there and they wish to remain uninvolved. Although I prefer not to deal directly with authors of record for plagiarized articles, I often contact the primary victims of plagiarism to let them know that I will be sending a retraction request to a journal or publisher. Their support can be helpful, but it is not necessary: it’s the documentation of evidence that counts.

You do it once and don’t get caught, then why not repeat it? But most folks are brought up to be honest, so most don’t do it.

It’s reassuring to me, actually.

In the preceding Word Of The Day, I quoted another part of the interview which mentions an attempted harassment of him as a whistleblower. It seems that some editors don’t realize that fraud is an unfortunate but inevitable part of the game, and they should be prepared for it, rather than assuming, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, their shit don’t stink. Something anyone in an editorial or even managerial position should probably consider.

Corrigendum:

noun, plural cor·ri·gen·da [kawr-i-jen-duh] /ˌkɔr ɪˈdʒɛn də/.

1. an error to be corrected, especially an error in print.
2. corrigenda, a list of corrections of errors in a book or other publication. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Philosophers, meet the plagiarism police. His name is Michael Dougherty.”, interview, Retraction Watch:

In my kind of work, I see the darker side of the profession. To give an example: a few years ago, two editors at a Taylor and Francis journal wrote to a senior administrator at my university – on the journal’s letterhead – to complain that my retraction requests constituted a waste of my university’s time and that “the ethical basis for those actions is highly questionable.” Their attempt at apparent whistleblower harassment was unsuccessful, and the philosopher they were seemingly trying to shield has earned, to date, 10 published corrections: five retractions, two errata, and three corrigenda.

OK, boys, it’s the bottom of the ninth and we’re down 20 runs. But I have confidence in you! I … nevermind.

The quirky Isle Of Dogs (2018) is a story from the other viewpoint – the viewpoint of the dogs exiled to the island off the coast of Megasaki, a city that was infested with sick dogs. Unfortunately, the story is a bit muddled as viewpoints change from dogs to the young humans who oppose the Mayor of Megasaki’s plans to massacre the dogs on the Isle of Dogs. Is this a story about the inscrutability of humans to dogs, and how dogs have to accommodate their masters, and thus gain the sense of purpose which acts as a barrier to the waves of ennui which threatens all sentient beings?

Or is it an inquiry into the atmosphere and results of a corrupt political machine? Do the ideals of the students who form the heart of the resistance to the evil plans of the mayor fade with age, or what? Unfortunately, the or what part is pivotal because our exposure to the human part of this movie is limited to the mayor and his minions, the scientific team who discovers the cure for the sick dogs and whose work is suppressed and leader assassinated, and the children who are devoted to dogs and truth. Is it truly vote-rigging which results in the re-election of the mayor? Or a populace persuaded by the skillful lies of the mayor, who have forgotten the companionship of the venerable dog?

In the end, the strongest thematic material is the value of persistence, and while the dogs and kid who’s searching for his personal dog on the island are charming, and some of the visuals are quite striking, in the end I cannot say I was moved by this movie. For all that there’s good self-consciousness, a couple of fun taiko drumming sequences, and interesting dialog, at its heart the story isn’t strong enough. Despite its exotic taste, this script needed at least one more draft in order to identify, clarify, and extend the theme of this story.

And that’s too bad. There are some strong elements present.

Theophany:

Manifestation of God that is tangible to the human senses. In its most restrictive sense, it is a visible appearance of God in the Old Testament period often, but not always, in human form. Some would also include in this term Christophanies (preincarnate appearances of Christ) and angelophanies (appearances of angels). In the latter category are found the appearances of the angel of the Lord, which some have taken to be Christophanies, reasoning that since the angel of the Lord speaks for God in the first person ( Gen 16:10 ) and the human addressed often attributes the experience to God directly ( Gen 16:13 ), the angel must therefore be the Lord or the preincarnate Christ. [Bible Study Tools]

Noted in “Divine Invitation,” Daniel Weiss, Archaeology (July / August 2018):

The text quotes at length from a prayer by Seth, a son of Adam and Eve, which is believed to have caused a theophany, or an appearance of God. “The user wants, if not a theophany, then at least the full attention of the divinity,” says Zellmann-Rohrer, “so the best way to achieve that will be to repeat the prayer that Seth is supposed to have used.”

If you’ve been following the news about the recent suit filed in Texas claiming the ACA is unconstitutional, Nicholas Bagley at The Incidental Economist thinks an amicus brief filed by the American Medical Association is an effective rebuttal:

Today, I wanted to highlight one of those briefs: this one by the American Medical Associationand other medical societies. It’s the brief that the United States would have filed if it hadn’t abandoned its duty to defend the statute.

The brief is excellent throughout, especially in arguing that the plaintiffs don’t have standing to bring the suit (an issue I flagged last week). But its most important contribution is identifying a Fifth Circuit case—one that binds the district court that’s hearing the lawsuit—that seems to dispose of the argument that a penalty-free mandate is unconstitutional.

In United States v. Ardoin, 19 F.3d 177 (5th Cir. 1994), the Fifth Circuit held that Congress may constitutionally exercise its taxing power without actually raising “some revenue” for the government.

Unfortunately, that’s not a SCOTUS decision, but the Fifth Circuit decision, so it’s always possible SCOTUS would ignore it if it ended up in the SCOTUS docket. But it might make for an early victory.

There are costs and there are risks, and for Bitcoin and ether, the risks may have just gone up, as the SEC thinks they are not subject to standard regulation. WaPo reports:

Two of the world’s biggest virtual currencies need not be regulated like stocks and bonds, a top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday, putting to rest months of uncertainty about how the financial regulator views bitcoin and ether, the cryptocurrency behind Ethereum.

Speaking at an industry conference in San Francisco, William Hinman, the SEC’s director of corporate finance, said the two top cryptocurrencies don’t meet the criteria for regulation that the agency typically applies to traditional securities.

“Based on my understanding of the present state of ether, the Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of ether are not securities transactions,” Hinman said.

Hinman’s remarks suggest that, unlike companies, which are required to educate stock investors about the health of their businesses, the developers behind bitcoin and ether face no such obligations. The basis for this conclusion, Hinman said, lies in the fact that bitcoin and ether are developed diffusely, by many unaffiliated people, rather than by a single, centralized entity such as a corporation.

I can understand the reasoning, but I wonder if lack of regulation will result in the growth of cryptocurrencies, or a drag on same. After all, your standard consumer doesn’t really want to take the time to understand the risks of using non-standard currencies, they just want it to work. The recent hack of some Bitcoins in South Korea is certainly a confidence sapper as well. While the right wing has certainly been successful in equating regulation with burden and barrier to profits, the simple fact of the matter is that a well-considered regulation is more than worth the time that goes into designing it and putting it into effect.

The day started out with a crash and a bang as a thunderstorm rolled into town, and is now settled into a determined dreariness. The weather is an accent on my injured elbow. Here’s a couple of pics to brighten a day.

Yeah, I don’t know what they are, either.

Update: This is actually in our back garden. I changed my mind concerning the pictures to publish but forgot to change the title.

As everyone tries to read their pet narrative into the Inspector General’s report on the conduct of the FBI top leadership, all 500 pages of it, Lawfare‘s team, led by Benjamin Wittes, has their own sober take on it. I found this particularly interesting:

First, the report validates the essential integrity of the investigation. It offers no reason to believe that, in the main, the Clinton email investigation was not a genuine effort by the FBI to learn the facts and apply the law to them in a fashion consistent with Justice Department policy and practice. This point will tend to get lost in the politics of competitive victimization, in which the Clinton forces want to blame their candidate’s ultimate electoral defeat on the bureau and the president wants to ascribe to federal law enforcement a “deep state” conspiracy to conduct a “WITCH HUNT!” against him and go easy on his opponent’s “crimes.” But it is actually the critical starting place. For all that the document finds fault with the bureau—disagreeing with key judgments, accusing the FBI director of “insubordination,” and charging individual agents and employees of “cast[ing] a cloud” over the agency—it never questions that the FBI as an institution was pursuing its proper mission: conducting a serious investigation in good faith.

Second, and relatedly, the IG broadly concludes that the investigation’s judgments were not influenced by politics. Time after time, when the inspector general evaluates how individual decisions were made, he concludes that there were legitimate reasons for the manner in which the FBI obtained evidence and interviewed witnesses—reasons that were consistent with past practice and with Justice Department policy. There are some important caveats: The IG’s office questions the decision to let Clinton be interviewed in the presence of two of her lawyers—a decision the report describes as “inconsistent with typical investigative strategy,” though it notes that there is “no persuasive evidence” their presence “influenced Clinton’s interview.” More importantly, as we discuss below, the inspector general was rightly disturbed by the highly political text-message exchanges between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok. Even here, though, the investigation “did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed.” Those steps, the investigation finds, were made by a larger team and “were not unreasonable.” More broadly, although the report is unsparing toward Comey, it finds explicitly that his actions were not influenced by political preferences.

In other words, despite the absurd accusations of there being some sort of Deep State out to get Trump, the FBI performed in the proper manner, politically speaking: that is, they performed a-politically. This should be vastly reassuring to independents as well as all citizens who understand the importance of law enforcement agencies being immune to the political winds. This is clearly a concept that does not impinge on the consciousness of President Trump nor his political cronies.

I am not going to take the time to read the report myself, so I don’t know if the Inspector General’s office, which reportedly criticized Comey’s behavior as FBI Director for departing from Department of Justice policies and practices, actually ventured to set forth its recommended decisions. For me, it seemed as if the FBI faced a very unpalatable situation, and did the best that Comey & Co could do. It would be interesting to see a full recommendation & justification from the IG, and then compare it to Comey’s decisions.

Speaking of former Director Comey, he had a deliciously innocently nasty response to the IG’s report in an Op-Ed in The New York Times:

I do not agree with all of the inspector general’s conclusions, but I respect the work of his office and salute its professionalism. All of our leaders need to understand that accountability and transparency are essential to the functioning of our democracy, even when it involves criticism. This is how the process is supposed to work.

His target is not the Inspector General’s office. It’s not the Administration. It’s all the amateurs who think they know better than the professionals who’ve trained and spent long hours thinking about how to best fairly govern.

Unlike Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a Trump ally who felt the need to hurriedly rush to judgment on Twitter (his choice of communications service may itself be a judgment on him):

The FBI didn’t want Trump to be President. Peter Stzrok’s text says “we’ll stop it.” The day after the election, FBI Attorney #2 said he was “stressed about what I could have done differently.” 2 weeks later he said “Viva le resistance.

An error easily avoided: confusing one man’s personal opinion for the official opinion of those in charge. Note that no one else, with perhaps the exception of his lover, in a liberal reading, was noted for such sentiments. I haven’t noted Rep. Jordan before, but I think, in the future, I shan’t be trusting his judgment much. Just another frenzied cultist with no real analytical capabilities, just the compulsion to defend da leader and attack “the enemy.”

I’ve briefly mentioned electric planes before, but now there’s the tragic news of a crash of an experimental electric plane. This IEEE‘s EnergyWise blog post suggests the batteries might have caught fire:

A local news site report, translated by Google, reports that “The aircraft ignited during the crash, the flames were extinguished by professional firefighters in Pécs and Siklós within a few minutes….” However, AVWeb cites witnesses who saw the aircraft “maneuvering at low altitude before catching fire and crashing in a near vertical dive.”

If indeed the fire began in the air, and if the airplane was indeed a pure electric version of the eFusion, then one might speculate the problem could have started in the lithium-ion battery pack. Such batteries can undergo thermal runaway, in which one cell suddenly releases a lot of heat, causing neighboring cells to do the same in a chain reaction. Thermal runaway has plagued cellphones, laptops, and e-cigarettes.

But it’s too early to tell.

I suppose there are two approaches to this problem. The more desirable is to construct batteries that just don’t catch fire, while the less desirable, but analogous to the fossil fuel world, is to have a fire suppression system that hardly ever fails. It’ll be interesting if they go one way, the other, or both. I suspect the latter.

I’ve just spent 10 minutes chortling over the latest Simon’s Cat animated cartoons. I’ve loved the Simon’s Cat series from the moment I saw the first one, years and years ago. They’re on Facebook here. Go on, take a look.

North Carolina remains a fishbowl view on corrupt politics – and an echo of the national stage. Via NC State Senator Jeff Jackson (D), WRAL.com reports on the recent statements of state Representative John Blust (R-Guilford) during a debate on an agricultural bill:

“This bill is moving like this because we’re taking sides in a dispute,” Blust said. “We know better than the court. We know better than the facts. We know better than the law. We’re going to protect one litigant, and we’re going to say to the other, ‘You don’t matter. You don’t count.’ It’s because the one side has the ear of the powers that run this institution.” …

“We accuse the courts of being biased and wicked and bad and [making] bad decisions. What about the way we operate?” he asked. “Is it right that one side gets to appear and pack the galleries and nobody from the other side gets any notice?

“We callously take away that right [for people to persuade their legislators], and then we criticize courts for being unfair,” he continued. “We sound like me after Carolina loses to Duke or State – it had to have been the referees. Our side lost this lawsuit, so it must have been a bad court. That’s a weak excuse.” …

“The way things are handled is pertinent to this bill,” he responded. “We’re the people’s house and the people’s legislature, and we ought to do business in a deliberative fashion that befits the trust that’s been bestowed on us by the people. That ought to be an ironclad guarantee that we take seriously at all times.”

One of the keys here is that, according to Senator Jackson, Representative Blust is not running for re-election. As has been noted in the press of late, if you’re a Republican ambitious to enter onto or remain on the national stage, you keep your mouth shut about the fundamental problems besetting the Party. But if you’re retiring, if you no longer depend on the Party or the base for your job, then just maybe you open your yap and start telling it like it is. At the national level, Gowdy, Corker, and Flake are just three names that have dared to contradict the official Party line on various GOP talking points.

The problem, of course, is that party members do their organization no favors by waiting until they’re leaving the profession before discussing the profound shortcomings of the culture of the GOP. In fact, it’s a disservice, since their influence is now on the wane.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the North Carolina legislature in the next election. It’s not clear to me, being rather afar, if the folks in North Carolina know of the ways of the GOP, or if they approve of them.

So I snapped some pics.

Steve Benen is upset with the wrong people with regard to the behavior of Representative Steve King (R-IA), after the Representative admiringly sharing a post by an admitted European Nazi sympathizer:

But what matters in this case is not Collett’s disgusting worldview. It’s not even Steve King’s unsurprising willingness to promote Collett’s online content.

What shouldn’t go overlooked is the Iowa Republican’s ability to get away with stuff like this – because the right-wing congressman’s party has an endless tolerance for his offensive antics. Or put another way, the question is less about Steve King and more about what GOP leaders intend to do about Steve King.

While it’d be great if the Republican leadership repudiated King, it doesn’t really matter. The people who are responsible for Representative King are those that he represents – Iowa’s 4th Congressional District.

His opposition in the mid-terms, J. D. Scholten, should use this as ammunition, and suggest that every vote for King is a vote for someone who is either a Nazi, or so dumb as to admire them. That’s a moral stain on anyone who dares to vote for him.

And, perhaps, a measure of the GOP’s moral strength.

Our white peonies didn’t last long. Perhaps the pink peony, somewhat destitute of blooms, will survive longer.

Too bad it was a wee bit out of focus.