Category Archives: Uncategorized

With his loss in the Republican West Virginia primary for the Senate seat currently held by Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), I thought Don Blankenship was finished with politics for this season, but it turns out I was wrong. From Politico:

West Virginia coal baron and former prisoner Don Blankenship announced on Monday that he plans to launch a long-shot third-party Senate bid after finishing a distant third in this month’s Republican primary.

Blankenship said he would run in the general election as the Constitution Party nominee. But he would need to overcome a “sore loser” law in West Virginia that prevents failed candidates in a main-party primary from refiling to run in the general election under another party’s banner.

Is Blankenship serious? A third place finish suggests those he thought were his natural constituency have rejected him, and his conviction on misdemeanor charges of conspiring to run his mine without regard to safety regulations, resulting in the deaths of 23 miners, will alienate those for whom Big Government doesn’t cause immediate heavy sweating.

In fact, I’m left with two alternatives. Either Mr. Blankenship has such a monstrous ego that he thinks he can pull off a miracle, or this is all about political extortion. In the latter case, his eventual goal is currently unclear. Perhaps a position in the RNC? A senior position in the local GOP?

The latter alternative seems the most likely. Keep an eye out for the ascent of Mr. Blankenship to a senior position. And possibly, a few months later, his sudden fall from grace as some sort of scandal comes to light.

And then question will be whether it’s a real scandal, or something engineered by the GOP extremist establishment.

Have you ever wondered about assessments of China’s approach to war? If so, this article by Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro on Lawfare might be of interest:

I found Beijing had three tendencies that hindered timely war resolution. First, in terms of wartime diplomacy, China was willing to open communication channels in the initial stages of conflict only with weaker parties. Otherwise, China cut off communications and delayed talking until it had demonstrated sufficient toughness through fighting. This, in turn, can result in a longer war than necessary. The second tendency concerns China’s approach to escalation—China consistently exhibited confidence, especially in the initial stages, that heavy escalation would ensure a short conflict that ended on China’s terms. This discourages Chinese leaders from considering de-escalation strategies, which may result in wars fought at a higher level of violence than would be the case otherwise. Last, with respect to mediation, China did approach third parties, which theoretically could have been beneficial. However, because China specifically involved them to pressure the adversary on China’s behalf and not to act as genuine mediators, the Chinese internationalization of disputes did not lead to swift resolution. Given that outside intervention is most effective when all parties are seriously committed to mediation, this trend to leverage third parties only to pressure China’s enemies is potentially problematic In short, China’s approach to diplomacy, escalation, and mediation created obstacles to conflict resolution.

However, China is not the same country it was when it fought its previous wars. There are three specific changes that may change Chinese war termination behavior. First, the Chinese military is significantly more capable with respect to other regional actors, which could plausibly affect its diplomatic posture. Second, the Party has less control over domestic public opinion in potential conflicts than it did in the Mao and Deng eras, which could plausibly affect its willingness to escalate conflicts. And third, China is now more economically and politically integrated into the international order, which could plausibly affect its approach to third-party involvement. I conducted a closer look at these changes in a recent article and found these three changes are likely to magnify rather than dampen China’s problematic war termination tendencies.

Assessments of this sort can never be made out of context, and with the assumption of the Presidency by Donald Trump, the context has changed. I suspect we’ve been seeing more aggression out of China purely to test President Trump, and since they continue to be quite aggressive, I think they’ve found someone who they can push around. Steve Benen summed up Trump’s behavior with respect to China today:

Worse, the larger pattern puts the White House in an especially unflattering light. Trump, eager to appear “tough,” said after his election that he was prepared to walk away from our “One China” policy. Chinese officials weren’t pleased, and Trump quickly backed down.

The American president also vowed to label China a currency manipulator, right before he retreatedon this, too.

The Trump administration was cracking down on ZTE after it did business with Iran and North Korea, lied about it, and created a domestic security threat. After stating his concerns for Chinese jobs, Trump backed down on this, too.

I wonder just how much we have to lose with incompetency in charge.

In a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS has decided to reject one –

OK, OK. I’m no lawyer, nor a Constitutional scholar. I apply common-sense to the law and, I suspect, I come off all wet. Still, this decision annoys me, because it’s part and parcel of the trend towards privatizing justice. Maybe everyone else is making the same point, I haven’t been out reading. But here it is.

– of its precedents, namely the idea that Separate But Equal is a sham. WaPo, among many, has a report on the case:

An ideologically divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that companies may require workers to settle employment disputes through individual arbitration rather than joining to press their complaints, a decision affecting as many as 25 million workers.

The court’s conservative majority said that the 5-to-4 ruling was a logical reading of federal law, and Congress’s preference for using arbitration to avoid costly and time-consuming litigation.

But the decision, involving a wage dispute, was roundly criticized on the left, and advocates said it could make it harder to press other workplace complaints such as discrimination and sexual harassment. …

The combined cases are EPIC Systems Corp. v. Lewis, Ernst & Young v. Morris and NLRB v. Murphy Oil.

Is arbitration a public or private service? It’s private, far as I understand it – and that necessarily renders it an unequal service, for such providers will not, maybe even cannot coordinate in order to find some way to provide equal services.

And that means injustice.

The heart of Brown v Board of Education is that separate facilities cannot hope to provide equal services, especially in an atmosphere of racism. While racism is not relevant to these cases, the same reasoning must apply – or the five justices who formed the majority must explain exactly how mediation service providers hope to provide equivalent services.

The privatization of justice, as we’re seeing here, has two facets.

First, the prioritization of corporate profits over public justice places the important priority of public justice far down the scale from where it should be. From humans to at least dogs, there’s an instinctive recognition of justice – and, yes, dogs do have a rough recognition of when they’re treated unfairly. Humans feel it keenly and resent it keenly.

And injustice alienates the victims from the perpetrators. That’s fine when it’s personal, when it’s some member of government who can be removed and replaced. It’s far more grave when it becomes a settled tenet of law. In fact, it’s a testament of a Court far too concerned with picayune details.

Second, by forcing justice into the private sector, it now becomes subject to the forces natural to that sector. We’ve discussed the mistake of migrating processes from one social sector into another, and this is an analogous mistake. The goal of just decisions will become twisted by the private sector goal of profits. Gradually, the pay of mediators will drop. Their support funds will be “optimized.” Experienced mediators, who may render good opinions initially, will quit in disgust. Their replacements? Inexperienced and biased, perhaps operating on non-mainstream social theories (or, to use technical jargon, they’re damned kooks!).

The results? Nothing too seriously, initially. Some people will be treated unjustly, but with unions in disrepute and the social community in continual flux, no one will organize the mass walkouts required to force firms to remove such noxious clauses from employment contracts.

But remember your history? The cause of the American Revolution wasn’t that minor tax on tea. The cause of the Revolution was the perception that the colonialists were treated unjustly by the English crown. This, too, will be perceived as an injustice – and, if the trend continues, we’ll see another revolution.

Hopefully, it’ll just result in kicking out the clowns who allowed this to happen and the passing of a law that obviates this ruling, and nothing more severe – like riots.

Due to poor organization skills on my part, I missed a couple of carousel-related pics, which I now own up to. The first is another view of the carousel:

Did I mention it was whirling about, and this was a smartphone camera? The second is a slightly out of focus capture of the carousel horses, barred from their rightful positions on the carousel and relegated to the wall opposite. For some reason, Jordan has them guarded by what appears to be angels.

He gets his mythologies a little confused, I fear.

Etiolation:

Etiolation /iːtiəˈleɪʃən/ is a process in flowering plants grown in partial or complete absence of light. It is characterized by long, weak stems; smaller leaves due to longer internodes; and a pale yellow color (chlorosis). The development of seedlings in the dark is known as “skotomorphogenesis” and leads to etiolated seedlings. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the third part of the tripartite column, “‘‘The Weight of This Sad Time’,” Andrew Sullivan, New York:

There is no music. There is no comic relief. There is instead a picture of an etiolated Christianity, a ghost of faith, kept alive only through the lies of the Prosperity Gospel or the cheap techniques of entertainment disguised as spirituality.

An interesting usage.

From Archaeology (May/June 2018):

According to some ancient sources, the Greco-Roman priests of Hierapolis would lead sacrificial animals toward the city’s purported gate to the underworld, where the beasts would suddenly collapse and die. A recent study has finally revealed the truth behind this 2,000-year-old mystery. “Pluto’s Gate” is actually built atop a fault that emits carbon dioxide. Because it is heavier than air, the gas collects in higher concentrations closer to the ground. The priests were tall enough to avoid toxic levels of the gas, but the animals were not so fortunate.

One of the more varied collections at House On The Rock was the collection of musical instruments, which came in two categories: those which were animated, and those that were not.

Here we have the control panel of an organ, an organ which had immense pipes:

The balance of the musical instruments were considerably less conventional than the organ. They often consisted of instruments that had been automated by Jordan and his staff, and they still play. None of them were amazing, except in the sense of a flying pig, but that was half the fun.

There appears to be part of a guitar encased in this concoction, looking as if it’s been taken over by some alien machinery.

Admittedly, the bells were probably unmodified.

There were a number of pianos throughout the House, but I don’t recall if this particular one had been modified to be a player piano.

This is a monstrous musical contraption, allegedly mobile. I’d rather not describe it further, lest it populate my nightmares.

Another couple of shots of the organ control panel.

And the orchestra plays on!

On The Resurgent Marc Giller tries to slyly slip in some historical revisionism while commenting on Glenn Beck’s apparent about-face concerning President Trump:

On the other hand, the manner in which the mainstream media covers the Trump administration has become so corrupt, so dishonest, so egregiously terrible, standing in solidarity with them against Trump has become unthinkable. Yes, Beck still believes that Trump can be bad—but the sanctimonious reporters who have made it their mission to bring him down are infinitely worse, not to mention more dangerous. That’s because a healthy republic depends upon citizens getting honest information, which is next to impossible when the media tasked with holding the government accountable pumps out propaganda instead of news.

Beck also recognizes that Trump has done some real good for the country. His economic policies of deregulation and tax cuts have reignited an economy that remained moribund under Barack Obama for seven years—and that translates to real relief for Americans who had suffered for too long under stagnant wages, high unemployment and despair for the future. For the media to overlook these important accomplishments while relentlessly focusing on Stormy Daniels, Russian collusion and every other specious claim in the hopes that it damages Trump has only damaged their own credibility.

I was somewhat interested in his comments in the first paragraph concerning corruption in the media, since it’s always important to proctor the media which brings us the news. But his remarks concerning the economy under President Obama eviscerates his credibility. The numbers are out there for all to see: strong recovery from high unemployment numbers and the Great Recession, and, if it matters, the stock market back on track. He does try to dance around these crevasses in his argument by suggesting it was only seven years, not eight, but his is a fool’s errand. I’ve read the numbers and the arguments over there, and lived those eight years. While some Americans have undoubtedly had a bad time of it, most of us have recovered from the Recession and prospered.

And, therefore, I cannot take anything else he says all that seriously, either. Again, according to the numbers, there’s been no economic recovery or acceleration under President Trump, we’re just cruising along because Trump has been mostly impotent. The early gains by the market under his Administration have been followed by a retreat. The market was undoubtedly excited by deregulation, but appalled by the trade war rumors. As with Obama, the market is a mediocre indicator of economic health; more importantly, the market is focused on making money, not on the overall health of the nation. Conservatives may use their reservoir of spittle on the “evil” of regulation, but this is reflective of the view of pro-business forces. Generally, business does not concern itself with the health of the nation, which is more properly the purview of government. But it would be helpful if conservative pundits widened their viewpoint to consider that there is a tradeoff between corporate profits and, say, clean water – the latter being more crucial to national health than those corporate profits.

But it’s passages such as Giller’s which makes it difficult to take their arguments seriously, and that’s unfortunate, because I’m sure a more honest conservative would have important contributions to make to the national conversation. If he had suggested Obama blundered on North Korea, or for not prosecuting war criminals in the previous Administration, or for not pursuing corporate criminals more aggressively, I could take him seriously – but he chose to play to his base.

It’s too bad. We need those voices from all honest viewpoints if we’re going to make this American experiment succeed – and not founder on the rocks of divisiveness and greed.

Calumny:

1. : a misrepresentation intended to harm another’s reputation • denounced his opponent for his defamatory insinuations and calumny
2. : the act of uttering false charges or misrepresentations maliciously calculated to harm another’s reputation • He was the target of calumny for his unpopular beliefs.

[Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Chile’s bishops offer to resign en masse over sex-abuse coverup,” Jorge Poblete, The Los Angeles Times:

In his five years as pontiff, Francis has been praised for his attention to social issues and the poor but accused of failing to punish clergy who abused children. Such criticisms intensified during the pope’s visit to Chile in January, when he labeled the accusations against Barros as “calumny.”

The pope’s words were widely criticized, even by Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, a key Vatican advisor on clergy abuse.

Francis later apologized and asked Scicluna to investigate the matter. The pontiff also had emotionally charged meetings with three men who said they were abused by Karadima. Those meetings prompted him to write a letter to the Chilean bishops last month, saying that he felt “pain and shame” over the men’s accounts and that he wanted to “apologize to all those I have offended.”

Maybe I’m being uncharitable in my judgments, but, seeing as this is the month I do charitable giving, I’ve been messing about with websites, trying to give charities my money.

And now I’ve run across a second website which makes it difficult to give the amount of money I want to give. The first, which I suspect was the ACLU, simply gave me a list of radio buttons with amounts, with no opportunity to give a custom amount. Baffled, I believe I just gave them nothing.

Now I’ve encountered the second site, which is aspca.org. It had a custom amount field, which I tried to use, but was rejected with the message that I had to select the “Other” radio button in order to use the custom field. Ummmm…. where is this “other” button to which you refer, sirs?

I suspect it’s just a sly way to manipulate you into giving more money.

So I tried again, and now it says it’s trying to process my donation of the radio button that was selected (I selected one for less money than I was intending), despite using the custom field. Desperate, isn’t it? But I think I buggered it by forgetting to put in my CVV and proper date on the credit card. Now it’s apparently in a sit ‘n spin forever loop. Deserves it.

Or am I just being crabby?

One of the passions of Alex Jordan, the builder of House On The Rock, was the circus, and he had a respectably sized collection of circus models, as I inadequately photographed here. Sadly, some of the shots are a little out of focus, as there wasn’t time to take great care with the camera. In a sense, that reflects our entire experience at HOTR. There is so much stuff that we began to lose focus and become a little bleary.

Complete with the circus train!

And, finally, a full sized diorama shot of showwoman and elephant.

A reader reacts to National Security Advisor John Bolton’s influence:

Why the hell does John Bolton have so much influence and/or power to cause so much mayhem in so many different agencies?

Because he looks the part of a national security advisor, and his views are what President Trump would expect of such a person on TV. Television is Trump’s world, defining its possibilities and its restrictions. He doesn’t seem to be able to think much beyond it, in fact.

I had to laugh – if in horror – at Eugene Volokh’s “final thoughts” (in reality, a defense) for his proposal to rid the U.S. Constitution of part of Article II, Section I.  The passage sets forth the qualifications for President to include, among other things, being a natural born citizen:

1. Anomalous Article II: If you were running a public company in the United States today, would you limit the CEO position to natural-born citizens? Be honest. Consider, too, whether POTUS is so distinct as to merit different treatment not only from how an American public company would define CEO eligibility but also from how the U.S. Constitution defines eligibility to be a federal lawmaker or life-tenured federal judge.

Note the use of the Be honest intercession – this elides the central question by quickly pushing beyond it. That question? Why consider this analogy? As we discussed at some length on this blog, there are fundamental differences between the various sectors of society. Here we run across one which I haven’t discussed, which has to do with the fundamental loyalties of humans.

Eugene is talking about two distinct categories of entities in his proposal: nations and corporations. Let’s briefly look at each from a historical perspective with respect to the loyalties we expect from them and their motivations.

Nations: A nation is an extension, through several steps, of the primeval family unit. I use the word primeval not for rhetorical effect, but because it is an instinctual behavior of the normal human being to have a fundamental loyalty to that unit; an instinct no doubt fostered by the relative safety offered by the family unit^[1]. Since those prehistoric days, we have discovered that, by expanding our “loyalty circle”, we enhance our safety. This is not an unlimited, linear progression, of course. As one circle impacts another and competes with limited resources, individual safety may be impacted.

But, skipping over that complex subject, we progress from family to villages to towns, cities, regions, and on to Nations. Interestingly, those intervening steps do not always retain loyalties.  Some folks never move away from their villages or towns, but as Lafayette noted, some have restless feet and never really put down roots. But once we reach the level of nations, people’s loyalties often become more steadfast. Ingrained. They see, from their often limited perspective, the advantages being a member of their nation; they are subject to the threats, real or not, of other nations, and seek safety in their own, offering loyalty in return.

But, more importantly, the nation is often an embodiment of a religious or ethnic mythology. As Americans, we have a certain mythology, originating in and used to justify various wars as well as the conquering of the American West.  But given our heterogenous nature with regard to religion, we rarely conflate being American with any particular religion^[2]. Our mixed ethnicity hardly even needs be noted, although certain emigré communities have attained notoriety in American culture: the Irish of Boston, the Poles of Chicago, the Norwegians of Minnesota. The point is that our experience with the mixing of national pride with ethnic and/or religious mythologies is meager.

And, I suggest, that mythology, regardless of origin, asserts an influence over the attitudes, judgments and actions of those born under it. Rationality recedes; loyalty comes to the fore. Throw in a tradition of self-sacrifice, which is often a worthy element of religious traditions, and you have a recipe for the effective mole.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a “mole” in this context is a person who joins some organization, professes loyalty, and remains with an organization for an often substantial period of time acting as an effective member, but waiting for a signal from another organization to engage in an act deleterious to the first organization. The time period in which they act in the interests of the first organization gradually immunizes them from suspicion and detection, so when they strike, they are still unsuspected. The more their faux loyalty has resulted in elevation within the organization, so much the greater is the damage they can inflict. Intelligence communities spend many hours worrying about such creatures, having been victimized over time.

Eugene’s proposal is a perfect opening for moles.

Corporations: A corporation is an organization created in order to supply  goods or services in hopes of scoring a profit in the transaction. The CEO is the person in charge of the strategy of the corporation, often in conjunction with a corporate board.

Do corporations inspire an instinctive loyalty? Some might argue they do. I grew up in a period of flux in which the corporations’ reputation as life-long employers became ragged. I recall my own father’s emotional distress as his employer, Sperry, became less an institution worthy of loyalty, and more an institution that was a member of a culture of mercenary necessity, ready to lay off employees or sell off divisions as thought necessary to preserve the bottom line, paying off the loyalty of their employees with little more than cold cash. For some, this was appropriate, but for others, the culture — that sense of community and belonging — was broken, rendering the corporate community little more than a cash extraction mechanism.

And that’s my point. If the corporate culture engendered instinctive loyalty, how often would we see the movement of a person from a CEO position at one company to the CEO position at another? Never. But, in fact, in the real world we do see that phenomenon, and it’s not even an unusual move. Do we see this in the public sphere? No doubt, there have been a few instances, mostly involving peaceful annexations, but, in general, no. Heads of government do not move from one country to the next. The question of ultimate loyalties is paramount.

This lack of instinctive loyalty to one’s corporation is, in fact, sensible. Few of them provide what I would call true essentials: food, water, safety, health. Most corporations exist to provide chairs, tables, cars, a vast host of things we think are essential, but aren’t. The benefits of corporate culture can be obtained from the culture we live in. Corporations are simply a convenient, and some would argue best, way to provide the goods with which we enhance our lives. It is, in fact, unlikely that a CEO will move to another corporation with the goal of destabilizing that corporation in favor of his former employer, because that instinctive loyalty simply doesn’t exist. Their motivation is uncolored by ethnic or religious mythologies in most instances. It’s often motivated by compensation, although some individuals have higher motivations.

Eugene’s implicit suggestion that there’s a viable analogy is dubious at best, as I think we can see now, but I think one more element needs to be examined to understand why his analogy is completely inappropriate, and that is the question of governance.

The selection of our method of governance was made by the Founding Fathers years ago, but that doesn’t really reduce one of the most difficult questions human societies face: how, in the face of human greed and fallibility, do we govern our public organizations? For this discussion, I mean nations. The Founders provided a framework designed to mitigate the bad actions inherent in our selfish natures, but I’ll skip any digressions on the nature and efficacy of this framework^[3]. Within that framework, though, we have to select leaders, and this may be the most difficult question for the Nation as a whole to solve.

Voting is our current method of selection, and while it has its advantages, it also has its disadvantages in that it expects a substantial fraction of the electorate to responsibly investigate the competency and character of the candidates. This is a difficult thing to do. I shan’t belabor the point, but merely point out that much of our judgment must come from secondary or tertiary sources.

How does the Article II clause play into this? By removing the question of a foreign loyalty bound by foreign mythologies, it slightly simplifies the task of judging a candidate. It’s not impossible that a candidate has been previously subverted, a concern that was noted during the JFK candidacy by the rumors that Kennedy, the first Catholic President, might be controlled by the Vatican. While dismissed as religious bigotry, it is symbolic of the fundamental concern of loyalty to the Nation. But such subversions are far more likely to be detected and publicized, even prosecuted.

Keep in mind, in the selection of the governors, just as with governance itself, certainty is a very scant quantity. We must deal in probabilities and work from a disinterested perspective, self-aware of our flaws and eccentricities.

Eugene asks “… whether POTUS is so distinct as to merit different treatment … from how the U.S. Constitution defines eligibility to be a federal lawmaker or life-tenured federal judge.” The President is an unique position with the Federal government, and while, during the current fiasco of an Administration, the role’s limitations have been brought into sharp relief, the fact remains that the Presidency also has powers unavailable to the rest of the Federal government, and they are under the control of one person.

Consider the lawmakers: do they operate in a vacuum, making laws without regard for others? No. In fact, the lawmakers must persuade their colleagues as to the wisdom of the laws they propose^[4], and those laws must satisfy those limitations imposed by the U. S. Constitution, as amended.

Who interprets the Constitution and the law? Eugene’s federal judge. None of those operate in a vacuum, either, as there are courts of appeal used to correct the improper interpretation, and the final court of appeal is composed of a collection of judges whom we hope excel in their chosen field.

But the occupant of the Presidential role need not persuade others of the wisdom of his actions, insofar as those actions are those preordained to be licit, he need merely take action. The president does not make law, but only implements it. The president chooses nominees for non-elective executive positions, but even if they are rejected by the Senate, the Senate has no power of selection, but only that of confirmation or rejection. Today, the President can make War in all but name.

Yes, the Presidency is a very special position, which is why it must be renewed every few years. It can be an enormous force for positive – or it can do enormous damage to the polity, even if it is tempered by a competent Legislature.

Collectively, this is why Eugene’s defense of his proposal is flawed.

Finally, during composition of this post one more thought came to mind. The United States is a polity of 300+ million people, of which the overwhelming majority satisfy, or will satisfy, the requirements of the Presidency. If a nation of this size must import an individual to be a President, if we cannot generate an individual of more than satisfactory competency, then what does that say about American culture? Here I don’t address the problematic question of “best President,” because we don’t need that. We cannot need that, because we cannot agree on the meaning of that phrase. But we need to be able to agree that someone is competent to execute the post in a disinterested manner. We know that the government’s responsibility is dispersed through a number of positions, such as the President’s Cabinet, who may report to him but may also examine him as well. He is neither King nor Autocrat, but rather a central role in a decentralized government. He needn’t be best, as we cannot even agree on what this means; he merely need be good enough.

Yeah, stop laughing. I know we can’t define that, either.

¹I think American law recognizes this instinctual and overriding loyalty by exempting the testimony of spouses against each other. Or is this just TV law?

²As a matter of dreary certitude, it should be noted that the truth of this observation is to the frustration of certain American religious leaders who are eager to illicitly co-opt American strength to their own religious causes. As an agnostic, I remain appalled at their ignorance of American law and tradition – or their deceit. Take your pick.

³Especially as the answer to the efficacy question remains in the future and will be inversely measured by the damage done by our current Administration.

⁴Obviously, during the current trend of using “team politics,” this requirement has been somewhat obviated.

On Lawfare, in a longish post Matt Tait of the University of Texas-Austin laments the damage done by the CIA’s torture program, and his final point is telling:

Finally, the RDI [rendition, detention and interrogation] program was reckless in ways that the officials who designed it may never really have understood, and for which they have never been held accountable. It is perhaps hard to fully convey how much of a threat the legacy of torture still poses to the United State’s ability to interact with its allies overseas and to its ongoing counterterrorism efforts.

The risks and subsequent fallout from this recklessness is vast. When the U.K.’s domestic security service, MI5, found out that the U.K. foreign intelligence service, MI6, had been involved in the rendition—but not torture—of suspects who had later endured torture, MI5 threw all MI6 officers out of its headquarters. This caused a prolonged rift between two of the main intelligence agencies of one of the United States’ closest allies—agencies that are themselves responsible for no small amount of intelligence that reaches the president in his daily brief.

Similarly, some extremely bad people are walking free with large payouts because the evidence against them was contaminated by torture. The program has directly led to considerable litigation in the U.K., Canada, U.S. and elsewhere. It has put top-secret documents at risk of discovery through litigation. It has caused a sustained foreign policy firestorm for the United States and its allies with enormous costs.

Defenses of this program ignore or undervalue these costs, or pretend they are not directly attributable to it. And even putting values aside, advocates of starting a new torture program as a matter of “toughness” ignore that the price of doing so will not be measured in a few hurt feelings.

Torture is a deeply flawed instrument when it comes to intelligence collection, easily fooled and  unverifiable. It’s real purpose is vengeance and fear; its results is loathing and disdain. It’s the tool of fools who have no faith in their own value systems. Matt’s story, which includes new CIA Director Gina Haspel, is a story of failure, law-breaking, and ego. She should not have been confirmed, and wouldn’t have been by adults.

Fecund:

• able to produce a lot of crops, fruit, babies, young animals, etc.:
  fecund soil
• producing or creating a lot of new things, ideas, etc.:
  a fecund imagination

[Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Saturday Waterfowl Extravaganza,” Kevin Drum:

This has been a very fecund year for the ducks and geese here in our little suburban watering hole. Last year we had no ducklings and only two broods of goslings. This year we’ve had three broods of ducklings and either four or five broods of Canada goose babies—so far.

Refik Anadol’s http Infinity Room.

A reader sends a link to an article on Ars Technica further documenting the energy costs of Bitcoin:

The bitcoin network is run by miners, computers that maintain the shared transaction ledger called the blockchain. A new study estimates that this process consumes at least 2.6GW of power—almost as much electric power as Ireland consumes. This figure could rise to 7.7GW before the end of 2018—accounting for almost half a percent of the world’s electricity consumption.

The study is an updated version of calculations performed late last year by analyst Alex de Vries. In this new version, de Vries has gathered more detailed information about the economics of the mining business. But his new numbers are broadly consistent with the old ones. Last December, he estimated that the bitcoin network was consuming roughly 32TWh annually, or 3.65GW. His website, which is updated daily, now shows the network consuming 67TWh annually, just under that upper bound of 7.7GW shown in his new study.

But even more interesting:

A crucial point here is that the difficulty of the mining task automatically adjusts to maintain a 10 minute average block creation rate. So if more computing power joins the network, the result isn’t that more bitcoins get created. Instead, it takes more computing power to produce each bitcoin, making existing mining hardware less profitable than before—and driving up the energy consumed per bitcoin.

I was not aware of this, and is a rare sighting of an anti-scalable algorithm, if I don’t miss my guess.

He’s working on frogs this week.

Those frogs you dissected in biology class? Fake. Real frogs are full of beans!

On 38 North, Joseph DeThomas agrees with my own suspicions concerning Kim Jong Un and his adversaries:

Kim Jong Un has to be given a great deal of credit for tactical diplomatic acumen. He began 2018 totally isolated and under severe economic and military pressure. He had no reason to believe any of the main participants would relent in sanctions pressure and he had reason to fear that they would lament but do nothing to halt any ill-conceived US military action. In five short months, he has totally reversed the diplomatic momentum of the situation. While he is still under sanctions pressure, he has eliminated any hope the US could resort to military action and maintain its alliance with the ROK. He has likely shifted China’s position back to its more traditional semi-supportive approach to the DPRK, especially as long as Kim refrains from further provocations, and he has isolated President Trump should the President wish to return to a policy of maximum pressure.

Kim did this through very slick public diplomacy in which he shifted his image from that of a comic book villain to that of a normal and quite approachable statesman. At the same time, he made himself the center of the diplomatic geometry of the Korean Peninsula. He began the year as the target of diplomacy. He has emerged this spring as its prime mover by dealing with each of his opponents bilaterally—offering them what they wanted in isolation from the others and by leaving Donald Trump until last, with Japanese Prime Minister Abe still on the sidelines, ignored by all actors.

The Japanese will carry the blight of World War II for another couple of generations, I suspect – because their Asian neighbors find it too profitable to let it drop. And it’s sensible to be wary of any entity that displayed such barbaric violence towards them.

But the real star of the show is Kim, I think. He remains the scion of a vicious family monarchy, no matter how many skills he displays in the diplomatic arena or how much good press he may garner, and that’s another key element of the drama playing out on the southern border of China. Is he building a mask? You bet. He may end up denuclearizing the peninsula, but it’ll be on his terms, not ours, or no dice. His biggest task may be decoding Trump’s utterances, which tends to descend into gibberish when he talks about anything beyond the American borders.

So I don’t expect any instant successes. The North Koreans have never been known for quick movement at the diplomatic table. And if Trump comes back from the summit claiming victory, well, don’t be naive.

Scofflaw:

Scofflaw is a noun coined during the Prohibition era to mean a person who drinks illegally. It is a compound of the words scoff and law. Its original meaning was someone who mocks or ridicules anti-drinking laws, but has extended to mean one who flouts any law, especially those difficult to enforce, and particularly traffic laws. [Wikipedia]

Used by my Arts Editor last night. Couldn’t remember last time I’d heard it, that must mean something significant.

The carousel of House On The Rock is reputed to be the largest in the world, yet lacks any of the traditional horses at all, instead populated with creatures out of legend and cockeyed mind. These pics may be a little out of focus, unfortunately, but a smartphone camera is hardly a match for a whirling dervish of paper maché and gearing!

Not that HOTR lacks for carousel horses. They are mounted on the opposite wall, of which I apparently didn’t take pics. Or haven’t found them, yet.

I was a little surprised on Wednesday night when Colbert of The Late Show said that previous independent and special counsel investigations have lasted longer than the Mueller investigation so far, during which I feel like I’ve aged a decade. (Sorry, I’m feeling a little manic tonight.) But here’s WaPo confirming Colbert:

“When you’re talking about an investigation that involves international activity, with a foreign government and foreign actors who have no incentive to be cooperative, such an investigation takes a lot of time,” said Jacob Frenkel, who worked in the independent counsel’s office in the late 1990s and is now at the firm Dickinson Wright.

By comparison, it took nearly a year and a half for the independent counsel to bring charges in what is now known as the Whitewater scandal — which began by exploring Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in a suspicious real estate venture — against Arkansas’ governor and two others. That case stretched on for nearly eight years, drawing in multiple independent counsels and exploring a wide range of allegations about the Clintons. They were never charged, and Bill Clinton was impeached, but not convicted and removed, for obstructing justice.

“Judged by historical standards, I think that the special counsel has amassed a remarkable record of achievement in the first year of his tenure,” said David Kris, a former assistant attorney general for national security who now runs the Culper Partners consulting firm. “It’s fast and it’s productive, and there’s obviously more to come.”

This is how I feel about the purpose of the investigation:

Legal analysts, say, though that Mueller is probably unconcerned with accomplishing a particular result — such as charging the president, or forcing his impeachment. Ron Hosko, a former FBI assistant director who worked under Mueller at the FBI, said Mueller’s main aim was always to be thorough, and “if at the end of that investigation he’s able to say, we found no evidence of collusion, kind of the core mission, I think Mueller would see it as, ‘we’ve accomplished our mission.’ “

Horse firmly in front of the cart. Let the evidence lead the way, and if there’s no conclusive evidence, then that’s that. I’ve seen the disasters that can happen by assuming a conclusion and then trying to prove it – reality comes sailing in through the window and steps in your freshly baked cake after mucking out the barn. Yech. And that’s just in programming.

Of course, those of us of a mendacious nature might ask if that’s how a member of either base (that is, the restless extremists in the Republican and the Democratic parties) would feel as well. But I shan’t. Nyah.

There’s no real point here except to note that investigations of this sort are lengthy processes and shouldn’t be hurried. Watching the various Trump lawyers and associated minions complain about the length of the investigation is, in its own way, a telling remark on how many of them feel about the matter – let’s close this up before they find something! Or, at least, that’s a congruent explanation. No firm facts, just a bunch of arrests, guilty pleas, and indictments.

Pass the popcorn. We’re not even to the fifth inning!

A reader corrects me concerning the possibilities of crowd-computing cryptocurrencies:

Serious miners often run multiple “rigs” (machines) and each may have as many as 8 to 32 GPU cards in it. It would take a huge amount of “idle” cycles ala SETI at Home to cover the resources of even a few miners.

Ah, truly dedicated systems. I wonder if they use bespoke computing solutions….

WaPo reports on the sudden weakening of the American capability to respond to global pandemics:

The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.

The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.

Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.

Pandemic preparedness and global health security are issues that require government-wide responses, experts say, as well as the leadership of a high-ranking official within the White House who is assigned only this role.

It’s simple to suggest that the Trump Administration is using a false libertarian view of the matter: that other countries should take care of their own problems. It’s false because political and even geographical boundaries are permeable: disease does not respect the former and can surmount the latter. As WaPo points out:

The day before news of Ziemer’s exit became public, one of the officials on his team, Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the NSC, spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That event killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.

Worldwide. That means the virus traveled from wherever it originated to just about everywhere, and this in a time when travel was not as cheap and easy as it is today. So, just as pathogens do not respect national borders, nor can our public health system.

All that said, reasonable people can disagree on the precise structure of how we prepare for eventualities such as this one. Perhaps we don’t need a high ranking official who concentrates on this one issue and sits on the National Security Council. Perhaps that’s a waste of money. I’m no expert on matters like this.

But when experts comment that the Trump Administration is screwing up by not having a high official working on this one problem, and given how terribly we all suffered last time, I’m more than a little nervous. Once again, this feels like third-rate amateurism at its worst. All the walls at the southern American border won’t stop another potential pandemic – it won’t even slow it down.