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In NewScientist (9 December 2017, paywall) Fred Pearce reviews Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle Of Water And Prosperity, by Sandra Postel, an environmentalist whose main concern are the world’s rivers. I, of course, have the gall to actually comment on what I read in the review, rather than read the book. Fred is doubtful of Postel’s thesis, which is …

At individual and civic levels, we use water with staggering inefficiency. It flows through our fingers. We could do things much better, [Postel] argues, if only we stopped treating it like a birthright that falls from the sky and more like a precious resource that sustains all life on Earth. “The water cycle is broken,” she writes. “But one river, one wetland, one city, one farm at a time, we can begin to fix it.” …

But for all her language about sharing and stewardship, Postel ultimately finds environmental salvation in the power of the dollar. She wants water to be owned, so it has a value to individuals and corporations. If they own and trade it, her argument goes, they will also safeguard it and use it well.

Her book focuses on examples where capitalism nurtures water. Most are in the US. She finds that water markets from California to New England deliver the precious resource to those who derive most economic value from it – almond farmers in California, city dwellers in New Mexico’s deserts or salmon fishers in the north-west.

I think Fred has good reason to harbor doubts, although my reasons may differ from his. Postel’s thesis is the classic libertarian position, which posits that resources which are privately owned will be nurtured and conserved by the owners, who wish to profit from those resources over the long-term. By contrast, publicly owned – or unownable, if I might coin a term – resources are subject to the tragedy of the commons, for there is no self-interest restraints on the harvesters of the resource, resulting in the plunder of the resource, even if it’s a renewable resource. Just think of the collapse and continued failure of the various fisheries around the world.

The problem with the libertarian position is its assumptions of the applicability of the ownership model, the rationality of the owners, the transmission of perfect information, and the correlation of private interests with the public good.

1. Ownership model. Libertarians and capitalism function on the notion of ownership, limited or not. This works rather well for tangible artifacts, such as houses, pencils, hammers, even computer code, because each is precisely definable, easy to identify, and has no basis for self-directed behavior. Contrast this with a natural fishery in which the fish are not man-made, cannot be easily corraled, and are apt to follow their own impulses rather than throw themselves into the nets of the fishermen.While water may not be self-directed, its essential quality to human survival combined with its behavior of raining in one location, flowing to another, and then being subject to harvesting, makes it an ill-suited subject for the model of ownership. Consider how one would apply ownership to the Nile River, as I’ve previously covered, where many countries, never mind private parties, could claim ownership:
   

   The Nile draws its water from three long rivers – the White Nile, Blue Nile and the Atbara, which flows from North-West Ethiopia to the Nile in East Sudan. The longest river in the world, the Nile stretches 6,650 kilometres and passes through eleven countries: Burundi, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The volume of the Nile’s annual flow is 84 billion cubic metres. [Future Directions International]

   The suggestion that an ownership model could be applied here appears to be risible. Many countries have claims on the contents of the Nile – how does one apportion it in a private ownership model? And then make the apportionment stick without conflict?

2. The rationality of owners. By their very nature, libertarians and capitalists tend to be relatively rational people, regardless of their adherence to ethical systems which exist outside of their immediate context. This is to say, they have a model of humanity which includes an assumption that people will attempt to better their condition through wise management of their resources. But as I’ve mentioned a time or two, humanity is not a rational species, but a species that is capable of being rational. This is a key difference. It is entirely within the scope of believability that someone with control of some resource would actually use it in a manner a libertarian, a capitalist, my reader, or myself would consider to be irrational. For example, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein cut off the flow of water to the Mesopotamian Marshes in an effort to drive out Shia Muslims in the 1980s and 1990s. For the libertarian who believes we should live in peace and compete only commercially, this bit of madness, which endangered an important ecological feature of desert-dominated Iraq, doesn’t fit into their model. And, sure, Hussein was a dictator, not an owner per se. But the example remains valid, as not everyone subscribes to a single model of rationality. Any owner, consumed with xenophobic (aka irrational) hatred for some alien group, who finds they can injure that group by destroying a resource over which they have control, may do that. And in the case of water, simply shrugging it off as a bit of self-destruction for which they’ll pay will not do, because water is important to everyone.
3. Transmission of perfect information. Rational decisions depend on information about the real world, and it should go without saying that such information is rarely perfect. A decision made in light of today’s information may be madness in light of tomorrow’s, thus endangering the central thesis that an owner will always act in their own self-interest. This is compounded by the various self-delusions so many of us seem prone to practice.
4. Correlation of private interests with the public good. The suggestion that the actions of private interests always correlates with the public good simply doesn’t work out well in the case of water, in conjunction with the points above, particularly #3. For example, Ethiopia is constructing a dam on the Nile River for hydroelectricity purposes. Seems like a wise, renewable energy move – until you consider that starving Egypt of life-giving water endangers millions of people, and risks starting a ruinous war. So who owns this water again? Or simply consider the owner who bought water rights on a river or ocean in order to jettison waste into it. Now it flows into another owner’s purview, as water tends to do, much to their chagrin when they realize the water is unusable for potables or recreation. By what right do they have to complain or even restrict the usage of the first owner? The ownership model seems highly inadequate to the challenge.

Here’s the real problem for me: I don’t have a suggested solution to offer as an alternative. I read enough libertarian thought on these sorts of things that I can see the problems with it, so I don’t really trust such suggestions. But in a world where natural resources are not equal to the task of feeding, watering, and clothing the human and non-human living creatures on it, I wonder if the only solution is going to be a reduction in the human population, probably through some ruinous and tragic mechanism, until those who are left will once again find Earth to be a bounteous world from which the essentials of survival may be extracted with little impact on the environment.

I’ve talked about the importance of rivers before here, where there has been proposals, some approved, to give rivers legal rights. Connected to this is the American Indian belief that rivers are sacred (looking through this link, I have a lot of suspicion about the historicity of their assertions, so take this link with a few flecks of salt). As an agnostic, I can’t say I much like the intellectual background of the assertion, but as a functional part of their society, it seems likely (I haven’t studied this) that this should keep a critical part of their ecological support system in a near-optimal condition. That is, rivers do not generally deliver additional benefit to humans or other creatures through the addition of pollution, so by marking them as sacred and thus implying a punishment, divine or in the real world, for those who substantially damage them, they’re relatively safe-guarded against self-interested mismanagement. I suspect that a comparison would suggest this is more effective than private ownership or the granting of “rights” by governments.

And, oh yes, I do feel the irony. I suspect it means our secular models of optimal societies are incomplete.

Both of these characters were wasted. Or perhaps they ARE wasted.

While The Living Ghost (1942) has many elements of a classic mystery, such as the missing wealthy man, his second wife and jealous daughter by the late first wife, various friends & relatives, servants, and the big mansion, it’s missing one vital element – a strongly written investigator role. Walter Craig is the missing banker, who entered his bedroom but never made it to the actual bed. After some futzing about with the police, one of the relatives suggests they bring in a private investigator, a man he knows who used to work for the prosecutor’s office and was one of their best. His name is Nic Trayne.

And what’s he doing now?

Why, he’s a professional listener. People who want someone to non-judgmentally listen to them pay $2 a session. He dresses up in a silly get-up, empties his mind, and has mastered an art that this reviewer has also mastered – the helpful grunt. For me, it goes like this – Oh, hi, you have a problem? Tell me about it. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh – Oh, you figured it out? Glad to be of help. Come back any time.

I think he has the pelt of an albino beaver on his head.

Although I must say Nic is better dressed than I.

And it’s an interesting and creative manner for adding color to a plot that might otherwise blend into all the other stories that use the other elements. The problem is that Nic, a former investigator, comes across as a scatter-brain. Do I find a scatter-brain credible as an investigator? No, and I’ll tell you why. To my mind, an investigator has to take in a number of facts, often unconnected on their face, classify them as to their criticality to the problem, and, keeping them in mind, construct a story that connects the facts and points to some conclusion. This alone suggests a mind that doesn’t leap like it’s been hit by an over-powered electrode every time someone opens their mouth. An investigator often also has to work under pressure, whether it’s time, danger, or some other factor. It’s almost enough to just have the rock-solid guy with a cig hanging from the corner of his mouth, uncaring about the world but for solving his client’s problem; it approaches genius when you see an investigator such as Sam Spade, clearly affected by a woman, still complete the investigation, sweating yet devious, and putting all the guilty away – including the dame. See The Maltese Falcon (1941) for a masterful example.

BUUUUT to return to the unfulfilled potential of The Living Ghost, although Nic initially demurs the thought of returning to investigation, the daughter, Billie, turns her wiles and intelligence loose on him and he soon succumbs – although he quickly admits he’s fully aware of her strategy. This appears to signal an interesting mind behind the silly mask of Nic – but it only really comes through once more.

Continuing onward, the missing man soon reappears in his own house – but incommunicado. He’s “cortically paralyzed,” a condition that may only be artificially induced using anesthesia and special medical gear. The police find that just such gear was delivered to a nearby house, purchased for rehab recently, and off Nic – and Billie – go to investigate. At this point, the ineffectuality of the lead character is compounded, because when Nic convinces Billie they’re trapped in the basement, she confesses her love for him, he gets in some necking time, and then admits it was all a trick. Chaos ensues, but they do find the medical gear, along with a bonus of some experimental subjects wandering the hallways.

Why did she fall for him? Beats the shit out of me. Either you write it off as one of those crazy dame things, or you condemn the scriptwriter to 20 years in the third circle of Hell. Personally, I vote for the latter. It really was jarring to see this bright, vivacious woman falling for this scatter-brain. (For those who wonder about me, I’m vague. Or so my Arts Editor tells me.)

Back at the house, and this is probably out of sequence, but one of the female relatives is a real whack-job, to the point where another relative says she’s been a member of every cult he’s ever heard of. She puts on a really good performance, suggesting that Nic is in mortal anger – and then we never see her again. So what was that all about? Just color? I was sad when she never reappeared. Especially when her eternally picked-on husband ends up dead in the garden, where incidentally Walter, the cortically paralyzed man, magically appears, manipulated to show up for reasons unknown. Maybe the TV editor decided to remainder her.

Eventually, Nic gathers everyone up for the classic big reveal, but with a twist. The realtor who sold the property housing the medical gear never met the buyer, but talked to them over the phone, so Nic arranges to have everyone record their voice on a wax record for later analysis by the realtor – but it’s a trap. Nic is ready and waiting when one of the friends shows up to kill him with a knife, and when the second wife rolls in to finish Nic off, the jealous daughter is ready and waiting and takes her down. So we learn that if Walter Craig, the wealthy banker, had died, the estate goes to the daughter – but if he’s incapacitated, the second wife takes over and can drain the estate.

So we have credible motivations, some fairly lively if not entirely vivid characters (the realtor is a real hoot and almost worth the price of admission alone), some of whom are wasted, and one investigator who shows some smarts in trapping the guilty, but is so … so … goofy that they might as well have substituted Gomer Pyle and achieved about the same effect.

And it’s not a good one.

This movie is fairly unusual for me, personally, in that it actually induced an urge to correct it. I really want to replace Nic the Investigator with someone more … substantial. He’d still need to be quirky, but something that didn’t annoy me. Maybe intrigue me. Hint at past wrongs, perhaps. The whole “professional listener” thing need not be discarded, but could be a signifier of some observation of criminals and victims over the years. And perhaps gives Billie, who needs more work herself, an actual reason to take a romantic interest in him.

Make him a real person.

Well, it won’t happen, but that’s how I feel after watching it.

BTW, I see it’s online. Maybe it’s better than the TV version we saw, but I’m not going to take the time to find out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WwDBT_CEYY

Ever wonder how to find ancient shipwrecks in deep waters? Turns out you follow the breadcrumbs:

Institute for Exploration / Ocean Exploration Trust

[Ben] Ballard says the Mediterranean seabed probably holds thousands of wrecks from the last few millennia. Still, individual boats are hard to find. In order to discover them, the researchers followed ancient trash trails.Ancient mariners often cast large clay jars called amphorae into the sea after using up contents like wine. So many were dumped that they can be followed like a breadcrumb trail. [“Wayfarers of the ancient world,” Joshua Rapp Learn, NewScientist (9 December 2017)]

Fascinating. They must keep maps of these trash trails, as such data would yield information about trade routes. Nothing obviously out there, though.

When an experiment in blood-letting goes wrong…

Camp.
Camp.
Camp.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) is a documentary primarily concerning the existence of four vampires in New Zealand, although we eventually get to meet other members of other groups of the supernatural community. We follow along as the four are profiled insofar as to their pasts, interests, and predilections, as they propagate their kind, and how they struggle with the problems inherent in being a former human, but now a creature immune to the normal vicissitudes of a human body. Friends and family die, no more day-time lunches, dressing for a night out without a mirror, those damn vampire-hunters, that sort of thing.

I think this was very well thought out and very well done, but somehow I never really quite found my way to the proper place to really enjoy it. True, the Procession of Shame had me laughing out loud, and my Arts Editor and I laughed at a few other bits, but giving the lead vampire the stereotypical mannerisms of a gay gentleman was distracting, I think. Although seriously trying to discuss such a choice in the context of a mythological creature has its own set of existential canards, but since it is a story, if of a variety unique to our age, it does make a twisted sort of sense to argue about such artistic decisions.

Then again, I never did get into This Is Spinal Tap (1984) either, so perhaps my sense of humor is somewhat defective. Many other critics liked it, and I can understand why. But it didn’t quite trip my wire, as it were.

Your mileage may vary.

Camp.
Camp.
Camp.

The idea of frozen iguanas plummeting from trees in Miami, as promulgated by many news outlets, including the Palm Beach Post, is probably most interesting for its novelty effect:

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials said iguanas can become immobilized or sluggish when temperatures hit between 40 and 50 degrees.

This morning, it hit 38 degrees at Palm Beach International Airport and isn’t expected to climb out of the 50s today.

While you may see cold-stunned iguanas on the sidewalk or in your backyard, wildlife officials warn they may even fall out of the trees.

But it’s also a reminder that invasive species such as the iguana and another plague on Florida, the Burmese python, are not always invading their version of the Garden of Eden. A geographical area experiencing a weather extreme can end up killing a substantial portion of the invasive species if it lasts long enough, perhaps enough so that humans can finish them off. Unfortunately, this cold snap won’t last that long.

But if a weather extreme could be artificially induced, it might work. I wonder if environmentalists have considered that – at least those that haven’t yet accepted thenotion that species do change geographical ranges as a natural rhythm of the world. The drive to exterminate species alien to a given geographical area is arguably just another management scheme – which doesn’t condemn the practice, but does remind us that managing Nature is a lot trickier than many of us think it might be.

Moderate right winger Jennifer Rubin of WaPo notes that the Trump White House might be in its final days:

As for Dhillon, this actually confirms author Michael Wolff’s ongoing refrain in his tell-all book that White House advisers considered Trump to be mentally and/or temperamentally incapable of doing his job. To continue to enable and defend him, knowing he is not capable of carrying out his oath, is a moral abomination and a violation of these advisers’ own oaths to defend the Constitution and country. Moreover, if Mueller has this information, it is because Dhillon and/or White House counsel Donald McGahn are talking to Mueller. Trump will now know that he is surrounded, in his mind, by disloyal people who are helping Mueller to make a case against him.

The walls are closing in on Trump, at least with respect to an obstruction-of-justice claim. Literally everyone mentioned above may have evidence that incriminates the president. Some of these people will have personal liability and therefore may be ready to cut a deal with prosecutors. The White House is melting down.

Last night I realized I had the impression that the Trump Administration is really facing disaster on just about all fronts.

1. Former Trump best friend forever Steve Bannon is now an outcast who has “lost his mind.”
2. The recent Trumpist’s attack on Robert Mueller may actually signal the realization that he has found a treasure trove of information of mis-deeds on Trump’s aides’ part – or even himself.
3. Trump’s foreign policy maneuvers have spanned a spectrum labeled “disheartening” on one end and “disastrous” on the other, even if I do wonder if Trump’s withholding of aid to Pakistan might work out well. His failure to coordinate with Tillerson simply screams “failing amateur”.
4. Senator Grassley’s recent rejection of two nominees to the Federal judiciary, as well as the withdrawal of a third, indicates Congress may be slightly less pliant than it was earlier in this Congress. And now Senator Gardner has also expressed opposition to judiciary nominations, even if it’s an ephemeral opposition.
5. Sessions’ regressive position on marijuana will only serve to intensify opposition among Democrats and Independents. Furthermore, the libertarian wing of the GOP will loathe Sessions even more, and have less and less to do with Trump’s generally un-libertarian positions.
6. Each and every special election since Jan 2017 has illustrated the short reach of President Trump’s influence, with the latest embarrassments being the near-loss of the Virginia statehouse to Democratic forces (retained by the skinniest of hairs, a ridiculous decision by a panel of judges), and the loss of Sessions’ old Senate seat in the most conservative of states.
7. And now the release of Wolff’s book, which apparently suggests Trump is mentally falling apart, i.e., may be falling into dementia.

And, yet, all that Jennifer says, and all I noted above, may not matter. If we’re to believe Gallup (and the Gallup poll has changed from daily to weekly, starting Jan 1, sad to say), Trump has gained in popularity of late – with Trump hitting 40% for the first time in quite a while.

This suggests to me nothing particularly new, just the simple old observation that most folks don’t really know or care what happens in Washington, D.C. I think there are three groups of Americans in this matter: political groupies, who are temperamentally attracted to politics, whether it’s for base reasons of power or intellectual curiosity (I sort of fit into the latter category). A second group, which has been growing rapidly and which I also sort of fit, of those who realize that, although they don’t have much interest in politics, elections have consequences (a Steve Benen aphorism), and so they’ve started educating themselves on what’s going on, and possibly even running for state-level offices. And the third group, which is shrinking as the second group grows, of those who don’t pay attention, who vote based on inertia (“dyed in the wool Republicans“, for example). Many, many people just don’t care, as the entire political process, whether it’s fund-raising, political maneuvers, or writing laws is repulsive, a reaction often reinforced by talk radio. Add in 40+ hour work weeks, interests that have nothing to do with gaining political power (although they may aspire to positions within their hobbies), and the time that it takes to run families, and it’s hard to blame them.

But without popular support, it appears the GOP will not attempt to remove Trump from his seat, no matter how incompetently he’s run this Administration. We may have to simply run him out of town in 2020.

Or not. Trump has a physical examination coming up on January 12^th. While it’s not clear to me that this includes a mental health evaluation, if he’s suffered any sort of physical failure, such as a stroke, that might impact his cognitive abilities, that would definitely be grounds for a 25^th Amendment removal process, to my non-legal mind. I don’t care how many people, deluded or not, support Trump. If his mind is no longer properly functioning due to physical or mental problems, we need to eject him from the Presidential office. It has nothing to do with disliking his policies and everything to do with the safety of the nation.

If you’re like me, I was initially excited when I read that Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) was going to oppose all further nominations to the Federal judiciary by the Trump Administration. But then I ran across a clarification in the Washington Examiner:

Republican Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado said Thursday he would block all of President Trump’s judicial nominees until the administration reverses its decision to rescind a policy that de-prioritized the enforcement of federal marijuana laws.

Gardner, whose home state legalized the use and possession of marijuana in the wake of that federal policy, said on the Senate floor he was not happy with the surprise decision, especially after both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and candidate Donald Trump said they would not interfere with states on this issue.

Which is quite the come-down for me. While the marijuana issue is certainly important, the quality of our Federal judiciary is far more important. If Gardner had simply said that the quality of the nominees has been wanting and he would no longer vote for the confirmation of future nominees unless they met the highest standards, then he would have won some qualified praise from myself. I can only say qualified because he’s presumably already voted for those who have already been confirmed.

But as the Examiner’s report indicates, this is nothing more than a political maneuver. It may put Sessions’ nuts in a grinder, which of course I will applaud, but it also implicitly opens Gardner up for counter-maneuvers which may force him to collapse his own maneuvers. After all, this is not based on some moral imperative, the bulwark of successful politics, but simply to serve his own political needs, aka survival (Colorado has legalized marijuana for recreational purposes, and is a position with a great deal of popular support).

And, given the importance of a highly competent and fair-minded judiciary, it should be a moral imperative.

I don’t expect Gardner’s position to hold up over time. Either the Trump Administration will back down in order to continue to sandbag the judiciary, or they’ll find a way to force Gardner to repudiate this position – perhaps by denying aid to Colorado in the face of some disaster.

Gardner is up for re-election in 2020.

Tabby’s Star continues to make news. This time WaPo is reporting that the odd visuals coming from Tabby’s may indicate dust:

Artist’s conception of Tabby’s Star.
Source: Wikipedia

Whatever substance exists between us and Tabby’s Star blocks more blue light than red light, as Boyajian, Ellis, Wright and other researchers reported in a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on Wednesday. Planets cannot explain the dips. “If you have something that is completely opaque like a planet, you would expect all the colors of the light to be blocked out at the same levels,” Boyajian said. Likewise, the discovery also rules out alien industry.

Dust is one of the few explanations this observation does not eliminate. “The selective absorption of blue light has to point to dust,” Ellis said. “Certainly dust is the culprit.” Very small particles could block blue light’s shorter wavelengths while allowing red light, which has longer wavelengths, to escape.

“It has the typical signature of dust,” Boyajian said.

But the mystery is not over.

Yet even in space dust, there is mystery. If it is dust, the dust cloud has not spread far beyond its point of origin, the authors noted in the paper. A ring of dust around the star would constantly block starlight rather than dim light in bouts.

The artist’s conception, above, suggests a simple ring, which implies the ring is at a 90° angle to us. I wonder if it could actually be a shell or sphere of dust, instead.

Reality is so much more fun than self-delusion, I gotta say. Can’t wait for the next report.

Just a short while after reading about Kim’s speech and its remarks, and writing about it, I ran across this, also from 38 North, by Peter Ward:

In the last few years, the seemingly ever more frequent North Korean nuclear and missile tests have been met with intensifying sanctions. Yet, North Korea’s economic recovery post-2000 has continued largely unabated. This is in part because the North Korean government has made radical changes in the management of its state-owned enterprises (SOEs). While the regime seems to be doing everything it can to keep up Stalinist appearances and Kim Jong Un probably believes that he cannot abandon socialist rhetoric without risking his legitimacy, in reality, markets increasingly play a central role in the lives of ordinary North Koreans. As such, the regime has been adapting to this new reality and moving to co-opt market forces by side-lining the Party in economic management. This is most clearly illustrated by the 2014 amended Enterprise Act, which came to light earlier this year [2017], granting SOE managers broad rights to engage in foreign trade and joint ventures and accept investment from domestic private investors. Institutionalizing market forces seems to be helping to create a better investment climate, and thus spurring growth.

I wonder if they’re learning by observing China, carefully opening up on the economic front while keeping the political world ordered to benefit themselves. But what are the limits? That’s unclear, although Peter concludes with this:

These changes to the SOE laws are the first steps on a long road to economic reform. Private property still is illegal, and the regime will need to figure out how to further expand the rights of de facto private business in order to ensure that recent economic growth is sustainable. Removing the Party, a bastion of the old socialist order, from daily economic life is clearly a step in the right direction, as it allows enterprise management and entrepreneurs to worry less about ideology. At the same time, the nuclear and missile programs mean that the foreign investment the country needs to grow and reconstruct its shattered infrastructure will likely not be forthcoming. These limited but real changes will likely run up against the hard realities that the regime’s foreign policy has created.

Will they be a miniature powerhouse? What about their human rights record? The future of North Korea remains obscure.

It’s always dangerous applying your judgment against artifacts from alien cultures, such as watching a film sourced from another nation, because the tell-tales employed by the movie makers, the short hand and cultural assumptions may or may not be recognized by the viewer.

Such is the possibly the case with Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), a film considered to be a masterpiece and seminal. My Arts Editor and I found it to be obtuse and, frankly, a little dull. Perhaps, as moderately well-off Americans, we are unqualified to judge this film, as it concerns itself with a young Frenchman, Michel, in post World War II Paris, short of opportunities, his mother dying. What to do? He takes up the old trade of pickpocketing. The audience is introduced to the various skills, which is interesting if accurate. The police may or may not suspect him; frankly, the inspector appears to be less interested in catching him at a crime than in introducing him to the idea of growing up.

Michel is intensely in his own head, torn between his physical needs and the morality under which he grew up; the woman who might have been his girl or even wife, Jeanne, is completely ignored. He may play at philosophical games in which self-recognized supermen are permitted to break the law, but there is little enough to a specious argument. Paranoid concerning the police, he leaves Paris for a couple of years, and admits that while he was successful at crime, he was a wastrel, losing it in cards and to women.

Returning to Paris, Jeanne is now a single mother, just as despairing as before, and he promises to help. But he lets his greed overwhelm his judgment, and is caught in the act and arrested. Now he rests in prison, indulging in the self-indulgence of fatalism. The only person who cares for him is Jeanne, and he finally admits that he loves her.

But why? We couldn’t tell. Motivations were waved at in this film, and while perhaps the French would understand, we did not. It made for a frustrating time. Technically, the movie is well-made, being black and white and well-photographed and observed. The acting was somewhat repetitive. Perhaps his suit, over-large and all he seemed to own, was symbolic of something, but neither one of us could see it without being jarred by it a little bit.

And perhaps it’s just a pet peeve and most folk don’t care, but narration really annoys me. Now, I’ll grant that it worked quite well in the commercial release of Blade Runner (1982), although I also like the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner. But in Pickpocket, it’s an example of the standard error of amateur story-tellers, which is telling, not showing. It left me wondering just how much the story could have been enhanced if he’d just kept his mental yap shut and shown why, in a strongly needed instance, he was falling in love with Jeanne.

Watch at your own risk.

Here I mentioned a report concerning something resembling free markets in North Korea, as reported by CNN. On 38 North, Robert Carlin analyzes Kim Jong-un’s recent speech to the North Korean nation:

Kim specifically mentioned the success of agricultural “work teams.” In effect, that might be an effort to signal public, high-level backing for innovations in agricultural policy, including the “plot responsibility system” introduced several years ago, and credited with keeping up production even in the face of bad weather. Kim also called for the state “to establish active measures to let the socialist responsibility management system prove its real worth in factories, enterprises, and cooperative organizations.” This is not new—it’s similar to a line he took in his 2016 Congress speech—but having it surface again in the midst of more challenging economic circumstances suggests Kim is not prepared to back off from reforms that have, at least to some extent, demonstrated their effectiveness. Overall, the picture is one of tightening ideological discipline while encouraging practical, innovative (obviously within limits) approaches at lower levels.

Seems giving folks a reason to take care of things is working in North Korea.

However you feel about the recently passed Federal tax change bill, or, for that matter, the failed AHCA, you had to find the process by which they were formulated and debated to be, well, disconcerting – written in secret, subjected to no debate in the case of the AHCA, if I understand properly, and only cursory meetings in the case of the tax change bill. The mad rush to get the bills through Congress and onto Trump’s desk betrayed a fundamental irresponsibility on the part of the Congressional GOP.

So this report in NewScientist (9 December 2017) on the legalization of euthanasia in the state of Victoria in Australia was a reminder that some people know how to legislate:

VICTORIA has become the first state in Australia to legalise euthanasia. The state’s parliament passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill last week after more than 100 hours of debate.

And the bill passed. It’s loaded with safeguards:

The legislation includes 68 safeguards to prevent foul play, such as criminal offences to stop vulnerable people from being coerced into ending their lives.

No matter your opinion on euthanasia, or perhaps more accurately legalized suicide, they followed a process, they had a real debate, perhaps some of the legislators actually changed their minds, and they finally passed it. I’d cheer either result, honestly. This is how adults run a country.

I wonder if they take interns. I know a whole bunch of people who could use the experience.

I need a new tie tack right there.

Nightfall (1957) is a suspenseful movie let down by its ending. Set a little after World War II, Jim Vanning is a vet on a street corner, happy to help out a man who needs a light for his cigarette. He runs into a single woman in a bar and strikes up a conversation with her. He gains her address, as his profession is as a painter and she, a model, is always looking for work. Walking her out of the bar, he is accosted by two men, one of whom speaks with familiarity to the woman, who flees at Vanning’s imprecations.

They have guns, so he is persuaded to accompany them to an oil pump, the sort that needs no supervision. There they threaten him and demand he return their money, but he repeatedly, if in a discouraged manner, says he doesn’t know where it is. One of them appears to operate on a plane different from ours, ready to shoot Vanning just for giggles. In a moment of inattention, Vanning stuns them, takes their car, and flees.

Remember the guy who needed a light? We change over to him, and it turns out he’s been tracking Vanning as well. He’s discussing his efforts with his wife – what’s this all about?

Back to Vanning, he goes to the apartment of the woman in the bar and has a beginning of a good yell at her for setting him up, but she claims ignorance. Then his story starts to come out, told through flashbacks, of Vanning and his friend, Doc, on a camping trip, and helping a pair of men who had a car accident near their campsite.

And pulled guns on them.

The plot continues on from here, and it’s not bad at all. Information dribbles out, there are twists and turns, and credible characters are built. Unfortunately, the focus on the two bad guys is too scant to make believable the interpersonal friction which leads to their eventual self-destructive quarrel; too, the carelessness of the good guys was a trifle unbelievable. I found myself wishing they had entrapped the bad guys through cleverness, even though self-destruction is a valid observation of the criminal condition.

Despite the flaws of the ending, this is a solid effort, which I enjoyed.

E. J. Dionne in WaPo remarks on Trump:

But we are past the time when we can believe any of this. Trump is, without question, doing enormous damage to the United States’ standing in the world, and his strategy for political survival is rooted in a willingness to destroy our institutions.

Nowhere else, though, does, Dionne remark on Trump’s enablers in Congress, most notably Representative Nunes, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, who supposedly recused himself from the investigation into claims of collusion, and yet reportedly continues to interfere, and Speaker Ryan, who continues to ignore a White House that is dangerously dysfunctional. Impeachments start in the House, Speaker Ryan, and you’re neglecting your duties.

Guess I’m just crabby this morning.

This is an odd video. I’m not even sure it’s funny.

The latest computer security threats to you are “Spectre” and “Meltdown”, according to Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare. What to do?

Lawfare readers should respond in two ways: keep their operating systems up to date and, critically, install an ad-blocker for your web browser. (Here are guides on how to do so in Chrome and Firefox.) In fact, a proper response to Spectre should involve ad-blocking on all government computers. Other than that, don’t worry.

I really should try that, since I use Firefox and Vivaldi, the latter of which is a Chrome-derived browser.

So what’s going on?

Modern computers are incredibly complicated but almost all the performance comes from attempting to exploit two concepts: caches and parallelism. And modern computer security often rests on a principle of isolation, blocking the ability of one program to learn or affect what else is happening on the computer. Spectre and Meltdown exploit breaches of isolation due to the interaction of caches and some parallelism features.

And then some high-level technical stuff.

Back when I was studying and working with Mythryl, the person leading that work was the late Cynbe ru Taren. I recall his analysis of how functional programming’s treatment of data would affect performance in a program designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs (cores) in a computer: because the data was not variable, it did not have to be copied to each core that might access it every time it changed. He felt that would be a tremendous boost to performance. I don’t believe he ever sat down and proved it, but it seemed quite reasonable to me, although my thread programming, which can involve the implicit use of available CPUs, has been very limited.

Which leaves me to wonder: if we changed common programming practice to move to functional languages that, by and large, don’t use variables, could we dispense with hardware optimizations which lead to security holes?

Steve Benen worries about the long-term consequences of the Trump Presidency for the American reputation:

As we discussed last summer, after Trump announced his rejection of the Paris climate accords, this presidency will end, perhaps in three years, at which point many Americans and their new president will turn to the world and declare with pride, “Don’t worry, Trump is gone. The fluke is over. You can trust us again. The United States is back and the American president can lead the free world anew.”

But at that point, many around the world will probably choose not to listen. They’ll realize that the United States is capable of electing someone like Trump to the nation’s highest office, and there’s no guarantee that Americans won’t make a similar decision again in the future. People around the globe will have no way of knowing when the electorate might elect someone else of Trump’s ilk.

And with that lack of confidence comes consequences.

When Trump’s successors, for example, try to reach international agreements, and make promises to our partners about the United States honoring its commitments, foreign officials will know that a Trump-like figure might come along, take office, and decide to betray those commitments.

And I think it’s true, but I don’t necessarily agree that this is a real problem for the world. From that perspective, having a single nation wielding that much influence is not necessarily a good thing, because, of course, it will order things behind the scenes to enhance its prosperity, and that can unduly impact other nations.

My real concern, as I may have mentioned elsewhere, is the blot the Trump Presidency leaves on the concept and theory of liberal democracy. For nations of any size greater than a few villages, finding a way to govern everyone in a stable manner without violence is a major challenge, and if the lesson drawn from Trump is that liberal democracies can elect freaking nut-cases that can severely damage a country in terms of domestic and foreign policy, well, that’s not good.

Will countries choose to return to the “strong man” model of government, as has Russia?

Glaive:

1. A weapon formerly used, consisting of a large blade fixed on the end of a pole, whose edge was on the outsidecurve.

   Quotations

   • 1786, The Welch Glaive is a kind of bill, sometimes reckoned among the pole axes. — Francis Grose, A Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons, page 52.

2. A light lance with a longsharp–pointed head.
3. (poetically or loosely) A sword.

   The glaive which he did wield. Spenser.

   [AskDefine]

Mentioned by my Arts Editor when I asked whether or not prosecutor Hamilton Burger ever considered just pulling a gun out and shooting Perry Mason. She suggested they’d go at it with glaives.

Source: Wikipedia

Chris Simms tells the story of how a plant louse nearly wiped out the French wine – and affected levels of crime – in NewScientist (23 December 2017, paywall). This was back in the late 19th century. Because of meticulous French record-keeping, this little bit of surprise popped up:

But when poverty and crime rise in lockstep, is poverty causing crime or crime poverty? “When there is a lot of crime, businesses can suffer, influencing income,” says Bignon. Disentangling what is cause and what is effect can often be difficult. …

As expected, as the blight spread to new areas, instances of property crimes such as theft, counterfeiting and pillaging rose. On average, these crimes were 22 per cent higher in districts affected by the bugs. The rise couldn’t be explained by other factors such as demographic changes caused by patterns of migration.

But there was a twist. While property crime ballooned, violent crime in the worst affected areas slumped, by about 13 per cent on average.

This doesn’t surprise Christian Traxler, an economist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. In 2010, he showed a similar relationship between a decreased supply of rye and crime in Prussia between 1882 and 1912. “Bad weather increased rye prices, which induced more property crime and fewer violent crimes,” he says.

Rye was used to make bread, but bad weather for rye also meant bad weather for barley, which is used to make beer. In both the French and the Prussian instances, Traxler thinks lack of booze explains the drop in violent crime. “Shock to wine production isn’t just a shock to income, but also to wine consumption,” he says. With less alcohol to drink, people are less inclined to fight. In England and Wales today, for instance, alcohol consumptionis thought to contribute to 1.2 million violent incidents a year. “Alcohol consumption makes people more impulsive, less restrained,” says Bignon.

An interesting natural experiment, once again raising the question of just what are we to do about alcohol. Just put up with the accompanying violence?

Perhaps so.

While looking over Daniel Byman’s overview of Iran on Lawfare in light of the protests currently going on in various Iranian cities, I ran across this thought-provoking passage:

In addition to uncertainty at the top, Iran’s economy remains vulnerable. The latest protests began over economic issues before turning political. The economy was shrinking before the lifting of sanctions, but sanctions relief—including additional export opportunities and the unfreezing of assets—have improved the economic situation, with the growth rate at roughly 7 percent in recent years and inflation stabilizing. However, Iran’s economy is plagued with corruption, and mismanagement is rife. The IRGC and various religious foundations control much of the economy, stifling competition and making reform far more difficult. Private investment remains skittish, especially outside the energy sector. The low price of oil makes these structural problems all the more painful.

In addition to these problems, popular expectations of prosperity are higher than they have been for many years. The lifting of sanctions fostered hope that incomes would rise and economic problems would diminish—the regime now has less ability to blame the United States or other enemies for its problems. Protests are a fact of life in Iran—few are massive, sustained, or tied to a broader political cause, but all show at least some level of dissatisfaction with the regime. Indeed, Hassan Rouhani’s election and those of his political allies was in part because of his promises to improve Iran’s economy due to sanctions relief.

And that made me think. For all the public screaming from both sides’ hardliners about the evils of interfacing with the enemies (the Axis of Evil, the Great Satan), I didn’t see anyone ever talk about how the sanctions relief might actually work against the Iranians – or how President Obama and his team may have truly taken President Rouhani, Supreme Leader Khamenei, and their team for all they got. How so?

With the utmost gravitas, which may have obscured his true intentions, Obama’s team removed the best excuse the Iranian leadership had for an economy inadequate to the needs of the Iranian citizenry. Once that excuse was removed and the inadequacy continued, the citizens can see more clearly where the problems may clearly lie within Iran.

And their conclusion appears to be that it lies with the leadership, at least so far.

They may go farther and blame the very structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran. For the leadership of Iran, the position of Supreme Leader of all he holds sway over – and that’s a lot – constitutes permanent power and privilege for those he favors. For those who fear anything from simple discomfort to lack of power, that’s gotta be comforting, unless you’re not favored by the Supreme Leader and his underlings. And during moments of transition, when the Supreme Leader is replaced?

Those are very shaky moments.

OK, all that said, do I really believe that President Obama and his team were that subtle in their strategizing? Maybe so. Although then we might even consider that notorious letter from the United States Senators to Iran, warning that the JCPOA would be abrogated as soon as a Republican President took office, to simply be part of a strategy put together by Obama in conjunction with the GOP, and, given the behavior of the GOP over the last year or so, I just can’t believe.

The answer to whether or not Obama’s goal was the upsetting of Iran’s government by ripping away a veil may rest somewhere in the locked files of the United States.

But the fact remains that by stripping away the biggest excuse the Iranian leadership had for its inadequate economy, the United States may have done more damage to Iran than the straightforward sanctions approach.

Hopefully, Trump and his team, as laughable as they mostly seem to be, can find a way to take advantage of the protests. Although, honestly, I’m at a bit of a loss as to a desirable outcome. Democracy? Are they ready for that? Monarchy? Because that worked so well last time?

Time will tell.

Meanwhile, authorities in Iran claim the protests are over, according to CNN:

The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Wednesday that a string of anti-government protests were over after six days of unrest.

In comments to the semiofficial Fars news agency, Mohammad Ali Jafari said that only 15,000 people had turned out at the height of the rallies and that the main “troublemakers” have been arrested. CNN has not been able to verify the claim on the amount of protesters.

“Today, we can say it is the end of ‘sedition 1396,’ ” Jafari said, using the year in the Iranian calendar.

“With the help of God, their defeat is definite,” he said.

Even if it’s true, they did happen. That will shake up the leadership a bit. Who knows, they may even make an effort to fix things.

Cerumen:

More formally, the glop in your ears is called cerumen, and it is made up of the secretions of the ceruminous glands – specialised sweat glands – and sebaceous glands in the outer ear canal. Most of these are waxy compounds, which clean the ear canal and protect it from drying out, as well as killing bacteria and trapping foreign bodies like dust and fungal spores. Mixed into that wax are bodily cast-offs like shed skin cells and hair, alongside potent antimicrobials and other chemicals. [“The secrets of your past that lurk inside your ears“,  Christie Wilcox, NewScientist (23 December 2017, paywall)]

On Lawfare, Michael Sulmeyer likes the new bill that will help protect elections from foreign meddling. He particularly likes the bounty program:

Only in the final two pages of the bill are readers presented with one of the most innovative moves in election cybersecurity: a volunteer bug bounty program called Hack the Election. (This portion of the bill seems to take its inspiration from a piece of previously-introduced legislation by Heinrich and Collins called the Securing America’s Voting Equipment (SAFE) Act of 2017.) Bug bounties are not new, as companies have often sought the assistance of white-hat hackers to find and fix potential cybersecurity flaws before malicious hackers can exploit them. …

Bug bounties don’t solve everything, but they offer institutions an avenue to receive cybersecurity advice about where to focus limited resources. If the military’s bureaucracy could find a way to let hackers on to their networks to search for vulnerabilities, election officials should be able to do the same. There will be those who point to the risks of authorizing hackers to hack, but that’s why DoD created a process to screen those who would participate in the bounty first.

The hope is that a program like Hack the Election can offer states yet another way to improve their insight into the potential cybersecurity risks that they need to mitigate. Jurisdictions and administrators still must address whatever vulnerabilities the hackers discover. But the ability to take advantage of the collective experience of a vetted set of hackers is one that shouldn’t be passed up, so I am pleased to see that the Election Security Act creates a way forward for states to do so.

I wonder what level of expertise will be required to be an effective hacker. My late friend Nancy used to delight in knocking over the old BBS software for which I was responsible, and I’ll bet she would loved to take a shot at this, too.

Regarding Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) a reader writes:

I like this movie. I love the music, so there’s that, but the variety of approaches in the short films is what kept me going, even if a few of the shorts might be too long or too non-narrative for some. I just didn’t try to think too hard about any of it — the music was what made me really like the more abstract parts.

And that variety of approaches, since at least some worked off of Gould’s own words, lent some more insight into this baffling character. I think the piece we liked least was the McLaren contribution.

Although at some point, I don’t recall where, my Arts Editor said something about one piano piece being ham-handed.

Mom used to be such a finicky eater.

I think the problem with Mom (1991) is that it couldn’t quite decide on its desired identity. It’s a movie about your typical grandmother being bitten by a werewolf. Is it about the horror of your mother, the grandmother of your child, becoming a ravening beast every night?

Or should the movie try to emphasize the comedic bits of a grandmother whose hunger pangs are truly embarrassing, who is herself quite embarrassed at this turn of events. There’s some amusement, for example, when she suggests that eating a homeless bum is far more acceptable than, say, a police officer.

But neither effort is pursued relentlessly, and so the movie wanders from the agony of the son, Clay, over his mother’s nightly deadly dementia, as it were, to the sight of grandma pursuing her snack of the night, an undercover cop horrified that he must shoot grandma, and frustrated that the holes he puts in her have little effect. Clay’s increasingly useless efforts to restrain his mother come to a climax when Mom eats his sister and threatens his unborn child, and so Mom must be … ah … put down.

Don’t waste your time on this one.