Category Archives: Uncategorized

Or is Decay and Renewal too pretentious?

Portulaca beset with a weed.

And grass, sensing imminent months of storm and wind and cold, prepares to let its seed fly away.

It’s hugging time!

Perhaps the theme of Godzilla 2000 (1999) is Your friends sometimes lurk in wolves’ clothing.

Seems a bit weak.

Or maybe it’s Sometimes you’re just the audience at the heavyweight fight. That might be more accurate, because this time it’s Godzilla, who’s been raiding the Japanese power grid, up against a flying saucer that’s thought to be 60 million years old. Somehow, the Japanese Crisis Control team has deduced that Godzilla’s secret is that his cells regenerate very, very quickly – sort of like the Borg in Star Trek, come to think of it. And, again, somehow, the Crisis Control team, or maybe it’s their rival, the guy with the smart kid and the broken windshield, has figured out that the creatures in the flying saucer want to harvest Godzilla for his secret. Oh, and somehow someone figures out the aliens in the spacecraft want to radically modify Earth’s atmosphere for their own comfort.

Well.

Eventually, there’s a second monster on the ground, and the Big G and the new guy have a rock ’em sock ’em time of it in the heart of Tokyo. Perhaps the best moment comes in the climactic fight when the new monster has a go at swallowing Godzilla whole, and Godzilla’s response is, well, let’s just say that was innovative.

Otherwise, though, it’s some rather awful special effects, some rudimentary plotting for the human characters, and some sort of muddled moral at the end. And definitely the feeling that Godzilla is just defending his territory and doesn’t give much of a crap about the humans, reinforced by some freeform arson at the end.

Definitely only watch at the end of a long day, waiting for the spouse to get home before you can go to bed. Or not at all.

While discussing this with my Arts Editor (she only viewed part of the movie), it occurred to me to consider whether or not Godzilla represents the United States, at least in this movie. After all, for all their efforts, the Crisis Control Team, the standin for the Japanese nation, are basically powerless to affect the behavior of the entity defending them. While they may be grateful that the attacking aliens are defeated, they are also trampled underfoot by a defender who really has his own concerns at heart – much like the Americans in post World War II East Asia. The entire nuclear thing may just be a decoy for the real message of the movie – Americans, get out!

In the wake of the Las Vegas tragedy, I was surprised to read that Pat Robertson, 700 Club founder, extreme conservative, and all-around God supporter, has taken a position that will end in the termination of gun rights. From Right Wing Watch:

“Violence in the streets, ladies and gentlemen. Why is it happening?” he asked. “The fact that we have disrespect for authority; there is profound disrespect for our president, all across this nation they say terrible things about him. It’s in the news, it’s in other places. There is disrespect now for our national anthem, disrespect for our veterans, disrespect for the institutions of our government, disrespect for the court system. All the way up and down the line, disrespect.”

“Until there is biblical authority,” Robertson continued, “there has to be some controlling authority in our society and there is none. And when there is no vision of God, the people run amok … and we have taken from the American people the vision of God, the whole idea of reward and punishment, an ultimate judge of all our actions, we’ve taken that away. When there is no vision of God, the people run amok.”

The problem is that, if liberty is to be retained, then so must be free will, and history teaches us that “Biblical leadership” leads to more discord in society, not less.

Therefore, without a doubt there will be those who will take up arms against any such Biblical leader, regardless of sect, who tries to impose their interpretation of the Bible on American society.

And therefore guns will be outlawed by this Biblical leadership.

As ever, Pat should really be retired to a rest home. His reasoning capabilities – or perhaps his familiarity with realities which he dislikes – appear to be impaired. Unless he was condemning President Trump, as Trump is guilty of many of these disrespects, plus a few more.

Yeah, I’ll keep that in my heart. Or is that sinful?

We’ve been out of touch since Sunday evening, only getting news on the massacre in Las Vegas second-hand. I’ve done a little more reading about it, but I thought I’d put some thoughts out there before I become weighed down with too many facts, not to mention the various opinions as the incident is politicized by those for gun control and those for expanding gun rights.

By too many facts, I should explain that I want to consider the problem of mass shootings, not the Las Vegas incident in particular, tragic and deserving of attention as it is. Particular incidents tend to magnify certain facets, while neglecting other facets of potentially greater relative importance; by removing particular incidents from the magnifying glass, perhaps a more effective strategy can be found.

So, to my eye, this appears to be a struggle between societal rights and individuals’ rights, wherein we can assign gun control arguments to the former and gun right arguments to the latter. By societal rights, I’m referring to the general American, and perhaps human, need to raise children in a safe environment; the needless loss of children is unacceptable to American mothers. We can see this in, paradoxically, the anti-vaxxer movement, as the American mother in particular, no longer sensitive to the deadliness of certain diseases for which we now vaccinate, react to the probability (false, as it turns out) that vaccinations increase the possibility of autism, a diagnosis which can result in the loss of a ‘normal’ life, especially in the extreme cases characterized by brain damage of various sorts. They resist the vaccinations in this fear, resulting in the resurgence of such debilitating and potentially fatal diseases as whooping cough, smallpox, and others.

By individual rights, I mean the obvious – the right of an individual to own modern firearms for self-protection. The traditional libertarian / NRA (National Rifle Association) argument is that such guns should be available to those who feel they are in danger. Then the libertarians like to engage in a bit of handwaving that supposedly supports the argument.

The liberal reader, at this juncture, may be pointing at the Las Vegas incident and proclaiming the failure of that philosophy. Lacking the facts of this specific incident, I am going to bypass this dead end of an argument, because I think there’s a better way to approach it.

The individual rights argument has an implicit assumption in its holster, and it is this: these incidents will occur and we need to fight back.

Well, this assumption, unexamined, contains at least two problems inimical to the individual rights position.

First, by permitting the expansion of gun rights, it puts more and more firepower in the hands of the good and bad guys. The individual rights argument may be that they are equally balanced, but this is a handwave that ignores the activities of gangs and other organized crime. While we may hope that, a la the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the bad guys will fight each other, we really have a vivid example just south of the American border where the drug gangs, unintentionally presented with riches by the American War on Drugs, not only massacre each other, but the good guys as well.

And, as anyone who’s served in the military will tell you, organized usually beats disorganized. (Appeals to asymmetric warfare will be denied, as they are organized use of warfare, but in an atypical mode. The mistake is to believe that small and faced with overwhelming odds either implies or equals disorganization. The protest is amazingly weak on examination.)

But second, the assumption that these incidents, as enabled by #1, will occur is actually an argument killer. Recall that Americans, by any measure, do not want a society punctuated by mass killings. This is disruptive to the development of children, emotional and intellectual, and ultimately is deleterious to the future of society, i.e., America.

So the individual rights argument claims the gun is needed for self-protection, but the societal rights riposte is to observe that the moment that first gunshot occurs for that momentous gun fight that is at the heart of the individual rights’ argument, the individual rights argument is defeated because society is now disrupted, made less safe – and therefore the future of America is threatened by the individual rights argument.

Given human nature, this result is inescapable. The prevention of such mass shootings should be first priority, not the chance to battle it out.

All that said, given how many people view government as a potential enemy of liberty, and not its enabler, not to mention hunting and even general fun with guns, it is necessary to find that balance between gun rights which does not alienate that part of society, and gun control, where mass shootings are minimized. That has long been a difficult part of politics, as it should be. But the Republican approach of giving the NRA all the rights it wants is not a proper approach to the problem, for the NRA does not have the burden of finding the proper balance; it merely advocates on the side of gun rights.

It’s the role and responsibility of Congress to deny those rights which, if implemented, will lead to a disruption of society. If that results in denying the NRA some of its demands, then good. I would prefer to see politicians with backbones, rather than the current crop in the majority who seem bent on bending over for industry and pressure groups.

And the same for societal rights. Those restrictions which are draconian without increasing the security of society should not be permitted.

This report in Roll Call on a Congressional failure to renew a Federal student loan facility named Perkins Aid reminds me of a short discussion I had on Facebook years ago concerning the entire college/aid ecosystem. Basically, I was, and remain, suspicious of the attempts to provide more and more aid, whether it be loans or grants or scholarships to students, because it reminds me of the classic definition of inflation.

Inflation, informally, is the printing of money without reference to any set standard of goods or other standard measure of wealth; often times, governments will print money without such controls in order to satisfy governmental debts. The classic example is that of the Weimar Republic, faced with World War I reparations, printing money with such abandon that citizens were paying for loaves of bread using wheelbarrows of money.

If I might abstract this, this is the injection of money into a system.

The result of such injections is that the price of goods also rise. Now, this isn’t a problem if all the citizens’ income is similarly affected, but it’s a problem, even a disaster, for those on fixed incomes.

Now let’s map these elements into the student/aid ecosystem. The printing of money maps easily enough to scholarships and grants, perhaps even loans. The common citizens are the students. And the goods?

The goods are the seats in the school systems.

Here’s the problems: the schools see greater and greater injections of money into the system. They can do either, or both, of two things: increase the number of seats, or increase the price of each seat. Why the latter?

Because they can.

After all, it’s manna from heaven. So both prices and seats (remember this) have increased. And that’s not a problem for those students with income that adjusts to the increase in prices, that is, loans/grants/scholarships, or in other words student aid, because those will all increase as the suppliers see the increase in prices – because that was triggered by the earlier wave of increases.

But this is hell for the student with no access to student aid. And it’ll just keeping getting worse.

Any solutions? Well, nothing palatable, I’m sure – but I have to wonder what would happen if student aid was severely curtailed. Certainly, scholarships are immune to suppression because they are often provided by private sources or by the institutions themselves. But loans and grants? These could be suppressed.

And now remember all those seats? Consider this: the students can no longer get the aid. Those seats go unfilled. Now you have educators, first class people, often with Ph.D.s, suddenly without teaching duties.

And while those who are researchers might think it’s time to cheer – no rascally students! – the truth of the matter is that students are always the future, from research assistants to tomorrow’s Nobel Prize winners.

And prestige, prestige, prestige. Most schools, or more properly school administrators, crave it. That’s a good reason to have school rankings, because they bring prestige.

But a school shrinking in enrollment loses prestige. People will ask Why is the school being avoided?

So what happens? The money has been cut off from the system, and the system must adjust – either shrink seats, which is doable but not attractive, or drop prices.

To be honest, the other side of the discussion claimed to have years of experience in college administration and didn’t think it would work out that way. I don’t recall if he gave an explanation, but if he did, it clearly didn’t stick with me.

But whenever I hear a proposal to increase student aid yet again, I always quiver a little and wonder if we’re just wandering down the path to a slightly uglier hell.

Semasiographic:

At the time, Urton identified seven binary features, which would allow for 128 distinct signs. Including different colors would make over 1,000 signs. He did not think the system was alphabetic, with signs representing sounds. Rather, he saw it as semasiographic: Signs had meanings, similar to musical notes and mathematical symbols. [“Unraveling a Secret,” Bridget Alex, Discover Magazine (October 2017)]

Perhaps the most interesting scene in the movie.

The Ladies Man (1961) falls into the cotton-candy genre of stories – it’s big, it’s complex, but when you’re done consuming it, you’re not full and it wasn’t all that good for you. This is a Jerry Lewis vehicle, through and through. His character, who appears to be on the autism spectrum, has graduated college, been dumped by his girl for someone without a head, and is looking for a job, pursuing ads for “bachelors.” After some false starts, he lucks into Mrs. Wellenmellon’s establishment, which houses about fifty ladies who are trying to break into show business. He is used by them for general chores and errands. And where is this going? Hard to say. I took the ride and I still don’t know why I should have bothered. Jerry showcases some tap skills, along with his usual farce. But, in the end, I just shrugged and filed it under “foreign experience.” Maybe it has meaning for other people.

Or perhaps it was left on the TV channel’s cutting room floor?

For another viewpoint from an expert, here’s Jonathan Rosenbaum’s entry on The Ladies Man. It may be that you have to be of that era, or an expert in it, to understand the commentary Lewis is creating.

Shipping containers turned into a starburst? From what I’ve read, no – this seems to be all computer rendering.

Completely convincing.

One of the odder indoor configurations.

By Whitaker Studio, UK.

Halobacteria:

Halobacteria (also Halobacteriacea) are a class of the Euryarchaeota,^[1] found in water saturated or nearly saturated with salt. Halobacteria are now recognized as archaea, rather than bacteria. The name ‘halobacteria’ was assigned to this group of organisms before the existence of the domain Archaea was realized, and remains valid according to taxonomic rules^{[citation needed]}. In a non-taxonomic context, halophilic archaea are referred to as haloarchaea to distinguish them from halophilic bacteria. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the the Research “come on” for Earth to Sky Calculus:

Earth to Sky Calculus has been conducting research into the stratosphere since 2010. Their work has resulted in cutting-edge findings on halobacteria, cosmic radiation and other conditions 100,000 feet about Earth.

Dorota Kobiela decided she wanted to make a movie about the artist Van Gogh … in the style of Van Gogh.

By hand.

This link leads to a BBC report on the project.

The samples they show remind me faintly of another film, A Scanner Darkly (2006), in which the unusual visual element contributed substantially to a work in which reality itself has become uncertain. That would certain be echoed in a Van Gogh view of reality.

Ah, and here’s the website for the movie, Loving Vincent. It appears to be in limited release already. I’ll have to check this out.

Waddya guys do again?

It may be a familiar theme, but it’s still riveting. On The Waterfront (1954) examines the problems inherent in cultural xenophobia as well as the every man for himself mentality. In this examination we see what we can remain, much to our perplexed sorrow, or what we can become once we take those steps of faith – and the harrowing nature of those steps.

“A hawk has made the pigeons nervous,” former boxer Terry, now dockworker, says about his flock of racing pigeons. The obvious allusion of the hawk is to the mob boss, Johnny Friendly, who runs the Dockworker’s union to which Terry belongs. Friendly consistently manipulates the members of the union to ensure they won’t trust each other, nor anyone outside of their insular little community, so that the only grouping is his ‘muscle’, armed and unafraid to use those weapons to keep everyone in line.

But the real hawk is conscience, the conscience of men who understand, if only dimly, that evil is in their midst, gnawing at their souls, glutting itself on wealth scooped from the pockets of the workers. They know the never seen Joey was killed by the mob muscle, and that knowledge feeds their hawk, causing it to flutter about, stirring them to restless anger.

Terry’s own hawk is feeding on his inadvertent collusion in the murder of Joey. Joey had planned to testify against the mob bosses, and Terry helped lure him for his apartment; from the roof, Joey takes a short-lived wing, and in his fatal plunge becomes food for the hawks. Terry avoids his conscience, convincing himself that he thought that Joey would merely be persuaded not to testing, but is forced to face the talons as he discovers the classic interest in Joey’s sister, Edie, a woman driven to discover what happened to her beloved brother.

The authorities, ever distrusted by the working men of the docks, have come to investigate corruption and murder, and serve Terry with a subpoena. Terry dances and dodges, for it’s every man for himself and testifying would mean the mob descending on him, but the hawk is digging into his shoulders for the ride, and soon he finds himself with his brother, Charley. Charley, who years before had told Terry to throw the fight that could have put him in the big-time. Charley, who gave him a few bucks for ensuring the profitability of Friendly’s bet. Ah, short-term gain and fraud, and how did that serve you?

“I’m a bum.” Every man for himself.

Charley had been assigned to bring Terry to Friendly to ensure Terry would not testify, but Terry is making the transition from a bum to a man right in front of him, and Charley knows what that means. Charley, at least in this TV version, is not well-drawn, so the scene is not convincing from his point of view, but Charley cannot force Terry to his death, a costly decision for Charley. Terry is lured out of his apartment, nearly run over, and finds Charley’s body. He vows revenge, but Father Barry won’t permit him to throw his soul away, escorting him away.

Following his damning testimony, Terry discovers his pigeon flock destroyed by a boy who helped him with it: a pigeon for a stool-pigeon, the boy shouts as he throws a dead pigeon at Terry. Thus are those who ignore their consciences destroyed, no? Terry then descends to the pier, unconsciously looking to rescue another flock, for it’s time for the dockworkers to receive their assignments, and soon Johnny and Terry are fighting. When Johnny finds Terry has a backbone, he calls for help from his mob muscle, and as Johnny is pounded to a pulp, the silently watching dockworkers surge back and forth, the claws of the hawk urging them on, but their uncertainty holding them back.

They said there’d be a popsicle at the end.

Father Barry and Edie show up, push aside the battered Friendly, and minister to a badly hurt Terry. As they do so, a ship’s owner comes by and demands the union get work, but the dockworkers ignore Friendly’s harangue, stripping Friendly of his power. Terry now must walk that harsh path from what they all know, the comfort of familiarity, even when it’s the brutal mob muscle, short wages, and no futures, to the uncertainty that will come by working together, strongly and fairly. Terry makes that pain-wracked journey, step by horrible step, and the dockworkers follow him to a better place as they begin the work of the day, leaving the lash of their former masters behind.

A movie filled with stars and stars to be, it’s a lesson in the importance of ethics and honesty, not only with each other, but with one’s self as well.

Strongly recommended.

WaPo won the Pulitzer Prize in the category of National Reporting in 2016 for their ongoing collation and reporting on people who were shot and killed by police during the year in the entire nation. The 2017 database is here, listing, as of today, 737 dead. Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine uses this database to analyze the current uproar concerning NFL players kneeling during the national anthem:

The Post has indeed found that there’s a strikingly consistent number of fatal police shootings each year: close to 1,000 people of all races. But that figure includes the armed and the unarmed. Fatal police shootings of the unarmed — the issue Kaepernick and Reid cite — are far fewer. In the first six months of this year, for example, the Post found a total of 27 fatal shootings of unarmed people, of which black men constituted seven. Yes, you read that right: seven. There are 22 million black men in America. If an African-American man is not armed, the chance that he will be killed by the police in any recent year is 0.00006 percent. If a black man is carrying a weapon, the chance is 0.00075. One is too many, but it seems to me important to get the scale of this right. Our perceptions are not reality.

Since Andrew is not citing how many black men are armed, I frankly don’t have a lot of faith in this math. I should think the proper math for calculating the probability of an unarmed black man being killed in an encounter with police might be something along the lines of

P_b * (1 – G_b) * S_b

Where P_b is the probability of a black man encountering the police, G_b is the probability that the black man is armed (and does it have to be a gun?), and S_b is the probably that the police will shoot an unarmed black man. Decorate with some solid statistical numbers and do a bit of algebra, and I’d feel more confident.

His note concerning some work done by a Cornell Ph. D. student, based on data from the Police-Public Contact Survey, is more interesting:

It’s a big survey — around 150,000 people, including 16,000 African-Americans. And it provides one answer (although not definitive) to some obvious questions. First off, are black men in America disproportionately likely to have contact with the police? Surprisingly, no. In the survey years that Lamoine looked at, 20.7 percent of white men say they interacted at least once with a cop, compared with 17.5 percent of black men. The data also separates out those with multiple encounters. According to Lemoine, black men (1.5 percent) are indeed more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to have more than three contacts with police per year — but it’s not a huge difference.

On the key measure of use of force by the cops, however, black men with at least one encounter with cops are more than twice as likely to report the use of force as whites (one percent versus 0.4 percent). That’s the nub of it. “Force,” by the way, includes a verbal threat of it, as well as restraining, or subduing. If you restrict it to physical violence, the data is worse: Of men who have had at least one encounter with the police in a given year, 0.9 percent of white men reported the use of violence, compared with 3.4 percent of black men. (For force likely to cause physical injury, i.e. extreme force, however, the ratio is actually better: 0.39 percent for white men compared with 0.46 percent of black men.)

What do we make of this data? I think it shows the following: that police violence against black men, very broadly defined, is twice as common as against white men, and narrowly defined as physical force, three times as common, but that there’s no racial difference in police violence that might lead to physical harm, and all such violence is rare. (Recall that the 3.4 percent of black men who experience violence at the hands of the police are 3.4 percent of the 17.5 percent of those who have at least one encounter with the cops, i.e., 0.5 percent of all black men.)

Of course, there’s always some question about data collection, and here I’d have to ask if this is self-reported data or not. Self-reported data is always subjective, and therefore always a trifle dubious. Still, it’s interesting how it turns out.

I am a bit disappointed that that Andrew limits himself to violent encounters. After all, these incidents are not isolated, but are part of a spectrum and collection of every day behaviors. We’ve often heard of profiling – does this show up in the data? And what sort of effect do unsupportable traffic stops and harassment have on the black community?

Earth To Sky Calculus sent a balloon up to 100,000 ft during the recent eclipse, and here’s the result, as assembled by Ginger Perez:

Earth to Sky Calculus is selling a poster. Spaceweather.com has more information.

Joseph DeThomas on 38 North believes both North Korea and the United States have blinded themselves to acceptable conflict end states other than blowing each other into nuclear bits:

Due to a fatal error in North Korean strategic calculation, this environment has been destabilized. Pyongyang has chosen to: 1) add millions of US hostages to its strategy by pressing forward with development of a thermonuclear-tipped ICBM; and 2) craft and test a nuclear war fighting strategy that targets nuclear weapons on key US military assets and facilities which are critical to US and ROK defense planning. Leaving aside whether having American civilians in North Korean nuclear cross-hairs would undercut the faith of our ROK and Japanese allies in US resolve, the US and ROK militaries simply cannot afford to have key air, sea or logistics bases and debarkation points for US ground reinforcements neutralized by a DPRK nuclear first strike—not to mention the military and civilian casualties that would result from absorbing the North’s first strike. However effective US and Japanese theater missile defense might be, it is vulnerable to a barrage of missiles and the DPRK has hundreds available for attacks on Japan and South Korea. Any prudent US commander would have strong incentives to preemptively attack North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities at the outset of a conflict in order to limit the damage to vital US military assets.[1] …

Denuclearizing North Korea is a worthy goal. But it is not worthy of a nuclear war in East Asia—even one the US would win. There are less appealing but acceptable alternatives that would leave US alliances intact and allow the natural advantages of the US and its allies to erode North Korea’s hostility over time. The same logic should apply to Pyongyang. It has been remarkably successful at playing off its many neighbors and the United States. It has survived the worst of its economic maladies. The greatest threat to its survival is forcing the US into a war in which it believes its own people’s survival is at stake. The DPRK could easily return to its earlier deterrent strategy and survive for decades.

Something we always dreaded during the Cold War – mistakes on both sides. In this case, it’s mistakes made of ideology, mendacity, and misunderstanding.

For those keeping track of this interesting Constitutional issue, Politico is reporting that the hearing concerning whether or not Arpaio’s conviction will be vacated will be October 4. A collection of Democratic lawmakers have submitted a letter to the judge asking her to reject the pardon.

More than 30 House members are urging a federal judge to reject President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio on a contempt of court charge.

The lawmakers—all liberal Democrats—filed an amicus brief Wednesday arguing that Trump’s pardon amounts to an unconstitutional intrusion on the judicial branch’s ability to ensure that its orders are obeyed.

“A full and unconditional presidential pardon….effectively deprives the Court of ‘the independent means of self-protection,’ and makes the Court dependent on the Executive,” the House members argue in the new brief. “The pardon here is an intentional usurpation of the Court’s authority by the President. President Trump does not pretend that his pardon of the Defendant is based upon the considerations of grace that usually justify the exercise of the pardon power.”

That would cause quite a stir and would probably go right to the Supreme Court. But would it further polarize the nation – provoke an interesting debate? I fear the former, not the latter.

As the Puerto Rico disaster reaction continues, it looks like Trump isn’t really into it. From CNBC:

President Donald Trump on Saturday lashed out at the mayor of San Juan and other officials in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, contemptuous of their claims of a laggard U.S. response to the natural disaster that has imperiled the island’s future.

“They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” Trump said in a series of tweets a day after the capital city’s leader appealed for help “to save us from dying.”

“Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help,” Trump said.

The tweets amounted to a biting response to San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who had accused the Trump administration of “killing us with the inefficiency” after Hurricane Maria. She implored the president, who is set to visit the U.S. territory on Tuesday, to “make sure somebody is in charge that is up to the task of saving lives.”

Trump has pledged to spare no effort to help Puerto Rico recover from Maria’s ruinous aftermath, and tweeted that military personnel and first responders had done “an amazing job,” despite having “no electric, roads, phones etc.”

Ignoring the personalities and politics involved, that last paragraph does raise an important point that, in the future, will be exacerbated by the forecast increasing violence of weather phenomena: what’s an appropriate metric for measuring our response to such disasters?

I mean, is it the number of lives lost after the incident has occurred?

Is it the number of lives lost during the incident?

Speed of response?

Magnitude of response?

Think about it – we’re starting to deal with disasters of a magnitude with which we’re certainly unfamiliar; in some cases, the severity will be unprecedented. And while I think Trump is, at his foundation, completely incompetent for the job of President, I do not care to follow into the condemnation trap.

That is, how hard is this particular problem to solve? How do we measure his response vs that of Hurricane Sandy vs that of Hurricane Katrina? Are those storms comparable? How does an island complicate matters? How does the damage to the mainland complicate our response to the damage to the island?

It’s worth contemplating. Right now, unless the commentator has some direct experience in major disaster relief, like Ret. Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, it’s hard to see the accusations – or Trump’s claims of an expeditious response – and anything more than a case of one person’s word against another over an incident we didn’t experience.

Maybe it’s the engineer in me, but we really need a way to measure the competency of the Federal response to disasters that is independent of the person doing the measurement. It’s fundamental not only for measuring the competency of the people in charge, but also for improving our response.

And that will be critical in the future.

David French on National Review thinks he knows what’s wrong with college sports:

None of this is surprising. All of it should highlight the need for radical reform. After all, in college sports we see the old collision — between the socialist Utopianism of the central planner and the entrepreneurial will of the individual. It’s long been puzzling to me how many conservatives support the NCAA model of athletic exploitation. Karl Marx once famously proclaimed, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The NCAA corollary is, if anything, a more corrupt, “From each according to his marketability, to each according to our whim.” “Need” has nothing to do with it.

And his solution?

There’s an easy alternative. Let’s replace the vast NCAA rule book with one line: “NCAA student-athletes must be enrolled at the school and in good academic standing when practicing with an NCAA-sanctioned team or playing in an NCAA-sanctioned event.” That’s it. That’s not a rulebook, it’s a notecard. It’s a slightly longer way of saying, “Treat student-athletes like all other students.” If a school wants to pay players a market rate, let it. If a local car dealer wants to use an athlete for a commercial, that’s fine. If a booster wants to contribute to a player’s salary, let him. Make the NCAA honest. Properly compensate the people who generate the wealth.

And this will place our colleges and universities – our places of higher education, coincidentally upon which the future of the nation rests – in the position of trying to balance the competing needs of education and having a winning team.

And notice how the former goal – education – is a well-defined, if vast, goal, with unlimited positive benefits for both the school, in terms of prestige, and for the nation, for increasing its competitive edge, while the benefits of the goal of having the latter, a winning sports team, are much harder to identify and quantify.

Let’s compare and contrast:

1. Goals
   1. Education: this the main purpose of an educational institution, to instill an education in its students. This should be the organic identity of the school, no matter its specialization.
   2. Sports team: putting a sports team on the field is not a putative purpose of an educational institution,and it has little to nothing to do with higher education. Not that you don’t learn important life lessons playing sports, but these are not the sorts of lessons that require the background of, say, Stanford; they can be learned just as well in the Minor Leagues of baseball.
2. Benefits
   1. The benefits of pursuing education unlimited and multifaceted, from bringing prestige to the instittution, benefiting a nation whose very existence may depend on the educational attainments of its citizens, to the citizens themselves becoming more aware of the complexities of nature and human culture that surrounds them. In short, a good education in a discipline which the student loves is of nearly unlimited benefit for all the actors.
   2. The benefits of a winning sports team? Beyond those that accrue to the actual players, one must appeal to the sense of community they engender. At this juncture, I must admit that I am speculating, because, despite the fact that I attended and graduated from the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities, the various sports teams were non-factors in my cultural life; indeed, most of my time was spent sleeping or studying. So I must merely speculate that a winning sports team improves student spirit; and beyond that, I see little of lasting benefit.
3. Detriments, by which I mean factors that are detrimental to the institution, nation, or students.
   1. There are few detriments in pursuing the goal of providing higher education, but I can think of a couple. First, there is, of course, academic fraud, brought on through the publish-or-perish culture in academics these days. Second, a certain insularity does seem to accrue in the academic world, as the most extreme example might be seen as the antifa movement.
   2. In the attempt to field a winning sports team, there are many detrimental factors. There is,
      of course, the provision of the “student-athletes”, which has led to periodic scandals and uproar. If we follow David’s recommendation, the nature of the scandals may change, but they won’t go away. “Tutoring” scandals wherein teachers are bought off, papers are written by someone other than the student-athlete, and other such incidents will not disappear due to David’s proposal. In general, corruption will continue unabated, and now perhaps unabashed.Second, the entire enterprise of college sports may become unstable as some institutions devote large amounts of resources, perhaps to the detriment of their real purpose, in pursuit of victory, while other institutions do not, resulting in boring contests and even teams dropping out.

      Third, what if your sports team is a losing proposition? Does that mean your community suffers? Is this a wise risk to take in an area that doesn’t contribute to the mission of the institution?
      But less obviously, there’s this entire “community binding” exercise. As frequent readers are aware, I recently commented on tribalism, and certainly a community falls into the same category as tribalism. I do not suggest that they are the same, but I am concerned that they instill certain attitudes that are inimical to the nation as a whole. I will grant that I am fairly blind to this entire part of the human experience. The University of Minnesota keeps sending me these applications to join the alumnae association, and while intellectually I guess I sort of get it, emotionally I find the entire phenomenon perplexing. I didn’t particularly enjoy the educational experience, even if I have derived many benefits from it, so why should I want associate with it afterwards?

No, I think David’s tried to step across a chasm and come up halfway short. I think the problem is that NCAA college sports, as it currently exists, is profoundly foreign to the mission of any educational institution. If David really wants to enable student-athletes to achieve their economic potential, especially at such a young age, then he should advocate educational institutions should simply dump the entire idea of the Big 10, Pac-10, the SEC, the NCAA, the entire schlepping, scandal-prone, distracting mess.

That’s what I advocate. If the NFL and the NBA want a minor league, then have them set it up.

But so far as I can see, college sports teams, as they are currently constituted, do nothing for the educational system as a whole, and that’s because they do not contribute to the main mission and purpose of the institutions.

I’d been thinking this would be an opportune moment for Tesla to make a move – and  CEO Elon Musk agrees. From Fortune Magazine:

Eight days ago, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm causing widespread damage and knocking out electrical power to the entire island of 3.5 million residents. As soon as the storm passed, Tesla began sending hundreds of Powerwall battery systems that can be paired with solar panels to the devastated island in an effort to restore electric power there.

And the shipments of Powerwall battery systems are continuing, a Tesla spokesman confirmed.

The Powerwall, which was first introduced in April 2015, is a battery designed for homes that store the energy generated by solar panels.

Tesla employees are currently in Puerto Rico working on installations of the battery systems and installing or repairing solar there. The employees are coordinating efforts with local organizations.

And they’re not advertising it, apparently. They’re just putting their backs into the effort.

It’s been a few weeks since the DACA kerfuffle, in which the Democrats came to an agreement with President Trump concerning the immigrants who came to the United States when they were very young, over the objections of the GOP leaders and the extremist-right wing that believes it controls the heart-strings of right. They predicted disaster for President Trump’s approval ratings. At this juncture, any such effect should be obvious. And the result from Gallup is …

… yeah, the extreme right wing’s predictions are about as good as Sylvia Browne, the notorious psychic who left a long history of failure in her wake – but kept on smilin’. There was no fall off the cliff (it was a small cliff in any case), and his base stayed in droves. The only folks he might have driven away are the Independents who voted for him, and I think by the time DACA came trotting in, they had already been driven off by his rank incompetence and unsupportable braggadocio.

So how to explain their failure? I’ve been working on that as one of the subjects of this blog, but Andrew Sullivan has published a fine short political history & analysis dating from the time of President Clinton. Not in-depth, but so many of his points correlate with my own observations that I find it a believable piece, and given his own evident independence and willingness to, well, think hard on subjects, I find it appealing enough to use it as a working hypothesis.

And what might be that hypothesis? Unsurprisingly, it’s tribalism, but more deeply explored than I have the knowledge to do so. I found this to strongly correlate with some of the more inexplicable observations of Trump supporters:

One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place. After a while, your immersion in tribal loyalty makes the activities of another tribe not just alien but close to incomprehensible. It has been noticed, for example, that primitive tribes can sometimes call their members simply “people” while describing others as some kind of alien. So the word Inuit means people, but a rival indigenous people, the Ojibwe, call them Eskimos, which, according to lore, means “eaters of raw meat.”

And that option to turn off the critical faculty can be a savior for some in a world ravaged by veritable tornadoes of information. Evaluating all that information, true or false, can be a formidable challenge, especially after a long day at work, whether it’s untangling some computer code or laying asphalt on the highway.

But while I can occasionally turn my back on the world and just read something irrelevant to the moment, I find I can’t just sign up to the tribe and start drinking from the community water fountain; hell, I found it hard enough to join the fencing club. Now, that was just shyness; my real objection to the political tribe is my reading of history and how tribes, whether they be Indians or Irish, American cavalry or, in the worst category, the Nazis, so often engage in the worst of atrocities simply because someone is outside of the tribe. Those activities fill me with horror, and while I doubt most political tribes would engage in the worst of these atrocities, I do see them as being of a spectrum of activities that are detrimental to the future of the United States in that they encourage contempt for their fellow citizens. I remember a time when the contributions of liberals and conservatives were of value to both sides.

That’s why I occasionally will mention that I prefer truth over loyalty, and why I don’t understand why Trump supporters are not aghast at his perpetual lying. I’ll remain an independent and an agnostic to the day I die, and I only hope my wife doesn’t have to testify in court that, no, I did not convert to either Southern Baptist-ism or Democrat-ism on my death-bed, unlike poor Robert Ingersoll’s wife^[1]. The invitation to stop thinking, to stop analyzing, seems to me to signal imminent death in a world where national competitiveness is more and more important.

But Andrew’s article, while not explicit, does, by implication, explain some of the other puzzling aspects of both Democrats and Republicans. If your party is full of people who’ve put their critical faculties on hold, then whoever is dispensing the ideology suddenly has a megaphone of millions of voices to assert their ideas – rational or not.

This is one reason that I do try to fight bad tribal ideas using the language of the offending tribe, rather than the “talking points” of the opposing tribe. In a sense, I’m trying to awaken those sleeping faculties by slapping them with their own ideas and language, where possible, and with obvious common sense where I must. Accompanying such arguments are always questions of truth; I don’t care what your tribe, liberal or conservative, is saying; you tell me, in your own words, why this or that. Can you make it comprehensible? Or are you really just spouting shallow drek you learned from some figurehead?

Let’s take the recent spate of travel scandals in the Trump Administration. During Democratic Administrations, the Republicans had hysterics over mis-use of funds for travel; yesterday, Republican Tom Price resigned from his position as Secretary of Health and Human Services, not because of Republican pressure, but because the overly sensitive President Trump, prickly to criticism suggesting he has any faults, told him to. But Price had a reputation for demanding extreme frugality in government travel when he was a Representative, and then … this?

Well, sure. The other tribe is always wrong, my tribe is always right. It’s provincialism. And it never occurred to Price that he could be wrong. Until now.

And, to get to the heart of the matter, it’s hypocrisy. If we’re going to continue to survive as a first-rate country, we should discard this acidic habit of hypocrisy in our political behavior, because it leads to bitterness and more polarized attitudes, and that defeats the necessary compromises for this nation’s government to function. Say it with me:

What’s wrong for one political party is wrong for all.

My suspicion is that fewer Republicans than Democrats understand that, but then I take a read through, say, The Daily Kos, and I’m not so sure; the tribalism of the progressives can sure be an example of group-think.

Getting back to Andrew, he worries about the country becoming worse and worse. But can we measure that? I don’t know that anyone is trying, but here’s an interesting Gallup time series graph of their polls:

While the liberal tribe appears to be expanding, the conservative tribe is declining, as are the moderates. I consider this a mixed blessing; what I’d really like to see is an Independent movement getting ready to spit on the two polarized tribes.

Perhaps to that end we need a new party. Its first tenet is that We’ll always self-criticize; the second is We’ll always be honest and honestly communicative. And, perhaps even more importantly, We always acknowledge that members of other political parties are our fellow citizens and siblings, and deserve respect.

Perhaps that last pillar will cause gales of laughter from the hardened political veterans. What of it? I think independents who are paying attention might vote for politicians who embrace principles, not positions, so long as they’re good principles. After all, that’s what the Founding Fathers did, and if they were imperfect in that embrace, at least they gave it a shot.

And it’s a lot easier to be loyal to a principle, well enunciated and understood, than to some arbitrary set of goofy positions. Like Climate scientists are in a vast conspiracy to impose socialism. If my respected reader is a Republican, then you really must repeat after me: That’s just goofy. And disrespectful of a whole lot of hard-working scientists who only want a better future for their kids.

¹See The Great Agnostic. For years after the death of the famous Freethinker Ingersoll, rumors circulated that he had converted, on his deathbed, to Christianity. His wife finally testified in court that he had not.

CNN is reporting Tom Price has resigned as Secretary of HHS:

Tom Price, the embattled health and human services secretary, resigned Friday in the midst of a scandal over his use of private planes, a storm that enraged President Donald Trump and undercut his promise to bring accountability to Washington.

Price’s departure came as he’s being investigated by the department’s inspector general for using private jets for multiple government business trips, even to fly distances often as short as from Washington to Philadelphia. The cost for the trips ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And so he joins that exclusive club of The Fallen Mighty, Legislative Version. This Congress’s only prior member is Senator Luther Strange, now soon to be former as noted earlier.

Teetering on the edge? Interior Secretary Zinke, who is also entering into travel scandal territory.

I gotta wonder if the extreme right is feeling uneasy as its leading exemplars are proving to be rather incompetent in the very mechanics of their jobs. I’m afraid the government has a higher bar of ethical behavior than does the private sector, boys.

On Lawfare Daniel Byman provides a primer on the fissures in global jihad. Will we be seeing more caliphates in the future?

Questions of tatarrus or the precise line where apostasy begins and ends mean little to most foot soldiers. Data from captured Islamic State records showed that 70 percent of recruits claimed they had only a basic knowledge of Islam. But some of these questions have a tremendous impact on the appeal of different groups. The revival of the caliphate, for example, proved compelling to many recruits and, regardless of its perceived legitimacy among purists, the temptation to play this popular card will be there in the future.

It’s always tempting to urge the United States to try to play up these divisions, and I’ve done so myself at times. The U.S. track record of influencing the jihadist dialogue, however, ranges from poor to nonexistent, and deliberately trying to generate ever more extreme factions isn’t wise. But these internal fissures do hamper U.S. enemies and do some of the work for us. At the very least, they expend precious time and energy trying to one-up rival groups in their propaganda. At most, the differences lead to actual shots fired or recruits and donors being turned off by infighting.

These endless differences between the various sects of Islam that Daniel notes in the article has always indicated to me that there is always a necessary vigilance concerning the extremists with grievances, real or imagined, against the West, but there’s little to fear in terms of a united Islam crusading against the West. Between the usual burdens of the religious in general and the general loathing they have for each other, a united command appears to be out of the picture.

For that reason there’s little point in allowing ourselves to be distracted from other, more potent opponents, such as Russia, even in its current bedraggled state, North Korea, and what appears to be a highly rational China.

Steve Benen’s post concerning the tendency of the GOP to deny reality is dispiriting:

Up until recently, this analysis was publicly available through the Treasury. As the Wall Street Journal reported overnight, that analysis has now vanished – because it “contradicts Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s argument that workers would benefit the most from a corporate income tax cut.”

The paper was available on the Treasury website during the summer, and it wasn’t clear when it was removed or whether Treasury intended to publish a new analysis. Other technical papers from 2008 through 2016 remain on its site, along with working papers dating back to 1974.

For Mnuchin, it’s critical that people believe that a corporate tax break would benefit workers, which makes all of the evidence to the contrary quite inconvenient.

But that’s just today. What about yesteryear?

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s probably because the Bush/Cheney administration developed a reputation for pulling a similar trick.

In 2005, for example, after a government report showed an increase in terrorism around the world, the administration stopped publishing annual data on international terrorism. When the Bush administration was discouraged by data about factory closings, the administration announced (on Christmas Eve) it would stop publishing information about factory closings. When Bush’s Department of Education found that charter schools were underperforming, the administration sharply cut back on the information it collected about charter schools.

The small blob on the left is Ganymede. In case you’re wondering, yes, Ganymede whirls around Jupiter, like our Moon whirls around the Earth.
Image Credit & Copyright: Damian Peach/SEN

Maybe it’s just the engineer in me, but this unwillingness to face up to reality, in fact to disregard reality, is really disturbing to me. How can they expect to achieve what they promise if they refuse to take reality into account? It’s like trying to account for the motions of Ganymede without taking into account the enormous gravity of Jupiter!

So long as the GOP persists in believing its own ideology rather than the reality dug up by the experts, its attempts to accomplish its promises will fail – and unlike in the past, where they might be excused with ‘good try’ and all that – although that didn’t happen in 2008 after the start of the Great Recession – this time around their contempt for experts, so glowingly displayed by Trump and the Congressional GOP, should be remembered and held against them.

The Great Faker, I expect, will be done in by Fake News, both that of the real news organizations, as well as his own lies.

A reader remarks about that tree in the voting booth:

Sure, it’s crazy. But only slightly less crazy than personhood for corporations. Corporations are property, not persons. My garage does not get to vote, lobby, etc.

At the risk of being nit-picky, I do see a difference between a garage and a corporation – the former is a tangible object incapable of self-directed activities. The latter is an intangible social construct which can be said to be capable of self-directed activities.

Besides the obvious fact that people are tangible objects capable of self-directed activities, I’d argue that corporations fail this personhood test because their aggregate nature practically guarantees difference of opinion on many important issues. To suggest that they are eligible to contribute money to political causes despite those differences in opinion is fallacious; in reality, only those in control of the corporation will have their opinions implemented, effectively amplifying their opinions well beyond the reach of the common citizen.

This makes the position of Chairman of the Board or CEO that much more desirable.

I was going to write a bad poem to fit this space, as the picture is rather misleading: the leaf-fall would indicate a cool fall evening. But, in truth, the temperature was near 90°F and the humidity was high.

And it occurred to me that while we have photos for recording the visual features of reality, or in a more disinterested manner of speaking, a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, in other sensory matters we have not yet achieved a recording process of similar immediacy.

So when you look at these photos, you may think you can deduce other features from the visuals, yet you’d be wrong. And I lack the ability to really bring that odd juxtaposition of fallen, dead leaves, nutrients withdrawn from them, in the midst of temperate weather in which you’d expect them to luxuriate, smack dab into your living room.

So you’ll just have to take my drab word for it. Imagine hard.