A sunset on Mars back a couple of years.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission’s 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover’s location in Gale Crater. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M Univ.
[h/t WaPo]
WaPo reports on Trump’s first fiscal year of governing, which in all fairness also includes the Republican-controlled Congress when apportioning applause – or blame:
It was another crazy news week, so it’s understandable if you missed a small but important announcement from the Treasury Department: The federal government is on track to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year — Trump’s first full year in charge of the budget.
That’s almost double what the government borrowed in fiscal year 2017.
Here are the exact figures: The U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, according to documents released Wednesday. It’s the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and a big jump from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year.
Many conservatives make the mistake of believing they can draw a meaningful analogy with a typical family unit – draw up a budget, live within your means, etc etc. They ignore the fact that no family has the means at its disposal that does the United States, nor the huge variety of responsibilities. Rare is the family that can raise taxes, borrow money using Treasury bonds against which risk is considered nil, or be responsible for public epidemiology.
We have survived years and years of rolling over our debt, and so far as I can tell it’s only resulted in a new profession, that of the doomsayer of government debt. Some, I doubt not, are fully honest in their profession, but others, particularly of a conservative bent, tend to shout doom while Democrats are in power, but fall silent when their brethren are in power, even as said brethren spend those fabled tax revenues as if they were pennies.
That said, there is no doubt that the deeper in debt we go, the more costly it becomes. But at the moment it appears to be little more than an ideological spear to thrust at your opponents when convenient, to ignore when not. I worry, though, that going in deb too far may lay us open to more economic upsets in the future, although I do not lay the Great Recession at that doorstep.
The 2018 value is a projected value, of course, as WaPo notes:
Treasury mainly attributed the increase to the “fiscal outlook.” The Congressional Budget Office was more blunt. In a report this week, the CBO said tax receipts are going to be lower because of the new tax law.
And that’s the point, I suppose. Governor Brownback of Kansas recently resigned that post, having laid waste to that state government’s revenues through a similar scheme of cutting taxes and waiting for increased revenue to come pouring in. It never did, and Brownback has been shuffled off to one of the most obscure of diplomatic postings, United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. A sad ending for a former Senator once considered a leading Republican light, he ends up being another conservative intellectual lightweight, putting his faith in the Laffer Curve with little thought as to its limits.
And is this what we’ll be seeing from Trump’s tax law? The initial reaction from Fortune 500 CEOs at the infamous meeting with Gary Cohn was vastly unsettling. I guess we’ll just have to settle back and watch the debt jump – particularly if we choose to indulge in a military buildup once again. And will the Republican Congress try to use the deficit they’ve created as an excuse to cut important social welfare programs? It should be interesting.
Readers react to my meditations on piercing closed minds – wherever they’re located:
Interesting. I’ve never thought about it this way. Guess I’ve never really given it much thought.
Another:
Yes, tribalism is wrong and is destroying our country. I don’t see any way to stop the USA from becoming a has-been nation.
My suspicion is that we’re in for a dip, but once enough of us have been banged on the head with the tangible consequences of bad thinking, our advantage in natural resources and a free(er) society will help us move back towards the front.
Unless the Chinese lead in artificial intelligence gives them a multiplier effect.
Another, from old friend Kevin McLeod:
Good article by Sullivan. Yes, tribalism is hurting us. I wouldn’t say it’s wrong per se – it has value in some situations – but in our current context it’s creating more problems than it solves. It’s good to see growing awareness of the central issue.
I wrote about the same topic in December at Medium: https://medium.com/…/the-bug-in-human-social…
Keep this subject in circulation. It’s a particularly difficult problem to solve because it’s instinctual or nearly so. Shedding outdated social fictions would be a good start.
A good article. I had forgotten about the Emperor’s New Clothes tale, it puts all the arguments about tribalism into one memorable & instructive story, applicable to the entire world of Trump politics.
After the mild collapse of stock prices last Friday, today the markets closed a few minutes ago, with the Dow down 4.6%. What’s driving it? I suspect this has more to do with the long-overdue correction that many analysts have predicted, and less to do with the apparently fangless Nunes memo – but every little bit hurts.
And just to double the fun, Congress must pass some sort of spending bill by Thursday.
And my Arts Editor points out that a new Fed chairman was sworn in today, replacing Yellin. I have no idea if that’s important or not.
Mucilaginous:
1 Having a viscous or gelatinous consistency.
‘a mucilaginous paste’
‘greasy and mucilaginous foods’
- 1.1 (of a plant, seed, etc.) containing a polysaccharide substance that is extracted as a viscous or gelatinous solution and used in medicines and adhesives.
‘the young leaves are tender and mucilaginous’
Noted in Greg Fallis’ eponymous blog:
You’re probably thinking something like “Yeah, well, Trump’s a dick.” Or “Yeah, well, it’s Monday and this is pretty much what Trump does on Mondays because he’s a dick.” Or “Why doesn’t some adult take the phone away from that mucilaginous motherfucker?”
This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!
CNN:
The highly controversial memo alleges that then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee that no surveillance warrant would have been sought for a Trump campaign aide without a disputed opposition research dossier on Trump and Russia. The memo is the most explicit Republican effort yet to discredit the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia, alleging that the investigation was infused with an anti-Trump bias under the Obama administration and supported with political opposition research.
The memo tries to connect what Republicans believe was a flawed application to monitor former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page to the overall counterintelligence investigation into potential collusion between Russians and the Republican campaign.
But the memo undermines its own argument about the application being overly reliant on the dossier. It notes that the application also included information regarding Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, suggesting there was intelligence beyond the dossier in the Page application.
Finally, the FBI says that the memo has material omissions, and Democrats contest key allegations in it. Resolving this shouldn’t be difficult: The counter-memo produced by the Democrats should be released, as well as underlying material including the transcript of the interview with Andrew McCabe, which has become the subject of a he-said/he-said between committee Republicans and Democrats. Perhaps the surveillance of Page bore some fruit; if so, we should hear about it. The more information the public can get about all of this, the better.
There is speculation that President Trump might, in response to the memo, fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw one of the renewals of FISA warrants on Carter Page. Trump made one of his patented ambiguously threatening remarks about this possibility on Friday. If he were to move against Rosenstein, it might cause a semi-collapse of his Justice Department, give further fodder to Robert Mueller, and undo the political headway Republicans have made in recent weeks. Trump should sit tight and — if the investigation is as unfounded as he says — await his eventual vindication.
Former FBI Director James Comey, fired by President Trump:
That’s it? Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs.
Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC):
“I actually don’t think it has any impact on the Russia probe,” Gowdy, the House Oversight Committee chairman, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“To the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower,” Gowdy said. “The dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’ meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice.” [via RollCall]
It’s worth noting that Gowdy recently announced he will not seek re-election, a decision insulating him from pressure by donors.
Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic, Shannon Togawa Mercer, and Benjamin Wittes:
But you get the point. The bottom line is that there are multiple reasons to expect that Nunes has not given a full and fair account of the FBI’s FISA process and that his memo is as factually deficient as it accuses the Carter Page warrant application of being.
and …
At the end of the day, the most important aspect of the #memo is probably not its contents but the fact that it was written and released at all. Its preparation and public dissemination represent a profound betrayal of the central premise of the intelligence oversight system. That system subjects the intelligence community to detailed congressional oversight, in which the agencies turn over their most sensitive secrets to their overseers in exchange for both a secure environment in which oversight can take place and a promise that overseers will not abuse their access for partisan political purposes. In other words, they receive legitimation when they act in accordance with law and policy. Nunes, the Republican congressional leadership and Trump violated the core of that bargain over the course of the past few weeks. They revealed highly sensitive secrets by way of scoring partisan political points and delegitimizing what appears to have been lawful and appropriate intelligence community activity.
It’s genuinely difficult to find an angle to the House Republicans’ “Nunes memo” that helps its intended beneficiary: Donald Trump. Every key argument the president and his allies hoped to advance has fallen apart, and after weeks of over-the-top hype, Republicans are actually worse off than they were before the previously classified materials were released to the public.
In fact, over the weekend, the memo’s credibility actually managed to move backward. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal each reported independently that the FBI did, in fact, notify a FISA judge to the political motivations surrounding Christopher Steele’s dossier. (The underlying allegation from Trump’s allies is wrong — information from politically motivated sources can be used to obtain a warrant — but the underlying charge is now dubious.)
Even if you strip the Republican memo of its context and ridiculous motivations, and consider it solely as a document intended to highlight an alleged FISA court abuse, the document fails miserably.
I was not aware of FISA until I started reading Lawfare; it’s not an everyday subject around American dinner tables. Given this obscurity, this will result on partisans being led around by the noses yet again – or perhaps the weaponization of the respective bases. Beyond specialized experts, I doubt that anyone can have a truly intelligent discussion about it. Ideologues will spout off, of course, prompted by their favorite leader – but will it really lead to anything?
Only if this all goes to court or impeachment perhaps.
I am interested in the fact that some Republicans are rejecting the memo as significant, suggesting that Representative Nunes, who is responsible for the memo, may be out on a limb here. However, given his outrageous behavior as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and yet his continued position, I do not see Speaker Ryan removing him from that prestigious seat.
Even if the prestige-meter is rapidly sinking under his leadership.
But the best analysis is probably Lawfare’s, above, as it seems quite complete and written by specialized professionals – in near-English, at that.
I have no doubt that I inherited my interest – passive though it may be – in archaeology from my mother. Not that dad wasn’t interested, but I think mom had the passion for learning the stories behind all the old artifacts, digs, and everything that went with it, starting with the old National Geographics. So it’s too bad that neither one of them is around to see this report on the Maya civilization in WaPo:
Archaeologists have spent more than a century traipsing through the Guatemalan jungle, Indiana Jones-style, searching through dense vegetation to learn what they could about the Maya civilization that was one of the dominant societies in Mesoamerica for centuries.
But the latest discovery — one archaeologists are calling a “game changer” — didn’t even require a can of bug spray.
Scientists using high-tech, airplane-based lidar mapping tools have discovered tens of thousands of structures constructed by the Maya: defense works, houses, buildings, industrial-size agricultural fields, even new pyramids. The findings, announced Thursday, are already reshaping long-held views about the size and scope of the Maya civilization.
“This world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data,” said Albert Yu-Min Lin, an engineer and National Geographic explorer who worked on a television special about the new find. “And what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilization is all of a sudden brand new again,” he told the New York Times.
An early result?
“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multidisciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With this new data, it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there — including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”
Wow. And what happened to that civilization? It just makes the blood race!
Andrew Sullivan is full of depressing pessimism when it comes to Americans and politics:
The problem with tribalism is that it knows no real limiting principle.
It triggers a deep and visceral response: a defense of the tribe before all other considerations. That means, in its modern manifestation, that the tribe comes before the country as a whole, before any neutral institutions that get in its way, before reason and empiricism, and before the rule of law. It means loyalty to the tribe — and its current chief — is enforced relentlessly. And this, it seems to me, is the underlying reason why the investigation into Russian interference in the last election is now under such attack and in such trouble. In a tribalized society, there can be no legitimacy for an independent inquiry, indifferent to tribal politics. In this fray, no one is allowed to be above it.
On the face of it, of course, no one even faintly patriotic should object to investigating how a foreign power tried to manipulate American democracy, as our intelligence agencies have reported. And yet one party is quite obviously doing all it can to undermine such a project — even when it is led by a Republican of previously unimpeachable integrity, Robert Mueller. Tribalism does not spare the FBI; it cannot tolerate an independent Department of Justice; it sees even a Republican like Mueller as suspect; and it sees members of another tribe as incapable of performing their jobs without bias.
And then he gets worse. Go read it (it’s the first part of his weekly tri-partite column) if you want to be disheartened.
Implicitly it raises the question of how to persuade the members of both tribes – he suggests the Democrats are also moving towards tribalism – that tribalism is wrong.
I’m not suggesting we don’t have a long history of tribalism in this country. Dyed in the wool xyz voter is a familiar chestnut. I’ve always taken it to mean that that the voter had more important things to do than worry about the political scene, between raising children and working, and usually legitimately so. And then remember the mass religious revivals we occasionally indulge in, until the next, and almost inevitable, revelations of the true motivations of the leaders damages those revivals.
But now, as Andrew points out, we’re seeing the wholesale abandonment of the most honorable of vocations, truth-seeking and living by the truth, by the GOP. Let me spell it out.
Once upon a time, in situations such as these, our ancestors, not so far away in time, would, regardless of political inclination, examine the evidence presented, looking both at its trustworthiness and what it said, and if they found the evidence compelling, they’d come to a judgment that put the interests of the country first. It required judgment, fair-mindedness, and a independent frame of mind that disregarded emotional responses in favor of intellectual rigor.
But some of us have lost that common-sense approach. Today, a huge percentage of the GOP has decided, prior to looking at evidence, that their leader is sacrosanct, must be protected, and thus cannot be guilty of any major crime. From this unsupported assertion, they then apply logic and conclude that any news, any evidence, which suggests their leader may be guilty of any sort of crime, must be false evidence. Indeed, using a meme supplied by just that person to which the evidence will allegedly point, they call it fake news, they even take up a belief that numerous news organizations with more than a century of tradition of excellence are simply making up news stories. All in the face of evidence
And it’s all so ass-backwards. They have a conclusion, and for that conclusion to work, they invent wilder and wilder stories. All the news organizations are making up news. That tape of Trump talking about “grabbing pussies”? Fake. The Russians? Oh, they’re our friends, they couldn’t possibly attack us.
And all because they have an allegiance to a group that overrides the good of the country.
That’s why tribalism is wrong. That’s why, in my view, it’s un-American.
How do we answer Andrew’s implicit question, then, of how to remind our fellow Americans about how we used to evaluate evidence, about how we used to put the good of the country ahead of the good of the party, of how pre-determined conclusions are the wrong way to go about evaluating our government?
I don’t really know.
But what I’m going to do is send this off to my friends who seem to in one or the other tribe and ask them to read this, think about it, and then send it onwards to their network of friends, to inject it into the thought-stream. Maybe everyone will snort at it, their minds made up and immovable in what I consider to be error.
But I present these thoughts not as a partisan – long time readers know I’m an independent – but as a fellow American who has grown concerned at this decay in common-sense in the GOP, and worried about similar patterns in the Democrats.
And I invite my readers to take similar steps. There will be no single event which will resolve this problem, just a series of small steps, of tribe members finally sitting down, thinking, and saying, What have I been doing? Recommend this post to friends, share it on FB, or however you want to point out that tribalism is wrong and is hurting America.
On this subject, a conservative reader sends me an article concerning the revived Keystone XL pipeline. From MSN/Money:
Nebraska regulators last November approved Keystone XL, a 1,180-mile-long (1,900-kilometer) extension of the existing Keystone Pipeline operated by TransCanada Corp.
However, the 3-2 vote in favor of expanding the pipeline followed a leak of 210,000 gallons of oil just days prior. That oil gushed from a section of Keystone in South Dakota before TransCanada cut off the flow. …
Proponents of the pipeline say it will lessen dependence on foreign oil while creating jobs. But environmental groups and many Americans — especially American Indians — remain furious about the project. Beyond the risk of spills, the project’s steep environmental costs also include the potential industrialization of 54,000 square miles of Alberta wilderness.
“The scale and severity of what’s happening in Alberta will make your spine tingle,” Robert Johnson, a former Business Insider correspondent, wrote after flying over the Canadian oil sands in May 2012.
What I found interesting is that a conservative reader sent it. It suggests that the future damage attributable to the pipeline through construction, maintenance, leaks, and supply to it bothers conservatives as well as liberals.
[h/t Bill C]
In NewScientist (20 January 2018, paywall) surveys recent research concerning a potential future collapse of civilization, and these are the kinds of research I like – something simple-minded, application of techniques from other disciplines. And the end of the world:
So is there any evidence that the West is reaching its end game? According to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, there are certainly some worrying signs. Turchin was a population biologist studying boom-and-bust cycles in predator and prey animals when he realised that the equations he was using could also describe the rise and fall of ancient civilisations.
In the late 1990s, he began to apply these equations to historical data, looking for patterns that link social factors such as wealth and health inequality to political instability. Sure enough, in past civilisations in Ancient Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two recurring cycles that are linked to regular era-defining periods of unrest.
One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society, then, as the population grows, the supply of labour begins to outstrip demand and so becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while the living standards of the workers fall. As the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, in which the misery of the lowest strata and infighting between elites contribute to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and made up of two generations – one peaceful and one turbulent.
Looking at US history Turchin spotted peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. Worse, he predicts that the end of the next 50-year cycle, in around 2020, will coincide with the turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a period of political unrest that is at least on a par with what happened around 1970, at the peak of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam war.
Which suggests we do a poor job of teaching our young the lessons of previous years. Hell, we could see that when the American Glass-Steagall legislation was repealed and our economy subsequently, and possibly consequentially, fell into the Great Recession.
Onwards:
This prediction echoes one made in 1997 by two amateur historians called William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book The Fourth Turning: An American prophecy. They claimed that in about 2008 the US would enter a period of crisis that would peak in the 2020s – a claim said to have made a powerful impression on US president Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
Turchin made his predictions in 2010, before the election of Donald Trump and the political infighting that surrounded his election, but he has since pointed out that current levels of inequality and political divisions in the US are clear signs that it is entering the downward phase of the cycle. Brexit and the Catalan crisis hint that the US is not the only part of the West to feel the strain.
When population grows, in the age before WMDs, it helped to perpetuate the society that it makes up, so there’s a social survival value to that population growth; but the cheapness of labor it causes, and the strains which appear to grow out of that cheapness over time, certainly tends to suggest that in the common economic models, the growth of population is not a salutary development to the members of the population outside of the elite. In the end, those religions which encourage[1] unlimited procreation – which is not uncommon, although not universal – may carry quite a lot of the blame for the misery of their adherents. Another reason to doubt the assertion that life is sacred, no?
But since we’re talking about a social science rather than a hard science, I don’t accept that these need be inevitabilities, and instead I believe this suggests that there’s certainly a role for government in the management of the economy. The trick is to do so without picking specific winners and losers, but instead to shape it in such a way as to benefit those who are not benefiting as they should. It certainly justifies a progressive tax system, since without one the rich ignorantly run the risk of the collapse of society – and the disappearance of their wealth.
The applicability of this article to current circumstances appears to be beyond dispute, as the article notes:
How and why turbulence sometimes turns into collapse is something that concerns Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. He noticed that while, in nature, some prey always survive to keep the cycle going, some societies that collapsed, such as the Maya, the Minoans and the Hittites, never recovered.
To find out why, he first modelled human populations as if they were predators and natural resources were prey. Then he split the “predators” into two unequal groups, wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.
This showed that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each other,” says Motesharrei.
Part of the reason is that the “haves” are buffered by their wealth from the effects of resource depletion for longer than the “have-nots” and so resist calls for a change of strategy until it is too late.
This doesn’t bode well for Western societies, which are dangerously unequal. According to a recent analysis, the world’s richest 1 per cent now owns half the wealth, and the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has been growing since the financial crisis of 2008.
One might say the elite’s allegiance to their family outranks their allegiance to the society which made their wealth possible in the first place.
This whole thing makes the pulse quicken, doesn’t it? After all, we’re talking about an existential crisis. I took a look for this Peter Turchin for any pubications which I might comprehend and discovered he has a number of books out on this sort of thing, well-reviewed, so I put a couple of them on my Amazon wish-list.
As if I have time to read them 🙂
1And by encourage, I suppose I really mean divinely command.
CNN/Money‘s reasons for Friday’s plunge in the markets?
I’m not quite sure what to think of this. The swiftly deteriorating democratic institutions of the leading economic powerhouse should be of concern to every investor world-wide. Their wealth, real and potential, is at risk when the trust we have in those institutions is threatened. If they choose to be worried about the GOP’s attacks on some of the most fundamental institutions of the United States – not only the FBI, but the judiciary as well – then we may see a helluva pullout.
And, in a way, that may be a political stabilization mechanism. If the President takes actions which destabilize the markets and threaten our prosperity, the immediate market signal may be the trigger we need. It’ll be the modern-day equivalent of the villagers with the pitchforks and torches, as the political class ejects the person doingthe damage to the system.
So long as it’s all theoretical, the GOP will sit on its hands. Its members are simply not bright enough to take necessary actions as a group. Sure, some are planning to retire, but that’s because they can’t see themselves doing much beyond that. But once the edge of chaos suddenly appears to them and their donors, it may become an entirely new scenario – with one expendable actor available.
Maybe. All hand waving here, as always.
The GOP, in the persons of President Trump, Representative Nunes, Speaker Ryan, and a number of others, hold the top of a hill in their war with the FBI. Normally, you’d expect those in a commanding position to win such a war, even second-raters like this bunch. But Eugene Robinson makes an important point – this is the FBI:
Presidents don’t win fights with the FBI. Donald Trump apparently wants to learn this lesson the hard way.
Most presidents have had the sense not to bully the FBI by defaming its leaders and — ridiculously — painting its agents as leftist political hacks. Most members of Congress have also understood how unwise it would be to pull such stunts. But Trump and his hapless henchmen on Capitol Hill, led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), have chosen the wrong enemy. History strongly suggests they will be sorry.
The far-right echo chamber resounds with wailing and braying about something called the “deep state” — a purported fifth column of entrenched federal bureaucrats whose only goal in life, apparently, is to deny America the greatness that Dear Leader Trump has come to bestow. It is unclear who is supposed to be directing this vast conspiracy. Could it be Dr. Evil? Supreme Leader Snoke? Hillary Clinton? This whole paranoid fantasy, as any sane person realizes, is utter rubbish.*
The asterisk is for the FBI.
And it’s quite the valid point. Let’s leave aside my constant, and no doubt annoyingly predictable, assertion that the Republicans are a pack of second-raters. Neither the President, an incurious man who doesn’t appear to have learned the primary management lesson that a boss should always employ people smarter than himself, nor his toadies in Congress, have the sheer resources to do the sort of investigating, collating of information, and out and out snooping which is the day-to-day business of the FBI. Nor do they have the professionalism, the discipline, and what appears to be the devotion to truth which should be, ideally and perhaps in reality, the attributes of the FBI. Not that I am deluded into thinking the FBI is run by angels, but it appears the current leaders, past and presence, are strongly bound by honor, and they’re certainly backed by one of the strongest information gathering and analysis organizations on the planet.
I suspect if President Trump and his allies want to play power politics with the FBI, they may lose a few appendages in a long, drawn out war. And while they’re distracted by the maelstrom, former FBI Director and current Special Counsel Mueller will be coming in from another tangent.
We can only hope the institutions of the United States will not be severely damaged while this Faustian drama plays out. And perhaps the FBI can also pull in a few outside players of whom we may not be aware.
Or, to return to the metaphor, President Trump may be beating his chest on top of that hill, but he picked a hill without a water source …. and the FBI will surround it soon enough.
Trying to predict this … Image Credit: NASA
I happened to run across something relating to this long-dormant thread concerning approximate solution computing where the problems are so difficult that they consume significant amounts of energy (the latter attribute of which also applies to Bitcoin, as discussed here), and as it’s from my alma mater (not that I have any sentimental attachment to it, not being the tribal sort), the University of Minnesota‘s Institute of Technology College of Science & Engineering, I thought I’d mention it. It turns out that CS&E has a Ph.D. student who has a paper getting published on the subject. I think. They sure weren’t talking about these fascinating subjects back when I was in school – but then, I barely survived college anyways. From a newsletter from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering:
Hassan [Najafi] is a doctoral student working under the guidance of Prof. David Lilja and his research interests include stochastic and approximate computing, fault-tolerant system design, and computer architecture. He is also the recipient of the University’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship that recognizes outstanding research work, for the 2017-2018 academic year.
A brief description of the paper:
Recent work on stochastic computing (SC) has shown that computation using stochastic logic can be performed deterministically and accurately by properly structuring unary-style bit-streams. The hardware cost and the latency of operations are much lower than those of the conventional random SC when completely accurate results are expected. For applications where slight inaccuracy is acceptable, however, these unary stream-based deterministic approaches must run for a relatively long time to produce acceptable results. This long processing time makes the deterministic approach energy-inefficient. While randomness was a source of inaccuracy in the conventional random stream-based SC, the authors exploited pseudo-randomness in improving the progressive precision property of the deterministic approach to SC. Completely accurate results are still produced if running the operation for the required number of cycles. When slight inaccuracy is acceptable, however, significant improvement in the processing time and energy consumption is observed compared to the prior unary stream-based deterministic approach and also the conventional random-stream based approach.
It sounds fascinating, but I doubt I’d understand the paper. For example, I have no idea what might be a unary-style bit-stream.
Massif:
In geology, a massif ( /mæˈsiːf/ or /ˈmæsɪf/) is a section of a planet’s crust that is demarcated by faults or flexures. In the movement of the crust, a massif tends to retain its internal structure while being displaced as a whole. The term also refers to a group of mountains formed by such a structure. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “Forgotten mountain shrine to a Soviet superstar of astrophysics,” , NewScientists‘s Aperture column (20 January 2018):
A FORGOTTEN jewel in the crown of Soviet astronomy, the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory is located on the picturesque southern slope of Mount Aragats, a four-peaked volcano massif in Armenia.
Much of the mountain (above) once lay in the permanent grip of ice. Glaciers inside its crater weren’t discovered until after the second world war. Since then, the snow line has risen and sheep herders have abandoned the mountain’s waterlogged environs. Photographer Toby Smith, on assignment for Project Pressure, a charity documenting the world’s vanishing glaciers, also recorded the lives of those who remain on the mountain.
Nice pics, too.
As of roughly 2 PM American Central, the big 3 stock market indices are down anywhere from 1.3% to 2%. Perhaps it’s a bit of buyers’ remorse after a long, long run.
Or maybe it’s this:
President Donald Trump — poised to approve the release of a classified memo about the Russia investigation — on Friday ripped the ongoing probe, accusing top law enforcement officials of favoring Democrats.
“The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” Trump tweeted. “Rank & File are great people!” he added. [NBC News]
Openly accusing the very officials he selected[1] to run the agencies of being in open and illegal revolt against him – with no evidence, to boot. It’s tempting to connect market behavior with this new low in intra-government relations.
But I don’t necessarily give investors that much credit. After all, the markets didn’t come crashing down when Trump won election, did they? They – the investors, collectively – chose to believe there’d be a steady hand at the helm. A fair enough position, too.
But with Trump continually failing to be President in a responsible and positive manner has been rattling the world, and this may be the next group to be rattled. The next week will tell us how investors are really feeling. Can’t come to conclusions on this single data point.
1These would be Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The former is definitely a Republican, and reportedly the latter voted in the latest GOP Presidential primary, while declining to vote in the election.
… that the trees have taken to using parkas.
On Treehugger Lloyd Alter suspects the oil industry won’t be disappearing just yet, despite the claims of some industry watchers on the green side of things:
Peak oil used to be about running out of supply; now some think that we will run out of demand. The oil companies will ensure that we never run out of demand.
Remember Peak Oil? It was all over TreeHugger, the idea that the easy oil was going to start running out and it would get more and more expensive and difficult to find.
We wrote post after post about Hubbert’s Peak and how we were all gonna die, that we are “in the confusion stage now, followed by chaos and collapse and basically the End of the world as we know it as we slide down the slope from the Peak.”
Then along came hydraulic fracturing (fracking), tight oil, deepwater drilling, Trump, Zinke and Pruitt, and the oil and gas are flowing freely and people are piling into pickups. Peak oilman King Hubbert became “a punchline rather than a visionary.” And now, over at the NRDC, Jeff Turrentine asks Could Peak Oil Demand Be Just a Dozen Years Away? But he isn’t talking about oil supply, he is talking demand, suggesting that electric cars are going to cause a different kind of peak.
In this very different type of forecast, oil production doesn’t necessarily begin to decline at a particular point. But our need for it does. And it’s not just a theory: Experts on all sides of the issue say that it’s really coming. At some point over the next 25 years, a number of cultural, political, and technological factors will combine to slake our global thirst for this once most essential of fossil fuels. After decades spent planning for scarcity, oil companies are now busily preparing for something that they never saw coming: their own marginalization.
To be fair, I thought the same thing two years ago, writing Sooner than you think? A prediction that electric cars will cause the next oil crisis. They don’t have to take over the market totally, just enough to tip supply of oil up over demand, like fracking did. But I suspect that the NRDC is being over-optimistic about oil company marginalization.
We wrote earlier about how the oil industry isn’t taking this lying down, and is seriously pivoting to plastic. They are investing US$180 billion to increase plastic production by 40 percent.
And, for Lloyd, this is a problem because we don’t recycle plastics in any substantial way. For the oil industry, that’s glorious news – new product going out the door. It seems to me that this may be a time for government to step in and say This material has to be recyclable and reusable or you can’t sell it. Of course, the screaming will be remarkable, both from industry and from the libertarians who think markets always automatically adjust, but it’s not going to happen without the managing entity – government – waving a hand.
People can be endlessly clever. It’s something worth remembering.
It seems like every time I turn around another Senator or Representative is not going to run for re-election. Most seem to be retiring, while a few are declaring for another seat. So I went looking and found that Ballotpedia has an excellent summary page of these announcements so far.
I don’t know how this compares to previous elections, and I didn’t find anything for previous years on Ballotpedia. Just to summarize, 3 Republican Senators are not running for re-election, and 15 Democratic and 34 Republican Representatives are not running for re-election.
Without the context of previous years, it’s hard to really speculate on what’s going on, but it sure feels like a lot of Republicans are realizing the next mid-terms are going to be very difficult, no matter what VP Pence might be thinking, and sometimes it’s easier to let the next generation carry the fight.
Then there’s the discouragement of realizing that the leadership is basically incompetent (I’ve seen sentiments roughly approximating that in print somewhere), realizing that power isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that sort of thing.
Incumbents are hard to beat. The large number of Republicans heading out the door suggest a lot of opportunities for the Democrats.
On Treehugger Melissa Breyer discusses the Swedish craze of plogging:
If Christopher Guest and crew were to make a mockumentary, a la Spinal Tap, about the warm-and-fuzzy cultural traditions of Scandinavia, they might have very well come up with “plogging.” They would portray wholesome Swedes running like gazelles through pretty Swedish landscapes, bounding with Swedish altruism as they stop, stoop, and pick up a pieces of Swedish litter to carry along with them for proper disposal. And it would be hilarious. But what’s even better than this imagined satire is that it is real! And it is awesome.
Which happens to be how I put things away. See it, grab it. Don’t see it, too bad.
My Arts Editor is not entirely happy with this process, I think.
The current Missouri Attorney General and likely Republican challenger for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Claire McCaskill is Josh Hawley. In keeping with the rightward lurch of the GOP comes this statement from him, via The Kansas City Star:
“We have a human trafficking crisis in our state and in this city and in our country because people are willing to purchase women, young women, and treat them like commodities. There is a market for it. Why is there? Because our culture has completely lost its way. The sexual revolution has led to exploitation of women on a scale that we would never have imagined, never have imagined,” Hawley told the crowd in audio obtained this week by The Star.
“We must … deliver a message to our culture that the false gospel of ‘anything goes’ ends in this road of slavery. It ends in the slavery and the exploitation of the most vulnerable among us. It ends in the slavery and exploitation of young women.”
Poor guy is getting a lot of press, and most of it bad. So let’s see if we can help him out here.
We know that the sex trade is the world’s oldest profession, if we may take chestnuts at their face value, no? So we can immediately eliminate the obvious contention of his statement. But consider this: for the vast majority of that time, the sex trade was merely considered part of the commercial activity of society.
So when the “sexual revolution” came around, freeing women from the compulsion of fidelity from which men had freed themselves long ago, it lent an exclamation point to the work of women over the last couple of centuries to secure their personhood, previously marked by the Suffragette movement.
Which is to say, what had been a simple part of the commercial activity of society suddenly became … repulsive. Enslaving women for sex prior to the sexual revolution had not been terribly abnormal, even when the bonds were matrimonial. Afterwards? Not in the least normal.
And, so, he’s right, if you can read the sentimental tea leaves properly. A fairly normal activity suddenly becomes repulsive – because of freedom. The freedom to indulge, or not to indulge. The freedom to use self-judgment.
Thanks for pointing that out, A.G. Hawley. I’m sure the pastors you were talking with will appreciate this point.
Ben Caspit of AL Monitor reports that it appears that Israel may be preparing for a war brought on by preparations in Lebanon of a manufacturing plant for precision missiles:
Any analysis of recent remarks and moves by Israeli decision-makers and the heads of the country’s security apparatus raises the reasonable possibility that they are preparing the Israeli public for a “war of choice” in Lebanon.
This concept of a “war of choice” is especially sensitive in Israel. Ever since the founding of the state, its leaders have always tried to fight just those wars that were forced on it by its enemies or by circumstances. In contrast, the first Lebanon war (1982) is the best example of a “war of choice,” which evolved into a lengthy catastrophe. The second Lebanon war broke out in 2006, after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers.
The question is when the third Lebanon war will break out and whether it will be started by Israel. What we do know is the third Lebanon war will encompass the entire northern front, meaning Lebanon, Hezbollah and Syria, along with their Iranian backers.
The impression that Israel is preparing public opinion for a “preventive strike” that it would initiate along the northern border has been getting stronger over the last year. On Jan. 29, President Benjamin Netanyahu set off on a quick visit to Moscow, where he had another meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was the seventh meeting between the two men in two and a half years, an unusual meeting frequency for heads of states. In fact, the two men meet more or less every quarter. Putin and Netanyahu have been “going steady” ever since the Russians first appeared in the Syrian sector. So far, this close relationship has succeeded in preventing friction between the Israeli and Russian air forces, which are operating in the same region, sometimes simultaneously.
The United States is also inevitably part of this equation, and given the erratic and weak Administration, it’s hard to say what will come of that effort. But it does appear Israel may be heading into war.
And I found it interesting that Ben, normally a critic of the Netanyahu leadership, did not suggest this might be a useful distraction for the besieged Israeli Prime Minister. I wonder if that is indicative of the seriousness of the Precision Project Missile work.
As speculation builds over the Nunes memo, on Lawfare Professor Orin Kerr of USC casts doubt on one of the central propositions thought to make up the memo – requesting an affidavit under false pretenses:
And some of that depends on identifying just what the narrative is for why the funding source was critical to establishing probable cause. I think that point is really important and too easily ignored. In #ReleaseTheMemo circles, any possible link between the Steele dossier and the Clinton campaign is like an atomic bomb. It completely annihilates any possible credibility the Steele dossier may have, leaving the exposed words of the dossier behind like the haunting shadows of the Hiroshima blast.
But that’s not how actual law works. In the world of actual law, there needs to be a good reason for the judge to think, once informed of the claim of bias, that the informant was just totally making it up. As United States v. Strifler shows, that isn’t necessarily the case even if the government paid the informant to talk and guaranteed that they would get out of jail if they did. Nor is it necessarily the case just because the informant is in personal feud with the suspect. What matters is whether, based on the totality of the circumstances, the information came from a credible source.
That’s a problem for #ReleaseTheMemo, I think. To my knowledge, Steele was not some random person motivated by an ongoing personal feud against Trump or Carter Page. To my knowledge, he was not a drug dealer facing criminal charges who was promised freedom if he could come up with something for the government’s FISA application. Instead, Steele was a former MI6 intelligence officer and Russia expert. He was hired to do opposition research because of his professional reputation, expertise and contacts. And his work was apparently taken pretty seriously by United States intelligence agencies. Of course, that doesn’t mean that what’s in the dossier is true. Maybe the key allegations are totally wrong. But if you’re trying to argue that Steele’s funding sources ruin the credibility of his research, his professional training and background make that an uphill battle.
That’s just the legal world, though. This is playing out in the court of public opinion, and it’ll be necessary to communicate the legal opinion to the public in order for the public to understand that the memo is meaningless – if, in fact, the memo contains what it’s thought it contains.
Politico is reporting the Vice President Pence is taking a confident view of the upcoming mid-terms – he thinks the GOP can expand its majority in both chambers of Congress:
“Elections are about choices,” he said in the interview in which he discussed his midterm outlook in detail for the first time. “If we frame that choice, I think we’re going to re-elect majorities in the House and the Senate and I actually think we’re going to, when all the dust settles after 2018, I think we’re going to have more Republicans in Congress in Washington, D.C., than where we started.”
How so?
The vice president’s team has devised a unique ancillary strategy to support his cross-country campaigning: partnering with America First Policies — a Trump-backed public-policy non-profit group designed to boost the president’s agenda — to hold public events designed specifically to discuss legislative achievements like the tax bill.
The goal is to have the group set up events to help voters understand what the White House sees as the upside of the Republicans’ legislative agenda. A senior administration official said Pence’s message at the events will provide a “blueprint for how to be successful in midterms.”
Out in reality, the legislative record of the GOP is dismal. A tax reform package, hastily assembled, which in all probability will do nothing for the economy – and may break it. That’s the only major achievement, written in secret and hurried through by the terrified rats who feared their donors. The rest of it is trivia or just major failures.
BUT Voters are all about perception, no? So I suspect this will be another Big Lie campaign. Their won’t be any mention of the recent AND imminent contretemps regarding the budget ceiling. No mention of how the party is being ripped apart by the Tea Party’s Freedom Caucus. No mention of the mostly supine position of the Senate GOP regarding Trump’s poor choices for the Federal judiciary.
But they will be public events. Will the Democrats setup booths outside the venues and label them as Truth, or Here’s Their Record, or How They Do Things? They’ll need to counter-message, that’s for sure, because marketing is where the GOP really excels.
Synecdoche:
: a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (such as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (such as society for high society), the species for the genus (such as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (such as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (such as boards for stage) [Merriam-Webster]
Noted, with some wonderment, in “Once and for all: Obama didn’t crush US coal, and Trump can’t save it,” David Roberts, Vox:
In his campaign, Trump seized on that resonance with an odd kind of fervor, using miners as props in political rallies and promising, again and again, to put them back to work. He has managed to make the fate of coal miners a synecdoche for the fate of the white working class writ large.
