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The dust settles in Kansas, as Republican Ron Estes defeats Democrat James Thompson in the 4th district in the race to replace Mike Pompeo, now the CIA Director, in the US House of Representatives. It’s interesting to read the spins on this. First, President Trump via the Kansas City Star:

President Donald Trump congratulated Kansas’ newest congressman Wednesday morning, but also misstated information about the unusually close special election in the Wichita region.
“Great win in Kansas last night for Ron Estes, easily winning the Congressional race against the Dems, who spent heavily & predicted victory!” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning after Republican Ron Estes beat Democrat James Thompson by 7 percentage points in a district that Republicans won by more than 30 points in November.

Estes, the Kansas state treasurer, will replace Mike Pompeo, who gave up his seat in the 4th congressional district in January to serve as Trump’s CIA director.

Neither the state, nor national Democratic Party predicted a victory in the race at any point. However, Thompson was quoted in some outlets as saying that his campaign was winning during the final days of the campaign.

Contrary to Trump’s tweet, Democrats did not spend heavily on the race.

From the progressive wing of the Democrats is David Nir on The Daily Kos:

In an extraordinary political earthquake, Kansas Republicans held on to a dark red House seat in the Wichita area night by just a single-digit margin on Tuesday night, throwing into question whether the GOP’s majority can survive next year’s midterm elections.

Republican Ron Estes, the state treasurer, had been universally expected to easily win the special election in Kansas’ 4th District to replace Mike Pompeo, who left to become Donald Trump’s CIA director earlier this year. But instead, Estes found himself struggling in a district that Trump carried by a dominant 60-33 margin and Pompeo won by more than 30 points last year.

I suppose at this point, President Trump’s followers are just hoping we should just accept he lies about everything, but it remains unacceptable.

Therefore, I request and require President Trump retract the lies embedded in his communication congratulating Ron Estes and promise never to do that again.

So how does Republican dominance look in the 4th district? This gives me a chance to play with a charting tool:

Data Source: Ballotpedia

While a 7 percentage point loss actually sounds like a lot, compared to the tighter races we’ve seen of late for President, the chart does clearly indicate a change in the mood of K4 voters, especially over a 5 month period. Will this continue?

I think it’ll depend on three factors. The two obvious factors are President Trump and the GOP. The former has been flip-flopping on his radical positions, and of late some of his positions approach reasonableness – although I suspect this is only random chance, as one White House faction or another gets his ear – or which world leader he talks to next. He may be the least important factor in the 2018 race for Kansas 4th.

The GOP, on the other hand, have been a consistent bunch – advocates of extreme positions, users of highly dubious reasoning, and vessels of damaged ethics, if we’re to judge from the current Administration nominees’ behaviors. Attempted revocation of the ACA damaged the GOP brand, yet they have returned to talking about the same action – acting as if the electorate was four-square behind them, which is not true.

That and a number of early missteps symptomatic of a party drifting well out of the American mainstream may damage their chances in K4.

But the biggest factor may be … Estes himself. I know very little about him, so I can’t guess how he’ll perform in the House of Representatives – will be be relatively independent, thus isolating himself from the more damaging effects of the GOP behavior patterns, but also from influence? Or will he be another yes-man, and thus vulnerable if the GOP manages to misread the situation completely and disappoint the Independents who hold the key to the next election?

Thompson, the loser on Tuesday, has stated he will run again. The time to start is now – to borrow the mildly loathesome phrase from the private sector, it’s time to build your brand. More accurately, now is the time to formulate positions and show why they are preferable for K4 residents – and point out how it’s conservative ideology wrecking the formerly great State of Kansas.

[EDIT Fixed typo 10/30/2017]

Urtext:

the original text (as of a musical score)

Seen in “The Bathtub Fallacy and Risks of Terrorism,” Kenneth Anderson, Lawfare:

The urtext of ordinary accident/terrorism comparisons might be the 2009 book by political scientist John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare puzzles over the latest dump of stolen NSA cyber-tools by the Shadow Brokers group:

The real mystery here is why the Shadow Brokers released this data. Ordinarily, a hostile intelligence service wouldn’t tip their hand by showing that they had obtained this information but there are some clear strategic benefits to that kind of signalling. Releasing the vulnerabilities themselves goes a step further. It ensures not only that the NSA is unable to use the Windows 0-days against targets, but that you aren’t either. It is a matter of short time before these tools are patched, and thus unavailable to anyone. These are tremendously valuable tools to just burn that way, so it does make one wonder (and worry): what exactly is the intended payoff here?

Steve Benen on Maddowblog gets a bit het up about President Trump’s changes in position:

One of Donald Trump’s most important early flip-flops came just 11 days into his presidency. As a candidate, Trump broke with Republican Party orthodoxy and endorsed lowering prices on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s negotiating power. That, however, did not last.

On Jan. 31, after a meeting with executives and lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, Trump denounced the idea he used to support, calling it a form of “price fixing” that would hurt “smaller, younger companies.” Trump had one set of beliefs, he heard conflicting information, so he adopted a different set of beliefs. …

Now, however, Trump is adopting an entirely different set of opinions on many issues, not as part of some grand ideological rebranding, but because some folks gave him new information he found compelling. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) explained this yesterday by saying, “Some of the things that were said during the campaign, I think he now knows simply aren’t the way things ought to be.”

That’s an exceedingly polite way of saying, “Trump had no idea what he was talking about when he ran for the nation’s highest office, but a variety of people are now guiding him new directions.”

Some sympathetic figures may find all of this vaguely encouraging. Perhaps it’s a good thing, optimists will argue, that the president is acquiring new information and drawing new conclusions. It’s at least preferable to him ignoring evidence and sticking to old assumptions that never really made any sense.

All of which brings up the question of how and when someone should change a position. Generally speaking, everyone takes positions on issues that are wrong. In the science community, these are called hypotheses, used to attempt to explain some observation. Scientists then attempt to falsify, that is, disprove their hypothesis. Those hypotheses which survive numerous such challenges are accepted on a contingency basis, that basis being that it may still be disproved in the future, but for the moment we’ll go with it.

Transferring this to the non-scientific world isn’t that much of a stretch, but for one thing – we tend to attach our egos, our prestige, into our hypotheses. Scientists are not immune to this problem, although the better ones manage to disconnect it. But outside of the science community, the prestige that goes along with backing a given position on an issue is inevitable. It’s not even necessarily a bad thing. After all, if someone comes up with one good position on an issue, maybe they’ll have more. Sure, give them prestige.

But when a hypothesis fails, then what? The ego and prestige resist being wrong, of course. A prominent example is the Kansas economic disaster, brought on by Governor Brownback’s position that lower taxes will spark an economic Renaissance. He wants Trump to replicate his position on the Federal level – and then surely heaven will follow.

It’s a choice bit of madness for a former star of the GOP who is beginning to lose the support of his own party. I suspect he’ll disappear – or at least should – into the swamp once he’s a former governor. Unfortunately, like the economist he relied on, Arthur Laffer (one of the great nominative determinism examples), he’ll probably linger on and assume an air of respectability, unearned in reality, but still palpable.

But I digress.

The proper response when a position on an issue results in an unpredicted (and negative, of course) result is that the position should be changed. This is what a mature adult human should do.

But President Trump is outside of this model of human behavior. During the campaign, he didn’t hesitate to promise whatever would please his audience most, without regard to realities on the ground. Now that he’s discovering issues are far more complex than his shallow knowledge base encompassed, he changes his positions.

It sounds reasonable, but it’s not. From Steve:

The Wall Street Journal noted a similar shift this week on the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump was skeptical of Ex-Im Bank, which funds U.S. trade deals, calling it “unnecessary.” The bank has been a target of Republican criticism, which Mr. Trump seized on.

But that view changed earlier this year after he talked to Boeing Co. CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who explained to him what role the bank plays, according to people familiar with the matter.

Explaining his new position, Trump told the Wall Street Journal this week that he “was very much opposed” to the Export-Import Bank, but “it turns out [that] lots of small companies will really be helped.”

The problem is that he simply goes with his latest information. Boeing is the primary beneficiary of the Bank. Sure, they’ll present a positive case. And for all that he once opposed the Bank, now Trump wants it.

Why, yes, I do think you’re awful parents.

I put off watching Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) because I felt the title was wretched.

The title is the most wretched element of this movie. This is a taut thriller about a nightmare – your child has gone missing. Set in England, a sister and brother have just arrived from America, along with her 4 year old child, and the child is being placed in a traditional British preschool. She disappears the very first day. But why? Ran away? Kidnapped? But no money, no celebrity, just another obscure mother and daughter …

And then the twists begin, as each assumption you might make is taken out and given a fierce shake, casting different lights and shadows over the story. Bathed in the traditional ascerbic British humor, mostly delivered by the police superintendent assigned to the case, it brings freshness to dialog that might have otherwise been a traditionally dull American dialog. And along with that dialog comes quirky, fascinating characters, from the aggressively self-promoting landlord, looking for some action from the single mother, to the elderly founder of the preschool, now writing a story book based on the imaginative stories of the children she’s cared for. In her living room is a painting of her co-founder, Madge, naked.

We started this movie on impulse, starting way too late to finish it. Except we did, drawn in by the fine performances, the intriguing characters, the flood of information that led nowhere, the paucity of critical information – all the elements of a good thriller.

And then the surprise blow is struck.

The organic nature of the story makes this an excellent specimen. The characters went where they must, with no deviation to the sentiments of the audience, who are consigned to following along behind the characters as they follow their impulses, and pay for their decisions. Yes, this strikes me as film noir.

Recommended.

Suzanne Maloney on Markaz highlights some potential long range maneuvering taking place in the Iranian Presidential campaign by one of the candidates, cleric Ibrahim Raisi:

However, recent events would appear to call Rouhani’s presumptive lock on a second term into question. In this sense, Ahmadinejad is, at least for the moment, mostly a sideshow. The real competition may come from Raisi, a former prosecutor whose political fortunes have risen stratospherically over the past year, when he was named the administrator of Iran’s oldest and wealthiest religious shrine and his name began to surface as a leading contender to succeed Khamenei. Although the supreme leader’s health appears to be relatively robust, his age (77) and the January 2017 death of another scion of the revolution—former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—has brought the whispered guessing game about leadership transition out into a much more open debate.

Like Ahmadinejad, Raisi’s sudden decision to contest the presidency, Iran’s second highest slot but one that is distinctly subordinate to the supreme leader, provoked some double-takes. Iranian elections are heavily managed, but a significant element of improvisation and volatility is unavoidable. Anything less than a credible campaign and a commanding victory would undercut the effort to position him as a viable supreme leader. It’s possible Raisi’s bid for the presidency is a mere trial balloon, to boost his name recognition and test his capabilities to engage with Iranian citizens. Alternatively, a well-orchestrated election victory would benefit Raisi as a future supreme leader, by giving him the same national exposure and executive experience as Khamenei, who served as president for eight years before his own elevation.

This strategy does not seem to apply to former President Ahmadinejad, who just registered, as Ahmadinejad is an engineer and teacher, not a cleric.

The currents of politics in Iran continue to swirl deeply. Last year former President Ahmadinejad was advised by Supreme Leader Khamenei to not run for a third term as President. Now, in the wake of his former Vice President Hamid Baghaei registering to run, President Ahmadinejad has also registered – purely to boost his VP’s chances, he claims. Rohollah Faghihi has the story for AL Monitor:

On the heels of Baghaei’s announcement, various video clips were released by Baghaei, Ahmadinejad and the former president’s controversial friend and aide Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, some of whose pronouncements have been interpreted as “deviant” by some religious conservatives. In one of the clips, Baghaei tells Ahmadinejad and Mashaei that “one of us must be sacrificed.” Based on this, it seems that Ahmadinejad is planning to pressure the conservative-dominated Guardian Council, which is tasked with vetting presidential candidates, to let Baghaei run. On April 12, after registering to run, Ahmadinejad and Baghaei both held a press conference in which Ahmadinejad said that his decision had been made in support of Baghaei, “I registered merely to support Baghaei and I will act according to the [supreme] leader’s advice. … I’ll be serving Mr. Baghaei with all my power.” The former president added, “Some people say that the [supreme leader’s] advice was meant to completely forbid [me from running], but what the leader said was just advice. … I am still committed to my moral promise.”

Conservatives and many analysts have been saying in recent months that Baghaei wouldn’t get approval from the Guardian Council. Baghaei, who has crossed many of the red lines in Iranian politics, was jailed for unannounced reasons for more than 200 days and he still has cases that are being reviewed by the judiciary. Therefore, Ahmadinejad’s candidacy might have been registered just to prevent Baghaei’s disqualification. However, the former president may try to stay in the race, putting more pressure on the Guardian Council, which would probably disqualify him for defying the supreme leader; such a decision could then provoke Ahmadinejad’s vocal political base. The likelihood of such a scenario caused conservative cleric Mohammad-Taghi Rahbar to voice his concern April 12 that Ahmadinejad’s candidacy could cause chaos in the country.

At least it doesn’t if there’s a high civilization to borrow from. 38 North‘s Martyn Williams reports on North Korea’s latest apparent achievements in the realm of quantum encryption:

North Korean media hasn’t provided much coverage of the development, which indicates it could still be in the research stage.

I’ve only been able to find two reports on the system. The first was in the Tongil Sinbo on February 27, 2016, and the second was on March 24, 2017, in the Naenara online magazine.

The reports say it was developed by a team at Kim Il Sung University.

The Naenara report mentions that the North Korean system is based on BB84, which was the first quantum key distribution protocol. It was originally developed by researchers at IBM and the Université de Montreal in 1984. And it mentions the error rate of the North Korean system is 3.5 percent against what it said was an international allowable error rate of 10 percent.

That all points to a working system in the lab, but putting it into real world use is very different and more complicated.

Still, it just takes persistence to make it work, and access to advanced science journals. And you can’t lock those away, because science advances best when researchers are free to discuss the state of their fields – so I wouldn’t argue that we need to keep North Korea from gaining that scientific information. That’s a mug’s game.

The news out of North Korea just keeps becoming less and less pleasant, doesn’t it? Martyn notes that it’s unlikely that it’ll be useful from Pyongyang to the launch sites just yet – but that’s only a temporary relief. Intelligence analysts had better be thinking about what to do when it does become widespread in North Korea – and what to do about it.

Kevin Drum laments our flying ways:

So flying sucks because we, the customers, have made it clear that we don’t care. We love to gripe, but we just flatly aren’t willing to pay more for a better experience. Certain individuals (i.e., the 10 percent of the population over six feet tall) are willing to pay for legroom. Some are willing to pay more for extra baggage. Some are willing to pay more for a window seat. But most of us aren’t. If the ticket price on We Care Airlines is $10 more, we click the link for Suck It Up Airlines. We did the same thing before the web too. As usual, the fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.

Flying is the ultimate denigration of the journey as the purpose of a trip – it’s all about the destination, where the journey itself is nothing more than an inconvenience that has been bought away. We substitute a few hours of uncomfortable, loud, bad air flying for a few days of loud, uncomfortable, but possibly interesting driving, for weeks and weeks of riding a horse or even walking.

So of course most people won’t pay extra for it – get there and start vacationing.

Just part of our hurry-up, 24 hour online culture.

In the travails of the leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), wherein a judge declared the leadership structure of the CFPB unconstitutional as the director cannot be fired, the CFPB has appealed and now the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice has disowned the Obama’s argument while managing to take … both sides of the argument. Deepak Gupta and Jonathan Taylor of the Take Care blog have the uptake. First, a summary of the first opinion:

It is this “for cause” removal provision that is now under attack in the courts. In October 2016, in PHH v. CFPB (an appeal from an enforcement action against a mortgage lender), a panel of the D.C. Circuit held that the for-cause provision, coupled with the agency’s single-director leadership, violates the constitutional separation of powers. Writing for himself and one other colleague, Judge Kavanaugh reasoned that the CFPB director is insufficiently accountable to the president because he is not removable at will. Never mind that many other hugely important federal agencies are led by those also removable only for cause (the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to name five). And never mind that the Supreme Court has expressly upheld the constitutionality of those agencies.

To Judge Kavanaugh, the critical constitutional distinction is that those agencies are led by more than one person, whereas the CFPB is not. His opinion claims that this distinction is grounded in the need to safeguard liberty and in what he calls the “deep values of the Constitution.”

Deepak and Jonathan think that’s irrelevant. And now on to the fun part:

What does the Trump DOJ think about the constitutionality of these agencies? We don’t have to speculate. It filed a brief on February 27 supporting the constitutionality of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. That brief adopted the reasons given in the FHFA’s brief, filed the same day, which describes the separation-of-powers challenge (the one based on Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion in PHH) as “wholly without merit.” Here’s a taste:

It is long settled that Congress is not prohibited from creating independent agencies run by officers removable only for cause. … It is also beyond dispute that Congress may structure agencies to be headed by a single officer. Plaintiffs’ position in this case is that those two aspects are somehow mutually exclusive, i.e., that Congress is forbidden from attaching removal protection to an office unless that office will share leadership with a number of other officers also having removal protection. No authority supports that novel and illogical thesis, and it finds no purchase in the principles that animate separation-of-powers jurisprudence.

The same Justice Department lawyer (Chad Readler, the acting head of the Civil Division) signed both this brief and the PHH brief—within the space of a few weeks. Although Readler later filed an “advisory” in the FHFA case saying that DOJ “does not urge reliance” on the separations-of-powers argument it had adopted earlier, he did not disavow that argument.

The upshot is that the Trump DOJ’s brief in PHH achieves a truly remarkable trifecta: It stands opposite not only another part of the executive branch and a previous administration, but also itself.

Given this extraordinary contradiction in DOJ’s position, which reveals that even Trump’s own lawyers are alarmed at the implications of the unprecedented position they’re advancing in the CFPB litigation, what happens next?

I, too, cannot fathom why the number of officers, so long as it’s more than zero, can possibly matter in the context of the Constitution, and, for that matter, common sense.

But I think the larger picture is to ask what’s driving the DoJ to take these opposing positions. While I won’t delude myself to think that the DoJ is unitary at even the best of times, the contradictions here may be indicative of a deeper sickness in the department, where a false doctrine (from the viewpoint of the government) may have been introduced. We need to remember that Government regulates the rest of society in the interests of justice – not the interest of profits.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com served as a judge for this year’s Architizer Awards:

Kamikatz Public House
Source: Architizer Awards

When I was asked to be a juror in this year’s Architizer Awards I was honoured, but had absolutely no idea how much work it was. Over the course of a week all my non-TreeHugger time was devoted to looking at and trying to decide among hundreds of entries. It was exhausting. And when you look at the list of jurors, there are hundreds of them, and it is a really stellar list; I am squeezed between Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Lockhart Steele, who founded Curbed. Just putting all the L’s in a room would be a great party.

Green Building is not a typology, given that everybody claims that they think about sustainability these days. But there is the Plus page that looks at concepts and included an “architecture + sustainability” category. I was not a judge in this category but love this brewery, the Kamikatz Public House, in Tokushima prefecture in Japan by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP.

Some interesting designs there.

Lt. Colonel Shane Reeves of the US Army remarks on the problems of justifying the legality of the Syrian missile strike, writing in Lawfare:

As Professor Deeks highlights, the United States may eventually attempt to shroud this moral justification in legality by arguing that the missile strikes were part of a humanitarian intervention to protect the Syrian people from Assad’s chemical weapons. Under this controversial use of force theory, moral legitimacy equates to legal justification for military action. Some have made efforts, most notably the United Kingdom following the Syrian use of chemical weapons in 2013, to outline conditions that trigger the right to intervene. However, these criteria are not widely accepted and decisions to use military force for humanitarian purposes remain subjective and inherently political.

The Russian involvement in the Ukraine is illustrative of this point. In March 2014 Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula, a recognized territory of the Ukraine, and occupied the region. Then-Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers condemned the act by stating the “intervention is without legal basis—indeed it violates Russia’s commitment to protect the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of the Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, claimed the intervention, in large part, was for humanitarian purposes including to protect Russian-speaking minorities and to stop anti-Semitic violence.

While Putin’s justifications were easily dispelled, his response was that of a humanitarian interventionist. Here lies the problem with these types of moral-based use of force decisions: they are inherently subjective and, consequently, easily abused. For example, why is there an obligation to stop the use of chemical weapons in Syria but not to stop the daily atrocities committed in North Korean work camps? When does the moral responsibility that justified an intervention end? Why do certain states have a moral imperative to act while others do not? This lack of clarity empowers states to make these determinations unilaterally and results in divergent views on the appropriate use of force. Even more dangerously, this ambiguity allows a state with nationalistic goals to act with aggression under the pretext of a moral obligation.

Possession of a deadly weapon such as sarin, VX, or any others of that class, on the other hand, have the potential to inflict serious harm on United States citizens, or for that matter U.N. peacekeepers, if it were to be deployed by Syria – or by those who were to steal it from them – in any location.

I think we could justify the Syrian missile attack on the grounds that destroying this weapon – if in fact it had been specifically targeted – is a matter of collective self-defense, which is noted by Colonel Reeves as an accepted justification for just such a military action.

I think the intellectual error in this scenario is to focus on the concrete results of the activities, rather than the potential, worse-case results. Through the latter lens, it becomes clear that the North Korean activities, as self-destructive as they may be, are not in the same class as possessing one of the more foul weapons devised by mankind.

It occurred to me this morning that modern word processors still lack that one important feature:

The sound of the typewriter mechanism pulling in the paper.

Whirr! Whirr!

So in this previous post I speculated that the Syrian missile strike would improve the polls for President Trump. Turns out, not so much:

Gallup notes in another article that, compared to similar actions by other Presidents, this action has relatively little support:

Reactions to the missile strikes President Donald Trump ordered are much more positive among Republicans (82%) than among Democrats (33%) nationwide.

And Independents are at 44 / 43. So we see a lot of partisanship here, while the Independents – the king-makers, if I may indulge in a completely inappropriate analogy – so far haven’t really swung one way or another. I hope they engage in a follow up poll, since the information that has emerged on the results seems to be mostly negative – airstrip not out of action, the planes destroyed may not have been operational, and the impact on the gas is not yet clear, at least to me. And then what is Trump going to do in the long term?

Kevin Drum thinks not much:

And yet, the US government is now officially committed to regime change in Syria even though it wasn’t last week. In fairness, so was Obama. But Obama was always clear that this was merely aspirational. Trump hasn’t said one way or another, and he’s avoiding the press, which would like to hear a little more about his new foreign policy. The problem, it appears, is that Trump doesn’t know what his foreign policy is. He doesn’t know what to do about ISIS. He doesn’t know what to do about Afghanistan. He doesn’t know what to do about China. He doesn’t know what to do about Syria. He doesn’t know what to do about North Korea. He only knows how to send tweets into the atmosphere about how all these folks better watch out because there’s a new sheriff in town. But there’s nothing more. Trump has taken strategic ambiguity to whole new levels.

Personally, I guess I’m rooting for the meaningless Twitter rants to continue. It’s better than the alternative.

As most anti-Trumpers feared, he now has access to advanced weaponry and may end up drunkenly shooting it off in frustrated bouts of anger. This will be no good for anyone, enemies or allies.

Nora Ellingsen and Lisa Daniels on Lawfare fact-check President Trump’s claim that the data justify his attempts to shut down immigration from certain countries:

A new, more comprehensive dataset became available to the public. Shirin Sinnar at Stanford Law School received under a Freedom of Information Act request from 2015 the National Security Division’s list of public and unsealed international terrorism and terrorism-related convictions from September 11, 2001 to December 31, 2015. …

Here’s the bottom line:

• The data Trump cited in his speech to the Joint Session of Congress simply don’t support his claims that a “vast majority” of individuals on the list came from outside the United States—unless, that is, you include individuals who were forcibly brought to the United States in order to be prosecuted and exclude all domestic terrorism cases.
• While the data do validate the Executive Order on its statement that hundreds of convicted individuals were born overseas, it actually doesn’t support the policy the executive order embodies.
• Of the hundreds of foreign-born individuals, the vast majority were born in countries not covered by the Executive Order.
• And of the relatively small number of individuals from covered countries—which total 43—the clear majority come from only two countries (Somalia and Yemen), while a vanishingly small percentage of that come from Iran, Sudan, Libya or Syria.

They will have two more posts in this series, analyzing the data and, presumably, giving their conclusions. But at the moment, it appears that Trump was simply pandering to his supporters’ xenophobia. Also interesting? How the right wing played it. Using the results found by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and National Interest,

Fox News and Stephen Miller ran with [the Center for Immigration Studies] headline: “Study Reveals 72 Terrorists Came from Countries Covered by Trump Vetting Order,” while the Washington Post fact-checked the study. The Post noted that some of the individuals on the list had entered the United States years before they conducted any crime and many of those individuals were not bomb makers, they engaged in more innocuous activities such as transferring money.

From John Archibald on AL.com about a year ago:

… that Gov. Doctor Dr. Robert Bentley (he had his name legally changed to Doctor so it would appear on the ballot) has become nothing but a punch line.

Astrobleme:

Many impact craters have been found in the last half century. By studying their chemical composition as well as those of the scars known as astroblemes – the mostly destroyed craters that still leave identifiable impressions – we can begin to fill in our planet’s visitor record. The guestbook is the Earth Impact Database. [Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall,  p160.]

The political punditry has been rumbling about the race to replace Mike Pompeo, now the CIA Director, who had occupied the Representative’s seat for Kansas District #4, generally considered to be a safe GOP seat. In fact, Pompeo had won it with more than 60% of the vote the three times he’s run for the seat, the last being the 2016 cycle (Ballotpedia).

I haven’t run across any recent public polls of the current replacement race between GOPer Ron Estes (winner of two previous statewide elections) and Democrat James Thompson, apparently with little political experience, but the Wichita Eagle notes signs of panic in the Kansas GOP:

National Republicans are wading into a Kansas congressional race few analysts thought would be competitive ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas will join Republican candidate Ron Estes at an airport rally Monday in Wichita, a day before voters in southern Kansas head to the polls to pick a new congressman. Vice President Mike Pence is also scheduled to record a robocall on Estes’ behalf, according to a state party official.

Cruz’s appearance comes on the heels of last-minute spending on television ads by the National Republican Congressional Committee and a fundraising push by U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin on Estes’ behalf.

Parties often run private polls, and perhaps the GOP is unhappy with some private results. For me, it’ll be a fascinating insight into how much damage has been dealt the Republican brand. The first source is, of course, Trump, who has wallowed about, failed to run a competent Administration, and then lied about it. His one success has been the completion of the nomination of Gorsuch to SCOTUS.

But, quite possibly more damaging, has been the activities of the House GOP members. Representative Nunes forced to recuse himself from the Russian investigation; Representative Chaffetz trying to sell off public lands; and Speaker of the House Ryan failing spectacularly not only in his political job of ramming through the retraction of the ACA, but even in having a basic understanding of the workings of insurance. These visible lessons in how ideological extremists behave may be a learning moment for voters who consider themselves conservatives – and are discovering those who claimed to fellow conservatives are actually extremists.

But this is all hypothetical. Perhaps Estes will also win 60+% of the vote. Perhaps Estes has a reputation as a moderate. Whatever the result, a lesson will be learned by someone. And by me.

One is giving birth to the other. Except it’s about to explode in fire! In space! Oh, the humanity!

Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land (aka Starflight One or Airport 85; 1985) is a limp noodle of a movie. Thematically, a story concerning the tension between free enterprise and good engineering, it’s about a hypersonic jet on its maiden commercial voyage. A simulator seems to suggest it may have problems at its operational altitude of 100,000 ft, but the mean old boss of the manufacturer refuses to be cautious.

And then a rocket is recklessly launched in Australia on the orders of a businessman set to make or lose a lot of money, without coordinating with NASA, against the better judgment of the flight manager. When the jet is reaching the pinnacle of its flight (we never actually see the takeoff, at least in this TV version of the movie – oh, wait, this is a made-for-TV movie!), the rocket malfunctions and must be destroyed, spraying debris in the flight path of the jet.

Yep, it gets hit.

And we don’t care. No story succeeds when we don’t care. Look, you don’t have to like anyone – after all, care doesn’t mean rooting for, it can also mean having a hate-on. But when a movie, a story, has characters who elicit nothing more than a shrug and a sickly joke about who’s sleeping with whom?, then your story has a problem.

A big problem.

It’s a fucking black hole of a problem.

So never mind that the science had us laughing out loud at points. Never mind the continuity problem when they call the second spaceship coming to their rescue by the name of the first one. Never mind that at one point they say they don’t have enough oxygen to make it to re-entry, and then do so anyways. Never mind that the children are not the first ones to be saved. Never mind that the journalist / volunteers who stay behind to face certain death, just on the off chance that the pics could be great if they survive, are never seen snapping a single pic.

We have no idea why we should care about anyone. Well, except hating a couple of type-A businessmen, and that just isn’t enough.

Sure, there’s interpersonal relationships – or so we’re told. Hell, it’s a little like watching a bunch of Swedes on Valium, for all the emotion we get out of this bunch.

Anyways. Deep breath. Stay away from the Bold and Italic buttons.

Just Don’t Watch This Film.

electrek has more news on Tesla’s solar power installations:

This weekend, Tesla updated the ‘Energy’ section of its website to unveil new pictures – see above and below – of a new exclusive solar panel made by Panasonic. Electrek has also learned some details about this new product that will apparently shape the future of the company’s offering in the residential solar industry.

The new panels are part of Tesla’s deal with Panasonic at the ‘Gigafactory 2’ in Buffalo. They will be manufactured by Panasonic at Tesla’s factory for Tesla’s exclusive use. They don’t plan to make them available to third-party installers or individuals. …

Like the solar roof, the move is part of Elon Musk’s plan to offer solar products with better aesthetics in order to create a distinctive brand that can be differentiated from other installers on a product basis. He said when first announcing that they were working on such solar products:

“I think this is really a fundamental part of achieving differentiated product strategy.

For the solar panels, that means a ‘sleek and low-profile’ look for all residential installation.

Sounds like a strong move into residential is well underway.

Trump continues to sow confusion throughout the Mideast, as Uri Savir notes in AL Monitor:

The PLO official told Al-Monitor that Greenblatt explicitly spoke about the possibility of a two-state solution. What encouraged the Palestinians most was the time element that was emphasized by the envoy when he told his interlocutors that Trump believes the time is ripe for a “dealmaking” process. …

This is a paradoxical development. After the US elections, the Trump administration was viewed by the Israeli right as a redemption of all anti-settlement and pro-two-state positions of the Obama era. The Palestinians, for their part, saw Trump’s victory as “the end of the world.” Today, positions have changed. The main sense one gets from talking with senior Israeli and Palestinian officials is one of confusion. Despite some similar positions, Trump is not Barack Obama, and he is therefore totally unpredictable. Initial signs indicate that a dealmaking attempt is not out of the question.

The Israeli leadership’s distaste for President Obama is no secret; they may develop a similar distaste for President Trump, as he is failing to fulfill their expectations of supporting rampant expansionism.

I expect Prime Minister Netanyahu to, once again, stall for time. Or stall for Pence.

Gotta love oddball objects – they’re the poles holding up the tent of common phenomenon. This one, from NewScientist (1 April 2017), caught my eye:

When small stars perish, they expand and create glowing shells of ionised gas, called planetary nebulae. But when astronomers observed the Boomerang Nebula in 1995, they saw something quite odd. It’s the only known object in the universe to absorb light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the afterglow of the big bang that keeps the universe 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. That means the nebula must be even colder.

Expanding gases will cool, but no one knew how Boomerang’s central star could eject enough gas to cool it to the temperature we see now in so short a time. …

[Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array,] we have the first detailed map of the Boomerang. On large scales, at least 3.3 times as much mass as the sun contains is being swept away from the central star at 170 kilometres per second within a spherical shell of gas. Could a single star produce such an outburst? [Raghvendra Sahai of JPL] didn’t think so.

ALMA’s high resolution let the team probe the frigid heart of the system as well. It turns out that within the shell of gas two smaller bubbles are expanding outward from the central star.

The team suggests that the single star was actually two, with one much larger than the other. When the massive star died and started to swell, it swallowed the smaller one. The companion continued to orbit the primary star’s core within the shell of gas. Eventually, it spiralled into the core roughly 1000 years ago in a violent merger that disgorged the two smaller lobes of gas (arxiv.org/abs/1703.06929).

Fascinating – you think of cosmic explosions as a location of heat, not cold. Elsewhere, they state that temperature appears to be 0.1 kelvin.

Boomerang Nebula. Image: NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

A couple of years ago, SciNews published early results concerning the Nebula’s shape:

[Sahai’s] group discovered a dense lane of millimeter-sized dust grains surrounding the nebula’s central star, which explains why the outer cloud has an hourglass shape in visible light. The dust grains have created a mask that shades a portion of the central star and allows its light to leak out only in narrow but opposite directions into the cloud, giving it an hourglass appearance.

Free! I feel so free!

A starkly told tale, Countess Dracula (1971) is a lurid, gamey story of a noblewoman, deprived of her husband and her beauty, who accidentally discovers the blood of virgins will restore her beauty.

For a short period.

And then she’s uglier.

Whether it’s the movie, or the editing for television, I cannot tell, but its sketchiness detracts from the story. Segues are abrupt and confusing. The main characters do get relatively full treatments, but the supporting characters, who are often performing important tasks, such as kidnapping the noblewoman’s daughter so that she may impersonate her to win the affections of a young man with whom she’s become infatuated, exist purely for the purposes of the story; I cannot imagine them doing anything but evaporating to dust once the story has passed their neighborhood.

Resentful of old age?

Because of this lack of empathy, there is little feeling of horror here, only of pity for her victims, virgins or not, who suffer her hatpin in the throat, as well as the audience, who is left wondering why the noblewoman could possibly think she can do this more than two or three times.

Here’s the thing: this is based, however loosely, on a real person, Elizabeth Báthory. From Wikipedia, Elizabeth was …

… a Hungarian noblewoman and alleged serial killer from the Báthory family of nobility in the Kingdom of Hungary. She has been labelled by Guinness World Records as the most prolific female murderer,^[3] though the precise number of her victims is debated. Báthory and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of young women between 1585 and 1609.^[4] The highest number of victims cited during Báthory’s trial was 650. However, this number comes from the claim by a serving girl named Susannah that Jakab Szilvássy, Countess Báthory’s court official, had seen the figure in one of Báthory’s private books. The book was never revealed, and Szilvássy never mentioned it in his testimony.^[5] Despite the evidence against Elizabeth, her family’s influence kept her from facing trial. She was imprisoned in December 1609 within Csetje Castle, Upper Hungary (now in Slovakia), and held in solitary confinement in a room whose windows were walled up where she remained imprisoned until her death five years later.

Countess Dracula, however sloppily made, shocks in this unexpected manner: the criminal activities, if not the miraculous transformations, may have actually occurred, and involved far more victims. It’s a pity the movie deviates from the historical story, for the Countess never stood trial. Instead, she was imprisoned in a walled room, where, isolated, she survived for several years. The swift punishment implied in the movie may have not been nearly as exacting as the non-judicial punishment ordained for her, presumably by the royal court.

But the movie, on its own terms, is less than affecting.

Off we go now:

We’re a little slow, I’m afraid, as we lack proper facilities. These are in place on the pool table in the cool, cool downstairs.