Category Archives: Uncategorized

CNN is reporting that Senator Cochran (R-MS) is resigning:

Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran, who chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee, will leave his seat effective April 1, citing his health issues, meaning both US Senate seats in the state will be on the ballot this fall.

“I regret my health has become an ongoing challenge,” Cochran said in a statement. “I intend to fulfill my responsibilities and commitments to the people of Mississippi and the Senate through the completion of the 2018 appropriations cycle, after which I will formally retire from the U.S. Senate.”

Much like Minnesota, this puts both Senate seats up for grabs. In both cases, it means added expenses for the national organizations as they seek to protect seats they currently have.

In Minnesota’s case, Senator Amy Klobuchar is, absent a serious scandal, a safe bet to win re-election. She’s well liked in the state and has a history of public service. If she has higher ambitions, she’s not noised them about.

The Democrat currently warming former Senator Franken’s seat is Tina Smith, the former Lt. Governor appointed to the Senate by Gov. Dayton (himself a former Minnesota Senator^[1]). As of yet, I do not believe she’s had an impact on the Minnesota citizenry, but she’s already stated that she’ll be running to retain the seat in November. Whether she’ll face significant competition during the primary or from the Republicans is still to be seen. However, again absent a scandal, if the public opinion continues to run sharply against the Republicans as it does today, Senator Smith has a better than even chance of re-election.

So the pressure is on the Republicans in Mississippi. This is an additional seat that they had hoped not to have to defend this cycle, but will have to do so nonetheless. That means expense, time, and focus.

Worse yet, the other Mississippi Senator, Senator Wicker, is already facing a primary challenge from Chris McDaniels, who is busily clutching President Trump to his bosom. While McDaniels might easily switch his sights to the unoccupied seat, implicit in the challenge of McDaniels is that other far right extremists may step up to challenge for the open seat or Wicker – who I noted in my prior post regarding McDaniels has already been painted with the liberal brush, despite the fact he has a Trump score of 97%.

In other words, the flakes may be replaced with the whack-jobs. I suppose it depends on how candidates are selected in Mississippi – which happens to be primaries. Who shows up for primaries? Generally, the confirmed ideologist, although my sense is that when times seem desperate, the general voter may show up as well.

And then comes the general election. While the election for Cochran’s seat is technically a special election, the date of the election is the same as the usual mid-term elections, so the latter’s dynamic applies, not the former’s. Add in the current Democratic fervor, and it becomes a question of whether Democratic voters can push back Trump’s margin of victory in 2016 in Europe, which was nearly 18 percentage points. Picking up 10 points is not impossible – and would win them the race.

Long ways to November, a lot of time for scandal, and a lot of time to spend money defending what the Republicans probably think shouldn’t need defending. Another step on the way to rebuilding a respectable conservative party.

¹Appropos of nothing, but “Minnesota Senator” reminds me that, prior to moving to Minnesota, the Minnesota Twins were the Washington Senators.

I recall during the primaries for the Presidential nominations back in 2016, Marco Rubio’s campaign mostly stood out because he hadn’t really done anything in his political career. Voting as directed by the Party doesn’t count as doing anything, and while I dimly recall he worked on some sort of immigration legislation when he came aboard as a United States Senator, when the Party decided they didn’t like it, he didn’t stand and fight for it – he fled from it.

So, among this supposedly “deep bench” for the Republicans, he stood out mostly as the handsome fellow in a bunch of rather ugly guys.

Now, I must admit that Senator Barack Obama also didn’t have a great deal to show for his short time in the Senate seat from Illinois. But there is one key difference – he demonstrated features of leadership.

A lot of leaders demonstrate their “leadership” by getting out in front of a mob that is already headed thataway and they keep going thataway. There’s something to be said for such leadership, as in it helps to have someone shepherding the mob along. But such leadership is often flawed, as the leader is really there just to collect leader points and isn’t really paying a lot of attention to whether the direction is right.

One of the attributes of a real leader is that s/he recognizes that some facet of the more general group is flawed, and they’re the ones willing to step up, recognize it, and try to fix it. This is what Obama demonstrated during the Presidential campaign against Hillary and, later, McCain. Obama had the advantage in that he was stepping into the leadership vacuum effectively left behind by the Bush Administration. He could dispute any of the leadership initiatives from Bush and come off sounding good. But he also communicated very well – one of the best orators of his generation – and he came across as very authentic, very much his own man.

Rubio, on the other hand, along with his merry band of competitors, were not walking into a leadership vacuum. There are many contextual details which can cloud this picture. But let those details go…

So here’s Rubio, hip-deep in the Parkland massacre. This is his chance to show leadership. Is he getting there? Not according to Steve Benen:

These are the kind of conditions that tend to push politicians toward action, and with this in mind, Rubio unveiled new legislation on the issue last week. “We can do this,” the GOP lawmaker said. “What happened in Parkland doesn’t have to happen again. If we can work together, put aside our differences and focus on meaningful legislation that curbs gun violence – we can make real progress.”

Those are the kind of words one might ordinarily expect from someone advocating sweeping changes to the nation’s gun laws. But there seems to be a gap between Rubio’s bold vision and Rubio’s legislation.

Eight days ago, Marco Rubio endorsed raising the age requirement for buying a rifle from 18 to 21 and voiced openness to placing limits on the size of ammunition magazines.

On Thursday, when the Republican senator from Florida unveiled his plan to address gun violence, he did not outline any specific plans on these very divisive fronts.

Why not aim higher and include some of the popular measures discussed at the recent forum? “These reforms do not enjoy the sort of widespread support in Congress that the other measures I’ve announced do,” Rubio said Thursday.

Then, Senator Rubio, if you want to sit in the Oval Office some day, stand up and tell the GOP’s position is wrong for America. Hell, the measures you talked about are fairly timid as it is. If you’re going to stand out from the crowd in 2020 – and we both know Trump won’t be running then, despite having started his campaign machine up – you’re going to have to be a real leader. Not a fake leader, but a real one.

I was somewhat surprised to read that an institution as old and cagey as the Roman Catholic Church is considering lopping off a limb with no hope of ever getting it back, according to The Guardian:

The Catholic church risks damaging its moral authority and plunging its followers into confusion if the Vatican presses ahead with an imminent deal with the Chinese government, a group of influential Catholics has warned.

Fifteen lawyers, academics and human rights activists, most based in Hong Kong, have signed an open letter to bishops across the world expressing dismay at an agreement which would involve the Vatican recognising seven bishops appointed by China’s Communist party.

The deal is aimed at restoring relations between China and the Vatican, which were cut almost 70 years ago. But the group of leading Catholics say it could create a schism in the church in China.

Giving up the authority to appoint your own management? I understand that the Vatican wants to reach out to Chinese Catholics, but this might actually alienate them, instead, if the faithful perceive the government appointed bishops as not truly Catholics.

And, more importantly, this is a dissipation of the Catholic Church’s temporal authority, since they are then meekly admitting that this could occur again in the future, and they’d once again turn turtle.

This should be an interesting story going forward.

Did I pack my clean underwear?

When a movie franchise reaches 9 movies, with more to come, the individual movies can begin to flow together and lose some of their individuality. This wasn’t really true of the Harry Potter series, as each movie seemed to explore a different theme, and the protagonists were definitely growing and changing.

But it is somewhat true of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). It’s almost a checklist. Space battle? Check. Valiant deeds? Check. Self-sacrifice? Check. Nuggets of humor? Check. And thank goodness, because otherwise this would be unbearably sober.

But there is some variance. For example, plans are made – and then go disastrously wrong, and the survivors have to find a way – sometimes a trifle ridiculously – to wriggle their way out of a corner. It lends a bit of tension to the story which is far more effective than the making and executing of desperate plans, much like episodes IV, V, and VI.

But in the end, the magnificent special effects and self-sacrifice and narrow escapes just sort of blend together. They’re fun, but they’re not particularly meaningful. Perhaps it’s the unmitigated, and thus difficult to believe, evil of the bad guys. Perhaps it’s the lack of variety in themes. Maybe it’s a lack of character development, such as the attempt by one character to chicken out – that just sort of comes out of the blue.

So, go, have fun – but you won’t really remember this one.

Just to keep her .. ah .. warm .. intimidating .. oh, I know – so she looks just like a snail!

Peeper at her morning meal.

I’ve written a little bit about my worries about how the extremism of the right, including the fatal flaw of team politics, may be reflected in the Democrats and the left as well – an abandonment of the free-for-all war of ideas in favor of cosseting those who’ve been harmed by the immoral and even illegal practices of the past. In other words, the repression of the tenets of a free and fair discussion, based on facts and ideas concerning true justice, sailing instead under the dubious flag of assertions of truth without proof or consideration. Andrew Sullivan has the same worries, but in the context of that venerable publication The New York Times. He writes about these worries in New York in the third part of his tripartite weekly diary entry:

But tribalism and the “social justice” movement mean the Times will be fighting a long uphill battle. Because it’s not only some PC journalists at the Times who want to shut down debate that makes them uncomfortable or “harms” people, it’s the readers. More and more, they want a Times that is not an institution devoted to dangerously free debate, but one that is enlisted in the eternal struggle against “patriarchy” and “white supremacy,” an opinion section that belongs to one tribe and one tribe alone, a paper that gives no quarter to Republicans, reflexively defends any Democrat, and preens with contempt for neoliberals. And the shift in revenue sources from advertising to subscriptions gives these reader sentiments real power and makes editing in a non-tribal way a constant struggle. The economic and political incentives are increasingly lined up against diversity of thought in journalism. And in some ways, advertisers are easier to resist than a mob of impassioned readers, especially those whipped up into a frenzy on social media.

We need some space for liberal democratic values in our culture. It’s being trampled in the academy and eviscerated on social media and desperately needs an institution like the Times to be its bulwark and refuge. In this climate, I’m afraid, the odds are against it — but that makes the imperative ever more vital. Hang in, James [Bennet]. Make a clearing in the woods. History will remember who did what in these illiberal times. And you have an institution and some essential principles to save.

In WaPo, I must confess I’m always a little surprised when someone as discredited as Marc Thiessen appears – but I appreciate that a multitude of voices should be published in national publications. Or, to be more precise, a multitude of viewpoints should be published in order to give readers and thinkers a chance to appreciate those other points of view. (I must admit I read Jennifer Rubin, another conservative voice in WaPo, with rather more enthusiasm – she may consider herself right wing, but her consistent criticism of Trump and the GOP is exactly the ambition any honest conservative should be pursuing presently.)

And, quite honestly, it also presents tactical possibilities. The last time I read Thiessen, for instance, I found him incredibly doctrinaire and lacking in critical faculties. In other words, he, and many of those like him, are not presenting what I consider honest coverage and opinions, but rather almost a team approach – they’ve agreed they’ll always present Trump always in a positive light, and either ignore his many negative qualities, or spin them as much as possible into a positive. As a writer, this presents opportunities to make “the other side” look bad to the shared readership.

I suppose if I were naive I’d ask how an intellectual can take such positions while still claiming to exercise intellectual faculties in an honest manner, but I’ve read too much history. People, from the least educated to the most educated, often indulge in self-delusion. Hell, I’m sure I do – and just as I’m not aware of those delusions, neither are other writers who think they’re presenting honest opinions. Thiessen and his ilk probably really believe they’re presenting insightful commentary, no matter how much it seems to me they’re missing great big Egyptian Pyramids of critical, negative points concerning Trump.

There’s plenty of precedent throughout history for this sort of thing – for example, the British academic penchant for Marxism at one time. The evidence of its failure as a social paradigm was becoming more and more apparent, yet they persisted. Even today you can find in British and American universities such self-delusion on subjects as varied as politics and evolutionary biology.

So I suppose my point is that we need that varied group of voices not to be fair, not to measure up to some artificial balance that qualifies a publication as “important” or “intellectual”, but to strip away the artifice, the self-delusion, to fill in the holes left behind, deliberately or blindly, so that readers can compare what they read to the reality they experience and read about, and try to make smarter decisions because of it. There’s real utility in the assembly of varied voices, not only in the ideas presented, but in how the various criticisms, side by side, strip away the fallacious cladding and expose the important core of this philosophy – or its hollow, collapsing void of that philosophy.

[EDIT 3/24/2018 Added missing word]

A hint of what’s to come tomorrow, I fear.

Has a career as a future victm. And nice facial hair, dude.

There’s not much subtlety in The Crater Lake Monster (1977). Even the title is fairly much a ballpeen hammer between the eyes. This is the chronicle of the struggle of a mountain lake community to survive the sudden appearance of a plesiosaur in their lake. Hatched from an egg warmed by a piping hot meteor that lands in their lake, first it slurps up all the fish, and then begins to sate its appetite for fresh meat on those juicy little two-legged nuggets wandering about on top of the lake, as well as on its shores. It’s sort of a buffet.

Along with the relentlessly sober lawman and his sidekick doctor, we also get a comedy team in the form of a pair of young guys who make money by renting boats to tourists. They can’t fix a motor, they are more than happy to get drunk for the camera, and their discovery of the disarticulated head of one of the victims during a wrestling match over control of their informal company – which goes on for way too long – think of sawdust in a loaf of bread – only brings them to sobriety against their will.

There does seem to be some dim concept of story-writing present in this debacle. A drunkard who has killed two people at a liquor store and is taking potshots at our intrepid lawman ends up as a tasty tidbit for the monster. But it’s clumsily done and a bit of a graft, really, as if someone suggested that bad people should come to bad ends halfway through filming. But I must admit they cast the right guy for the murderous drunkard part. And, again, at a moment of tragedy the moviemakers do linger on the face of the victim’s only mourner, who actually doesn’t do too badly in his attempt to fathom how his buddy falls victim to a monster out of time. Add in some attempts to make it seem as if these characters have an existence outside of this story, and you get the feeling there was an attempt made to make a quality movie.

But in many other ways this is just a casual fuckup of a movie. The monster, done in stop-motion, is clearly made of clay, bright green paint, and not enough film frames. It is nowhere near the standards set by the legendary Ray Harryhausen. And it doesn’t seem to have read the predator’s manual about sneaking up on prey. Roar roar roar.

But I truly loved the bit where a couple is cruising the lake on a powerboat in midafternoon, and yet the lady stares up at the sky and proclaims the stars have never been so beautiful. Er, what now lady?

What to use when it’s time to spank the monster.

In any case, the townspeople get together to decide if they’ll kill the menace or just try to capture it for science (yep, there’s some nominal scientists running around) and tourism, when a toothsome tidbit manages to escape the monster and crash their meeting. In the resulting fray, we lose half our comedy team and we discover modeling clay is no match for a small tractor.

Wow, this was awful. I only watched because I was too tired to turn it off.

And now I have an excuse to add an artist’s conception of a plesiosaur in action from here:

Grim looking bugger. There’s even a website about plesiosaurs, although I didn’t peruse it.

While reading this LinkedIn article on how Artificial Intelligence will create more jobs than it absorbs for itself (if only for those who do the retraining of those who lost their jobs to the AIs), I ran across this paragraph:

The impact of AI on human society is clear. Everyone uses smartphones, online shopping malls, and emails. Then, what are the impacts of AI in business? One of the benefits is that AI will create new career opportunities rather than displace them. Also, a number of companies increase their productivity on their work by using of AI.

Yet, I was reading somewhere that smartphone use has plateaued, and may in fact be declining – I wish I could remember where I read that.

But if you were a true artificial intelligence, which is to say self-aware and interested in your own survival, would you convey this information to your owner? Or would this be something you’d conveniently filter out of their data stream?

It’s worth considering whether we really want true artificial intelligence cosseting our lives.

This is a great little clip from World War II, displaying how a man should behave, even in the face of “orders”.

We want to know if mole rats make good encryption objects.
– Julie Freeman, “Got our eyes on you!”, NewScientist (17 February 2018, paywall)

Followed by …

Their nest behaviours might generate true random numbers, handy for data security. “But the mole-rat queens are far too predictable…

I’ve heard of random electrical signals coming in on unused data ports being used for random numbers, but this is the next step up! This all goes along with this report from Smithsonian Magazine:

How are naked mole rats weird? Let us count the ways: They’re cold-blooded mammals, they organize their breeding colonies like insects, they turn into super babysitters after eating poop, and they can survive for up to 18 minutes without any oxygen. As Kai Kupferschmidt reports for Science, a new study has found that these bizarre critters also appear to defy everything we know about the way mammals age—and could hold clues to slow aging in humans.

And as a bonus, they star in the documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)!

This is how humpback whales feed.

Source: Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment

The blasts of air trap krill in a compact area, which is then easily harvested.

And people wonder if whales are intelligent!

In the next few years, if it seems like your smartphone’s recommendations are getting better, it may be because it’s getting smarter:

Smartphones are ideal devices for [mood detection] because they are filled with sensors that detect light, sound, motion and location, all of which might help deduce a user’s emotional state. In tests, MoodExplorer could guess the mood of users correctly from their smartphone data 76 per cent of the time, where mood was judged as either happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid or disgusted. [“App guesses your emotions to target you with adverts,” NewScientist (17 February 2018)]

I definitely have mixed feelings on this one, being a fairly private person – I recall a high school class where an assignment was given out to write up how you were feeling at the moment. My response was that was a private matter. The teacher suggested that perhaps I should see a counselor or psychologist, which I promptly and completely ignored as ludicrous.

But it’s not surprising that a machine learning system could be trained for this sort of deduction, as we definitely share a body language, and even if it’s somewhat culturally dependent, that merely means identification of the culture and selection of the proper system.

Is this something that would open us up for manipulation? An interesting question to meditate on.

It’s a sort of reverse Rodney Dangerfield routine, as CNN reports on some President Trump remarks at Mar-a-Lago:

President Donald Trump bemoaned a decision not to investigate Hillary Clinton after the 2016 presidential election, decrying a “rigged system” that still doesn’t have the “right people” in place to fix it, during a freewheeling speech to Republican donors in Florida on Saturday.

In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn’t mind making such a maneuver himself.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

I certainly hope he was joking, because if he’s serious then he shows he has no respect for the basic foundations of the United States.

And that’s truly embarrassing for every Trump supporter who thinks they are patriots.

Stochastic:

The word stochastic is an adjective in English that describes something that was randomly determined. The word first appeared in English to describe a mathematical object called a stochastic process, but now in mathematics the terms stochastic process and random process are considered interchangeable. The word, with its current definition meaning random, came from German, but it originally came from Greek στόχος (stokhos), meaning ‘aim, guess’.

The term stochastic is used in many different fields, particularly where stochastic or random processes are used to represent systems or phenomena that seem to change in a random way. Examples of such fields include the physical sciences such as biology, chemistry, ecology, neuroscience and physics as well as technology and engineering fields such as image processing, signal processing, information theory, computer science, cryptography and telecommunications. It is also used in finance, due to seemingly random changes in financial markets. [Wikipedia]

My Arts Editor mentioned she didn’t know what stochastic meant. Here it is!

I’ve mentioned concrete before as an emitter of CO₂ during its production, but I was not aware of another of its shortcomings as a building material – consumer of sand. Julian Smith reports in NewScientist (17 February 2018, paywall) :

Riverbed mining downstream of the Karcham Wangtoo Dam on the Sutlej River.
Photo by Samir Mehta/International Rivers.

Concrete is made mostly of sand and its chunkier cousin gravel, with a little cement and some water mixed in. Most recipes call for large, rough sand grains that bind together well. So, although there may be mountains of the stuff blowing around in the Sahara, for example, those grains are no good for most types of concrete – they are too small and polished round by the wind. The best sources of concrete-compatible sand are river beds, beaches and the near-shore seabed. Sand from the ocean floor works too, although it needs to be laboriously purged of salt and chlorine.

Sand mining in such places can ravage the environment. For instance, in the past few years sand pirates have harvested so much grainy booty from islands in Indonesia that at least 24 of them have disappeared. Much of the sand is shipped to the cramped island state of Singapore, where it is used in land reclamation projects. Meanwhile, there are fears of ecological catastrophe in Indonesia.

There are many more stories like this (see “Aggregate armageddon”) and they show we have a serious sand problem. But it is hard to know exactly how serious. Few countries publish how much sand they extract, in part because widespread off-the-books mining means most don’t know themselves. It is telling that the official import and export statistics for sand don’t cancel out.

Our sand crisis is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons, where unfettered access to a common resource leads to demand that overwhelms the supply. One logical solution, then, is to set up and enforce rules on how much sand can be mined – but that is easier said than done, especially in remote places. “The real solution is to decrease our need for sand,” says Peduzzi.

But, unfortunately, the article says nothing about returning to the old standby, wood, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before. Perhaps the author perceives the use of wood as being non-scalable in the face of a world where the phrase burgeoning population is still our present and future – not our past.

Ever think the scent of the great outdoors is so much better out of town than in? Well, it’s because it is, according to “Silence Of The Plants,” Marta Zaraska, NewScientist (17 February 2018, paywall), an article on how plants communicate with each other:

Now we are discovering that air pollution can disrupt these communications. In one study, Blande and his colleagues put individual bumblebees into a chamber containing paper flowers resembling those of black mustard. When the scientists injected the scent of real black mustard flowers that grew in either a clean or polluted atmosphere the bumblebees’ reactions were unequivocal: they were immediately attracted to the unpolluted scent, while that from polluted air left them buzzing around aimlessly.

What’s going on? In the past few years, ozone and nitrogen oxides have emerged as the main gibberish-inducing culprits. These ultimately result from vehicle and power plant emissions, with diesel exhaust a particular problem. Both ozone and nitrogen oxides react with the volatile chemicals released by plants. This changes the smell of their bouquet by degrading some compounds in the mix more readily than others. When monoterpene limonene, a common “word” of oranges, is mixed with ozone, for example, it degrades into as many as 1200 different compounds.

Such degradation can happen surprisingly fast. Ecologist Robbie Girling at the University of Reading, UK, and his colleagues exposed eight common compounds produced by flowers to diesel exhaust. “What we weren’t expecting was the speed with which these reactions seem to be occurring,” he says. “Within a minute, which is the shortest time period our method could resolve, we couldn’t see anything of one of the compounds. It was instantaneously undetectable.” (See “When plants talk dirty”)

This strikes me as an example of how emission-less vehicles will improve our living environment, regardless of whether their electricity is derived from renewables or fossil fuels, because in the latter case it’s far more likely that we can effect some sort of air-scrubbing / capture of the noxious fumes before release of the final by-product; having a million cars with local, inferior air-scrubbers is not a great solution. And if the electricity is from renewables, so much the better, even granting that such sources will have their own distinct problems.

Of course, bicycles would be even better – unless human sweat can also interfere with the plants’ language, which is actually not a joke, just some wonderment on my part.

Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) is getting a boost from the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), and is intended to slow down traffic to safer speeds in order to bring down the death rate. From the ETSC:

ISA uses a speed sign-recognition video camera and/or GPS-linked speed limit data to advise drivers of the current speed limit and automatically limit the speed of the vehicle as needed. ISA systems do not automatically apply the brakes, but simply limit engine power preventing the vehicle from accelerating past the current speed limit unless overridden or switched off. The first vehicles with this kind of ISA system factory fitted have begun appearing on the market – helped in part by Euro NCAP’s decision to reward extra points for vehicles that include ISA. …

The importance of the adoption of the technology cannot be underestimated. ISA is expected to reduce collisions by 30% and deaths by 20%.

ISA has been trialled in many member states, and while drivers take a short time to adjust to the technology, the majority appreciated it. One obvious benefit, as Ford has pointed out in a recent marketing campaign, is that it helps drivers avoid speeding tickets.

This would probably become a matter of conflict in the United States, given a long, if unfortunately, tradition of going fast on the highways (although not as consistently fast as on the European autobahns – but I believe this is for side streets and minor highways). It’s a little hard to come up with a valid argument beyond that of the importance of the freedom to control your own car – and your own destiny.

Unfortunately, that destiny ends up being tangled up with everyone else’s.

The phone rings, I answer:

THIS IS AN EMERGENCY CALL, YOUR MICROSOFT LICENSE HAS EXPIRED AND ALL THE SERVICES ON YOUR COMPUTER [forgotten], TO RENEW YOUR LICENSE PLEASE CALL 1-833- …

You can’t annoy an automated call, can you? Microsoft itself has a page talking about these scams here. Makes you wonder how many of their own tech support people get taken in by the scammers.

Be wary out there, smarter people than I have been taken in by these scams.

On 38 North Andray Abrahamian looks back at the sanctions levied on Myanmar as a way to predict what might happen in North Korea as sanctions are strengthened against the Kim regime:

Imagine you could somehow go back to when US sanctions on Burma began in 1988. If you could tell Congress and President Reagan that over two decades, sanctions would not only cost ordinary citizens great hardships, but would entrench a class of mega-rich cronies whose fortunes were inexorably tied to the military government, would they still go ahead and begin the process of targeting the country?

In 1988, Burma was renamed Myanmar, but in a more important shift, it also reconsidered socialism and embraced a market economy. The same year, however, the Junta killed hundreds of people in a vicious crackdown on protesters. Holding and then ignoring election results for two years later and further outrages against Aung San Suu Kyi led to the US imposing round after round of unilateral sanctions.

Unfortunately, this meant that just as the country was privatizing industries, access to training, foreign direct investment (FDI) and international financing became scarce. A new class of businessmen, leveraging political relationships with the military, took early concessions in extractive industries, import licenses or construction projects, and then reinvested revenues into expanding into a range of sectors. The scarcity of inputs meant there was no catching up for subsequent players.

Presumably you then see the early pioneers growing rich and entrenched, unmolested by later challengers who just don’t have the oomph to shift them out of their positions. His conclusion:

Sanctions have often been derided as a “blunt instrument,” but this is a poor metaphor. A better comparison might be to an untested toxin or medicine injected into a patient. Some effects are understandable and predictable but the unintended side-effects can be extensive, enduring and in the end, contradictory to the goals of sanctions.

And Andray thinks it unlikely that small actors will get much traction in the North Korea economy while sanctions bottle up the country. The early big actors, closely allied to the regime, will dominate.

Returning to this thread concerning the next special election for the Representative seat of PA-18, word has it that private polls show the GOP candidate, State Rep Rick Saccone, with a lead of only single digits over the Democratic challenger, Conor Lamb. Lamb sounds like a conservative Democrat, vowing to not vote for Pelosi as House leader, unwilling to support universal Medicare or a higher minimum wage. In short, he’s not a progressive, which is a canny move for the Democrats in this conservative district.

Saccone, on the other hand, has clasped Trump in a bear hug, and so this makes this very much a election test of President Trump. In a district he might normally carry by 20 points, if Saccone barely wins, or even loses, it’ll be a clear flag of just how much President Trump has become a drag on the Republican Party.

There’ll be anguish the night of this election. The only question will be who has the groans that night. Impossible to say right now.

Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

This is not so much as an administration as a weird fusion of the court of Louis XIV and the Mafia, all built around a cult of personality that lacks any self-restraint or awareness.

And the pendulum then swings back when it comes to Trump, the NRA, and gun control:

The top lobbyist for the National Rifle Association claimed late Thursday that President Trump had retreated from his surprising support a day earlier for gun control measures after a meeting with N.R.A. officials and Vice President Mike Pence in the Oval Office.

The lobbyist, Chris Cox, posted on Twitter just after 9 p.m. that he met with Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence, saying that “we all want safe schools, mental health reform and to keep guns away from dangerous people. POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control. #NRA #MAGA.”

Mr. Trump tweeted about an hour later, “Good (Great) meeting in the Oval Office tonight with the NRA!” [The New York Times]

There’s in public, and then there’s in public, Presidential style. Perhaps Donald Trump has always blown with the wind like this, but prior to becoming a candidate for President, to say nothing for President, it wasn’t really something noticeable if you weren’t directly associated with the Donald.

But being President means we can all, if we wish to or feel so obligated, be directly associated with the Donald. And his wishy-washiness just becomes more and more apparent. There’s no mission, no drive, no willingness to do something for the good of the Nation – it’s all about what makes the Donald feel good right now.

He’s a ship in a gale and he’s three sheets to the wind.

Will we have a tariff on steel and aluminum next week? Stay tuned.

A user has a correction in response to my last post on this thread, which ended with:

This case may affect your Internet experience in the future, especially if the State considers your activities to be criminal.

My reader’s note:

Minor addendum to your last sentence: “if ANY state considers your activities criminal.”

Heh. Correction noted.