Category Archives: Uncategorized

And what’s behind door #2?!

I think someone took an initial story idea and ran with it in Cowboys And Vampires (2010), and that’s too bad, because the elements surrounding the story, such as the acting, cinematography, even the cheapo special effects, are actually competently done. But the story? It needed a few more drafts.

It tells the story from the viewpoint of Johnny Dust, a fading B-Movie Western star, who, between movie gigs, works as an everyday performer at a movie studio’s tourist attraction, a Western shootout, in Tucson. The story is given an intriguing framework, or rather two of them. The first is an interview with Johnny after the incident, told in isolated shards which let’s Johnny do some of his best work. The other framework are flashes from some of his best movies where a side-kick character keeps encouraging him to do the right thing.

And then the studio lot is sold to a company that wishes to redevelop it for a theme-park experience, and with Halloween, we can fairly much guess where this is going, so we lose some tension there? But why? Why would the vampire owners of the company moving in want to setup for a massacre of Tucsonites? Think of the future – the Feds swoop in and soon the vampires are extinguished or on the run – and their secret might be revealed.

Parasites rarely want to signal their existence.

And then there’s the time Johnny is bitten by one of the vampires. Does he change and begin sucking blood? Well, not really. They trowel on the makeup a little more deeply, but was I really supposed to believe this womanizer’s faith is going to save him when the faith of everyone else does not?

On Opening Night, the fun begins, and after a while we’re down in a mine, where the screaming and the running starts. And lasts way, way too long. You might have to admire the bravery of killing a young child by slapping him against a rock, but that strikes me as a taboo too far.

And all along the tension doesn’t really mount. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have a deep reason to connect with these characters, or maybe it’s because the title is a dead giveaway. In the end, I found myself just shaking my head in disappointment. I said there were enjoyable, competent elements to the movie, but its heart and soul, the story, just stank.

Halcyon:

adjective

1. Halcyon describes an idealized, idyllic or peaceful time.

   An example of something you would describe as halcyon is the long, lazy and peaceful days of summer vacation.

noun

1. The definition of a halcyon is a bird, which legends say, has the power to calm the winter sea.

   A halcyon is a kingfisher from Southern Asia and Australia.

[YourDictionary.com]

Heard on Colbert last night.

A reader remarks on libertarian gun control:

Yep, that libertarian — or whatever — argument about arming the populace will make us polite is complete nonsense. It’s illogical when examined in the slightest, because it is moronically simplistic thinking being applied to one of the most complex systems* in existence, human society.

* (To quote Nassim Taleb: “The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts.”)

In my view, the more we embrace irrational religious systems on a literal basis – rather than taking the general good they convey – the less society should be entrusted with guns. The libertarian response is grounded on the assumption of rationality, but we need to remember that humanity is capable of rationality, but is not rational in and of itself. It’s easy to see some obscure passage in a divine text that someone interprets as an order to massacre someone else – say, the Cathars.

Depression is not generally a rational response to reality, yet depression is a rampant mental illness. We need to learn from that simple lesson.

In a by-conversation, our reader continues to comment on markets:

Supply does not create demand. Demand creates supply. This is basic high school level economics. Applies to every business ….. except Apple.

I’d argue that the Republican ideology context is different from the Apple context. In the former, they see the lifting of taxes as more fuel for building factories, etc, as if those taxes are holding back that investment. This ignores two problems, if you’ll permit the digression (this is me on a head cold):

1. The cost of borrowing money, the usual way of investing in product, old or new, has been ridiculously low for a very long time. This suggests that there’s no unfulfilled demand.
2. Much demand comes from those in the lower tax brackets. By increasing taxes on them, demand will be further suppressed.

This, it seems to me, is just a way to give more money to the people who don’t need any more.

Now, Apple wasn’t supplying an already open market. They opened a new market, created (or discovered – I’m not sure English actually has a precise word for the phenomenon) the demand by dangling spanglies in  front of everyone, and then gilded the lily with an integrated “app” offering (probably the very word “app” was part of the siren song), the famous ecology. I think this is a bit different from trying to create demand by increasing supply …. although just typing it makes it sound similar.

Another reader remarks in the context of the first reader:

That’s a very good point. Supply-side trickle down has been tried and extolled over and over, and it has never once delivered. This may well be the primary reason. A company can’t sell more product X if there aren’t buyers for it. The eventual buyer for all products is the consumer, and consumers are majority lower and middle class. (This ignores those companies who sell exclusively to the government, which in turn pays them with money forcibly extracted from the populace — which sounds rather feudal in this context. But even then, the populace is still majority lower and middle class.) More money in all the average person’s pockets means more commerce, and more business. More money in the pocket of the 1% means a slow death spiral into collapsed economies.

And I see I repeated this reader’s argument above, except he was more direct. I wonder if we’re going to be experiencing the Trump Recession as part of the insanity by half our electorate.

But it’s a true thing that taxes, in the libertarian and GOP worlds, are considered, at the very best, a necessary evil. In my evolving view, there’s certainly room for abuse in taxation, but this is how we fund those services which are ill-provided by the private sector. To suggest that taxes hold back economic expansion (itself a concept that bears reconsideration as a desirable goal) is an ideological assertion which is meaningless without context – but that’s how it’s given.

Where’s the silver lining? If the tax “reform” is passed as formulated and we do experience the Trump Recession my reader predicts, that particular religious precept ideological assertion can be given the lie.

I’ve talked from time to time about gerrymandering, most recently here. So, as I blear my way through this head cold, I was interested to see mention of a new approach to building a legislative map. From the Abstract of the academic paper:

We design and analyze a protocol for dividing a state into districts, where parties take turns proposing a division, and freezing a district from the other party’s proposed division. We show that our protocol has predictable and provable guarantees for both the number of districts in which each party has a majority of supporters, and the extent to which either party has the power to pack a specific population into a single district.

NewScientist (11 November 2017) amplifies:

With the approach, one political party draws an electoral map that divides the state into the agreed number of districts. The second party then chooses one district to freeze so that no more changes can be made to it by either side. It then redraws the rest of the map. Once the new map is complete, the first political party freezes one of the new districts, and redraws the rest of the map again. This continues until every district in the state is frozen.

I’m too sick – and no doubt inexperienced – to analyze this approach. But it does remind me of times past in which scientists were fooled – or fooled themselves – when analyzing psychic phenomenon. It didn’t take long for the skeptics’ movement to come up with the best way to analyze such phenomenon:

Send in a magician.

Scientists are not practiced in the art of fooling, so it becomes a game for the psychic shyster to fool the scientists, and they succeed. But a magician is basically the same as a psychic shyster, except they cheerfully shrug and admit that it’s all just trickery – just like the psychics. And that makes them optimal for revealing the tricks of the psychics.

Now, it’s a stretch – and maybe the authors of this paper did it, I haven’t taken the time to read it – but it’s my hope that they tossed this plan into the laps of a bunch of politicians, just to see if politicians react as they predict.

Or if they find loopholes in this scheme.

Ambit:

The ambit of something is its range or extent.

(American)

1. a circuit or circumference
2. the limits or scope; bounds [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “May the government restrict political T-shirts and pins inside polling places?” Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy:

Another question is whether the policy, though facially viewpoint-neutral, will be so vague that it is likely to be implemented in discriminatory ways. As the challengers’ petition argued, the law “often requires election officials to rely on their own subjective judgments about whether certain apparel falls within the ambit of the law’s ban on ‘political’ speech.”

It isn’t just Russia and the United States. In fact, anyone with a fair bit of mathematical ability and some moxie can play in the game of cyberwarfare – and that easily includes North Korea. Adam Meyers on 38 North has the summary:

Finally, the maturity of North Korean offensive cyber operations has been demonstrated through the integration of destructive attacks by cyber units during military exercises executed in the midst of escalating tension with South Korea. For instance, following the December 2012 launch of the Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite via the Unha-3 satellite launch vehicle, tensions on the Korean peninsula were high. That March, following the passing of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR 2087) and B-52 strategic bomber overflights in South Korea, North Korea responded with a particularly aggressive disruptive attack against South Korea. This massive wiper attack targeted South Korea’s financial and media sectors and coincided with provocations by North Korean military and escalating political rhetoric. This pairing allowed for maximum psychological impact, while demonstrating North Korea’s ability to integrate offensive cyber activities into well-developed military doctrine. During these attacks, the Korea Broadcasting System (KBS), Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), Yonhap Television News (YTN) and several Korean financial institutions reported disruptions. With the threat of military escalation on the table, many in South Korea would have depended on the media outlets for breaking news. Disruption of ATM networks and financial institutions would further add to the chaos as word of media disruptions began to spread.

As tensions are once again escalating between North Korea and the international community, more attacks perpetrated by DPRK cyber actors are likely. The recent increase in financial sector targeting associated with these actors may illustrate the potential for disruptive attacks to demonstrate both the capability of the North Korean actors, as well to achieve objectives in line with their broader military doctrine. While North Korea’s isolation may be detrimental to its economy and international relations, it is an effective shield from which to launch offensive cyber operations against a connected and delicate global system.

Of course, they must have a connection to that global system. I wonder if it’s vulnerable to Western manipulation as well.

Miguel de la Torre has no more patience for the Evangelical movement, as noted in Baptist News Global:

Evangelicalism has ceased to be a faith perspective rooted on Jesus the Christ and has become a political movement whose beliefs repudiate all Jesus advocated. A message of hate permeates their pronouncements, evident in sulphurous proclamations like the Nashville Statement, which elevates centuries of sexual dysfunctionalities since the days of Augustine by imposing them upon Holy Writ. They condemn as sin those who express love outside the evangelical anti-body straight jacket.

Evangelicalism’s unholy marriage to the Prosperity Gospel justifies multi-millionaire bilkers wearing holy vestments made of sheep’s clothing who discovered being profiteers rather than prophets delivers an earthly security never promised by the One in whose name they slaughter those who are hungry, thirsty and naked, and the alien among them. Christianity at a profit is an abomination before all that is Holy. From their gilded pedestals erected in white centers of wealth and power, they gaslight all to believe they are the ones being persecuted because of their faith.

Evangelicalism’s embrace of a new age of ignorance, blames homosexuality for Harvey’s rage rather than considering the scientific consequences climate change has on the number of increasing storms of greater and greater ferocity. To ignore the damage caused to God’s creation so the few can profit in raping Mother Earth causes celebrations in the fiery pits of Gehenna.

Miguel says it far better than I possibly could, being an agnostic (and fairly clumsy with words). But I wish Miguel had taken the next step and begun to analyze what makes the Evangelical movement so vulnerable to con-men. Or is all mankind vulnerable to these sorts of things?

I tend to think the culture of religion automatically makes the religious more vulnerable. They’ve already learned to believe there’s a God, despite a lack of evidence; the natural sense of suspicion and common-sense is thus blunted.

But I’m sure Miguel could be more exact, if only he would.

[EDIT added forgotten link to Baptist News Global 11/17/2017]

A reader writes concerning CEO behavior:

The supply-side Repubs get it wrong at every opportunity. No rational CEO will build new plants or hire employees unless and until there is a demand for what they will produce. Do they really think, for example, that 3M will increase Post It Notes production simply because they may now have (after tax reform) the financial ability to do so?

Right. They’re assuming flexible demand when, in fact, there may not be any demand. In fact, the reader’s comment highlights the importance of helping the lower and middle classes, either through redistribution or better education / training.

I think right now any tax cuts will be funneled to the owners of the companies, the investors, in the form of dividends and share buybacks.

Vespertine:

adjective

1. of, relating to, or occurring in the evening:vespertine stillness.
2. Botany. opening or expanding in the evening, as certain flowers.
3. Zoology. appearing or flying in the early evening; crepuscular. [Dictionary.com]

Encountered during a meeting with my boss on Wednesday.

Fun fact: the entire movie will be shot in this pool!
Dammit, I don’t know how to swim!

I’ve seen Constantine (2005) a number of times over the years, and I think it’s one of those under-appreciated movies you hear about, although I understand that someone’s under-appreciated movie may just be drek to me, and vice versa.  I like Constantine, first and foremost, for the tight plot, which features John Constantine, a cynical, bitter defender of mankind, doomed to Hell, and his encounter with a police detective whose twin sister has just committed suicide.

Except she doesn’t think so.

In a world where the “half-breeds” can whisper in the ears of the vulnerable, manipulating them towards various ends, John functions as a policeman upholding a misty, gloomy treaty between God and Satan, judging when the agents of one or the other have stepped over the ill-defined lines drawn up in that agreement, and removing them – violently.

But the suicide begins a chain of events in which John’s friends, who are not as sympathetic as they might have been, are beginning to die and odd, impossible things are starting to happen. Satan’s son, Mammon, lusts for control of the world, and he’s found a way to do it.

And when push comes to shove, and even God’s agents have betrayed him, John just has to bust the move you wouldn’t expect the hell-bound to do – he commits suicide.

Once you accept the supernatural, the plot seems organic and logical, although I’ll leave fine theological points to the Catholics. I find it easy to believe in Constantine’s actions, as well as those of the detective; the motivations of Constantine’s friends, unfortunately, are less clear, and if they’re interesting, they’re too obscure to actually contribute what they might have to the plot.

The special effects are, for the most part, well done. Hell itself is suitably horrifying, but its references to modern life, principally in the form of the modern city, ruined in hellfire, really makes the point. And I appreciate how the tile floor wrinkles as a body being dragged down to Hell acquires more and more weight – it’s a special effect with a specific, appreciated message.

I will object, however, to a scene in which someone is about to be stabbed when time stops, and … I just don’t think it’s well done. And our glimpse of Heaven, well, what are you going to do with the indescribable? Make it look like a couple of buildings wrapped in golden fog? Granted, it’s a tough one to do, but this felt limp.

I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the ancient evils from Hell against certain modern sensibilities, in particular the egotism mankind’s defenders has, and the calm use of golden, sanctified bullets on the invading force.

And the portrayal of Satan is something I keep coming back to – he’s not overawing or regal, he’s banal and probably enjoys roasting ants under a magnifying glass, and has amazing powers that it’s difficult to understand his goal in using them – except to satisfy childish impulses. It’s a lovely portrayal of evil, if Satan is evil.

I don’t want to forget to mention the very dry sense of humor that occasionally shows up. Just what is this chemistry between John and the police detective? I’m not even sure they know. But it kept me amused.

It’s by no means a perfect movie. I suspect another rewrite of the script might have given us more insight into hell-bound John’s state of mind as he fights for mankind, tormented by the knowledge that he has lung cancer, and that would have increased the impact of the movie. And while I did say the plot was tight, during this viewing I kept a weather-eye out and picked up on a couple of plot holes. For example, the last confrontation with Midnight – what convinces him to help John? That’s not in the least clear.

But it is still a tight ship that celebrates the never-say-die attitude, and that sometimes even Satan can be fooled – and sometime he’ll fool you right back.

Do you adore your leaf blower? Do you consider sleeping with it tucked under one arm because it makes fall so easy? David Dudley in CityLab would like some words with you:

• The crude little two-stroke engines used by most commercial backpack-style blowers are pollution bombs. “Simplest benchmark: running a leafblower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles,” [James] Fallows writes. “About one-third of the gasoline that goes into this sort of engine is spewed out, unburned, in an aerosol mixed with oil in the exhaust.”
• Those emissions—plus all the other fine-particulate crap that the blowers kick up—constitute a public health hazard for anyone in the vicinity, but especially for the poor bastard running the thing. In most cities and suburbs, those most afflicted are low-wage employees of landscaping companies, not residents or homeowners.
• SWEET JESUS THE NOISE GAAH MAKE IT STOP. A gas blower at full cry can exceed a 100 decibels for the operator (OSHA requires hearing protections at 85), as these Sacramento blower foes explain, and it carries for hundreds of feet in every direction, irritating all who dwell therein.

Having just raked again, yesterday, I still don’t have much sympathy for those who use the gasoline-powered things (I should imagine there are electrically powered versions). It may be another example of chasing leisure and labor-saving to the nth degree, and seeing as exercise has once again been singled out as a positive, this time in the realm of memory retention, I gotta say that these little beasties are not cute enough to keep around.

As usual, the GOP seems to have lost contact with reality. From WaPo:

President Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, looked out from the stage at a sea of CEOs and top executives in the audience Tuesday for the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting. As Cohn sat comfortably onstage, a Journal editor asked the crowd to raise their hands if their company plans to invest more if the tax reform bill passes.

Very few hands went up.

Cohn looked surprised. “Why aren’t the other hands up?” he said.

He laughed a little to lighten the mood, but it didn’t cause many more hands to rise. Maybe the CEOs were tired. Maybe they didn’t hear the question. It was a casual poll, but the lukewarm response seemed in tension with much of the public enthusiasm among corporations for a tax overhaul.

The president and his senior team have kept saying that the tax plan would unleash business investment in the United States — new factories, more equipment and more jobs. But, perhaps as the informal poll suggested, there are reasons to be doubtful that a great business investment boom would materialize.

This actually shouldn’t be surprising in light of this academic work that we talked about a while back concerning the lower-than-expected level of business investment occurring right now. If enough companies are not feeling the edge of the knife at their throats because they’ve become dominant, then why should they invest?

I suspect that taxation is not the horrible burden that many Republicans believe. Some companies use creative tax dodges, while others recognize it as simply the price of doing business – and perhaps a welcome price at that.

Smaller business owners will, of course, welcome the lower taxes – but the general lowering of taxes will generally not help competitive positions, because in most cases everyone gets the break.

If the President is serious about unleashing business investment, perhaps it’d make more sense to look into breaking up the big companies. Restore competition – and redundant jobs. Remember, monopolistic practices and giant corporations are antithetical to the American mythos.

Laicize:

What happened was this: The Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, under pressure from victims, posted on its website the names of eight priests who had been laicized — “dispensed from the clerical state” by the Vatican — for sexually abusing children. [WaPo]

How about a battery? Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com suggests hydrogen isn’t really a fuel:

For a very long time, I have been skeptical of hydrogen as a fuel, because, in fact, it isn’t a fuel so much as it is a form of battery. Right now, most hydrogen reformed from natural gas, so it is a fossil fuel; the fans of hydrogen are pushing electrolysis, which uses a lot of electricity, so it was often promoted by the nuclear industry as a justification for building more reactors. It would then be turned back into electricity in fuel cells and drive electric motors, which is what batteries do. But hydrogen is a tiny molecule that is hard to keep bottled, and the whole process seems less and less efficient or straightforward when batteries keep getting better and cheaper. …

Ben Spurr of the Toronto Star notes:

Because the fuel is stored for later use after it’s produced, it could be produced during off-peak periods overnight, which would lower the cost and allow the province to tap into its considerable electricity surplus. Hydrogen would also allow Metrolinx to run clean trains while avoiding the expensive and disruptive work of erecting overhead wires along hundreds of kilometers of track.

Those are both key points; hydrogen as battery could use off-peak power to run trains at peak times. It could help flatten out demand and help pay for those multi-billion dollar refits of the nuclear fleet.

Changing a viewpoint or definition often leads to insights, so I appreciate this recasting of hydrogen as just an irretrievable fuel to a cyclical battery element.

I think dear old dad is about to blame you!

The only character in Drowning Mona (2000) who is not exhibiting a host of tics, neuroticisms, or various forms of narcissism is the police chief of Verplanck, NJ, Wyatt Rash, who is faced with the discovery of Mona Dearly’s body in her son Jeff’s car. And where’s the car? In the lake.

Hidden in this cacophany of emotionally damaged families is a fair murder mystery, for Mona didn’t go willingly into this lake, but all the while madly pumping the miscreant brakes and screaming profanities, the latter being her normal operating procedure for her adult life. Much like the Tunguska Event trees, Mona’s influence has been negative, even nasty, and it’s left her family and, ah, business associates more or less in shock before she died, from her husband, hesitant from beatings, to her son, hell-bent on beer, to her son’s co-business-owner, who has learned not to express emotion. Even the waitress sleeping with a father and son has the twitches at the thought of Mona.

You won’t unravel this mystery before Chief Rash does. Not only don’t you have information he has, but his motivation is the greater – his pregnant daughter’s fiancee is one of the suspects, and things are looking bad for him – and the chief’s daughter. But when another body appears in the lake, pressure begins to build in this farce – is there a mad killer on the loose?

Or is the killer just a bit pissed?

Well acted and with some big stars, if that matters to you, this is a fun little romp; there’s not much of serious interest here, but it’s a well-made movie, full of quirky characters and other bits (my favorite is the funeral home – “As Seen On TV!”), and a story which is in no hurry to reveal big secrets.

From Steve Benen on Maddowblog:

In 1991, former KKK leader David Duke won a Republican gubernatorial primary, and GOP officials from across the country wanted nothing to do with him. The party explored a variety of alternatives, but eventually, even Gov. Buddy Roemer (R) officially endorsed the Democratic nominee, Edwin Edwards.

This wasn’t easy – Roemer had previously taken an “Anyone But Edwards” posture – but when the Republican nominee was considered outrageously unacceptable, it made sense to announce support for the rival candidate.

Edwards was burdened by a series of corruption allegations at the time, leading to a famous bumper-sticker campaign: “Vote for the crook, it’s important.” (Edwards ultimately defeated Duke by 22 points.)

It might be embarrassing, but it’s a unique bumper sticker.

percipient:

1.  : one that perceives
2.  : a person on whose mind a telepathic impulse or message is held to fall [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in the Short Circuit column of The Volokh Conspiracy:

Federal agents investigating company that may have ripped off the VA want to interview eight potentially percipient reviewers who criticized the company online. Must Glassdoor, a platform that allows employees to anonymously review employers, reveal the reviewers’ identities to the gov’t? Yes, says the Ninth Circuit; there is no protected right to anonymous speech here.

In a very long piece (which I did not yet finish), Dave Blair and Karen House discuss the issues facing remote drone operators on Lawfare:

We were struck by the concept of concurrence, this personal form of the Just War tradition, while listening to our crews discuss the strategic logic of various strikes conducted with the goal of stopping the Islamic State. Alongside ethicist Joe Chapa, Dave has argued that when one sees the killing inherent in strikes as a means of personal glory, it risks damaging the soul. This is distinct from properly celebrating technical excellence or collective achievement in a mission, even if the subject matter is the same. Such grasping at fame also leads to a culture of cut-throat competition, which is problematic for a community whose tactics are based on collaboration. For both ethical and tactical reasons, the chain of command ensured crews received as much information as practical about targets, and made a point of discussing strikes as team accomplishments. The crews that finished the target successfully concluded months or even years of finding and fixing that target. The endgame was a capstone achievement done on behalf of all who contributed.

We found that, given adequate access to information and a culture where it was safe to discuss such things, crews would engage in deep and nuanced moral reasoning during the quiet hours of watching a target. The RPA community would come to a consensus about the ‘why’ of a strike, and that agreement provided purpose and focus in the pursuit of the target. When crews ratified the eventual intent to strike, a collective determination helped bring the strike about, providing a tactical edge that proved decisive on more than a few occasions—steely resolve gave the crews a reserve to keep laser focus over long hours. …

The better the crews knew certain targets, the less traumatic the strike was to them. The crews were not only making judgments about the moral logic of the strike, but they were also making assessments regarding the character of the targets as people. In short, what sort of person the target is matters.

In Grossman’s model, most of the people in the crosshairs are ‘tragic enemies,’ people who are fighting under understandable circumstances—the king’s soldiers, answering their nation’s call to arms; Robert E. Lee, fighting for his homeland of Virginia; perhaps even Rommel or Vo Nguyen Giap, depending on one’s historiography. This is why stories of the First World War’s Christmas Truce and Hal Moore and Nguyen Huu An’s 1993 staff ride at Ia Drang move us on an intensely emotional level: Reconciliation between tragic enemies tries to build a better peace in which we do not need to fight each other.

This is not true of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, nor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There is no world, barring a radical road-to-Damascus transformation, where a reconciling staff ride of Kobani would make any sort of sense. The acts these men personally committed—raping children, murdering aid workers, mass beheadings, drownings and immolation on the basis of insignificant differences of religious law, taking sex slaves and creating license for others to do all of these things—place them into a different category. These are not tragic enemies; they are malicious enemies. By their very nature, they are a clear and present hazard to the innocent, and a world where they are free to achieve their objectives is a worse world for humanity. This squares the Grossman model with the remote warrior’s experience. The better a tragic enemy is known, the more traumatic killing them becomes; the better a malicious enemy is known, the more compelling the need to stop them becomes. Thus, there is no real way basic human empathy for a target can be reconciled with the duty to protect the innocent.

While this may tend to bring down collateral damage figures, it may multiply the guilt when that does occur.

I think Dave & Karen’t piece is worth taking a longer look at it than this fragment presented here.

Shit, I don’t know. I was just about to quit reading for the night when a last glance at Retraction Watch yielded up this pointer to an alleged paper in IOSR Journal of Research & Method in Education on, well, the title should probably tell all:

Nobel Prize Physiology 2017 (for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm) is On Fiction as There Is No Molecular Mechanisms of Biological Clock Controlling the Circadian Rhythm. Circadian Rhythm Is Triggered and Controlled By Divine Mechanism (CCP – Time Mindness (TM) Real Biological Clock) in Life Sciences.

Can an artificial intelligence – of which we have no known general forms – suffer from dementia? Or – as I am far more inclined to think – is this just a randomly generated collection of nonsense? The author is …

Dr V M Das, Das Nursing Home, Fatehgarh, India University Of God.

In case you’re wondering, there is a University of God website, but whether or not they’re connected to this is not clear. Back to the fun, here’s the start of the Abstract:

Mind, the inner most box of nature has not been investigated by modern physicists. Mind has not been incorporated in Standard model. Mind can only be studied by participatory science. Having searched Basic building blocks of the universe i.e. mass part of reality, we have also investigated mind part of reality and finally two fundamental particles with mind and mass realities are hypothesized. Now we discuss how to further investigate mind so as to know their structures and functions. Atomic genetics is the branch of science where we investigate about fundamental interactions of the universe i.e. atomic transcription and translations. New words have been coined to understand hidden science of mind part of reality.. We are set of informations (Code PcPs). Informations (Code PcPs) never die. The theory predicts that Informations (Code PcPs) could be recreated. Hence dead cell could be made Alive only by Highest center of the universe (Almighty B.B.B). To understand real biological clock and to understand circadian rhythm triggering and regulation , we have to understand Basic Building block ( mind CCP, Code PcPs and CP , mass realities ) ( Fig 1)

I think I’ll just hope this is another hoax paper, used to expose journals as merely predatory. But it’s impressive hoaxing, because it’s giving me a headache even as I chuckle.

But this cost caught me by surprise. NewScientist (4 November 2017) reports on how much energy it takes for the “mining” that supports Bitcoin, and it’s non-trivial:

We have known for a while that bitcoin hogs energy. That is down to the way it works with the blockchain. Each transaction starts with a user broadcasting the details of that transaction to a network of linked computers, where it is duplicated in thousands of identical, unfalsifiable ledgers. “A blockchain, including bitcoin, has to operate on the assumption that no other computer can be trusted,” says Teunis Brosens, economic analyst at ING. So instead of trusting anything, each computer independently verifies part of the transaction, in a process called mining.

Mining prevents computers creating fake ledgers. They need to show “proof of work”, a gruelling cryptographic puzzle that takes so much processing power that generating false entries becomes prohibitive.

All that processing guzzles a lot of electricity. That’s still peanuts compared with the energy use of the internet, but one recent estimate put the annual electricity consumption of bitcoin mining at 23.07 terawatt hours, roughly the amount of electricity used by Ecuador each year.

I had no idea it was that high, and it really calls into question the scalability of this approach to electronic currencies. As someone who’s taken on scalability and performance issues a time or two, this doesn’t sound like it’s solvable simply because it’s designed to make false entries far too expensive.

That is, you solve the scalability problem and your trust level will deteriorate something approaching zero.

So, as NS reports, a new approach is being evaluated:

The latest solution is a radical one: change the way blockchain works altogether. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of cryptocurrency network Ethereum, announced last month that he would adopt a completely different way of doing transactions, known as “proof of stake”.

He adds his voice to a chorus who think that instead of proving a computer is trustworthy by taking out a “proof of work”, they could vet themselves by placing a small amount of money into a fund, which they get back if the validation turns out to be authentic, says Brosens. In a similar way to proof of work, it is difficult for fraudsters to replicate.

I’d hesitate to jump right on that bandwagon until it’s been fully evaluated by people smarter than me. Experts. By which I mean computer-savvy criminals.

I don’t read Retraction Watch enough, but I found some time this weekend and they came up with this bit of AUGH!

This week, we received a press release that caught our attention: A company is releasing software it claims will write manuscripts using researchers’ data.

The program, dubbed “Manuscript Writer,” uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate papers, according to the company that created it, sciNote LLC. A spokesperson explained the software generates a first draft the scientist should revise, and won’t write the Discussion, “the most creative and original part of the scientific article.” But can it provide any coherent text?

Oh, no doubt coherent. But the point of anything you write is to find a way to communicate the essence of your subject to the reader. While I understand that in the field of archaeology it’s often a problem getting researchers to put their shovels away and actually write their field reports and findings, I think most researchers are motivated simply because that’s the only way to advance from junior to senior, from senior to world class and people actually respect you. And that should require you to sit down and write that damn prose.

Not have some machine do it for you – and maybe foul it up.

I found this opinion to be of particular interest.

David Moher of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute said the program also raises a different concern:

The product appears to be geared to maintain the publication mill – publish or perish. Many universities and research institutes are trying to move away from this model. Today, there are many avenues to make research accessible, such as Open Science Framework and a host of preprint servers. Most importantly, research needs context and I’m not sure this tool can or should be providing the necessary human involvement in generating research reports.

Getting away from publish or perish – it certainly sounds good. I wonder what unintended consequences will come of it.

If he upsets you, just imagine what he looks like naked, Mrs Hoffman.

In general, when I hear the word propaganda, I automatically expect dishonesty and incompetence, but in The Man I Married^[1] (1940) I found neither. Carol, a successful New York editor, married Eric Hoffman, an immigrant from Germany, eight years ago, and they have a son. Word has come from Germany that Eric’s father needs help with the factory he owns, so Eric is taking his family there to help his father settle matters.

The era? The late 1930s. A little background for those who didn’t follow along on the World War II section of your history studies. World War II didn’t start on December 7, 1941, when America entered the War. It started in stutters and stops. Some might include the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), although that was more of a proxy fight; the annexation of the Sudetenland in September, 1938 might be a proper start, although no actual fighting took place. For actual fighting, the invasion of Poland in September 1939 would be the beginning, at least for Europe. Based on some dialog, this movie appears to be set in perhaps August of 1938.

As they prepare to leave, a medical doctor of their acquaintance visits them and asks for a favor, the conveyance of $500 to his brother, a philosopher Gerhardt, who has been imprisoned at Dachau. They are happy to oblige, and embark on a passenger liner for the trip.

The movie makers take advantage of the disembarkation to surprise their audience, undoubtedly American, who may not understand how the dominance of Adolph Hitler has saturated all of German life at this juncture. Every social interaction ends with a Heil Hitler, and the tension on the dock is palpable to the audience, if not to the families coming off the ship. In the Hoffman family, all are delighted, both for the novelty and for the return home.

But it is on the train, in a compartment they share with a German, where the real propaganda kicks in. Eric is reading bits and pieces from a newspaper he’s picked up – radios are sold to the citizens by the German government for only 40 marks! After several other references, including Volkswagen, the German sharing the compartment politely sweeps up his belongings and leaves the compartment, but with a short monologue – yes, the radios are 40 marks, but you cannot use them to listen to Moscow, Paris, or London, and why, he says sarcastically, would a loyal German citizen need to listen to those when the German newspapers are right here?

It’s a lovely commentary on the importance of the control of information for a dictator, and conversely the gathering of true information from diverse sources for citizens.

They eventually arrive at Eric’s father’s home, an elderly man who is careful with his words. Why? Because one day after a gathering there, someone was arrested and taken away for disrespecting Hitler, and the old man suspects his man-servant for reporting the crime.

From here on we see the consequences of Nazi domination of Germany. There is the brutalization of non-Germans by Germans, but done with nuance: some of the Germans remonstrate with those Germans who are cruel, and those who are cruel are also coarse. I suspect the idea was that the lowest classes suffered the most from the incredible inflation caused by the World War I reparations demanded by France, and so given the opportunity to be dominant, they seized on the opportunity. There are other incidents, and then, of course, the caution that wafts throughout society: do not disrespect Hitler, do not cause trouble, do not help the bullet ridden neighbor stumbling through the night.

Carol, of course, wishes to convey the money to the doctor’s brother, and to this end she contacts an American foreign correspondent named Delane in Berlin, with whom she discovers that Gerhardt is dead. Delane then tricks the address of Gerhardt’s widow from a German official, and they visit her to give her the money. When the widow asks how her husband of forty years died, they report that he died of appendicitis.

She remarks that as being a bit funny, he having had his appendix out twenty years earlier.

Meanwhile, Eric has been captivated by his return to German society, and having only been gone for eight years, its improvement in terms of tangible wealth and intangible pride makes it entirely plausible. He has been trying to sell the factory, but has reported little luck; during this period, they attend numerous social events, from dinners to a full-on (and fascinating) political rally. But eventually an offer comes through, and now he won’t accept it – no one accepts a first offer, he explains to Carol, who now wants to return home.

Skipping some propaganda-motivated, yet organic plot-twists, we may know where this is going, and eventually Eric admits he’s cheating on his wife with a proper Aryan woman he knew growing up. The marriage is at an end, and Carol gives up on it. But there is still one thing to have a tug-of-war over: their son. In an era where a divorced woman always gets the children, he insists this is a German child and will remain in Germany, despite her protests that he is American and should come home with her.

In the climactic scene attended by Eric’s new girlfriend, the fight over the child appalls Eric’s father. He appeals to tradition, to good sense, even to patriarchal authority, all for naught. But in the face of the good Aryan woman of Eric’s dreams, so contemptuous of the old German man who refuses to subordinate himself to the new, better ways, Eric’s father drops the A-Bomb, the hidden fact.

Eric’s late mother was a Jewess.

The look of shock on the girlfriend’s face before she sprints horror-stricken to the door is fucking priceless – what, did he have cooties? Eric, already listing to port from having refused his father’s direct orders, capsizes and sinks before our eyes, a man caught in a system where he is suddenly no longer on top, but in the sewer with shit flowing all over him.

And it’s a system where he can never, ever hope to climb out of the sewer. Such is the nature of authoritarian systems where irrelevant, permanent attributes of a person are used to classify and assign people to economic categories. The opposite of a meritocracy, is means the best are stuck in their meaningless categories, while the incompetent can rise to the top, spreading disaster around them until the very ground beneath their feet opens and consumes them.

Eric is lost, but Carol and her son are not; they depart for America. So the story is neither happy nor noir, but like most of life, a mix. While I shan’t quite recommend it, for the audience concerned about the politics of today it’s worth a viewing, if only to admire the artistry of a propaganda piece that must have been made in quite a hurry.

¹While I don’t care much for the title The Man I Married, the alternative title mentioned on Wikipedia is infinitely worse: I Married a Nazi.

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare look into the recent allegations of a kidnapping plot with intent to deliver the victim, Fethullah Gulen, to his political enemy, President Erdogan of Turkey, to be implemented by former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. They look with the hard eyes of experienced National Security lawyers, and so it looks a little grim for Flynn and his son, Michael Jr.

But that’s not all:

Flynn would be barred from continuing to act as a foreign agent after January 20, when he took office, and that offense (a felony) would not be able to be remedied—as Flynn has sought to do previously—with retroactive filings.

Finally, there’s the matter of what all of this means for President Trump, who famously asked then-FBI Director James Comey to back off of the Flynn investigation in the period before he then fired Comey. This request has always represented a grave matter, particularly in the context of President Trump’s larger set of interactions with law enforcement over time. It was, after all, a profound violation of the principle that the President does not direct law enforcement on investigative matters. It is, however, a far graver matter to the extent the investigation of Flynn involved potentially violent felonies. If Flynn is really suspected of involvement in a kidnapping plot, the question of what the President knew and when he knew it goes from being merely important to being acutely crucial.

The public needs to know what precisely President Trump was asking his FBI director when he said to him: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

It’s a little hard for me to understand what might be going through Flynn’s head at the time, although the simple love of money is well known to make men do stupidly dangerous things.

But it’s not yet clear why Trump was so deeply involved that he appealed to Comey to take the pressure off of Flynn. Perhaps here merely didn’t want a hint of mud on his administration, never mind that buckets of it were on the way.