Category Archives: Uncategorized

PETA has sent me a survey, and stamped on it prominently:

You have been selected to participate in an important survey of Minnesota residents …

I live for the day I’m selected for an unimportant survey.

Andrew Sullivan and other bloggers started talking about the GOP “echo chamber” years ago, and, having been away for a couple of days with illness, it really struck me that the GOP may be disconnected from most of the United States these days. The obvious example is the ACA replacement bill. Kevin Drum provides a lovely graphic illustrating the problem:

And yet Speaker Ryan seems bent on jamming it through the House. This is a bill basically held hostage by the far-right Freedom Caucus, a group of 40 Representatives who, by voting en bloc, seem to be able to remove at will all the important elements of a health bill, such as pre-existing conditions, hospitalization, or anything else you can name.

But this is a new issue, relatively speaking, and perhaps the public will grow to like it, as unlikely as it seems. So let’s take a look at something that would be more shocking. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price was formerly Representative Price of Georgia’s 6th district, a “deep red” (heavily GOP leaning) district, meaning that his 2016 victory, winning with 61.6% of the electorate, was actually his worst showing – he even once ran with no opposition from the Democrats. His move to Secretary of HHS means a special election will be held to replace him.

A triviality, right? But the GOP can read polls and apparently they’re more than a little worried. From National Journal:

Re­cog­niz­ing the high stakes in an up­com­ing spe­cial House elec­tion in sub­urb­an At­lanta, the GOP-aligned su­per PAC Con­gres­sion­al Lead­er­ship Fund is spend­ing an ad­di­tion­al $1.1 mil­lion in tele­vi­sion ads against the Demo­crat­ic front-run­ner, Jon Os­soff. After its first spot showed foot­age of a col­lege-aged Os­soff dressed up as Han Solo to poke at his im­ma­tur­ity, the new ad cam­paign is tread­ing on more fa­mil­i­ar ground, con­nect­ing the 30-year-old Demo­crat to un­pop­u­lar House Minor­ity Lead­er Nancy Pelosi.

This on top of another buy – major dollars for a district so safe that sometimes Democrats can’t even scare up a challenger. Why? Heavy presents the case:

A new poll released March 20 shows progressive Democrat Jon Ossoff increasing his lead in a special election to replace Tom Price in Georgia’s 6th congressional district.

The “exclusive” poll, performed by conservative-leaning zpolitics and Clout Research, shows Ossoff ahead of the 18-candidate field with 41 percent of the support of those polled.

Especially this:

The survey ran from March 15-16 and found that Ossoff, a first-time candidate with a business and national security background, has built on his lead in the race in comparison of a poll that was released in February. In that poll, Ossoff received 32 percent of support while Handel was at 25 percent and Gray was third with 11 percent.

A 9 point jump in support? He’s still not free and clear, but the 6th district has abruptly become a drain on GOP resources – no doubt a real shock to the system.

The intense discussion of the health bill, not to mention the mental stability of President Trump, may be serving notice to the public to pay more attention to politics and elections – and that, in turn, may cause the GOP’s tendency to talk to itself to become more emphasized.

Working against this thesis? Control of Congress. But that may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. As a RINO-enforced collection of nominees and bills are passed, making clear the extremism elected to Congress, it may be a self-destructive victory for the GOP.

A glimpse into insanity, the classic silent film Phantom of the Opera (1925) is a powerful story of the consequences of a society too obsessed with beauty and grace, where one man suffers a terrible accident, leaving him hideous, and is outcast from Paris. Now in hiding in the Paris Opera House, his mysterious presence a symbol of titillating terror, the abyss separating him from human society erodes his basic respect for humanity, leaving only one bitter peak of his former life:

His love of beauty.

For he is a voice teacher, coaching a lovely up and comer, Christine, from the shadows in which he moves, never revealing his shattered visage to her. She is now the understudy, and he demands, through written correspondence, that the owners of the Opera House make her the prima donna over the current prima. But, the mother of the current demurs, and the next time the current prima donna performs, a chandelier suddenly falls into the audience, precipitating panic.

Investigations intensify, from a spurned lover as well as the police; the Phantom finds an Opera House employee has discovered one of his secrets and ends his life. And Christine soon vanishes, drawn into the shadows of the Phantom, where the sensitive nerves of the Phantom are once again plunged into a salt bath. Her rejection of his ruined face plunges him into infernal madness.

Frantic searches ensue, the Opera House employees snatch up torches, and after one more fruitless ploy, the Phantom is plunged into the river.

There are irritating facets to this movie: “The Strangler” appears to be a deus ex machina, although later it appears it’s simply the Phantom. Christine is, in my Arts Editor’s words, “a wench”. But the innovative use of symbolism, lighting, and the inventive story keeps this movie moving right along, its message perhaps more applicable now than ever.

Recommended.

Petrichor:

14. Cherrapunji also holds a long-standing record for highest rainfall in a 12-month period: 86 feet, 10 inches, set back in 1860-1861.

15. The folks in Cherrapunji might be tired of it, but many people enjoy petrichor, the scent that often follows rainfall. Two Australian researchers coined the term back in the 1960s.

16.A U.S.-based team working at about the same time identified geosmin, a byproduct of soil bacteria, as the source of earthy notes in the distinctive smell.

[“20 Things You Didn’t Know About … Rain,” Gemma Tarlach, Discover (April 2017, paywall)

Ever get that gassy feeling?

On top of Strange Invaders (1983) comes Invisible Invaders (1959)! A terribly, terribly earnest movie concerning a nuclear scientist who has just quit a commission on nuclear weapons in disgust, and is faced with the corpse of another scientist who delivers an ultimatum that the Earth must surrender to the invisible (and asthmatic) invaders from outer space who have conquered the rest of the Universe.  This was probably conceived as a high tension thriller, with the scientist, his daughter, another scientist, and an Air Force representative ensconced in a bunker while they listen to the world falling apart around them, where they become the world’s only hope to roll back the invaders.

Sadly for them, they are beset by a veritable host of zombies, logic errors and aesthetic errors, including “If they can inhabit dead bodies by literally slipping into them, why can’t they just walk through walls?”, and, “Isn’t that a bit gross?”, and, “If you’ve taken over the Universe, then why do you want us to surrender? Why don’t you kick our asses and be done with it?”

Surely an MST3K candidate of high standing, we laughed our way through most of it, although the consistently adequate-to-good acting was certainly soberly appreciated. As I’ve just acquired the second head cold of the season, this was more appreciated than it might have been otherwise. If you watch, make sure you do it with friends or family who have an aesthetic appreciation of snark.

Back in 2010 NASA discovered one of the sources of trajectory errors: bumps in the gravity field of the Moon. From 2010, here’s a map:

Source: NASA

NewScientist (11 March 2017) is now reporting that those mascons are old impact craters:

Jay Melosh at Purdue University in Indiana and his colleagues were searching data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission for traces of underground lava tubes when they came across two large buried craters.

These had been hinted at last year, when Alex Evans at the University of Arizona and colleagues used GRAIL maps to find evidence of more than 100 craters buried beneath seas of basalt formed by ancient volcanic eruptions.

One of the new craters, called Earhart, is about 200 kilometres across and is almost completely masked by a later impact and subsequent lava flooding. Another discovery is a buried crater 160 kilometres in diameter, which has been called the Ashoka Anomaly (Icarus, doi.org/b2j9).

From the GRAIL mission page:

On a map of the moon’s gravity field, a mascon appears in a target pattern. The bulls-eye has a gravity surplus. It is surrounded by a ring with a gravity deficit. A ring with a gravity surplus surrounds the bulls-eye and the inner ring. This pattern arises as a natural consequence of crater excavation, collapse and cooling following an impact. The increase in density and gravitational pull at a mascon’s bulls-eye is caused by lunar material melted from the heat of a long-ago asteroid impact.

“Knowing about mascons means we finally are beginning to understand the geologic consequences of large impacts,” Melosh said. “Our planet suffered similar impacts in its distant past, and understanding mascons may teach us more about the ancient Earth, perhaps about how plate tectonics got started and what created the first ore deposits.”

And knowing what created the ore deposits might help guide us when searching for new deposits – here or on other planets.

Conspecific:

Finally, many animals maintain specific territories, within which they are intolerant to the presence of conspecifics (i.e., members of the same species). According to Polis, crowding increases the frequency with which individuals violate the space of others. By reducing overcrowded conditions, cannibalism can serve to decrease the frequency of territory violations. [“The Case for Cannibalism,” Bill Schutt, Discover (April 2017, paywall)]

The tide continues to go out on the coal mining industry, as CBS Moneywatch notes:

Electricity company Dayton Power & Light said on Monday it would shut down two coal-fired power plants in southern Ohio next year for economic reasons, a setback for the ailing coal industry but a victory for environmental activists.

Republican President Donald Trump promised in his election campaign to restore U.S. coal jobs that he said had been destroyed by environmental regulations put into effect by his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.

Dayton Power & Light, a subsidiary of AES Corp. (AES), said in an emailed statement that it planned to close the J.M. Stuart and Killen plants by June 2018 because they would not be “economically viable beyond mid-2018.”

Sadly, the plants employ a lot of people:

“They are by far our largest employer and it will absolutely be devastating to our community here in Ohio,” Michael Pell, president of First State Bank in Winchester, Ohio, said in a phone interview. Pell, one of several local community leaders who have lobbied to keep the plants going, has become a spokesman for Adams County on the issue. …

The plants sit at the heart of a region Trump vowed to revitalize with more jobs and greater economic security during his 2016 campaign. As part of his pledge to reinvigorate the area, Trump also said he would “bring back coal.”

It’s unfair to blame this entirely on the free market economics – part of the straw that broke these camels’ backs were environmental requirements, making it too expensive to upgrade the plants. But it’s entirely fair to shut down coal since a clean environment is essential to human health and overall prosperity. Since Trump’s campaign promises included bringing coal back to this part of Ohio, I wonder if he’ll compensate through retraining programs or some other approach.

Or if he’ll just toss them into the ocean, so to speak.

On our way out of the Guillermo del Toro exhibit at the Minneapolis Art Institute, we stumbled across this installation.  It’s a project by local artist Alison Hiltner, in which she cultivates bags of spirolina algae.

The Minneapolis StarTribune describes the presentation:

“A total of 56 teardrop-shaped sacs, heavy with a multihued soup of green, are suspended in groups of four from a canopy of metal racks. Each sac is warmed by a utility lamp and connected to black tubing, tangled overhead like sinister vines. The tubes connect to a hydroponic pump that serves to aerate the algae. But this does not occur unless gallerygoers breathe into a CO² sensor, which triggers an Arduino microcontroller to actuate a series of power switches that run the pump.”

Kind of a cool concept.  The room gurgles, bubbles and wheezes as the algae breathes in CO₂ and breaths out O₂.  It’s a stark contrast to the spectacular detail and polish of the del Toro exhibit, but no less impressive in its way.

If you’re a Guillermo del Toro fan and weren’t aware that the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts was hosting an exhibition concerning his film work, make yourself aware – and it closes May 28, 2017. We visited this afternoon, and, after having forked over our $20/ticket, we had a leisurely stroll through an exhibit that illustrates his obsessions, motivations, and working process. Included in this are his work journals, which left my Arts Editor virtually speechless at his restless imagination.

Pictures are encouraged, but I decided not to distract myself with excess photography. This was striking enough to photograph, though:

So go and enjoy!

Carl Engelking on D-brief discusses the latest odd finding – matching names to faces:

A name might also affect the face we see in the mirror.

In a battery of studies involving hundreds of participants, researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem showed that people can correctly match a name to a face better than random chance. That’s because over time, according to researchers, we develop a look that reflects the associations people commonly have with our given name. …

[Yonat] Zwebner designed 8 different experiments; six that measured how well hundreds of individuals from France and Israel could match a name to a face, and two that tested a computer’s ability to do the same thing. Participants saw a headshot, and were required to choose the correct name from a list of four. In every experiment, participants’ accuracy exceeded random chance, or 25 percent. Their computer learning algorithm, trained on 94,000 faces, correctly matched names to faces with 54 to 64 percent accuracy.

But here’s where it gets interesting: In one experiment, French participants correctly matched French names and faces 40 percent of the time, but when French participants were asked to match Israeli names and faces, their accuracy dropped to 26 percent—just about chance. Similarly, Israeli participants were better at matching Hebrew names and Israeli faces than French names to French faces. This disparity, researchers say, is evidence that culture-specific stereotypes influence the characteristics we associate with a name.

Going further, researchers say these stereotypes ultimately affect a person’s facial appearance. But how?

And … no real answer. The presented one – that we internalize expectations and “… cultivate a look that reaffirms those expectations.” Rather chicken and egg, if you ask me.

Of course, I wonder what happens to folks who change their names. Do their faces follow suit? Or are we merely talking about facial hair and eyebrow shaping?

And what about those of us with rare names? Neither Hue nor my given name of Hewitt are burdened with the barnacles of expectations – does this mean I’m freer than most?

Concerning the American military’s response to climate change, a reader writes:

Now you got me wondering how much of the hubbub in the South China Sea is related to a desire to control access to ocean life as it migrates north from equatorial waters. Pretty much every form of life capable of migrating to temperate climates will as global warming increases. We definitely need to be focusing on food sources during that shift and the smart money will be anticipating. The U.S. isn’t even reacting.

I wonder how many GOPers are depending on the private sector to take care of it, without understanding that the governments of other nations are going to provide their food sectors with all the extra muscle they can – and that our private sector will be at a disadvantage.

On Slate, Mark Joseph Stern reports on a tragedy:

Andrew Scott and his girlfriend were playing video games in their Florida apartment late at night when they heard a loud banging at the front door. Scott, who was understandably disturbed, retrieved the handgun that he lawfully owned, then opened the door with the gun pointed safely down. Outside, he saw a shadowy figure holding a pistol. He began to retreat inside and close the door when the figure fired six shots without warning, three of which hit Scott, killing him. Scott hadn’t fired a single bullet or even lifted his firearm.

The figure outside was Deputy Richard Sylvester. He failed to identify himself as a law enforcement officer at any point. He had no warrant and no reason to suspect that Scott or his girlfriend had committed a crime. He did not attempt to engage with Scott at all after he opened the door; he simply shot him dead. And on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit held that Scott’s parents and girlfriend cannot sue Sylvester because the officer’s conduct was not “clearly” illegal.

I think it might be more helpful to focus on the larger issues, rather than get tied up in the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which is the legal reasoning used by at least two courts now to find the deputy non-culpable. There have been many calls, and many efforts, to build trust between law enforcement and the communities it polices. For example, following the Castile shooting, the Falcon Heights City Hall issued an email to residents which states, in part,

Our goals are to unify our community around a plan to address the concerns we have heard since this tragic incident, and to work to restore trust between law enforcement officers, and the residents and city visitors whom they serve.

We should start from ground level and work our way up, and that means collaboratively constructing¹ a definition of the word trust. I don’t want to thrust forward a full, detailed definition, but rather I simply want to bring out a facet of the word which I think should be emphasized, and it is this.

Trust must imply vulnerability.

Trust is about partnership, not about a hierarchical relation in which the superior is granting favors out of the goodness of their heart – or fear of pitchforks and torches. Trust is about opening oneself up to the possible fatal wound of another – and trusting they won’t do it.

The application of qualified immunity automatically puts law enforcement personnel in a superior position, and while I recognize they are doing a tough job, if they want that job to be a little bit easier, they must be willing to show that trust by being vulnerable. By discarding this doctrine and saying, yeah, he didn’t point a gun at me, and, no, I didn’t identify myself properly, and now I have to face a penalty.

Another situation – approaching a vehicle with your guns drawn. Without additional information that the occupants are dangerous, that gun should be in the holster. Does that raise the danger level for the cop?

Sure does. No doubt it’ll get a few killed through ambush.

But by approaching so many cars with innocent citizens with guns drawn, those very citizens who are supposed to be safeguarded are, instead, endangered. Accidents do happen. After a while, law enforcement personnel burn out and have suboptimal responses. And then innocents die and a little bit more trust withers

And our society becomes a little less special.

¹I avoid the word “asking” as it implies an unwarranted hierarchical structure to society. I also avoid the word “defining” as that may lead people to think the dictionary is the best authority for this process.

Wait, Captain, these farmers like their isolation!

We see Strange Invaders (1983), and we find a strange mixture of elements: good acting by actors faced with odd material; oddly well done special effects which take advantage of shadows and clouds to gesture at the aliens waiting at our door, without wearying us with poorly done details; believable, ordinary characters dealing with an extraordinary world as best they can.

On the other hand, the editing and continuity are a wretched mess; the reactions of the bigger institutions dubious; and a happy ending is tacked on to what could have been a very effective movie if they had, instead, gone with a good noir ending. Thematically, we’re left with a standard Persistence pays off theme; I’m not sure, absent the happy ending, that a rational, appealing theme could be pulled from the debris – but that hypothetical dark ending might have made you cry.

But you do feel like these are characters that were lived in, that had other things to do until Centerville, IL, became a petri dish, and you do find yourself watching, almost despite yourself, as the movie hops erratically along towards a climax less about heroic actions, and more about heroic resolve.

You may enjoy this with mood enhancers, though.

Chalazae:

Ever noticed those little springy white cords attached to egg yolks? Have a look next time you crack an egg. They’re the chalazae and they hold the yolk suspended mid-egg, so that it floats in an incubation bath with a constant temperature. They also ensure the developing chick is not damaged when its mother turns the egg. Egg-turning only evolved in modern birds. Opposite birds buried their eggs, so it is possible their eggs didn’t have those stringy bits. [“Flipping the birds,” sidebar, Jeff Hecht, NewScientist (4 March 2017, paywall)]

NewScientist (11 March 2017) reports on the latest theory for OCD:

THE thoughts and urges that are characteristic of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) may be caused by an inability to distinguish between safe and risky situations.

People with OCD feel they have to carry out certain actions, such as washing their hands again and again, or repeatedly checking the oven has been turned off. Those worst affected may spend hours every day on these compulsive “rituals”.

To find out more about why this happens, Naomi Fineberg of the Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust in the UK and her team trained 78 people to fear a picture of an angry face. They did this by sometimes giving the volunteers an electric shock when they saw the picture. About half the group had OCD.

The team then tried to “detrain” the volunteers, by showing them the same picture many times, but without any shocks. Judging by how much the volunteers sweated when they saw the picture, the team found that people without OCD soon learned to stop associating the face with the shock, but people with the condition remained scared.

Brain scans revealed that the people with OCD had less activity in their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in signalling safety and predicting rewards (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1609194114).

Suggesting an organic problem susceptible to medical treatment. It has the virtue of being believable.

Feel the G-forces, lady?

It may have Bogart in it, but he’s a very young Bogart, with just hints of what he’ll become. Love Affair (1932) is a stilted affair, and the version we saw had a hissing audio which served to underline the problems in this film: characters who didn’t ring true, dialog with no imagination, delivered after uncertain pauses, and a story that didn’t drag us into its clutches.

I don’t wish to suggest it’s entirely without virtue, as the opening scene is quite engaging as Bogart, a pilot, takes a pretty young socialite up in his biplane for some stunt flying. It’s fun and the two develop a fair bit of chemistry, between doing loopedy loops and holding down the vomit. But then we veer off into random social torture, the vicissitudes of the Great Depression and the lusts, however politely held in check, of older men, and, oh, I’ll tell you that this had twists and turns – and I didn’t care. This is Bogart still learning his craft, his face uncarved, merely a pretty boy.

And while there are some nice parts, you have to tramp through too much to get to it.

Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare gives his learned opinion on how to read FBI Director Comey’s testimony today regarding the Russia investigation:

But free as I am from the shackles of any actual knowledge, let me offer readers the following user’s guide to Comey’s testimony, which can be summed up in one simple sentence: Comey’s communicativeness with the committee—and through it with the public—will almost certainly be inversely proportional to the seriousness of the Russia investigation.
That is, if Comey says a lot, makes a lot of news on Russia matters, and cheers a lot of anti-Trump hearts by maximally embarassing the President for his outrageous comments on Obama’s alleged wiretapping of Trump Tower, that will very likely be a sign that Comey has relatively little to protect in terms of investigative equities in the Russia matter and is thus free to vent. Conversely, a quiet, reserved Comey—one whose contrast with the relatively loquatious FBI director who talked at length about the Clinton email matters will infuriate a lot of liberals and frustrate those who want to know what’s going on with Russia—may well spell trouble for the President.

Why? Stipulate that there’s very big news concerning Russia and the Trump campaign:

 Comey, in other words, has significant investigative equities to protect and he believes that he needs to be there in order to protect them—in other words, that he has a responsibility to not get himself fired because of his anger about the Trump tweets (or anything else) because he has to make sure the investigation can proceed unimpeded. In this situation, I would expect him to be minimally verbal. He may have to answer yes or no questions in certain instances, including about the truth of the wiretapping allegations, but he will refuse to answer a lot of questions. He will make as little news as humanly possible. He will be exceptionally spare with his opinions. He will make a point of not antagonizing the President. Lots of people will leave disappointed.

So I was at work all day. How did the testimony go? NBC News reports:

Sitting beside the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael Rogers, Comey began the hearing by revealing in his opening statement that the FBI was in the midst of a counterintelligence investigation into the Russian campaign to hack, leak and promote bogus news stories. Part of that investigation, he said, would examine whether the Trump campaign coordinated with that effort.

Comey said he could not disclose any details about the probe. Normally, he said, the FBI doesn’t confirm or deny investigations, but it can make exceptions in cases of major public interest.

This ride could get very interesting.

Tangentially with regards to Obama’s alleged primary failure, former Secretary of Labor for President Clinton Robert Reich recently visited Washington and thinks Trump’s victory is the result of people distrusting an apparently rigged system. What happened when he mentioned that to various denizens of Washington?

Many people asked, bewilderedly, “How did this [Trump] happen?” When I suggest it had a lot to do with the 35-year-long decline of incomes of the bottom 60 percent; the growing sense, ever since the Wall Street bailout, that the game is rigged; and the utter failure of both Republicans and Democrats to reverse these trends — they give me blank stares.

Here’s his Tweet; this Daily Kos posting from Keith Pickering is more legible.

If Trump leaves before four years have elapsed, his successor may have to consider returning Glass-Steagall to law after an appropriate campaign to blame its abolition for the Great Recession. It would certainly be easy enough, since it’s already been written; industry should remember it, if not fondly, but better, perhaps, than Dodd-Frank; and it may even be true that its removal by a business-owned Congress is to blame for the Great Recession.

If we accept and continue the story arc of blame, the GOP‘s plan to replace the ACA with a vastly inferior substitute could be a devastating act of seppuku, perhaps leading to its reincarnation as a reasonable political party once again. However, in the interim, who will take over in the power vacuum?

Palladium:

(secondary) A palladium or palladion is an image or other object of great antiquity on which the safety of a city or nation is said to depend. The word is a generalization from the name of the original Trojan Palladium, a wooden statue (xoanon) of Pallas Athena that Odysseus and Diomedes stole from the citadel of Troy and which was supposedly later taken to the future site of Rome by Aeneas, where it remained until perhaps transferred to Constantinople and lost sight of after the conversion of the Empire to Christianity. [Wikipedia]

Noted in President George Washington’s Farewell Address:

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.

While politicians may be able to get away with deny climate change, but the Pentagon has to be more careful. Military Times reports on the contents of the Quadrennial Defense Review:

Economic competition. Thawing in the Arctic has opened new maritime routes and revealed new energy sources, creating new competition between the U.S. and Russia. The Pentagon’s 2013 Arctic Strategy statement details its plans for safeguarding American interests there and ensuring freedom of navigation. It calls the region a “strategic inflection point,” noting that as the ice caps continue to melt, there will be rush to claim the oil, natural gas and other resources there.

The Pentagon views the Arctic as vital for establishing ballistic missile defenses to safeguard the homeland. But  Russia’s buildup there has greatly exceeded that of the United States. Its military has established a new Arctic command, added four brigades, 14 airfields, 16 ports, and has 40 operational icebreakers and 11 in production. The U.S. has only one working icebreaker, and it was commissioned in the 1970s.

In the South China Sea, warming waters have forced fish stocks to migrate north, increasing the potential for conflict between China and U.S. allies whose economies depend on that trade, says Frank Femia, who heads the Center for Climate and Security. The non-partisan think tank includes several senior retired military officers concerned about climate change and its impact on national security.

A reminder that climate change will be changing the very nature of many conflicts, both military and economic. The refusal of many in the US Congress to acknowledge and begin to deal with climate change and its results may doom the United States ambitions to disappointment.

IT’S HARD TO SAY, as a crisis properly handled could turn things around. But right at the moment, it appears President Trump’s budget and backing for the GOP ACA replacement is not playing well to the crowd, according to Gallup:

This looks to be his low point so far, and tomorrow’s update should be fascinating, although honestly his approval rating (37% in this chart, with a disapproval rating of 58%) will probably move back up as the vagaries of polling and regression to the mean takeover. But I think we’re seeing the results of being an autocratic business owner thrust into a government office which attracts constant attention for its occupants’ behavior – and their attention to liberal democracy ideals. He admits his policies will hurt his own supporters; he wants to inflate the military even more; and while some of his more outré promises continue to have his active support, many others have fallen by the wayside. His New York mannerisms may have played well with those who needed to hear that someone sympathized with their economic plight, and would promise to do something for them, there may now be a dawning recognition that they are little more than a convenient trampoline. As a private business owner, Trump only rarely had to worry about the facts, as they only assumed importance in courts of law who insisted he pay attention to those facts. But in the public sector, an insistent free press makes facts and truth more important, more relevant – if not to him, then to those who are affected by his actions, and can return the favor. I wonder if his support for Speaker Ryan’s ridiculous replacement for the ACA was, in part, a political quid pro quo to not be impeached.

My question remains the same – will he resign, or will he be thrust out forcibly by Congress?

A lush example of the murder mystery genre, Laura (1944) is a leisurely delight. A body, shot in the face with a shotgun, is found in the entryway of a high end apartment by the maid, and the hunt is on for Laura Hunt’s (ahem!) killer. Is it her long-time mentor and (perhaps) lover, the caustically witty and famous columnist, Waldo Lydecker? Is it her alleged fiancee and wastrel, Shelby Carpenter? Is it the woman who also loves Shelby, Diane Redfern?

Is it the woman who also loves Shelby, Ann Treadwell? Was it the maid, Bessy?

Heck, we even speculated it was the cop, the hard-boiled Mark McPherson.

This is a quietly all-around well-made movie, featuring luscious, intriguing sets. But the real treat is the competition between a story that weaves together questions of guilt, love, and passion, and the actors who are performing the story. To the former are the strengths of understanding the difference between information and critical information, as we try to discern who committed this horrific crime – and why? And dialog which clarifies the characters for us – the rapid fire patter of the columnist, Lydecko, the brusque, brooding lines of McPherson, and the languid, vague inspidities of the wastrel, Carpenter. We hear them and they help us zero in on the essence of these characters. But along with that comes a plot featuring move and counter-move, ambiguities and how they pain both he who has to interpret those ambiguities – and she who delivers them. Did she break her word to him – or did she just break his word to himself?

But characters need actors, and these actors deliver. Dana Andrews is a particular standout as the cop, McPherson, clearly communicating that this is a man with some inner demons, leaving us wondering how they drive him – to find guilty murderers, or be one himself? But matching him is Clifton Webb as the ascerbic Lydecko, so often ready with a murderous quip, a prick pried from his shell by the beautiful Laura Hunt. Laura, seen in flashbacks, and fiancee Carpenter, played by an absolutely towering Vincent Price, are forced to the second tier in this movie, despite valiant efforts. But even outside of the main cast, regardless of very limited minutes, both the maid Bessy and Carpenter’s third place lover, Ann Treadwell, are brought to devious life by performances which stir up questions about themselves and human nature which well-nigh demand movies in themselves to answer. Kudos to both story and actors for giving them backgrounds which actually, in one case, made my skin crawl. But, perhaps most to the entire movie’s credit, afterwards my Arts Editor and I talked out several small plot holes – but we didn’t care. The momentum of the movie carried us through those and on to the finale.

This is a movie which can grab your attention and not let go until the final shot is fired and the clock runs out on our murderer.

Strongly Recommended.

Lee Schafer opines in the StarTribune on the inexplicable behavior of Jim Surdyk in breaking the law concerning Sunday liquor sales, and in the process manages to bring President Trump into it:

The rule of law takes a beating in this kind of political environment, too. It’s particularly telling that one in four respondents in a February survey said President Donald Trump should be able to overturn a judge’s decision if he happened to disagree with it.

Our new president isn’t exactly a staunch defender of our traditional sense of the rule of law, of course. He has done things like complaining that our laws forbidding Americans to bribe people when doing business abroad are “horrible” and criticizing a “so-called judge” for taking “law enforcement away from our country.”

Yet this is an issue that seems to have partisans on both sides with blind spots, and critics of the president seem to have a cart-and-horse problem when discussing issues like a perceived threat to our rule of law. It seems far more accurate to call his election as president a result of what’s been happening in our culture, not the cause of it.

Meanwhile, over at The Minnesota Skinny, Frank (I think) also drags President Trump into the Surdyk fray as he defends the opening of the Surdyk’s liquor store.:

It might not have been the right thing, it might not have been the fair thing, but the numbers may one day reveal a risk that produced value despite the penalty. For a similar example, we can look toward the White House.

We still haven’t seen Donald Trump’s tax returns, and you know what? We’re never going to. Never ever ever. No stupid petition you sign on the Internet is going to get those books open. Bernie Sanders might as well shout into a seashell. Trump was supposed to open the books during his campaign, wasn’t he? I’ve no doubt the contents of those returns would have him removed from the White House, but nobody can make him produce them. So, he didn’t. He was lambasted, he’s still being lambasted, but it didn’t stop him from getting elected. Nobody could punish him then, and sure as hell nobody can punish him now.

Frank looks at the law as simply part of the risk equation of life, while Lee is looking at the law as a more sacred part of society, the part that helps us get along with each other. Honestly, while Frank’s view has a certain hipster appeal to it, it’s the sort of approach that only works so long as a small fraction of society is doing it. What happens if everyone decides to drive faster than everyone else? We end up with pileups worth of a Formula 1 race. Robbing banks? We can tolerate that until everyone’s robbing a bank. Frank’s approach is the parasite’s approach, the approach that seems to yield great results – but, to lapse into software engineering patois, it has no scalability.

And, of course, it suffers from the ethical lapse of the end justifies the means.

Getting back to Surdyk and his liquor store for a moment, I’ll just state right now that, for the next couple of years, my wife and I will not be visiting Surdyk’s for any of his products. Sure, this is symbolic – we go through maybe 5 bottles of wine a year, mostly for cooking, and there are wine shops much closer than Surdyk’s. But we have visited there in the past, as they have a better selection than most places, and the smell of the cheese shop is quite heavenly.

But we’re going to take a skip. His lack of respect for society is repugnant.