Category Archives: Uncategorized

Pernicious:

Having a harmful effect, especially in a gradual or subtle way.
‘the pernicious influences of the mass media’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in GOP Senator Jeff Flake’s speech to the Senate today, of which a transcript may be found here. The relevant passage:

But many untruths are not at all trivial — such as the seminal untruth of the president’s political career – the oft-repeated conspiracy about the birthplace of President Obama. Also not trivial are the equally pernicious fantasies about rigged elections and massive voter fraud, which are as destructive as they are inaccurate — to the effort to undermine confidence in the federal courts, federal law enforcement, the intelligence community and the free press, to perhaps the most vexing untruth of all — the supposed “hoax” at the heart of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Boko Haram is a jihadist organization located in Nigeria, Chad, and nearby nations. One of the most violent terrorist organizations, it’s suppression has proven difficult. On Lawfare, Professor Alex Thurston has 5 myths concerning Boko Haram that he’d like to dispel, the most discouraging of which is this one:

Myth #5: Americans Know How to Defeat Boko Haram

Americans, especially the U.S. government, have been full of suggestions for how Nigeria can and should defeat Boko Haram: Increase socio-economic development programming in northeastern Nigeria. End human rights abuses by security forces. Conduct counterinsurgency, rather than counterterrorism. Involve neighboring militaries in the conflict. Deradicalize prisoners. Talk to Boko Haram. Don’t talk to Boko Haram. …

If Nigerian politicians and military officers, absorbing lectures from their American counterparts about counterinsurgency, socioeconomic development, and human rights, quietly raise an eyebrow, they could be forgiven their skepticism. Sixteen years into the war in Afghanistan, can the United States claim undisputed expertise in counterinsurgency? With the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights recently expressing shock at the conditions he saw in rural Alabama, can America claim perfection at socioeconomic development? With recurring allegations about U.S. military abuses of human rights from Somalia to Yemen to Afghanistan, can America claim that its hands are always clean? Nigerians are not stupid or ill-informed: They watch the news, too.

As I wrote above, the Nigerian state has failed, so far, to defeat Boko Haram—but there are no guarantees that American experts, confidently offering prescriptions from afar (or near, from an increasing variety of coordination cells, special operations deployments, and NGOs), would do any better, even if their prescriptions were followed to the letter. Obviously it’s good for Americans, Europeans, Nigerians, and others to keep thinking about potential solutions. But the solutions are just that: potential. Nigeria is not an equation to be solved like some math problem in a workbook, where the answer is evident if you know how to find it—rather, Nigeria is one of the most complicated countries in the world. Any resolution to the Boko Haram conflict will require a good deal of experimentation, trial and error, and even luck. It may also take quite a long time.

I’ve been hearing about Boko Haram for years, between violent raids and the mass kidnapping of young women and girls. Their defeat is not likely to come from battlefield advice from Americans, but from within their own culture – understanding what and why those of Boko Haram are motivated to engage in these actions.

And to look into how resource scarcity may be playing into this situation.

Or they just are fairly dumb. Philip Bump of WaPo helpfully points out the errors of Fox & Friends of Fox News when evaluating some poll data from Survey Monkey:

Over the course of 2017, SurveyMonkey conducted 605,172 interviews of Americans. A quirk of statistical analysis is that the precision of poll results from a survey of 605,000 people vs. only 1,000 people is small; the former has essentially no margin of error, but the latter has a margin of error of only three points. This is why most pollsters don’t bother polling hundreds of thousands of people. Why spend the money when your estimate is good with far fewer people?

Those 605,172 interviews, though, were conducted over the course of the year …

On Tuesday morning’s “Fox and Friends,” the hosts were discussing a survey showing that most 2017 coverage of Trump’s presidency was negative. Kilmeade interjected with some good news.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “through all this negative coverage, they did a survey of 600,000 people about how black America views this president. His numbers have actually doubled in approval. It’s still low, it’s around 25 percent, but it’s doubled since the election.”

Okay. So. First of all, they didn’t do a survey of 600,000 black Americans. Second of all, Kilmeade clearly thinks that saying “600,000” adds heft to the results, which, as we noted above, it doesn’t. Third, Trump’s approval numbers haven’t doubled, for the reasons above — and then some.

Approval numbers necessarily start only when a president takes office; after all, how are you going to evaluate the job performance of someone who doesn’t yet hold a job? Gallup has asked Americans their views of Trump’s job as president since his first week in office, allowing us to compare approval ratings among black Americans from the earliest point to the most recently available ratings (through the end of 2017).

Trump’s approval among black Americans fell nine points from January to December. Rather than doubling, his approval rating among those Americans was actually more than cut in half, dropping from 15 percent to 6 percent.

Philip continues onward, disassembling Kilmeade as well as Neil Munro of Breitbart. And, you know, this isn’t opinion, or he says she says. This is statistics, cold hard math. Anyone can do it. But it appears Fox News and Breitbart think their readers are too lazy or ignorant to actually check up on the reasoning skills of these news outlets.

Which is right in line with their history.

Saccades:

When you move your head and eyes to scan a scene, your eyes are incapable of moving smoothly across it and seeing everything. Instead, you see in the image in a series of very quick jumps (called saccades) with very short pauses (called fixations) and it is only during the pauses that an image is processed.

Your brain fills in the gaps with a combination of peripheral vision and an assumption that what is in the gaps must be the same as what you see during the pauses. [“What an RAF pilot can teach us about being safe on the road,” LondonCyclist]

[h/t Chris Johnson]

Did you hear about the study that supposedly shows that almost all terrorists are foreign born? It appears that this might be a controversial conclusion. Simon Maloy noted a small-print caveat, but since he put his finding on Twitter, which is virtually unreadable, I’ll quote Steve Benen on Maddowblog instead:

Simon Maloy, for example, took note of the Trump administration’s methodology. From the second full page of the newly released report: “This information includes both individuals who committed offenses while located in the United States and those who committed offenses while located abroad, including defendants who were transported to the United States for prosecution. It does not include individuals convicted of offenses relating to domestic terrorism, nor does it include information related to terrorism-related convictions in state courts.”

Oh. So the point of the report appears to be bolster Trump World’s argument that those concerned about terrorism on American soil should necessarily be concerned with immigrants and foreigners. After all, as the document put it, approximately 73 percent of those convicted of international terrorism-related charges in U.S. federal courts “were foreign-born.”

But that includes convicted terrorists who weren’t in the United States until we brought them here for trial and it excludes instances of domestic terrorism – which, as we know, is often at least as dangerous to the American public as international terrorism.

From the Department of Justice:

“This report reveals an indisputable sobering reality—our immigration system has undermined our national security and public safety,” said Attorney General Sessions.

It’s hard to decide if Sessions is trying to bolster the xenophobic position which resonates with President Trump’s base, or if he’s attempting to gloss over any and all Christian terrorist actions on American soil – of which there’ve been a few, mostly resulting in the assassination of doctors who perform abortions.

But the motivation, as base as it is, and as poorly as it reflects on AG Sessions’ intellectual and moral qualities, is irrelevant to a consequence not mentioned by Benen or Maloy, and that’s this: If this report is not withdrawn and/or repudiated, in particular by the AG himself, then it’ll become part of the intellectual record of the United States, meaning that its apparent flaws will be ignored, and its conclusions to be congruent with the reality.

And then? Policies will be implemented on it. And the taint of the study will transfer to those policies, as is ever the case. Soon we’ll have a tanks all over the southern and northern borders and hordes of police checking every incoming plane and ship, while scant dollars will be dedicated to the problems of domestic terrorism. And then we’ll wonder why we don’t seem to be as safe as we should be, and no one will think to look at the critical flaws of the report that started it all.

Unless we protest this now.

If you can’t afford a story, you can always borrow some cleavage.

Some people work to the tune of checklists: as each task of a project is completed, a big ol’ checkmark is applied to the list, and when all the boxes are checked, hey, you’re done.

So let’s make a checklist!

Bad title? Check.

Bad audio? Tinny. Check.

Toothmarks on the scenery? Check.

Exploitation? Check.

Bad effects? They’re doing that out-of-focus thing. Check!

Bad plot? Wandering from point to point, yep. Oh, and plot holes. Check check check!

Dubious dialog? Check and a half.

Bizarre death scenes? MEEEEE-OW!

And such is the reality of The Corpse Grinders (1972). Yep, they’re putting corpses through a meat grinder. Nothing interesting in that title. OK, maybe why – it’s because a cat food company is about to go under, and, in search of cheaper raw materials, the pair running the joint have resorted to using a new raw material.

Speaking of pairs, the characters do tend to come in pairs. Let’s meet a few.

There’s the grave-robbers, a husband and wife team. He’s big and blustery, she clings to a doll, even while helping carry the corpses. He wants what’s coming to him, I’m not sure what she’s doing in this relationship. I’m not even sure what she was saying. Helluva accent.

There’s the business owners. They’ve already offed their primary investor – and made him part of their product line, so to speak. The younger, dominant one has to keep the older one in check, as he’s a little interested in the help but nervous as a Yorkie.

Oh, the help? One’s a little slow, the other’s a deaf mute on crutches. They’re intriguing but ultimately only one ends up as product.

All the victims have a cat. MEEOW. Nibbling at the victims’ carotids, mostly.

Then there’s the pair of geese. Food for the grave-robbers? Security geese? (There really is such a thing as a security-llama.) Their role is obscure, perhaps they’re just local color.

And the heroes? This pair is a Doctor and Nurse team who like to smooch. Their cat makes a quick cameo, mainly to sink claws into his chest. They think nothing of it until a corpse is brought in, all messed up in the chest and throat. Reports of other attacks start popping up. And what brand of cat food do they use?

There are a couple of guys who are not in a pair, a hit-man who is helping the cat food company transition to a new mix of products, and a mystery fellow who seems to be taking a lot of notes while people walk by him.

The plot holes? Maybe it was the result of the TV cutting process, but at one point the husband grave-robber is garroted by the hit-man, yet five minutes later he’s being shot. Sadly, the security geese seemed confused and uncertain of the action to take after the wife grave robber went galloping by, hotly pursued by, well, that would be giving away the plot.

And then the dialogue, oh my. It ranged from dully predictable to laughable. Maybe the latter was on purpose. For example, the Doctor calls the Food Adulteration Agency for information on some cat food they submitted for analysis, and the answer? “Nothing adulterous here.” And then when the Doctor and Nurse encounter the deaf-mute and try to speak to her, she taps her ear, and the Doctor says “Oh, she’s a mute, she can’t understand a thing we say.”

Well.

Eventually, Nurse ends up on the conveyor belt leading to the grinding machinery, half-naked, and is heroically rescued by the guy with the notebook (ol’ Doc is nursing his wounds). There, wrecked the ending for you.

Sadly, there are not enough laughs to justify watching this clunker.

Pamela Wible has written an important and fascinating article for WaPo on the phenomenon of doctor suicide. Not doctor-assisted suicide, but doctors committing suicide:

The response was huge: So many distressed doctors (and medical students) wrote and phoned me. Soon I was running a de facto international suicide hotline from my home. To date, I’ve spoken to thousands of suicidal doctors; published a book of their suicide letters; attended more funerals; interviewed hundreds of surviving physicians, families and friends. I’ve spent nearly every waking moment over the past five years on a personal quest for the truth of “why.” Guilt, bullying, exhaustion are big factors. Here are some of the things I’ve discovered while compiling my list and talking to so many people: …

Lots of doctors kill themselves in hospitals. They jump from hospital windows or rooftops. They shoot or stab themselves in hospital parking lots. They’re found hanging in hospital chapels. Physicians often choose to die in a place where they’ve been emotionally invested and wounded.

If our society is going to continue to depend on medicine, then we need to take a closer look at how we conduct the medical business because we currently have a shortfall in many specialties. Do we train doctors properly? What stops people from becoming doctors? I know those in charge of training claim the harsh training produces doctors to be depended on – but what about the wastage of those who wash out? Is this really the best way?

Having read the article, at least some of it suggests that the normal human emotional operating procedures – a phrase I use with specificity – may be the cause of many of these suicides. With that in mind, I wonder how  hard it would be to use people without those standard emotional responses as doctors.

Not being a psychologist, I don’t know if sociopath would be the right word for what I am thinking. But not caring that deeply for your patients might be a survival lifeline for doctors.

Or maybe Artificial Intelligence is the way to go here.

I was reading about the collapse of British firm Carillion on CNN/Money, a firm that started out in construction, but now …

The company also builds infrastructure for high speed rail and power distribution projects, and provides government services such as road maintenance and hospital management.

Merely interested transformed to fascinated by this bit:

“It has been more than surprising, possibly even negligent, that the U.K. government continued to dish out contracts to Carillion even though their future has looked uncertain for some time,” said Fiona Cincotta, a senior market analyst at City Index. “[This] is a costly mistake that the U.K. government can ill afford.”

As if the government turning a profit is top of her mind, perhaps. But here’s the thing: a wise government should not be limited to a single source of supply. As an example, in the past the United States War Department (later DoD) carefully spread its spending between many suppliers when it possibly could, for a couple of reasons, including the importance of not having a single source go under, and because competition is a good thing: It improves services and reduces costs, assuming it’s well-managed (not an easy thing in itself sometimes).

So when a government awards a contract to a struggling firm that has done good work in the past, they are extending a lifeline to a firm that, if it recovers, will provide the government with a necessary buffer against the problems that come with single sources. Companies that supply government needs are often specialized, such as battleship makers, (military and science/technology suppliers, oh my, the whole institutional knowledge thing can be far more important than in private sector land.), so finding new sources is a problematic venture.

Compare that to a company signing a contract with another company to be supplied with something. If the supplier goes under, then the first company may have a claim on the remnants of the second – but possibly only after a costly, time-consuming court battle. So it makes sense for them to evaluate suppliers’ financial conditions, along with the usual, and cross a supplier off if its financial condtion, if knowable, renders it questionable. They may still want the comforts of competition among suppliers, but the resources of most companies do not compare to that of a major Western government.

So what took my attention was what may, and I emphasize may because the analyst’s quote is extremely limited, be a misapplication of sector wisdom. It’s always worth asking that question when someone, an analyst, comments on something that may be quite out of their expertise.

Of course, one day after not ruing using Twitter comes a story, told on Twitter, that tells how President Obama said goodbye to an assistant staff secretary leaving for a new job. Here’s the link to the tweets. I didn’t quite tear up, but I do like it. And it exemplifies how President Obama treats people. I’ll skip the compare and contrast.

Source: NY Daily News

It’s a reminder that there are stories and there are mediums for the stories. Some mediums are better for certain stories than for others. This was a quick, sentimental hit that happens to reveal how President Obama cares for people, from a quick goodbye and good luck to someone moving on. The medium needn’t be words, as the pic on the left demonstrates. We know he’s paying homage to another service member making the long, last trip to their hometown.

I still won’t use Twitter. It’s a ridiculous format, too many badly told stories, it’ll induce ADD. But the occasional dip on the advice of someone braver than I? Fine. In this case, WaPo provided some backstory, and here’s the link to that. But the Tweets are really enough.

Returning to progress on the hypothesis that increased prevalence of CO₂ in the atmosphere leads to the reduction of useful nutrients in food, Harvest Public Media (via NPR)  has a report on the possible impact it’s having on one of our favorite American foods – beef:

“Somewhere on the order of 50,000 cow pies got shipped to Texas for this study,” says [researcher Joe] Craine, who co-owns Boulder, Colorado-based Jonah Ventures.

What he’s found is a trend in the nutritional quality of grasses that grass-fed cattle (and young cattle destined for grain-heavy feedlots) are eating. Since the mid-90s, levels of crude protein in the plants, which cattle need to grow, have dropped by nearly 20 percent.

“If we were still back at the forage quality that we would’ve had 25 years ago, no less 100 years ago, our animals would be gaining a lot more weight,” Craine says.

Craine thinks part of the problem may be related to moving cattle to feedlots. When cattle are taken from the prairie, their manure, which delivers nutrients into the soil, is removed.

But he has a sneaking suspicion that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are contributing as well. Increased CO2 levels have been linked to fewer nutrients in plants like rice, wheat and potatoes.

And this may break public support for spewers of CO₂:

“Pretty soon you’re at the point where the protein concentrations are too low for too long a period for the animals to gain any weight,” Craine says.

Seeing as this is focused on grass-fed beef, which is only a small part of the total beef market, perhaps I hyperbolize when it comes to the impact on public attitudes towards CO₂ production. Still, it’s another chip from the boulder of public opinion – and beef is important to the American psyche.

And that’s not nearly as important as the question of the overall impact of increased CO₂ on our food system. If it’s causing us to pack on the pounds, increase diabetes, stress our overloaded health system – well, I suppose the deniers can encompass those topics as well. But the basic fact that CO₂ levels are rising is undeniable – it’s just a matter of measurement – and then the argument is whether the plants are actually changing their nutritional content due to the change in gas composition of our atmosphere.

I wonder which institution is out front with a set of greenhouses, each with an unique gas composition in which CO₂ is varied, and getting ready to measure the nutritional value of each crop grown? Probably no one, but I predict that as more of these results come in, someone’s going to sit down and do it. And then we’ll see more studies on how just such changes to the food supply affect our health.

And then the frantic denials and stony-faced pursuit of profits will be just like the nightmarish tobacco industry dishonorable debacle.

BTW, just how IS that CO₂ measurement from Mauna Loa doing? Hmmmmm. Looks like it’s still tooling right along – upwards trend.

We’ve talked about team politics before, wherein loyalty to Party suppresses your own good sense; it’s part of the larger phenomenon of tribalism. This has at least a couple of results, such as the ascension of the incompetents up the ladder to high office, and the attempted removal of those who might actually try to exercise their good sense in service to party and/or nation. The latter is happening now in Alabama, as Politico is reporting:

Alabama GOP Sen. Richard Shelby is confronting a fierce backlash from conservatives over his refusal to support Roy Moore in last month’s special election — with Moore backers pushing a censure resolution and robocall campaign targeting the powerful lawmaker.

Moore’s supporters are furious with Shelby over his remark days before the Dec. 12 election that he “couldn’t vote for Roy Moore,” a controversial former state judge who was facing allegations of child molestation. Instead, Shelby said he would write in the name of another unnamed Republican.

Moore’s backers say the comments from the 83-year-old dean of Alabama’s congressional delegation effectively delivered the election to Democrat Doug Jones, and now they’re fighting back.

This week, three Moore supporters submitted a resolution to the Alabama Republican Party executive committee calling for Shelby to be censured. It argues that Shelby “publicly encouraged Republicans and all voters to write in a candidate instead of voting for the Republican Candidate Judge Roy Moore,” and that his “public speech was then used by the Democrat Candidate in robocalls to sway voters to not vote for Judge Roy Moore.”

The move came after a pro-Moore outside group, Courageous Conservatives PAC, ran robocalls last month describing Shelby as a turncoat and calling on him to resign.

“Sen. Richard Shelby stabbed President Trump and conservatives in the back,” said one of the calls, which urged listeners to call his office and complain. “Tell Shelby you’ll never forget his disloyalty to President Trump and the Republican Party for his treasonous actions. Tell Shelby he’s betrayed his trust to Alabamians and he should resign his office. Call now.”

While one might immediately suspect the GOP tribal motives of the attackers, those last two paragraphs really puts their nasty little motives into focus, doesn’t it? A senior GOP, no, THE senior Alabama GOP member, a man who should, and did, express a leadership opinion in unequivocal terms, and rather than respect his opinion and, perhaps, offer a rebuttal, the Moore supporters choose the tribal option – off with his head!

Because they – and their deeply flawed candidate, who’d wreck the United States if he could have his druthers – think they’re smarter than a man whose spent years in politics.

I think we’re going to be seeing shit like this for years to come from the GOP, as it perceives its problems being insufficient loyalty, rather than inferior candidates. Quite literally, in point of fact, the Party really has little chance to generate superior candidates, because that requires admitting that the candidates who’ve the charisma, or the boot-licking abilities, to climb the ladder are, in fact, inferior – and when it’s always team politics, that’s a hard thing to do. No one will vote against someone on “your” team.

And it may be one of those self-reinforcing trends, because as more and more members decide they can’t stomach a candidate, say so publicly, and get run out of the Party, it will face more and more failures – and will blame it on the failure to be loyal to the Party, and thus respond with more and more loyalty requirements, which will result in more inferior candidates, blah blah blah.

But this may take a while – a few years, at least. And they’ll never really figure it out, because for a while team politics was quite successful, even if the resultant GOP-controlled Congresses have been unimpressive – or even disgraceful. But as candidates get worse and worse, the process will go, and in the person of Moore and Trump is already beginning to go, from positive to negative.

Ever been curious about the procedure for choosing the occupant of seat of the Supreme Leader of Iran? AL Monitor has a leaked video for which they’ve provided some description and translation:

A newly released video has shown the process in which a body of 74 clerics elected then-President Ali Khamenei to the highest position in the decade-old Islamic Republic, a position he has held for nearly three decades. While parts of the video from the June 4, 1989, Assembly of Experts meeting have been seen before by Iranian viewers, the entire, complete version not only shows the intricacies of the election process but offers new information that was not public knowledge.

The video begins with a discussion about whether or not the assembly should elect a single individual to replace Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic who had died the day before at age 86, or whether the assembly should elect a governing council of three to five individuals. Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who chaired the meeting, calls for a vote on whether there will be an individual election or council.

This is where one of the lesser-known facts comes out of this meeting. The election, according to Rafsanjani, was to be a temporary one until the necessary constitutional changes could be made. Someone from the floor asks that the temporary nature of the election not be made known to the public and Rafsanjani agrees. By standing, 45 members of the assembly vote in favor of holding an election for an individual.

And were those Constitutional changes ever made? Khamenei remains the soul occupant of the top level of the Iranian political hierarchy.

Ordure:

1. : excrement
2. : something that is morally degrading [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in this 9 Chickweed Lane comic strip.

I’ve never had an account on Twitter, and only read a few tweets over the years, so I missed out on this little bit of political maneuvering:

And this week, rumors spread of the impending publication of an essay by Katie Roiphe in Harper’s magazine that might take a similarly skeptical tack. Some believed that Roiphe might even hold the instigator of the legendary Shitty Media Men list accountable, and that this person might thereby be subjected to online abuse. And so a Twitter campaign was launched, in a backlash-backlash, to preemptively stop the publication of an essay no one had actually read. One Twitter activist, Nicole Cliffe, went further: “If you have a piece in the hopper over at @Harpers, ask your editor if the Roiphe piece is happening. If it is, I will pay you cash for what you’d lose by yanking it.” This strikes me as a new development for the social-justice left: They now believe in suppressing free speech — even before they know its content! It also strikes me as ominous for journalism as a whole. When journalists themselves wage campaigns to suppress the writing of other journalists, and intend to destroy a magazine for not toeing their ideological line, you can see how free speech truly is on the line. Why not simplify this and publish a blacklist of writers whose work, based on previous ideological transgressions, cannot and should not be published?

Pretty quickly, others on Left Twitter offered money for other authors to pull their pieces from the issue — and a few writers said they had agreed to do so. Cliffe was admirably blunt about her intent: “If I have my druthers, the March issue of Harper’s will consist of a now-toothless 200-word piece on the list that doesn’t name anyone and a long meditation from the editor on raw water.” Then this Twitter threat: “If Katie Roiphe actually publishes that article she can consider her career over.” Meanwhile the very people who were up in arms about possible online harassment of the list organizers, went online to call Roiphe “pro-rape,” “human scum,” “a ghoul,” a “bitch,” “the definition of basura,” a “bag of garbage,” and “a misogynistic bottom-feeder.” That’s another thing with ideological fanatics: Irony tends to elude them.

And then the final twist Wednesday night: One Moira Donegan outed herself as the creator of the list, and wrote a long essay defending herself.

The essay is, to my mind, eloquent, beautifully written, even moving at times, but baffling. I read it waiting for the moment when she took responsibility for what she did, or apologized to the innocent people she concedes may have been slandered. But it never came. It’s worth recalling here exactly what she and others did. They created an online forum in which anonymous people could make accusations about men whose careers and reputations would potentially be destroyed as a consequence. There was absolutely no attempt to separate out what was true or untrue, what was substantiated and what was not. “Please never name an accuser” she advised upfront in the document. And then: “[P]lease don’t remove highlights or names.” No second thoughts allowed. The doc openly concedes its grave claims should be “taken with a grain of salt.” In her essay, Donegan actually cites this as exonerating evidence, as if reckless disregard for the truth were a positive virtue for a journalist, and not actually a definition of libel.

Just trying to write about it is like hugging a porcupine at this point, really, because if you write something that offends someone else, pop!, they plunk you on a list that requires no proof, just simple allegations, and your career is over – if only temporarily. Why temporarily? Right now we’re caught up in righteous ideological zeal, fed on justified outrage, but short on references to open society norms. But as that wave of zeal builds greater and greater, those who are holding it up will start to get gobbled up themselves, much like Leon Trotsky taking an ax in the head on the orders of a fellow Communist. Imagine yourself filled with excitement over this lovely list – until your husband, or your father, or your brother, or even a mother, sister, lover appears on the list.

A list to be taken with a grain of salt.

And you think it’s unjustified. Sure, brother John flirted, but why is he on the list?

So someday – hopefully soon – this list will fall into disrepute. Donegan will probably find a tough professional life ahead of her, but hopefully the rest will be more or less forgiven. Because that’s one of the things we do.

Andrew goes on to call it all McCarthyism, which is no doubt accurate, but makes me sad for all the folks with the surname McCarthy; we need a word, shorn of personal epithet, that conveys the horror of the error of trampling the norms and rules of an open society that have been developed through such toil, something perhaps a little short of the religious term blasphemy.

And it should denote someone who has temporarily forgotten the injustice that can spring from trampling those norms, even if you do so in the name of remedying an injustice. Because it’s not the hallmark of a stable system. No reference to truth, to reality? Sounds like superstition to me. Rancid, deadly superstition.

Psammophorous:

SOME plants have an odd defensive tactic against insects. It seems they use sand grains as abrasive armour that damages the insects’ teeth.

These “psammophorous” plants have sticky surfaces to which sand adheres. This sand was suspected to be involved in protecting against herbivorous insects, but this was only tested in 2016. Eric LoPresti of the University of California, Davis, showed that plants with sand coats are eaten less. LoPresti and his colleagues have now examined why. [“Plants use sand armour to break teeth of attacking caterpillars,” NewScientist (6 January 2018)]

I didn’t actually find psammophorous defined anywhere.

I don’t want to do a sequel, either.

Disney is a major motion picture studio, which means they bring major talent, skills, and technology to every movie they make. This makes their release of the movie John Carter (2012) all the more puzzling. We can see the skills and technology in every scene, whether it’s a natural scene on Earth, or a 90% CGI scene on Mars, because they look authentic, they look consistent, and quite often they look magnificent.

But, as so often is true, the problem appears to be the story. Now, it’s true that the original Martian series does not contain fascinating plots. The series survived on exotic locales and species, but it was not hard to spot the hero of the story, and we always knew the hero would not only survive, but be practically unscathed.

But John Carter is only very loosely based on A Princess Of Mars, the first novel of the series, as it claims in the credits. It’s true that Carter is a Confederate calvaryman, looking for gold in the antebellum Southwest, and stumbles across a way to jump between planets, if more violently than in the novel. Once across, he’s captured by the Tharks, four-armed creatures with rifles and swords. But then the tale swerves, featuring the ambulatory, predatory city Zodanga that has wiped out nearly all the opposition on Mars, with the exception of city of Helium. Zodanga’s leader is aided by therns, mysterious humanoids of magical technology.

And this is part of the problem: they’re not well enough defined that we can understand their limits. They have transporter technology, personal appearance shields, frightening weapons, and a mythology on Mars that makes them into the unbeatable. In order to appreciate Carter’s strategies, we need to know what they can and cannot do. And why are the therns fairly stupid? The therns are on Earth as well as Mars – why didn’t they realize that an Earthman would physically stronger than a Martian? Yet we see Carter breaking iron chains with his bare hands – going to Mars makes you stronger? Really??

The story moves along at a sprightly clip, which has the unfortunate effect of skipping over important character development. For example, there’s this creature I’ll call a super-dog that is fanatically attached to Carter. Why? Well, it was kicked a couple of times at a party, and Carter stops it by starting a fight. But the fight actually makes the audience overlook that entire motivation, and thus the super-dog’s loyalty, which is an important plot mechanism, seems unexplained. By comparison, in the novel the dog is badly hurt protecting some Tharks from the local wildlife, but the Tharks are about to savagely kill it when Carter intervenes and saves its life, forcing the Tharks to heal it. (It’s also too much of a super-dog, even though it may be my favorite character in the movie.) Doesn’t that seem a bit stronger of a motivation, even for a dog?

And why is it wrong for a Thark to know which other Thark is your biological parent, or a child of your’s?

It’s a pity. The CGI is beautiful, the airships of the Martians alien yet attractive, there are several strong female characters, the dialog is not awful, and occasionally becomes clever. But some characters are wasted, such as the leader of Helium, who comes across strongly in his one big scene, not to mention his Admiral, Kantos Kan, who engineers the rescue of Carter from the Zodangans by pretending to be kidnapped, a maneuver pulled off with true panache. I must admit I wished the movie was about Kan rather than Carter.

And I don’t usually mention casting in my reviews, but the lead is played by Taylor Kitsch, and I must admit I didn’t like him. Part of it is the awful hair, part of it is that he always seems confused and a little behind everyone else – which is understandable in an alien environment, but I increasingly found it frustrating.

In the end, despite a big investment the movie was a flop. It can be fun to watch, but don’t come out of it with that feeling that your life has been changed. There are just too many questions and plot holes.

Most of us remember this part of a poem from our school days:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!^[1]

Commonly associated with the Statue of Liberty, she who welcomed many a desperate family from abroad over the years, it’s quite a contrast to the scrapingly (right along my nerves) worldly view of Pastor Robert Jeffress of megachurch First Baptist Dallas, justifying the views of President Donald “shithole” Trump, as reported by WaPo:

Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, a prominent Southern Baptist church, said that while he would not have used the same language Trump did, he agrees with the president’s perspective.

“What a lot of people miss is, America is not a church where everyone should be welcomed regardless of race and background,” Jeffress said. “I’m glad Trump understands the difference between a church and country. I support his views 100 percent, even though as a pastor I can’t use that language.”

The United States, Jeffress said, has every right to restrict immigration according to whatever criteria it establishes, including race or other qualifications. “The country has the right to establish what would benefit our nation the most,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything racist about it at all.”

America is not obligated to accept people based on need, such as the case with refugees, he said. “I wouldn’t let the language obscure the point he’s making: Why would we allow people who will not benefit our country?” Jeffress said. “We have the right to screen [refugees] based on the economic benefit they might bring, and we can establish the criteria we want to use.”

For a country that was founded on a notion of freedom, fought a ruinous Civil War on that notion of freedom, received and celebrated the Statue of Liberty on that notion of freedom, and invited in refugees on that notion of liberty – all implemented in various flawed manners, of course – it seems the height of hypocrisy to deny that notion of freedom in immigration now. And, worse, from a pastor of religious tradition which, at least in its most basic traditions^[2], has been the champion of those least powerful in the world, the leper, the poor, the downtrodden, the refugee, to hear his tongue wrap around that most antithetical to his tradition is shocking and appalling.

I guess his addiction to power has led him down different paths.

For the interested, Steve Benen notes how the White House evangelical advisory council has, for the most part, clung to their positions of influence. That it exists in the first place seems inappropriate to me; that they cling despite the shitstorm through which they’re flying is appalling and speaks to their addiction to prestige and influence.

¹Today I learned something new: the poem we hear about in school is part of a larger poem by Emma Lazarus. From How Tall Is The Statue Of Liberty:

New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

²In the interests of full disclosure, I am an agnostic, and have been my entire life. Nevertheless, it doesn’t require an initiate to discern the basic principles of the sect.

Which doesn’t sound all that great, but here’s an analogous approach involving a cancer afflicting the Tasmanian Devil, who have been miserably decimated (or, my Arts Editor would point out, far worse than decimated, since decimated merely means losing a tenth) by this cancer. In the following, MHC refers to a set of proteins on a cell’s surface which identifies it as “being from here,” but neurological cells often hide these, at least in the Devils, and these fatal cancers are thought to be from the neurological system. From NewScientist (6 January 2018, paywall):

[Gregory Woods at the University of Tasmania] was recently tinkering with the vaccine when he discovered something quite remarkable. He grew tumour cells in a liquid spiked with cytokines, which are molecules that turn on a cell’s MHC labels. Then he injected the cells into afflicted devils. Over time, their tumours began to shrink and, in some cases, disappeared completely. “It’s a bit odd, treating cancer with cancer,” says Woods. Still, he can’t argue with the striking results.

It’s fascinating. It suggests that the injected cells are telling the cancerous cells to turn on their MHCs, and then the immune system exterminates them. There may not be much application of this particular bit of knowledge, but it’s still fascinating.

Unless a new MHC could be forcibly attached to cancer cells.

Perhaps NewScientist’s Feedback column (6 January 2018) has foreseen the capstone of the energy problem of Bitcoin:

If this trend continues, it won’t be long before someone tries to build a Dyson sphere, enveloping the entire sun, to power the trade in cryptocurrencies. Which perhaps explains why we haven’t heard from any Kardashev type 2 civilisations yet – they are all busy mining bitcoin.

The dedication of the entire civilization to the discovery – or validation – of a currency. I’m sort of boggling at this right now.

Farrago:

A confused mixture.
‘a farrago of fact and myth about Abraham Lincoln’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in a cartoon for NewScientist (23 December 2017), which does not appear to be available online.

Steve Benen’s mention of a report that President Trump may have slept with a porn star leaves me flat:

… the Wall Street Journal  reports this afternoon on a curious alleged payment during the 2016 campaign season.

A lawyer for President Donald Trump arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult-film star a month before the 2016 election as part of an agreement that precluded her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

Michael Cohen, who spent nearly a decade as a top attorney at the Trump Organization, arranged payment to the woman, Stephanie Clifford, in October 2016 after her lawyer negotiated the nondisclosure agreement with Mr. Cohen, these people said.

Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, has privately alleged the encounter with Mr. Trump took place after they met at a July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, these people said. Mr. Trump married Melania Trump in 2005.

The reporting has been met with several specific kinds of denials.

And … so what? We know his base doesn’t care if he sleeps around. They’re so deeply in his thrall that they’ll excuse most anything he does that isn’t obvious betrayal of the United States. Sexual hijinks? That may even be seen as a positive, because, for them, leadership means breaking the rules.

So don’t expect anything out of this story.

In a different fantasy, Trump apologist Marc Thiessen has published a column in WaPo that describes Trump’s public meeting concerning immigration as a complete success that has destroyed Trump’s critics and let’s him get on his way to success. No, I’m not kidding:

This week, two incredible events unfolded before our eyes: American television viewers were invited into the White House Cabinet Room, where for nearly an hour they watched as President Trump effectively led a bipartisan meeting in which he and congressional Democrats made real progress on immigration reform.

And it snowed in the Sahara Desert.

The reason for the Saharan snow was a rare blast of arctic air sweeping across Algeria. The reason for the rare public display of presidential leadership was the release of a new book by New York media gossip columnist Michael Wolff that portrays Trump as mentally unfit to be president. Wolff describes Trump as being like a child who “could not really converse . . . not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.” In just 55 minutes, Trump completely discredited Wolff’s thesis.

This would be the same meeting where other observers noted that Trump managed to get so far afield that his GOP minions had to drag him back to their position. I saw a part of that meeting, and Trump sounded excited, confused, passive-aggressive, and made promises that I wouldn’t trust in the least.

I don’t know what Thiessen thinks he saw, but then I recall when Sarah Palin burst on the national scene and how most of the conservative punditry committed a coordinated swoon at her feet. They should have been ashamed. She came across as a lunatic. After the election, she abruptly quit her job as Governor of Alaska, so discrediting herself – and the swooners.

And I’m quite sure she still has supporters, completely confused as to how to evaluate politicians in a sane manner. Just like Marc.

Any ideas what this might be?

Incredible, isn’t it? It’s recent picture from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter. Here’s another shot:

Both are color-enhanced, of course.

In The New York Times, David Brooks thinks the Trump Administration is improving:

Third, the White House is getting more professional. Imagine if Trump didn’t tweet. The craziness of the past weeks would be out of the way, and we’d see a White House that is briskly pursuing its goals: the shift in our Pakistan policy, the shift in our offshore drilling policy, the fruition of our ISIS policy, the nomination for judgeships and the formation of policies on infrastructure, DACA, North Korea and trade.

It’s almost as if there are two White Houses. There’s the Potemkin White House, which we tend to focus on: Trump berserk in front of the TV, the lawyers working the Russian investigation and the press operation. Then there is the Invisible White House that you never hear about, which is getting more effective at managing around the distracted boss.

To my eye, that first sentence is completely disconnected from the rest of those two paragraphs. Imagine if Trump didn’t tweet. Why? Trump’s Tweets are now an officially sanctioned line of communication, and so a suggestion that we just ignore them is to only look at the part of the Administration that does what you desire, without acknowledging everything else. This is not high journalism, it’s low-brow selective vision.

And Joe Scarborough in WaPo is not in the least happy with Brooks’ comments:

Brooks’s column was met with effusive praise across the Never Trump community, even as the moderate Republican suggested a sort of detente in return for the favorable conservative policies being produced by the Trump White House. The columnist approvingly cited reports that behind the scenes Trump is a well-informed and affable leader who knows how to run a good meeting. Brooks even makes the breathtaking claim that “the White House is getting more professional.”

I find myself at a rare loss for words. Let’s simply review Trump’s actions over the three days since Brooks’s column was published.

The president once again advocated making it easier for politicians like him to sue columnists such as Brooks. Such a move would do immeasurable harm to our First Amendment free-speech guarantees.

Trump also pressured Republicans to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation and politicize the rule of law. This autocratic partisan plea to subvert Robert S. Mueller III’s work comes after the former FBI director has already secured convictions of Trump’s national security adviser and a top foreign policy expert, along with indictments of his former campaign manager and another key campaign operative.

If you only look at the good trees, you’re not going to see the diseased trees that signal ongoing disaster. But let me use language that any good conservative should recognize:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. [Benjamin Franklin]

Or, for those of Brooks’ ilk, the aphorism might go:

Those who would give up a little honor for a few goals will have, nor deserve, either.

Of all the subjects that interest me, and thus I write about, water is undoubtedly the most basic. Today I note a report on MSN.com concerning Cape Town, South Africa:

t’s the height of summer in Cape Town, and the southwesternmost region of South Africa is gripped by a catastrophic water shortage. Unless the city adopts widespread rationing, the government says, the taps “will be turned off” on April 22, 2018, because there will be no more water to deliver.

This would make Cape Town the first major city in the world to run out of water, according to Anthony Turton, a professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in South Africa, who spoke to the New York Times. “It’s not an impending crisis—we’re deep, deep, deep in crisis.” The shortage is the result of a multi-year drought.

The city is asking residents to restrict their water use to 87 liters per person per day. That’s roughly the equivalent of a four-minute shower using a regular shower head, or an eight-minute shower using a low-flow shower head.

Cape Town’s water system isn’t built to withstand a multi-year drought (nor are any city’s water system), which are expected to occur “perhaps as rarely as once in a millennium,” according to a group of professors from the University of Cape Town.

This particular drought won’t last forever. But according to climate models, it is likely part of a trend for the Western Cape of South Africa, where climate change is expected to bring lower chances of wet years and higher chances of dry years as the century progresses, according to Piotr Wolski, a hydrologist with the Climate Systems Analysis Group. Water rationing may soon become the norm for the city of 4 million.

I expect, if we haven’t already, we’ll soon see migrations out of Cape Town until it reaches a sustainable level of inhabitants. The rest? I don’t know, but if there’s not enough water, they either have to fight over it – or move.

The climate change debate has so far been a lot of denial, followed by a lot of finger pointing. But the result is all about the human carrying capacity of planet Earth. Will it go up, effectively making us less overpopulated? A few folks point out that the higher CO₂ concentration must surely be better for plant growth. However, if those plants merely have more carbohydrates, then the argument fails from the human perspective.

But for most of us, I think without preventative action, current anchors of human existence – Miami, Tokyo, New York City – may start to shake in ways we’ve only seen when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were subjected to the atom bomb. Predictability, a key factor in human prosperity, will begin to disappear.

And that will surely lower the human carrying capacity of the planet.