Greg Fallis rejects mysticism for personification:

It’s become popular among some Republicans to claim Comrade Trump isn’t really a Republican at all. They act like he’s some sort of chimera — a semi-mystical, implausible synthesis of disparate bits of different animals. Part liberal, part conservative, part patriot, part iconoclast, part traditional, part unconventional, part who the fuck knows. A new type of politician, they say.

Bullshit. Trump is the distillation of everything the Republican party has become in the last couple of decades. He’s selfish, self-centered, cruel, mean-spirited, fearful of anything different, completely unscrupulous, alienated from reality, dismissive of science, contemptuous of facts, mercenary, fundamentally dishonest, sneering, arrogant, judgmental, and too privileged to give a shit about anybody or anything that isn’t useful to him.

Love it.

Let me add that the repeated attempts by libertarians to suggest that markets will self-correct, that government regulation is largely unneeded, seems more and more obviously a simple cover for the selfish or lazy.

Self-interest is easy. You get a simple, well-defined goal that applies to you, such as make more money, and you chase it without regard for more ill-defined problems. And this actually isn’t the worst approach to running a society when government is properly understood to have the responsibility and the power of safeguarding the greater good, whether it be the poverty-stricken or the environment.

But the libertarians became fixated on taxation, because that has a direct impact on the wealth accumulation drive, so towards the end of reducing taxation, they came up with ideas about why the government didn’t have to regulate. Some seem reasonable on their face; a few others didn’t seem to understand the phrase irremediable harm, such as whoever it was writing the mimeographed The Utilitarian. Or perhaps it was Utilitarianism. Their bit? Criminal law was unnecessary.

Back to the point, I have to wonder if the members of the GOP echo chamber would actually recognize the essential truth of Greg’s description. The conservative kant, as Greg describes it, if taken as such would blind the believes to the rather crass truth of Trump. And the GOP is too often fixated on fixed positions rather than principles. You can see it in their fruitless attempts to make the charge of hypocrisy stick:

Jefferson owned slaves.

Yes, a terrible thing in the 19^th century.

Oh, wait, he lived in the 18^th century. Was it still awful? Yes. But it was also part of society and, in fact, Jefferson was developing the higher principles that would lead the North to eventually reject slavery. Decades later, in the 19^th century, the American Civil War erupted because slave owners, faced with a civil society consensus, a morality, which forbade slavery, revolted rather than conform to the principles of morality which had evolved in so many other countries, and had, at least, gained ascendancy in the backward United States. Why? Because their society might change; because their wealth might decrease.

We can reduce this to a principle, but it would be a tawdry principle suggesting that the accumulation of wealth takes precedence over the guarantees of liberty for all.

For people fixated on positions, the actions of Trump may indeed seem mystical, or at least inscrutable. For folks who function on principles, though, it becomes a matter of recognizing the principles of Trump. And that’s where liberals and most independents become sick of him, once they’ve studied him.

Why?

See Greg.

I just liked how the tomatoes looked on the counter.

Maybe I should have tried the under cabinet lights as well.

Venery:

the gratification of sexual desire.
the practice or sport of hunting; the chase. [both archaic; Dictionary.com]

I was just curious, given this previous entry in this feature.

Joseph DeThomas on 38 North notes how the sanctions put in place against North Korea has inadvertently crippled the research sector devoted to North Korea:

YouTube’s decision to delete North Korean YouTube channels has served to highlight the sometimes-unintended consequences of sanctions and the absolute power enjoyed by Internet companies over their users. In doing so, the company has cut off a vital supply of video used by open source researchers, which means there is now less visibility into what’s happening in North Korea. The Western world’s understanding of North Korea is limited to begin with, cutting off access to these few windows into North Korean thinking and life further hampers our knowledge of the country.

On September 8, some in the open source intelligence community logged on to YouTube to find the “Uriminzokkiri” (우리민족끼리) channel was gone.

The only explanation from Google was a simple notice: “This account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s community guidelines.” At about the same time, the same message appeared on the “StimmeKoreas” YouTube channel.

Both had been on YouTube for about 7 years, each had thousands of archived videos and millions of views, and had become essential references for video from the DPRK. There were hours of news videos, documentaries and military programming that had enabled researchers to uncover numerous secrets about the DPRK over the years. Needless to say, those researchers were not pleased.

A multitude of viewpoints is vital to understanding enigmas such as North Korea, and by losing their access to the information on the Internet because of a simple decision by Google, a number of viewpoints are lost. Don’t just think the United States government, or for that matter the UK or Chinese governments, are on the ball and have everything under control; difficult to crack nuts often require expertise from academic and independent experts.

And all of them run on information.

This isn’t a call to nationalize the Internet, but it is a salutary example of how the Internet must be managed carefully in order to not lose information which has national and international security facets to it. If there is a threat of war, private companies are not going to have the firepower to make North Korea back down.

[EDIT: Added forgotten link to source article]

And so they’re building cities, which might bewilder some folks who believe in the sanctity of nature. On D-brief, Nathaniel Scharping reports on the discovery of two octopus cities:

Both communities were also built near dense populations of scallops, and the bounty of food both enables the octopuses’ sedentary lifestyle and could convince them to play nice with each other. Indeed, the rich prey availability has enabled a sort of cyclical expansion of the cities. As more shellfish get eaten and discarded, the midden grows, allowing more octopuses to build dens and begin discarding shellfish in turn.

Geoffrey-Smith refers to the octopuses in the two cities as “ecosystem engineers,” given that they have essentially landscaped their surroundings to create a more hospitable environment. The urban development has itself attracted a much more diverse assemblage of sea life, he writes, expanding the effects of the octopuses labors beyond just their species.

Of course, it is a bit of stretch to call Octatlantis a community in the traditional sense. Octopuses are not obligated to live together, and given the unique advantages of this particular area, it seems they’ve simply chosen to put up with each other’s presence rather than embrace togetherness wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, the advent of communities and social life is theorized to have spurred our own development, and these gatherings give researchers the chance to observe the beginnings of what could be a long-term experiment in octopus cultural evolution.

Very interesting. The next step along the escalator to greater sophistication? If they’re not spending all their time eating and hiding from predators, what might an octopus invent?

Business Insider has a video, which I have yet to view, here.

Deconstruction, Arden Hills, Minnesota.

From the other side it looked just fine. Wish I’d gotten a few more photos from other angles, but the weather was a discouragement.

Coming back to revisit Trump’s position on the Dreamers (DACA) and his tentative agreement with the Democrats – has it destroyed him in the polls? Nope:

Of course, this simple poll aggregates all of the issues and therefore could conceal important changes in the composition of his support. For example, perhaps his core was badly damaged by his association with the Democrats, but enough Democrats or Independents approve of it to more than make up for the damage to his core. NBC News and the Wall Street Journal did a poll specifically on DACA, which is interesting if unsurprising:

We can see there’s a basically humane center to most of America when it comes to people brought to the United States before they could make their own decisions. Only among Trump supporters does opposition to giving them a reprieve approach 50%, and given the misinformation on which that group often seems to operate, one has to wonder how that would change if they were given more accurate information or not^[1].

Whether this can be applied to my speculations is unclear.

But the first poll certainly indicates Trump’s move on DACA has not further damaged the Trump Administration’s reputation on an overall basis; it may have improved it. And if the core splits over this question, then Trump is necessarily moving off his core into the sea of independents, who are necessarily less than dependable for unquestioning support. As Trump continues to blunder along as the permanent amateur, one has to wonder how long before the independents abandon him.

¹I do wish the poll numbers had included what percentage of the total poll each of the groups made up.

Andrew Sullivan is developing an inadvertent feature of commenting on the antifa movement in his once a week missive. Here’s his latest:

I wish I could say I’m shocked by new polling on college students’ views on free speech. But if you’ve been following the culture these past few years, you could see this coming. Today’s students neither comprehend nor support the very concept of free speech, which is foundational to a liberal democracy. A full 19 percent even believe that physical violence is now justifiable to shut down speakers who engage in the vaguely defined term “hate speech.” That’s one in five students endorsing physical coercion. Antifa really is making headway, isn’t it? A small majority, 51-49, supports shouting down speakers you disagree with — and that goes to 62 percent of students who identify as Democrats.

Back in ’80s at the University of Minnesota, I recall reading in the University newspaper, The Minnesota Daily, about a non-violent movement to control speech, to find a way to outlaw “bad speech”. The soft science professors were spending many hours on this, talking to student leaders, formulating approaches, etc. And the paper then talked to a physics professor who had been involved.

Apparently, the whole thing was laid out to him, he said, “Free speech is absolute,” and walked off. That was it for him. He recognized the moment you start qualifying speech, it’s a vulnerability that can be turned on the very people who urge it. I don’t think today’s antifa adherents have figured that out.

No surprise. They’re still learning.

But what gets my attention about the movement from thirty five years ago and the antifa movement of today is the failure to understand how to define success. For that physics professor, he seemed to realize that there’s no endpoint, no time where the last brick is laid and you declare the church has been completed.

Free speech has a purpose, and that’s to facilitate the marketplace of ideas. It has no place in judging those ideas, for otherwise it becomes worthless, it becomes a political tool for those who find advantage in silencing opponents with cunning and smiles; judging must come from those who participate, willing to judge honestly and with justice in their hearts, and not from those who willingly manipulate the process in order to benefit from hidden agendas.

But, critically, it’s an ongoing process, and until we find the answer to every last question, it will always be an ongoing process.

The antifa think limiting free speech, the great oxymoron, solves a problem, but in reality it merely cripples the most important process of liberal democracies.

And that’s why this violent, illiberal antifa movement, despite any high and noble goals, is a failure from the get-go.

Terms of venery –

Appears to be a synonym for collective noun:

Collective nouns are nouns that refer to a collection or group of multiple people, animals, or things. However, even though collective nouns refer to multiple individuals, they still function as singular nouns in a sentence. This is because they still are technically referring to one thing: the group as a whole. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Chain e-mail claims that when baboons congregate, it’s called a ‘congress’,” C. Eugene Emery Jr., PolitiFact:

The names for collections of animals are called “terms of venery,” and Hargraves said the best reference source for them is the 1968 book “An Exaltation of Larks” by James Lipton, host of “Inside the Actors Studio.”

This is no innocent peek over the ridge!

Either he has cataracts from all that time under water, or it’s the evil Godzilla, and judging from his actions, it’s the latter in (deep breath) Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001). An American nuclear submarine has been lost, and the Japanese find its hulk, along with a mysterious glimpse of something glowing.

Soon, to their consternation, the Japanese government knows that Godzilla is on his way, having fed off the radiation of the power plant of the submarine. One of their leaders wants to know: Why Godzilla is picking on them? On this question pivots the plot of this movie, as it turns out the daughter of one of the military leaders, a photo-journalist working for a company of dubious quality, has run into an old, mysterious man who has some sort of confused story concerning how there are monsters which will reappear when the land of Japan is menaced.

And Godzilla represents the spirits of those who were killed during the ‘Pacific conflict’, who are angry.

I think. It’s a muddle.

Along with the named monsters comes a somewhat smaller one with red skin and a horn, who is never named. Emerging from the ground, he intercepts Godzilla near a resort, but Godzilla tricks him to falling into a hole, and as he tries to escape, Godzilla rather cruelly atomizes him with his trademark bad breath. I felt sad for him.

Then Mothra appears, sans her fairy singers but armed with darts, and meets Godzilla at Yokohama. By this time, the army has been informed that only Godzilla need be fought, and start to work on him while Mothra flaps about. Sometime during the battle, King Ghidorah also appears. It’s an epic battle, and Ghidorah actually manages to die three different times, while Mothra only once – but she resurrects Ghidorah with her spirit. At this point, they’re underwater in the bay and the Japanese army has sent a submersible armed with special weapons, where Godzilla makes the same mistake as will one of the Ogdru Jahad will do in Hellboy, and eventually disappears himself.

For American eyes, the plot seems outlandish, and the land based monsters trudge about like guys in rubber suits, while Mothra is more like a work of art than a monster. On the other hand, the stages are impressive, as are the various explosions, and we see only a few model planes and trucks, for this is mostly about the battle of the spirits of the Japanese homeland against the spirits of those killed by Japanese aggression. The central theme is anti-war. The actors try hard, but when you’re up against monsters, it’s hard to generate that memorable character.

All in all, this entry is not as bad as some in this long-running series.

It turns out Zika causes microcephaly because it can get through the brain’s blood barrier that keeps most pathogens out – and it attacks stem cells.. But this capability, if harnessed, may turn out to be a useful weapon in the fight against the worst of brain cancer – glioblastoma. Clare Wilson of NewScientist (9 September ) reports:

Jeremy Rich at the University of California, San Diego, and his team have tested the Zika virus on glioblastoma, the most common kind of brain cancer. Glioblastoma is one of the most difficult cancers to treat – even after surgery and other therapies, it usually kills people within a year of diagnosis.

The team found that exposing samples of human glioblastoma tumours grown in a dish to the Zika virus destroyed the cancer stem cells. It is these stem cells that usually kill a person, as they can become resistant to all available treatments. …

The researchers have no plans to start testing Zika in people with brain cancer as they are concerned the virus could pass to pregnant women: a mosquito species that carries Zika is found in some parts of the US, and the virus can also be transmitted sexually. Instead, they plan to see if they can genetically modify the virus to be safer, but still work as a possible treatment for brain cancer.

Another team in the UK is planning a test using unaltered Zika. Now if we can find a way to treat individuals with Zika, which is really only dangerous to fetuses and infants, this might be an intriguing approach to the problem of brain cancer.

I see President Trump is off flapping his lips again.

Source: SBNATION

President Donald Trump criticized some in the National Football League Friday night at a rally for Alabama Republican Senate candidate Luther Strange, saying team owners should fire players for taking a knee during the national anthem.

Trump added that if fans would “leave the stadium” when players kneel in protest during the national anthem, “I guarantee, things will stop.”

Trump said NFL owners should respond to the players by saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired. He’s fired!” [CNN]

In a way, this reflects Trump’s views of how his Administration should be treated – no criticism, the institution is far too important to be criticized. In the same way that some think the flag is far too sacrosanct to be made part of a national conversation on how the black minority should be treated by everyone else, Trump’s view of these matters is reflected in his remarks: if the players are indicating that not everything is hunky-dory, then bloody well fire them because it reflects poorly on the institution, and the institution is all. In that way, Trump is protected.

With such sentiments is the path to stagnation and failure paved. Criticism is a way forward, not a way backward.

If President Trump is terrified of having that conversation regarding the treatment of our black citizens by the police, then at least let him have the guts to say he’s terrified. Distractions such as the flag issue or kneeling during the national anthem are just that: distractions. They should be ignored by those who are serious about the future of this nation.

And when will the Vikings wise up and bring in Kaepernick, the guy who started this kneeling during the national anthem, to replace the injured Bradford? Or do they think the current backup is going to be effective? I didn’t watch any of the games so far, but judging from the score in the Pittsburgh game, he was not effective. One data point is not a trend, of course….

It seems to me that the Equifax data breach is quite the egregious breach of business ethics. Most of us do not have a business connection with them; they are in the business of collecting information about the consumers of the nation, summarizing it, and then selling that information to various other entities.

You do not contract with them to do this, and you cannot control that activity.

In case you’re not familiar with this scandal, here’s a randomly selected story on it from the AARP:

With credit-reporting firm Equifax revealing that hackers may have stolen financial and consumer data on at least 143 million customers in the U.S., it’s quite possible that your personal information — including birth date, Social Security number, driver’s license and address — could fall into the hands of criminals.

Equifax said that it hasn’t found evidence of unauthorized activity on its core consumer or commercial credit-reporting databases. But criminals could use the treasure trove of personal information acquired in the breach to apply for credit cards and loans in your name, access your bank accounts and establish a phony presence online with email and social media accounts.

Not because you made a mistake, mind  you. But because they made mistakes.

Well, this sort of problem, as a class, is causing disruptions to American society. It is preventable and is the result of criminal neglect.

It’s not an accident. Someone – some entity, singular or plural – balled things up.

And how to fix it? I think someone with a corral full of lawyers should step up to the plate and bring a suit that asks for the dissolution of Equifax as the remedy to the injury to the class of consumers who had their data revealed and are now vulnerable to identity theft and other crimes.

Speaking as a software engineer, the industry has hid for far too long from responsibilities such as these. Industry should have its teeth kicked in over these scandalous, preventable mistakes, because that’s how this works – someone steps in a pothole and breaks their neck in the courthouse, and everyone else finally realizes you can’t dump mercury into the lake any longer. I’ve written about Underwriter’s Software Labs before, a fictional entity that shouldn’t be. How much longer before someone with the resources realizes that software development cowboy style is not resulting in shining examples of software?

Maybe it’s time for the insurance industry to get involved again.

Out of the old email bag comes another shot at dividing the ol’ United States into those who would lead the country, and those who despise them. Here’s an abridged version, since it runs a bit long:

Anthropomorphic Nouns

I thought this might be boring, but stick with it.  You’ll love the ending.

We are all familiar with  a

Herd of cows,

A Flock of chickens,

[omitted]

Now consider a group of Baboons.
Baboons are the loudest, most dangerous, most
obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least
intelligent of all primates.
And what is the proper collective noun for a
group of baboons?
Believe it or not… A Congress!
(Note: I hadn’t heard that before, so I looked it up. It is correct)

A CONGRESS OF BABOONS!

That pretty much explains the things that come out of Washington ! 

You just can’t  make this stuff up.

Ummmm…. except you just did. I went looking to see if a group of Baboons were a Congress and didn’t find anything in Wikipedia. A wider search yielded up the fact that this email has actually been analyzed and debunked. PolitiFact is on the case:

Two places where we did find it were sources in which virtually anybody could insert a definition on a whim: Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary.com. (In the Urban Dictionary, someone added the definition on Sept. 3, 2011, in response to the e-mail.)

And it’s no longer present in Wikipedia.

So we turned to Orin Hargraves, a freelance lexicographer and president of the Dictionary Society of North America.

The names for collections of animals are called “terms of venery,” and Hargraves said the best reference source for them is the 1968 book “An Exaltation of Larks” by James Lipton, host of “Inside the Actors Studio.”

The first part of the book, which examines real terms, has no reference to baboons. Only in the section that includes whimsical terms that Lipton coined or uncovered is there any reference to the primates. “A rumpus of baboons” is listed right next to “a buffoonery of orangutans.” (One of our favorites: “a prickle of porcupines.”)

For those who love useless bits of trivia:

Shirley Strum is at the University of California, San Diego, and director of the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project in Nairobi,Kenya. Larissa Swedell is at Queens College of the City University of New York and studies the primates in Ethiopia and South Africa.

Both said the correct term for a group of baboons is a “troop.”

They also note baboons are actually quite bright.

I suppose the next outstanding question is Why didn’t I just direct my correspondent’s attention to the above article?

Here’s the thing: It’s necessary to scrutinize the activities of our individual delegates to the federal government, to evaluate their performance, and to recognize self-interested and/or disinterested behavior. It’s necessary to perform this duty in a thoughtful and honest manner which will yield praise for exemplary service by such members, for which names such as Lugar and Kerry come to mind, and condemnation for such members as Weiner and those who’ve been convicted of corruption.

This mail is not that scrutiny.

This is mail designed to inculcate a general disdain and contempt for one of the most important legislative bodies on the planet. For those Americans who consider themselves patriotic, this mail is an insult, because the structure of our government is one of our strongest safeguards.

Worse yet, it’s a subtle call to treason. For all that Congress often moves at a snail’s pace, it’s better a snail than a Ferrari that races off a cliff. And if it seems like Congress isn’t promoting your favorite business’ interest, my reader would do well to remember that government defends that which cannot defend itself, such as the poor and the environment, the defrauded consumer and the lake shore inhabitant discovering the lake is about to be polluted by industry. Industry rarely needs defense; it needs restraint.

So when I read an email like this, I’m sensitive to how it brings government into general disdain. I’m aware of how this may discourage a person, who may be competent to an elective or judicial post, from pursuing that post – leaving it vulnerable to the ideologically extreme, the avaricious, the dishonorable.

We’ve been seeing that of late.

Spread the word.

Mr. Meade has, ah, revised his predictions, as FoxNews reports. In fact, he’s fairly opportunistic:

David Meade, who claimed the world is ending Saturday when a mysterious planet collides with Earth, is now backtracking on the calamitous claim.

Meade said the world won’t end on Sept. 23 after all, but instead Saturday will only mark the beginning of a series of catastrophic events to occur over several weeks.

“The world is not ending, but the world as we know it is ending,” he told the Washington Post. “A major part of the world will not be the same the beginning of October.”

Meade said his prediction is based on verses and numerical codes found in the Bible, specifically in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. He said recent events, such as the solar eclipse and Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, are omens of the approaching apocalypse.

And he explains the importance of the number of 33 in Biblical numerology and tries to roll astronomy into the gig, according to the report. For the young and the uninformed, this may seem portentous and magical.

For the rest of us, who’ve dared to read history beyond the standard textbooks, or have simply been around for a while, it’s the same old tired drek, designed to make people feel like they’re part of something divinely important. Take advantage of the disasters of the time, whether they be war, pestilence, weather, or tectonics, and behind it is someone in search of fame, prestige, wealth, and power.

It’s easier to make up stuff about God than it is to study Nature.

Remember the Biblical bit about the father’s sins will be visited on the offspring for umpteen generations?^[1] NewScientist (9 September 2017, paywall) has a modern take on this one – that is, the reason why London ended up enveloped in smog is due, in part, to the masters of fraud, from Mick Hamer:

Source: IanVisits, which also has information on this topic.

IN THE first decade of the 20th century, transport reached a tipping point. Would the future belong to petrol, electricity or even steam? The stage was set for a decisive showdown when the world’s first practical electric buses hit the streets of London in July 1907. They were clean, quiet, reliable and fume-free, unlike their petrol-powered counterparts, which were widely reviled for their deafening din and evil smells.

Electrobuses, as they were called, were an immediate hit with the capital’s commuters, and the prospect of a successful challenge to the internal combustion engine was greeted with delight by press and public alike. “The doom of the petrol-driven omnibus is at hand,” forecast the Daily News. “The electrobus is probably a more formidable rival than the petrol omnibus, not only to the horse omnibus but also to the tramway,” concluded Douglas Fox, the country’s foremost engineer and designer of many of the world’s railways, at the September 1908 meeting of what’s now the British Science Association. …

It was a con from the start. In the spring of 1906, the London Electrobus Company announced plans to put 300 electrobuses on the streets of the capital. It offered the public the chance to buy shares worth £300,000 to finance the project, claiming that it had acquired a patent for the huge sum of £20,000 that gave it a monopoly on the electrobus. This seemingly guaranteed that investors would reap enormous profits, and the public rushed to invest.

Almost immediately, however, inquisitive reporters exposed the scam. One bought a copy of the patent. He discovered that it was for a motor vehicle transmission – about as relevant to the electrobus as a patent for a hair dryer. It was simply a device for conning would-be investors. Another reporter visited the west London works where the electrobuses were to be built. Instead of finding a production line gearing up to churn out hundreds of vehicles, he found a former stables next to a pub. Alerted by articles in the papers, angry shareholders demanded their money back. It all ended up in court and the electrobus company was forced to refund more than 1000 investors.

The story continues, and you can buy Hamer’s book, A Most Deliberate Swindle, if you find this interesting – it’s to be published in just a few days, so I haven’t read it, either.

Thus electric vehicles were crippled with a bad rap and petrol powered vehicles took over, despite complaints concerning pollution, both environmental and auditory. Today we’re digging our way out of the fossil fuel hole, not because electric vehicles were out-competed, but because the primary backers were simply swindlers.

¹Yeah, I don’t remember.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has once again apparently saved the liberal bacon by insisting on the use of traditional processes and procedure when it comes to legislation, as CNN reports:

“I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal,” the Arizona Republican said in a statement. “I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried. Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will (affect) insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it. Without a full CBO score, which won’t be available by the end of the month, we won’t have reliable answers to any of those questions.”

But I have to ask whether these are the salutary efforts of a man who will lead Congress out of the hellhole it had recently dug for itself, or the words of a man who remembers better times and is repeating it to a chorus who will largely disregard him.

I fear the answer is the latter. The Senator may wish to believe that he can shame the GOP into returning to the better forms of government, but I fear that the very character of his Party has changed so much in the last twenty years that it’s difficult to see them as willing to use those forms. As one of the older legislators (elected to the House in 1982 and has served continuously since, moving to the Senate in 1986), he remembers what might be considered better times, when Senate collegiality was more important, and the Senate GOP rejected the attempt to convict and eject President Clinton.

But the rightward shift of the GOP has made the most important of McCain’s goals in this context, the return to proper legislating, nearly unattainable. We’ve seen Speaker Ryan and, to a greater extent, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, engage in lies, mendacity, and legislative activities that would embarrass their mothers, and they do so with no evident reluctance.

I do not see the shaming by a Senator in the twilight of his career as being truly effective.

Now, as some have pointed out, given the activities of some of the most extreme of the GOP Congressional members, the more moderate of the conservatives may appear to conform to McCain’s wishes, but I fear it will only be out of necessity. Bi-partisan efforts may allow the GOP in the two chambers to ignore their most extreme members’ objections to others’ plans, but don’t mistake this for an embrace of the old ways of governing through mutual consent.

The GOP, despite not understanding how to govern, appears to be convinced that it has all the answers and it doesn’t need any help from anyone else. I fear that Senator McCain is having a last hurrah, and his replacement will not understand the importance of good government, and how both sides can have good ideas.

The Party ideology no longer permits such thing blasphemous thinking.

Joan Garcia likes spheres. I think this is the best one.

More spheres here. And I must admit her horse has ‘tude.

More of her marble stuff here.

Kevin Drum engages in what appears to be a meaningless critique of an academic paper’s conclusion. The paper, by Jack Mara, Lewis Davis and Stephen Schmidt, concerns how membership in a fraternity or a sorority during college, or lack thereof, affects grades and post-graduation financial success. Here’s the paper’s results and conclusion:

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student GPA by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional four – point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol-related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. …

Our results indicate that college administrators face an important trade-off when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus: while such policies may significantly raise academic performance, these gains may come at a significant cost in terms of expected future income for their graduates.

Kevin thinks the result is backward:

I’d argue exactly the opposite: this paper puts another nail in the coffin of fraternities and sororities and eating clubs and so forth. Allow me to reframe the authors’ conclusion:

Our results provide empirical evidence that fraternities are just another way for social elites to keep themselves at the top regardless of actual performance. Those rejected by fraternities, even though they have higher GPAs, earn 36 percent less than those accepted by fraternities. This is further evidence, if any were needed, that college administrators face few trade-offs when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus.

And I think the intellectual confusion present in both conclusions is really reigning supreme. First of all, colleges exist to educate citizens, not to increase their financial earnings. A financially successful person does not define the successful citizen in the eyes of society, otherwise we’d all be praising Al Capone^[1].

Second, from an individual’s perspective, using financial earnings as a proxy for success in life is well documented as a red herring.

Third, it’s a mistake to consider using such a trivial metric as financial success as, well, being a business success. There are many examples of senior executives who basically burn down their firms, but they walk away with immense amounts of money. There is no apparent attempt in to correct for the mismatch between financial success and real-world success.

I would entertain arguments that such a mismatch is illusory, but I think that such an argument would stray into solipsism, always an intellectual error of elephantine proportions when attempting to evaluate across a collection of individuals.

And then there’s the constraints of the survey, starting with it being one college. And then:

3,762 alumni responded to the survey, a response rate of 25.8%. The survey asked respondents for information about their demographic characteristics, college activities, academic achievement, and current work status and income. In the analysis below, we limit the sample to men under the age of 65 who are employed full-time and for whom all of the control variables are present, resulting in 1,667 observations.

Men only? Under 65? Why even consider questions of success of any kind before the age of 65? This sort of strikes me as madness.

¹Or is that what we did in the last Presidential election?

How often do you get to reprimand a world-class conductor? Not very often, so Scott Chamberlain takes advantage of the opportunity to school Leonard Slatkin, albeit using pre-reviews of Slatkin’s new book, rather than the actual source material:

“Slatkin criticizes management and musicians about equally in his overview. The former remained quiet for too long about its mounting financial troubles, and the latter failed to pose early questions about funding when times were flush.”

The fact that years later we still have to knock down these casually-made, false equivalencies is, quite honestly, mind-boggling.  For what I hope is the last time, there is no equivalency here.

Let’s dig in. The Orchestra’s previous management didn’t “remain quiet” about mounting financial troubles—they actively engaged in a wide-ranging disinformation campaign directed at the musicians, the community, the City of Minneapolis, Minnesota’s State Legislature, and beyond.  This isn’t me just being mean saying this, this was abundantly documented during the lockout, and clearly documented in the Orchestra’s actual board minutes. For example, when the Orchestra leadership was approaching the State Legislature to secure bonding money to refurbish Orchestra Hall, it shaded the numbers to create the appearance balanced budgets and overall fiscal health. Then, on the eve of contract negotiations with the musicians, management shaded the finances in a different way to report a large deficit and make it seem that financial collapse was imminent.

Along with this, management lied about the size of the reported deficit. This wasn’t an accident… in 2011, the board retained the public-relations firm Padilla Speer Beardsley to determine “what size of deficit to report publicly.” Once it determined the optimum number, leadership manipulated its fundraising, expenditures and draws from the endowment to match this pre-determined number. And that was the origin of the $6 million deficit the management kept toting. …

The musicians—along with everyone else—were actively lied to. Repeatedly. Over many years. Which is why the public, local government, state government, and funders reacted so harshly. The two sides are not equivalent.

And so on. Scott makes clear that the lockout model of arts organization finance is a failure – and Slatkin’s equivocation is incorrect.

trichromats:

Trichromacy or trichromaticism is the possessing of three independent channels for conveying color information, derived from the three different types of cone cells in the eye. Organisms with trichromacy are called trichromats. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the Letters section for NewScientist (9 September 2017) in a letter from Tony Durham:

Perhaps it is something to do with the disabling effect of living with atypical colour vision in a society designed for trichromats. If so, I would expect the effects to be particularly noticeable when looking at TV and computer screens, colour photographs and paintings, all of which assume trichromatic colour vision. Further investigation might yield insights into how we see colour.

It’s been interesting watching the interpretations of the Graham-Cassidy health bill, because they really feed right through the prisms that everyone holds up in front of their eyes while interpreting anything. For example, Kevin Drum of the liberal Mother Jones magazine:

It’s hard to know how to react to the cynicism of the Graham-Cassidy health care bill. For starters, it’s as bad as all the other Republican repeal bills. Tens of millions of the working poor will lose insurance. Pre-existing conditions aren’t protected. Medicaid funding is slashed. Subsidies are slashed.

But apparently that’s not enough. Republican senators (and President Trump, of course) obviously don’t care what’s in the bill. Hell, they’re all but gleeful in their ignorance. Nor is merely repealing Obamacare enough. Graham-Cassidy is very carefully formulated to punish blue states especially harshly. And if even that’s not enough, after 2020 it gives the president the power to arbitrarily punish them even more if he feels like it. I guess this makes it particularly appealing to conservatives. Finally, by handing everything over to the states with virtually no guidance, it would create chaos in the health insurance market. The insurance industry, which was practically the only major player to stay neutral on previous bills (doctors, nurses, hospitals, and everyone else opposed them) has finally had enough. Even if it hurts them with Republicans, Graham-Cassidy is a bridge too far[.]

While pundits are always biased – it’s really all they have to sell in most cases – the fact that even the insurance industry is stepping back in horror is telling. On the other side, Chris Pope of the conservative National Review believes it’s better than just a fix:

This simple solution goes further than BCRA in redressing the great disparity in federal Medicaid assistance between states. Indeed, it does so without concentrating cuts on low-spending expansion states such as Arizona. It also prevents states from evading spending caps by merely inflating the number of healthy, able-bodied individuals enrolled, as they could do under the BCRA.

The ACA spends more than twice as much on expanding Medicaid as it does on premium tax credits for the exchange. By consolidating funding for both entitlements, Graham-Cassidy allows states to pool resources to increase the attractiveness and stability of the individual market. In doing this, it meets a clear need, but it also facilitates more thorough reform by repealing the individual mandate and potentially allowing fairly priced, fully competitive insurance to be offered outside of the exchanges. It also greatly expands the flexibility and potential uses of Health Savings Accounts.

But, as I understand it, Pope disregards the fact that the Republican-controlled states, which mostly chose not to take advantage of the Medicaid expansion, did so of their own free will – and apparently from political pique. It’s a little hard to find self-inflicted harm to be a compelling case for much of anything. Except perhaps to examine the inner workings of the most prominent conservative party.

Steve Benen of the liberal Maddowblog proceeds to rip the GOP Senators up one side and down the other. Here’s reason 1 of 5:

1. Republicans have to keep a promise. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said yesterday, “I could maybe give you 10 reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered. But Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign. That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill.”

That’s absurd. For one thing, it’s ridiculous to think a vague campaign promise is as important, if not more so, than the real-world effects of overhauling the nation’s health care system. For another, if Republicans “have a responsibility to carry out what [they] said in the campaign,” they’d also be extending coverage to everyone, shielding Medicaid beneficiaries from cuts, and guaranteeing protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Instead, GOP officials appear desperate to break those promises without explanation.

But as compelling as I find the hypocrisy assertion, this is probably even more diagnostic of the basic incompetency of the GOP:

GOP officials have had seven years to create a compelling sales pitch on health care. That they’ve failed so spectacularly doesn’t inspire confidence in their regressive plan.

It’s rather like watching a rebellious 13-year old boy, told to take care of a laborious chore, who decides to spend 5 minutes on it, rather than the two hours it requires. The entire sequence is unprofessional and quite discouraging about the half or more of the country who voted for these incompetents.

On The Volokh Conspiracy, Thomas Mulligan has published a comparison of meritocracy vs libertarianism which sparked a thought. Now, I did wonder if his characterization of libertarianism as it is currently is accurate, because I quit reading libertarian materials (mostly REASON Magazine) several years ago, but I guess I’m willing to stipulate it for the moment:

The American Dream is a meritocratic ideal.  Our national ethos is that no one should be guaranteed prosperity, but all citizens should have an equal opportunity to pursue it through their merit.  What a person can become should turn only on his or her intelligence, effort, skill, and the like—and not arbitrary features, like race or parental wealth.  That way, if a social hierarchy emerges, it is a “natural aristocracy”—as Thomas Jefferson put it—filled by “virtue and talents”, not “wealth and birth”.

This description of a just economy appeals to Americans across ideological lines.  And it is, by my lights, correct.

But it is not a libertarian ideal.  If we followed libertarian principles and implemented libertarian policies, we would create a very different economy than the one so many Americans desire.  We would create an economy in which merit was not taken seriously.

Consider the lamentable state of opportunity in the United States today.  Our economic mobility is among the worst in the developed world.  Children who are born rich stay rich.  Others, no matter their merits, cannot escape the trap of poverty.  Note that this is not because genetics determine economic outcomes; they do not.  Instead, birth into wealth provides social advantages, like access to elite education, as well as brute inheritance.  The wealthiest 1% of American households inherited, on average, $3 million.  This is no coincidence.

Unequal opportunity is incompatible with meritocracy.  Whether you are rich or poor ought to turn on your merits—not your parents’ merits, or their parents’ merits.

There’s an ambiguous implication that we’re currently libertarian, which would either outrage the libertarians, or kill them off in gouts of laughter, but that’s not really here nor there – and Thomas elsewhere suggests that we’re not libertarian in any case. For me, though, the insight is the assertion that our economic mobility is very poor, and is tied to inherited wealth.

I hadn’t heard the claim concerning the American economic mobility before; I know that years before the libertarians had claimed we had high economic mobility. Have things changed? Thomas provides a link to what appears to be an academic book entited Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, but dating from 2005 – so I have to wonder if this is still accurate.

But I appreciate his theoretical hand-waving a bit more. After all, libertarians basically want to reject just about all regulation in the belief that the marketplace will self-regulate where necessary. They spend a lot of time making that argument. So connecting the inheritance of wealth with stultification is quite interesting. It’s unfortunate that his source of statistics that he would use to bulwark his position appears to be somewhat suspect – and is vulnerable to arguments that things would be better without all those regulations.

Given all that, if we accept that we should be running a meritocracy rather than libertarianism, then I’m a little puzzled that Thomas doesn’t take this to its logical conclusion:

Outlaw inheritance completely.

Sounds insane, doesn’t it? As someone who’s an independent and probably best classed as a mainstreamer, it sounds a bit insane. I’d never considered that position until just now, although I’ve heard it advocated from time to time, most interestingly from someone whose name I don’t recall, but was an investor on the level of George Soros – but this was 25 years ago or more. At the time, I wrote it off as someone who didn’t want to deal with the politics and logistics of the Last Will, but maybe he had a good point after all.

Of course, then you have to ask where the estates of folks should go after liquidation? A lot of people will pee their pants at the thought of the gooberment getting it, although it might be a way to reduce income taxes. But if we’re going to be a true meritocracy, then we’d better be ready to help out new adults as well – because being born into wealth isn’t the same as inheriting it – you get advantages from that as well. And Thomas addresses this with conventional remedies, to which I have nothing to add.

But it does boggle the mind a bit. Libertarians do like to see themselves as people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps – but those with inheritances maybe didn’t have to pull so hard, did they? Perhaps a more formal approach to meritocracy might have, ah, merit?

Remember the Wisconsin / Foxconn deal? Kevin Drum misdoubts it:

According to estimates from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the money Wisconsin pays to Foxconn will be higher than the combined taxes they get directly from Foxconn and from workers at the Foxconn facility. This annual deficit won’t become positive until 2033. The cumulative deficit won’t become positive until 2042. And this all assumes that Foxconn produces the 13,000 jobs it says it will. If it doesn’t, the deal will look even worse for Wisconsin. …

Until now, Wisconsin’s most famous product has been cheese. In the future, state Republicans hope that Wisconsin will be famous for assembling consumer tech products. In reality, their new most famous product is old-fashioned gullibility. They got taken to the cleaners.

I think the Wisconsin GOP is playing to its base so that in 2018 it can proclaim that it’s the party of the high school diploma only whites, not the Democrats. It’s a strategic maneuver.

And it’ll be interesting to see if it works. I think it’ll be a positive for the GOP class of 2018, but after that it may turn into an anchor around their necks.