Category Archives: Uncategorized

Stumbled across a day or two ago. Remarkably unremarkable.

Neuromorphic computing:

Neuromorphic engineering, also known as neuromorphic computing,^[1][2][3] is a concept developed by Carver Mead,^[4] in the late 1980s, describing the use of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) systems containing electronic analog circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system.^[5] In recent times the term neuromorphic has been used to describe analog, digital, mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI, and software systems that implement models of neural systems (for perception, motor control, or multisensory integration). The implementation of neuromorphic computing on the hardware level can be realized by oxide-based memristors,^[6] threshold switches, and transistors. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Think on this,” Liesbeth Venema, NewScientist (5 August 2017, paywall):

But soon real action was happening on the neuromorphic computing scene. Shortly after Williams’s discovery, Wei Lu, an engineer at the University of Michigan, took the crucial step and showed that memristors can act as plastic synapses. He used a device made of several thin layers of silicon, one of them with a smattering of silver ions, and showed this can mimic that second feature of the brain. Lu later showed that memristors can simulate the third ingredient too; the memristor synapse could be strengthened or weakened depending on the exact timing of applied electrical spikes.

Regarding Greenland and wildfires, a reader remarks:

Well, that’s cheerful news. At this point, I give humanity about a 25% of continuing to blunder along at about our current trajectory for 20 to 40 years, 50% chance that hundreds of millions of people will die to starvation and insurrection over food/water in the same time period, or about 25% that humanity will be darn near extinct in 40 years.

Ah, an optimist. Since we’re well over 7 billion now, and with no desire to be hyperbolic, I’d not be surprised at an epidemic, or possibly a war, taking out more than 2 billions of us. A horrendous tragedy at its best, and probably many of the best of us would die, while the worst of us would survive. And take us into another war.

I wish I could say that “On the other hand…”, but it seems shallow to continue.

Readers comment on the hidden motivations of statuary:

I saw a graph of this the other day. Would be nice to add to your blog post.

This is the one Kevin Drum came up with:

Another reader:

You go dude! This was part of a story on MPR or NPR the other day – such a great way to disarm the argument that these are “memorials.” Thank you.

Next question: how to use these effectively? Although, judging from the news from several Southern cities, it appears there’s a concerted effort to take the statues down.

When something I thought was covered by a bunch of glaciers catches fire, something is either seriously wrong with my education – or the world. NPR (among many other outlets) reported on the wildfires of Greenland today:

More than two weeks after they were first spotted, wildfires on the western coast of Greenland are still burning, worrying local residents and drawing the attention of scientists.

Source: Wikipedia

The fires are roughly 90 miles northeast of the second-largest Greenlandic town, Sisimiut, as we previously reported. There are currently three growing hot spots, according to an analysis of NASA data by Stef Lhermitte, an assistant professor of geoscience and remote sensing at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Nina-Vivi Andersen, a reporter for Nanoq News in the capital, Nuuk, has lived in Greenland her whole life and says she has never heard of a wildfire there.
“It’s very unusual,” she says, and the timing is particularly bad because reindeer hunting season just opened on Aug. 1.

Satellite data suggests that a campfire or a cigarette likely started the fires.

These are burning in areas of permafrost, which is catching me by surprise. So what’s going on?

[Jessica McCarty, an assistant professor of geography at Miami University in Ohio] has been studying satellite and other data about the Greenland fires for weeks now and notes that the area appears to be home to mostly low vegetation like moss on rocks, with no trees or tall grasses. She says all signs point to this being a peat fire.

“[Peat] is a good fuel source,” she explains. “It’s essentially like the peat logs you buy for fire pits or for fireplaces.” When peat burns, the flames don’t run across the landscape quickly the way they do in grass or forest fires. Instead, peat fires smolder down into the ground, so the boundaries change more slowly and they can burn for a very long time. Some peat fires have been known to persist through winter months, smoldering away under the snow.

Peat fires also release a lot of greenhouse gasses. “Peat is basically pure carbon. So, yes, when it burns it releases a lot of CO2,” says McCarty.

What to say? Right now it appears to be a positive feedback loop, which will either end with a runaway greenhouse event (think Venus), or a termination of the loop when caches of carbon are exhausted.

But it’s all about those conspiring scientists, isn’t it?

I’ve mentioned The Blue World, published  in 1966 by Jack Vance, a couple of times over the last few days. I’d been feeling a little stale, a little distressed, and decided to retreat into some old pulp-era fiction by one of my favorite authors.

Get the taste of Trump out of my mouth, ya know?

Midway through, I realized that taste was going nowhere because there were a lot of parallels in The Blue World to the entire Trump phenomenon. Briefly, the preservation of unearned, outrageous privilege; the clever mixing of truths with lies during political discussions; the rise of the under-educated; the buffaloing of the unprepared by the militaristic; the debate over the great threat between those with society’s best interests at heart and those for whom the threat is the source of their privilege; stretching a parallel, the discrediting of the opposition by the antagonists.

It was really quite a jolt.

Sure, it’s pulp, or just post-pulp, depending on when you think the era ended. It’s fun. The good guys win in the end. It’s one of the best of the pulp stories, but I shan’t recommend it, unless you’re a fan of SF pulp-era fiction, and if you are, you’ve probably already read it. Vance is a true legend of the genre.

But I couldn’t stop from drawing parallels. And, given the age of the book, I take the lesson that the general principles of Trump are nothing new on the American political scene, only their prominence. Congress has always had a dodgy reputation, particularly in the 20th century, and I begin to understand really why. The exigencies of the lust for power, crossed with provincialism and, let’s face it, a lack of education and religious fundamentalism, along with a little fearfulness. The only new thing is the Internet.

And, as I read The Blue World, the book fell apart. Literally fell apart. It’s old enough that it might be a first edition (just checked, and it appears to be so), but no collector would pay for this mess. My Arts Editor will attempt to reassemble it, but right now it’s just fragments.

Hopefully, that’s a sign. A good sign.

Dr. Herb Lin relays the laugh of the day (and a lesson in narrow educational costs) at the expense of Prime Minister Turnbull of Australia, via Lawfare:

Australia is weighing in on the encryption debate regarding exceptional access by law enforcement. As George Brandis, the Australian Attorney-General, described last month, the Prime Minister’s office advocates requiring “internet companies and device makers [to follow] essentially the same obligations that apply under the existing law to enable provision of assistance to law enforcement and to the intelligence agencies, where it is necessary to deal with issues: with terrorism, with serious organized crime, with paedophile networks and so on.” He further asserted that the chief cryptographer at GCHQ, the Government Communication Headquarters in the United Kingdom had assured him that this was feasible.

The Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, subsequently entered into an interesting interchange with a reporter.  When asked by Mark DiStefano, a reporter from ZDNET, “Won’t the laws of mathematics trump the laws of Australia? And then aren’t you also forcing people onto decentralized systems as a result?” The Prime Minister of Australia said “the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”

Dr. Lin explains how Turnbull could have credibly handled it:

Turnbull’s statement is absurd on its face.  A more astute response would have been to acknowledge that human laws must be consistent with the laws of mathematics but then to say that the laws of mathematics do not prevent compliance with a requirement such as the one proposed by the Attorney-General. But the Prime Minister would also have had to acknowledge the above-mentioned trade-off explicitly—and maybe such an acknowledgment would have been politically inconvenient.

In other words, backdoors can be used by law enforcement AND criminals, which is also true in non-digital-life.

A couple of days ago I mentioned the GOP primary for the special election to fill Jeff Sessions old Senate seat, which happened last Tuesday. No one crossed the 50% rubicon, so the top two finishers, former Chief Justice Roy Moore (he who can’t seem to disentangle his religious inclinations from his civil obligations) and current seat holder by appointment Luther Strange (whose accession to the seat is full of red flags – see this post) will move to a runoff to win the right to face – and probably defeat – the Democratic candidate, former U.S. attorney Doug Jones.

But what surprised me was this mention, via AL.com, in the post-election reporting on US Representative Mo Brooks, who came in third in the GOP primary. This is a Republican candidate, mind you, in a party-segregated primary:

But Strange and McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund [SLF] flooded the state for weeks with attack ads against Brooks – suggesting that he was more closely aligned with top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi.

“Nancy Pelosi and I are not best friends,” Brooks said as the audience laughed. “If you don’t take my word for it, ask Nancy Peolosi.”

Brooks also said that, contrary to another SLF ad, “I do not support the Islamic state.”

First of all, you might as well call it eating your own young when you accuse a candidate of your own Party of the moral equivalent to treason. This for a Representative whose “Trump Score,” which FiveThirtyEight defines as the percentage of votes an elected official’s votes coincides with the result desired by Trump, is 92.5% as of this writing. It is mendacity of a startling order. It’s just about as surprising as attempting to RINO Speaker Ryan out of the party.

Secondly, I have to wonder just how ignorant the Alabama voters have become. To really think someone like Mo Brooks supports the Islamic State requires a level of ignorance about the world and about the Republicans that is more than a little hard to believe. Of course, this type of ad is a choice by the SLF – perhaps they only perceive Alabama to be full of ignoramuses.

It’s a bit of a gob-smack.

But if you consider the atrocity that Fox News has committed on its viewers, it actually makes sense. Fox News viewers, carefully manipulated to only know what Fox News wants them to know, must be wooed in a different manner than well-informed viewers. Perhaps this is the style. Throw even a Party loyalist under the truck when they are not the favored candidate – you have to wonder if there’ll be damage to Brooks in the next House election.

Or is it just that the GOP is now full of attack weasels?

Mordant:

A mordant or dye fixative is a substance used to set (i.e. bind) dyes on fabrics by forming a coordination complex with the dye, which then attaches to the fabric (or tissue).^[1] It may be used for dyeing fabrics or for intensifying stains in cell or tissue preparations. As applied to textiles, mordants are mainly of historical interest because the use of mordant dyes was largely displaced by directs. [Wikipedia]

Encountered, as in my previous entry, in Jack Vance’s The Blue World. Passage omitted.

Ever wonder why southern leaders are often loathe to remove symbols of the Confederacy? I have. Via Kevin Drum and Vox comes this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on the history of Confederacy symbols, and I found this bit quite interesting:

4. There were two major periods in which the dedication of Confederate monuments and other symbols spiked — the first two decades of the 20th century and during the civil rights movement.

Southerners began honoring the Confederacy with statues and other symbols almost immediately after the Civil War. The first Confederate Memorial Day, for example, was dreamed up by the wife of a Confederate soldier in 1866. That same year, Jefferson Davis laid the cornerstone of the Confederate Memorial Monument in a prominent spot on the state Capitol grounds in Montgomery, Alabama. There has been a steady stream of dedications in the 150 years since that time.

But two distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols.

The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.

And so, as Kevin Drum observes, these symbols of the Confederacy are not memorials, but rather visible symbols of an institution which had, at one time, enslaved Americans based on their color – and threatened to continue to exert its “superiority” through violence. It’s all about intimidation, and the flag plays a part in it.

I, like most everyone I assume, was not aware that the monuments didn’t really start going up until the South felt the need to enforce its privilege. Pride? Stubbornness? Something totally foreign to me? I dunno.

Someday you house may be designated by a three word code. What, you say? No, What3Words:

what3words provides a precise and incredibly simple way to talk about location. We have divided the world into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and assigned each one a unique 3 word address.

Better addressing enhances customer experience, delivers business efficiency, drives growth and supports the social and economic development of countries.

With what3words, everyone and everywhere now has an address.

The UK’s Royal Mail is unamused.

In NewScientist (5 August 2017, paywall) Jessica Hamzelou reports doubts about the most basic of medical advice – taking your meds for a week or two:

In fact, it is the longer courses that cause problems. In 2010, an analysis of 24 studies, which included thousands of patients with respiratory and urinary tract infections, found that people on longer courses of antibiotics were more likely to develop antibiotic-resistant infections. …

So why do many prescriptions tend to last one or two weeks? When Martin Llewelyn at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the UK tried to find the origin of antibiotic prescription lengths, he struggled. “It appeared that people working in the 1950s arrived at these, probably because they were worried that people would otherwise skimp on treatment, or because they were afraid of resistance,” he says.

Antibiotics are often prescribed in multiples of five or seven days. This is probably because these numbers correspond to the number of fingers on a hand and the number of days in a week, but there’s no medical basis, says Llewelyn, who co-authored a letter on the subject published last week (BMJ, doi.org/b9z8). In fact, it might be a better idea to stop taking antibiotics once you feel better and symptoms are resolved, he says.

Well, that’s a bit disturbing. And after all that urging about not cutting your meds short, too.

The Baptisia before toweling off.

Greg Fallis discusses the differences between statues and memorials:

So then, let’s go ahead and talk about war and statues of Confederate generals and war memorials and what should be done with them. Let’s start with this: when it comes to war, there are essentially three groups of people involved. There are the politicians who declare war, who develop the policies of war, who determine the political goals of war. There are the officer classes, who are in charge of actually prosecuting the war based on the politician’s policies and goals, who determine the strategies used by the armies and the broad range of tactics to fight the battles. And then there are the poor bastards who fight the war — the ordinary people who have nothing to do with strategies, who have little or no voice in the politics, but who do the fighting and the killing and the dying. This is true of all wars in all the nations of the world over the entire scope of history.

Why is that important? Because it’s important to distinguish between statues and memorials. Statues are built to honor the specific politicians and the senior officers who start the wars and prosecute them. Memorials, on the other hand, are generally built to honor the nameless mass of soldiers who get mutilated or killed fighting those wars.

For the last several years there’s been a movement to remove and/or destroy statues honoring Confederate politicians and military officers. Over the last few days we’ve seen that notion expand to include essentially all symbols of the Confederacy. Statues, memorials, flags — get rid of them all.

I totally understand that feeling. I just disagree with it. Well, I disagree with chunks of it. I have no problem with removing the statues of Confederate leaders. I don’t want to see them destroyed, but I think it’s a fine idea to remove them from public land and place them either in storage or in museums. Destroying statues of people we dislike or whose beliefs we disagree with — that’s what ISIS does. It’s vengeful, it’s small-minded, and at heart it’s an attempt to color over the past. Remove them, and if they must be displayed, display them with context.

Removal into storage and destruction are more or less the same thing – if done in totality. Putting representative statues in museums, with explanations of the side they represented and why they are no longer displayed, seems most appropriate.

Professor Philip Zelikow explains that private armies are not legal in Virginia, via Lawfare:

The Second Amendment arguments can be—and have been—overcome. Individuals may have a right to bear arms for self-defense, but they do not have a right to organize and train as a private military group. In 1886 the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for controlling what the Second Amendment calls a “well-regulated Militia,” when it held that “[m]ilitary operations and military drill are subjects especially under the control of the government of every country. They cannot be claimed as a right independent of law.” A New York appellate court noted in 1944: “The inherent potential danger of any organized private militia is obvious. Its existence would be sufficient, without more, to prevent a democratic form of government, such as ours, from functioning freely, without coercion.” That language seems awfully resonant today.

The language of Virginia’s Constitution is clear. While “a well regulated militia” is valued, including what state law calls the “unorganized militia,” the Constitution stresses that, “in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

Well, when truckloads of organized groups of heavily armed men drive into my town—or your town—it is time to uphold the civil power. Virginia, like most states, has the legal power to stop them. And the precedents are on the books.

This strikes me as one of those boundary cases found in systems. If you’re a revolutionary, this is one of those oppressive laws which puts you more under the thumb of the detested government. If you’re the government, this is a common-sense law which not only protects the government (a sentiment that falls apart under examination), but also criminalizes gangs that are sufficiently militaristic.

All that said, I have to wonder if Minnesota has such a law.

Sorry about the anachronistic reference for the younger readers. Trump, or at least his Justice Department, evidently wants to run the clock back quite a ways, as they insert themselves into a lawsuit, as reported by Professor Andrew Koppelman in Fortune:

The opposing arguments by Justice and EEOC center on a case now before a federal appeals court, involving a sky-diving instructor, Donald Zarda, who was fired by his employer in 2010 after telling a female client he was gay. Zarda reportedly said this in order to prevent any awkwardness for the woman who would be tightly strapped to him during the sky-diving jump.

And what is the DOJ argument?

The Trump Justice Department argues in its brief that antigay discrimination is permissible because women and men are treated the same, even though it causes differential treatment of gay and straight employees. This is the same kind of reasoning that the Supreme Court rejected in 1967 when it struck down laws banning miscegenation and interracial marriage. That ruling struck down an 1883 decision in which the Court held that a law against interracial marriage did not discriminate against either race. The 1883 case argued that blacks and whites were barred equally from marrying members of other races. But the Court eventually understood that these laws relied on racial classifications. The same logic is likely to prevail with antigay discrimination: It flunks the test, laid down by the Court in 1978, of “treatment of a person in a manner which but for that person’s sex would be different.”

Revanche:

the policy of a state intent on regaining areas of its original territory that have been lost to other states as a result of war, a treaty signed under duress, etc. [Dictionary.com]

A related word noted in “Condemn the White Supremacists, Mr. President,” National Review:

This is somewhat awkward for President Trump because the cracked and malevolent young men raging about “white genocide” are his people, whether he wants them or not. Let us be clear about what we mean by that: President Trump obviously has defects and shortcomings as a political leader, but we do not believe for a second that those failures include a sneaking anti-Semitism or a secret taste for neo-Confederate revanchism. At the same time, he has made common cause with those who have flirted with those elements for political and financial gain.

Kevin Drum interprets the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the financial results if Trump does, in fact, trash the Cost Sharing Reductions (CSRs)  in an effort to discredit the ACA:

This comes from a new CBO report on the likely effects of eliminating Obamacare’s CSR subsidies. Basically, the federal government would save money by not paying the CSR subsidies but lose money by paying more in tax credits to poor families. The net result would be more spending on Obamacare.

There’s a couple of fascinating facets to this. First of all, the CBO constitutes an expert agency, a thing to which President Trump has become quite allergic over the last year. After all, sometimes experts bring unwanted results, and we can’t have that damaging the fragile Presidential ego, now can we?

So perhaps he’ll disregard this report, trash the CSRs, and then we’ll find out – are the experts worth their pay?

The other fascinating part is how the the more regular care facilitated by the ACA leads to a national cost-savings. I mean, we shouldn’t be surprised at this, it was, no doubt, even predicted, but still the decline in the growth of spending rates has outpaced even that predicted by the CBO.

In a bit of related news, The New York Times is reporting another prediction is not coming true – a shortage of GPs:

Studies published just before the 2014 coverage expansion predicted a demand for millions more annual primary care appointments, requiring thousands of new primary care providers just to keep up. But a more recent study suggests primary care appointment availability may not have suffered as much as expected.

The study, published in April in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that across 10 states, primary care appointment availability for Medicaid enrollees increased since the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansions went into effect. For privately insured patients, appointment availability held steady. All of the gains in access to care for Medicaid enrollees were concentrated in states that expanded Medicaid coverage. For instance, in Illinois 20 percent more primary care physicians accepted Medicaid after expansion than before it. Gains in Iowa and Pennsylvania were lower, but still substantial: 8 percent and 7 percent.

Though these findings are consistent with other research, including a study of Medicaid expansion in Michigan, they are contrary to intuition. In places where coverage gains were larger — in Medicaid expansion states — primary care appointment availability grew more.

Clouds on the horizon if you don’t take care of yourself.

Intuition is simply short-cut thinking, reasoning without considering nearly any hidden factors. So – keeping in mind this is quite the limited study, since it only covers 10 states – what might be some of these factors? The article cites better compensation rates for Medicaid patients. In fact, I wonder if, as more patients sport the Medicaid badge, they become a desirable patient, especially with the rise in compensation – so more docs decided to accept Medicaid.

But I’d like to pursue the benefits of regular checkups a little further. Think of a car – if you get the oil changed on the manufacturers schedule, you have a better than even chance that you’ll never encounter a serious problem with the engine for at least a decade. Neglect changing the oil for five years, on the other hand, results in an expensive engine rebuild or replacement, as a friend of mine found out a while back.

Same goes for people. Regular checkups means the doc can move quickly through his checklist of things, but if you haven’t been in for a decade, then he or she must be more thorough, maybe prescribe more vaccines, etc etc.

All this and no Sarah Palin death panels, either. Imagine that.

Ecology has way too many variables, but examples are instructive. Melissa Breyer on Treehugger.com covers more research relevant to my own interest in Lyme Disease, which is already alarming, specifically on how small rodent predators suppress the presence of illness in mice:

In Alabama a GOP primary is coming up tonight to select a Republican candidate for the Senate seat formerly held by current United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Luther Strange, former Alabama Attorney General, was appointed to the seat by Governor Robert Bentley, who Strange was investigating at the time; Bentley resigned a short time later in a sex scandal, and his successor called for an early special election, rendering Strange a short incumbent, whose story remains fresh in the mind of voters.

Also in the race is former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was boosted out of the Alabama Supreme Court twice, once for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument, and once for refusing to enforce the SCOTUS decision legalizing same sex marriage.

And least offensive is current US Representative Mo Brooks.

But what has my attention is their apparent tone-deafness, as CNN is reporting:

On Alabama’s airwaves, the candidates’ ads have largely focused on the candidates’ support for Trump.

And, to be sure, Trump has injected himself into the race — recording a robo-call on Strange’s behalf Monday after twice tweeting his endorsement.

On the campaign trail, though, the three major candidates have all taken pains to never cross Trump — including Monday, when none would criticize Trump’s initial comments on the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

If and when the President goes down in humiliation and disgrace, those who are associating him will certainly be singed by the blowback. I am aware that Trump remains fairly popular among Republicans, although even that is notably lower than normal.

But it should be clear that Trump is not a horse to be ridden to victory, and that this primary should have been an opportunity for one of these candidates to step up and claim the mantle of leadership, not indentured servitude. To say, “Hey, no, I think Trump is inappropriate as President, and as your Senator I will hold him to the highest standard, and if he doesn’t meet those standards, and the opportunity presents itself, I will vote to replace him.”

But these candidates seem to not be aware of their world crumbling around them. While I expect this Senate seat to remain in Republican hands, it could be a very interesting special election come November.

Asseverate:

To declare seriously or positively; affirm. [The Free Dictionary]

I ran into this in Jack Vance’s The Blue World, but shan’t reproduce the passage here. I’ve always enjoyed Jack Vance as he’s unafraid to use unusual vocabulary, giving his novels an exotic feel integral to the novels.

The results of watching this movie.

Scream and Scream Again (1970) is a bait and switch flick – advertising Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee as the leads, yet collectively the three are on screen for less than fifteen minutes. Add in dramatis personæ devoid of sympathetic characters, a scattershot approach to movie making that damn near gave me whiplash, and apparently random actions which might have had hidden motivations, but didn’t convince me, bad bad bad special effects, and this is one shoddy piece of junk. I could only approve of the use of the Vulcan death pinch, which had some satisfyingly bloody results.

The makeup is clumsy, but who can resist the charm?

Or, as my Arts Editor put it, this movie would have been vastly improved by the presence of a Holstein in galoshes.

I think I’ll agree.

Since Senator McCain voted against the Senate’s replacement for the ACA, he’s come under fire from the right-fringe, and recently one of live rounds came through as an email. This time I’m going to forego quoting the thing, because, quite frankly, I don’t know much about the subject on a factual basis, but I will summarize: in 1967, a terrible accident befell the American aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. The official report was that an electrical surge in an F-4 Phantom caused it to inadvertently fire a rocket while on the flight deck; it hit an A-4 Skyhawk without exploding. At this point, it’s not clear whose A-4 it hit, as then Lieutenant Commander McCain noted immediately following the incident, a not unsurprising admission given how human memory can be damaged by stress. I’ll let Wikipedia summarize the incident:

In July 1967, a fire broke out on board the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. An electrical anomaly had caused the discharge of a Zuni rocket on the flight deck, triggering a chain-reaction of explosions that killed 134 sailors and injured 161. At the time, Forrestal was engaged in combat operations in the Gulf of Tonkin, during the Vietnam War. The ship survived, but with damage exceeding US$72 million, not including the damage to aircraft.^[2][3] Future United States Senator John McCain and future four-star admiral and US Pacific Fleet Commander Ronald J. Zlatoper were among the survivors.

A representative character assassination piece, not identical to my email, but quite similar, has been published online at The Burning Platform, no doubt a reference to the Forrestal.

As a piece of assassination mail, it bears many of the earmarks which should have the big red flag in the air – it comes after a specific incident in which the victim did not follow the script, the writers insist that some vast conspiracy has covered up the victim’s culpability, as in this:

You see his grandfather was a famous FOUR STAR Navy admiral and his dad was at the time of the incident was a powerful Navy FOUR STAR admiral and McCain graduated from the Navy Academy. So the old boy Navy tradition cover his ass network went into high gear immediately; and make no mistake, it does exist and it did for him.

There is no objective evidence presented; indeed, this is almost not a red flag, as most such pieces will strenuously try to portray themselves as objective reporters in their efforts to be convincing. The assertion is one of those ugly little pieces that can never be disproven by anyone other than the actual author. In fact, this piece comes across as little more than a slimy shot at the Senator. This doesn’t mean it’s ineffective, because McCain is known to treasure his honor, and when someone accuses him and his family of engaging in such a dishonorable act, well, it must be infuriating.

Now, like I said, I know very little about this incident. I’m going down a different, if familiar to long time readers, path, and note how sad it is to see the rigid discipline of the Party come down on one of the last honorable members of the GOP currently holding office. This discipline, these demands to play team politics and bedamned to anyone who dares to use their judgment to evaluate some legislation, continues even in the face of the disaster befalling the nation and the GOP. A responsible legislature would be seriously evaluating Trump’s judicial nominees, and not just grumbling about them, but actually rejecting them. I could go on in this vein, but I shan’t.

What I shall say is that this is the black, pulsating, Satanic underbelly of team politics, where either you’re a yes-man – or you’re out on your ear. Doesn’t matter what you know, or how wise you are, or anything else of real value – all that is of value is your vote, and how you cast it.

Someone else is doing the thinking. And making an example out of McCain.

How much longer will the GOP survive with this horrible rule in place? Keep an eye on the news, because it’ll just get worse until they implode.

For more information on the Forrestal besides the link to the above, here is a link to FactCheck.org’s check into the situation. Here’s another link to a site unfamiliar to me, PunditFact, also rejecting the slander.

Addendum: it would be interesting to trace all these mail and web sites and see if they actually lead back to one person or organization, out to discredit McCain. Beyond my resources, though.

The fallout of the tragedy in Charlottesville includes the opening of eyes of more of the citizenry.

As we watch the President’s incredible failures of leadership grow, with the sad tragedy in Charlottesville being just the latest, his pecuniary preoccupations, his intemperance, what may be a generally racist attitude, and his general incompetence, I think this article in Politico should be taken very seriously by all the Senators.

President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees are ignoring key Senate Democrats as they vie for lifetime appointments to the bench, according to documents and senators — a break from longstanding practice that diminishes the minority’s power to provide a check against ideologically extreme judges.

The brewing tension between the White House and the Senate over filling an unusually high number of judicial vacancies is impeding the pace at which Trump installs lifetime appointees to the federal bench — so far one of the president’s few major victories, with his legislative agenda largely stymied in Congress.

Given the fact these are lifetime appointments, this is one of the most important responsibilities of a sitting US Senator, and I would hope – although I’ve been proven wrong so far – that GOP Senators would put country before Party.

Especially when the Party is being led by a man as deeply incompetent as Trump, a man who, I must remind my readers, holds odd beliefs and has engaged in frankly unethical behaviors. These behaviors cast deep doubt upon any person nominated by him, or his advisors, to the Federal bench.

As a citizen of the United States, I call upon the Senate to suspend all movement on judicial appointees until the situation with President Trump has been resolved. It is clear we approaching a national crisis; it is also becoming clear that President Trump has a hidden agenda, given his reluctance to condemn the traitors in Charlottesville immediately. Given these obvious facts, all movement on his judicial nominees should be stilled, as it’s impossible to trust, or even believe, that he has selected the best available to occupy these lifetime positions. Indeed, the GOP has admitted as much during the hearings, as noted by NPR:

“Mr. Bush, I’ve read your blogs,” [Senator John Kennedy (R-LA)] said as he stared at the nominee. “I’m not impressed.”

This was after Senator Franken (D-MN) pressed Mr. Bush concerning his citation of non-credible sources in a blog post concerning birtherism. Sadly, despite these admissions, Mr. Bush was confirmed in his position. This should not be permitted any longer for nominees from a President of such low quality.

I’ll be drafting letters to my Senators, who are Franken and Klobuchar, although both being Democrats, it’ll have a limited impact. I hope you’ll do the same with your Senators.