Category Archives: Uncategorized

The wake of the Stumpf debacle has not smoothed over yet, as four Wells Fargo executives have been fired, and their bonuses clawed back. WaPo reports:

The four executives are current or former senior managers of the megabank’s community banking division. They will not receive their 2016 bonuses and will forfeit the stock and stock options they were awarded, Wells Fargo said in a statement.

The terminations are just the latest effort by the San Francisco-based bank to move beyond a scandal that has already led to the departure of longtime chief executive and chairman John G. Stumpf. The over-100-year-old bank has been battered by lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle for a five-year scheme in which thousands of employees, to meet aggressive sales goals, set up sham accounts that customers didn’t request. Wells Fargo admitted that it fired 5,300 employees for the conduct and has eliminated the aggressive goals that some have said drove the behavior.

But the bank has seen the number of customers signing up for new accounts tumble and it continues to face pressure from lawmakers who say the bank needs to do more to rectify the matter. It is unclear whether the board’s unanimous decision to fire four executives will be enough to quiet Wells Fargo’s critics.

It’s not entirely clear to me how important the general consumer business is to Wells Fargo, nor how news of the firings will shine up their image. Perhaps they should consider actually holding discussions on what makes for a responsible banking institution.

Maybe they should start with my Arts Editor’s opinion.

Kevin Drum continues down the leaded gasoline path, this time hybridizing it with the Muslim travel ban, version 2:

But here’s the funny thing: Gorka might well be right but for entirely the wrong reasons. Young men who live in a wide swath of the world stretching from North Africa to Central Asia probably are more prone to violence than they are in the developed North. But it has nothing to do with Islam. That’s just the handiest thing to latch onto. It’s all about lead:

The Trumpies got struck down for temporarily banning immigration from a set of seven seemingly arbitrary countries, so instead they should create a rule that temporarily bans immigration from any country that phased out leaded gasoline later than, say, 2001. They might have to fiddle a bit with the numbers, which they have plenty of experience doing, and maybe add some weird second condition in order to get only the countries they want, but with a little creativity they could make it work. And it’s not based on ethnicity, religion, or even nationality. You’re welcome!

Don’t give them ideas. And don’t think this is a trap – the Trump Administration doesn’t seem to comprehend the meaning of the word contradiction. They just sail right through without embarrassment. Thus all the fantasized massacres. In the meantime, Trump’s approval remains embarrassingly high – embarrassingly high for the United States, that is.

I suppose Russia finds his performance a bit frustrating. The Chinese? They’re still gnashing their teeth at the apparent failure of their little ploy.

I’d never heard of vernacular architecture, but here it is, from Ariana Zilliacus on ArchDaily:

“Vernacular architecture can be said to be ‘the architectural language of the people’ with its ethnic, regional and local ‘dialects,'” writes Paul Oliver, author of The Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of The World’. Unfortunately, there has been a growing disregard for traditional architectural language around the world due to modern building technology quickly spreading a “loss of identity and cultural vibrancy” through what the Architectural Review recently described as “a global pandemic of generic buildings.” People have come to see steel, concrete and glass as architecture of high quality, whereas a lot of vernacular methods including adobe, reed or peat moss are often associated with underdevelopment. Ironically, these local methods are far more sustainable and contextually aware than much contemporary architecture seen today, despite ongoing talks and debates about the importance of sustainability. As a result of these trends, a tremendous amount of architectural and cultural knowledge is being lost.

I’m sort of interested in more detail on why Ariana thinks vernacular architecture is more sustainable than modern architecture – that strikes me as an argument that requires a lot of support, given that many of the examples she cites later in her article were not developed in a context of high population densities – or simply high populations. For example, this:

Found in what is possibly the wettest human-inhabited place on earth, during monsoon season in Meghalaya the rivers grow to become far more violent and powerful than in the dry season. To cross, the Khasi tribes that lived in the region would build bamboo bridges, however they were not strong enough to last the monsoon. Around 180 years ago they experimented with a new technique, pulling the roots of a rubber tree across a river the slowly grew into a bridge that is now capable of sustaining the weight of 50 people. The living root bridges of Meghalaya take around 25-30 years to grow, and they only grow stronger with time. There are a few living bridges that have had enough time to grow into fully functioning structures, but over the last 25 years this practice has begun to die out. Waiting decades for a bridge to form is far too long in our modern day world, especially when a steel or concrete alternative can be constructed in a fraction of that time—although they certainly aren’t as magical.

That said, the many solutions to the problem of housing in the face of limited resources are fascinating, as are the stories that accompany them.

 On the island of Læsø in northern Denmark there is a longstanding tradition for seaweed roofs, made using eelgrass. A successful salt industry on the island meant that most of the trees were used to power kilns for salt refinement, leaving residents with little to construct their homes. As a result, they used driftwood from shipwrecks and eelgrass from the ocean that were able to withstand decay for hundreds of years, thanks to the fact that they were impregnated with saltwater. Unfortunately a fungal disease wiped out over 200 of the existing buildings in the 1930s, leaving only 19.

Sort of like black mold, maybe.

Spolia:

Some of the most interesting of the Nimes tombs are made of reclaimed materials, or spolia, from the ruins of an older Roman necropolis that once lined a main road south fo the city. [“Memento Mori“, Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology (March/April, 2017), print only.]

A reader sends an update on teacher pay in the benighted state of North Carolina:

Gov. Roy Cooper proposes a major, multi-year investment in North Carolina teachers. 5% average raise this year and next year. Under his plan, NC would rank best in the Southeast in 3 years and reach at least the national average in 5 years. He also proposes a teacher supply stipend to be paid directly to the teacher at the start of the school year.

Sounds like Governor Cooper didn’t get the memo about throwing the teachers under the bus. How will he finance it? According to The Charlotte Observer, some promised tax cuts may not occur, but given GOP dominance in the legislature, that will be a tussle, so Cooper is hoping to bring in some unusual allies:

“I’m going to be asking the business community to go the General Assembly and say, ‘Don’t cut the corporate tax rate again. Instead, raise teacher pay,’ ” Cooper said at a January gathering of education advocates in Raleigh.

I expect the smart businesses will work with him on that.

It makes me sad to have to say it, but since President Trump wants to take a dump on the press in the best Nixonian tradition, I think it needs to be said.

One of the absolutely most important tools of a free people is information, full & complete. Not what’s convenient to their biases, left or right, but as complete as possible.

So when President Trump pronounces,

I also want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news. The dishonest media which has published one false story after another with no sources, even though they pretend they have them, they make them up in many cases, they just don’t want to report the truth and they’ve been calling us wrong now for two years.

he’s talking about news organizations that dare to call him out on verifiable lies – by claiming they don’t have the sources. But they do, they’re more than willing to make them available.

So here’s the struggle for the heart and soul of the United States – good information, and the willingness to act. For President Trump, his actions betray his greatest enemy – accurate information about himself. The free press, the media, finds itself under attack from two sides. The first is a President who, with no training and no apparent ideas as to the role of the press in the nation, cries out in anger every time he is found out. Truth has nothing to do with him, it slipped out of his car in the dead of the night. And now he assaults the free press, a press that has saved this nation countless times over the centuries, he assaults one of our pillars.

Second, a lesser, but more subtle attack is mounted by the ownership of the press. Let’s face it, it takes a special ownership of a news organization to do it right: not to slant the news, not to strip context from news they don’t like, to just investigate, investigate, investigate, and then present it so the audience can judge. We know, from Bruce Bartlett’s investigations, that Fox News has failed that test. I suggest another approach to detecting such news organizations is to search for Trump endorsements, and know them as big red flags.

This is one of the most important issues facing American citizens today, and if you’re a conservative who is considering taking the President seriously, then be serious about it. Ask about it! Ask for specific examples, and ask for a hundred of them! If the White House won’t respond, ask the local GOP. If they won’t deliver, either, then there’s your answer. Walk away.

But if they do, good! Now follow through and check them. Call up your friends, divide up the allegations, and follow through. Did the mainstream media really make all this shit up?

But if they don’t, do you have the honesty to call him on it? Or are his promises too alluring still?

NBC News reports on an early statement on the Obama Administration:

Barack Obama ranks as the 12th best leader in U.S. presidential history, according to a new survey of 91 presidential historians conducted by C-SPAN.

The panel placed the 44th president just below Woodrow Wilson and just above James Monroe.

I think Obama will end up even higher – but I think there’s little point in taking this survey seriously. First, there just hasn’t been time to adequately analyze and digest Obama’s policies and their results; second, some of the results of his policies will not be apparent for years or decades – case in point, the Iran nuclear deal. Perhaps in two decades it’ll be time to analyze its final results – and reorder the list in that light.

But now? Must be a slow news day on President’s Day.

We used to dig arrowheads and spears, old swords and bits of armor.

Then came the old bombs, the landmines, devices that malfunctioned and threatened descendants three generations later than the old warriors who had hated, fought, and left their debris behind to threaten those who hardly comprehended the motivations of those who did this.

Now it’s happening again, in Iraq. Adnan Abu Zeed reports in AL Monitor:

Radiation levels in parts of Iraq — including the heavily populated capital — are an environmental disaster that must be investigated and remedied, parliament member Hassan Salem and his Iraqi National Alliance electoral coalition maintain.

The level of contamination actually rises at times as more radioactive remnants of war are uncovered. Children, unaware but fascinated, find and play with irradiated leftovers, such as abandoned vehicles and military equipment. ​Scrap metal dealers, some of whom are children, contribute to the spread of contamination, and unsuspecting factory workers actually burn contaminated bricks in furnaces for fuel.

According to Salem, this explains how radiation levels reached 62% above the “normal” reading in the Kasra wa Atash district, near Sadr City in northeast Baghdad. …

Speaking to Al-Monitor about pollution in combat areas and leftover radioactive military equipment, Ministry of Environment Undersecretary Jassim Abdul Aziz Hamadi al-Falahi said the situation is under control. He added, “These areas are classified and isolated, and most of them are monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Falahi noted, “The Iraqi state is not standing idle, as several specialized bodies are monitoring radioactive contamination rates and the surface area of contaminated sites, including the Iraq Radioactive Sources Regulatory Authority, the Radiation Protection Center and the Radioactive Waste Treatment and Management Directorate affiliated with the Ministry of Science and Technology.”

Another enduring legacy of the Bush Administration and its unnecessary war. Perhaps it would have been worse if we had not invaded, but I find it hard to justify. Very, very hard to justify.

Otherlab has solved the problem of dead-heading in a slightly different way, as noted by Seeker:

Otherlab’s team, led by Mikell Taylor, made the drone in response to a DARPA call for disappearing unmanned systems as part of the agency’s Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems (ICARUS) program. It’s designed to land within about a 33-foot (10-meter) radius of a pre-programmed GPS spot.

ICARUS: great spot of humor there. Continujng:

Currently, dropping emergency supplies like blood and vaccines from the air is messy and inefficient with plenty of loss, Taylor explained. Sending regular drones is expensive because they have a bad habit of crashing and turning into trash. Airdropped cargo attached to a parachute can break apart in mid-air, land in a pond or end up in the wrong hands.

“DARPA was interested specifically in something that could degrade fairly quickly so when you deliver your supplies with a hundred of these, you don’t have drones littering the ground for the next 20 years,” Taylor said. To that end, her team constructed the body from flexible cellulose-based material. Inside were off-the-shelf electronics, although DARPA has a separate program for electronics that dissolve on impact.

If we add a self-aware AI to the drone, then we’d have a scenario reminiscent of Blade Runner (I never read the P. K. Dick story Bladerunners originated from), in which an artificially sentient organism has a very short lifespan. And there might be a temptation to add that capability, if ever developed, since that would give the drone more flexibility.

There’s a short story in there somewhere.

But at the moment you have to like the idea a lot, once the dissolving electronics are “perfected.” And it occurs to me – dissolution does not mean traceless dissolution. What if, say, the jungle floor was discolored where a drone crashed and dissolved? Would this amount to art? Perhaps if done purposefully by an artist?

Daniel Byman comments on Lawfare concerning the difference between the public perception of the danger of terrorism attacks in the United States, and the public’s perception:

The public’s perception of the danger of terrorism is far worse than the reality. Even after fifteen years of a relentless global counterterrorism campaign, 40 percent of Americans believe the ability of terrorists to launch a major attack on the United States is greater than it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and another 31 percent believe it is simply the same. There is no evidence for either of these propositions.

Some of this misperception stems from the post-9/11 media environment. After the towers fell, reporting of terrorist plots, let alone actual attacks, has skyrocketed, particularly if the perpetrators have even weak connections to jihadist groups like al Qaeda or its even more evil spinoff, the Islamic State. The globalization of media meant that Islamic State attacks in Dhaka or al Qaeda attacks in Bali receive considerable press coverage, to say nothing of the attacks in even more relatable and accessible locales in Europe. All of this makes Trump’s claim that the media have neglected terrorism seem bizarre to terrorism experts, where the normal complaint is that the media do the terrorists’ job for them by giving them so much free publicity. Indeed, although the terrorism problem in Europe is more severe than that facing the United States, it too has not surged dramatically compared to past decades. The 1970s and 1980s saw many attacks. Recent years have seen bloody and horrific attacks, like the 2015 shootings and bombings in Paris that killed 130 people—but 1988 saw 440 people die, most of whom perished when Libyan agents bombed Pan Am 103.

Just like the Web, don’t go believing what any politician wants you to believe. Indeed, in an ideal democracy, the politicians would take the findings furnished by experts and use them when setting priorities, deciding on funding sources, and that sort of thing. When a politician rejects the findings of experts, the odds are you’re looking for someone grasping for power.

And be wary.

This started with the GOP rejecting various parts of science over the last few decades; Trump is merely the next step. He’s not new, but there may be one new facet: a news media willing to expose him. They need to keep on doing that, keep calling him a liar, and if & when he starts to fail to come through on promises, advertise that as well.

And keep working on his tax returns.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com notes another blow struck against the coal miners:

The latest piece of evidence, reported over at AZ Central, is about the major utilities which own the massive 2,250 megawatt Navajo Generating Station in Arizona—described in the report as one of the largest polluters in the nation. The plan, according to AZ Central, is to shutter the plant by 2019, when one of the three turbines will have to be retired anyway.

And I see Sami has the same concerns I have – but for the Navajo who are losing a major revenue source:

Given the astounding economic, health and environmental impacts of coal, this decision is a major win for environmentalists. But as with any such closures, we should all be calling for support for the communities who have relied on this project—and a nearby coal mine—for income.

In much the same way that Australian unions have joined forces with environmentalists to demand a “just transition” away from coal, we need to make sure that in the shift away from fossil fuels, we create opportunities for all communities to benefit.

A “just transition” in Australian lingo, to me, just means the recognition that we are all in this together; there is nothing wrong in helping out those who are hurt by our transition to cleaner energy sources. In fact, failing to do so is really a betrayal of them. We are not a some faux-Darwinian society in which hell takes the losers, because the losers may rise up and batter down the winners. We originally built societies to hold back forces that could not be handled by individuals, and that rule still holds true.

Disney’s Moana (2016) is its periodic issuance of an animated inspirational youth movie, one in a long line, including the recent Frozen (2013), and it’s technically quite a movie. The animation is, as one might expect from Disney, virtually flawless, achieving blue oceans and skies which are a step up from what has come before – at least in my experience. The water seems crisper and bubblier, and the outrigger canoes seemed to be just a bit more realistic than I would have expected, the larger versions moving with a majestic grace across the oceans.

The movie’s name is eponymous to the main character, an island chieftain’s daughter who wants the one forbidden thing – to go out on the ocean. When her village faces extinction due to the spoilage of all of the food sources, Moana listens to her grandmother’s stories concerning the rot poisoning the world, and goes out beyond the reef, onto the wild ocean, in search of the demi-god who caused the rot to begin. Facing obstacles both internal and external, they return an island goddess to her old self, and the rot disappears.

This is an old story format for Disney, now part of a story from the Polynesian cultures, and Disney uses it to inspire a new generation of children. They know how to draw sympathetic characters, and mostly succeed in this story, although one character, a giant crab who has collected an artifact, a magical hook previously owned by the demi-god for its own collection, unused and but a prize, is too much of a buffoon to be anything but a cardboard character. With some work I could see the symbolism of the dangers of an obsession with things for their own sake, but the problem with such an interpretation is that the character doesn’t really suffer for the obsession; he may lose the artifact, but in the end he’s simply a singing, homicidal crab. This criticism also applies to the coconut pirates, who could have been more if we’d known more about them. Were they simply metaphorical? Were they creatures of the Gods, sent to test Moana? Or are the Gods competitive

Another minor flaw in execution lies in the behavior of the demi-god, who, finding his magical hook is cracked and fading, gives up, leaving his task for Moana to complete; later, he returns, but we don’t really get to experience the why. Adults can certainly guess why, but the children who are there to learn lessons about life lose the opportunity to see why someone might risk their most valued possession. The movie’s emotional impact would have been boosted if his decision to risk his most treasured possession had been illustrated.

A member of the Scene Stealer’s Guild

But Moana’s part of the story is spot-on, as is the comic relief of her chicken. The music is quite striking, and is mostly sung quite well. The characters mostly work. But perhaps most telling was my reaction:

I wanted to be there on the outrigger canoe.

Recommended.

Encaustic painting:

Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. The liquid or paste is then applied to a surface—usually prepared wood, though canvas and other materials are often used. The simplest encaustic mixture can be made from adding pigments to beeswax, but there are several other recipes that can be used—some containing other types of waxes, damar resin, linseed oil, or other ingredients. Pure, powdered pigments can be used, though some mixtures use oil paints or other forms of pigment. [Wikipedia]

Noted in Nadia Alenov’s Artistic Statement:

Encaustics helps seal in the intrinsic qualities of an image and elevates the piece to a state of timelessness.

Maybe.

According to the local news, the Trump campaign rally in Florida was well-attended, mostly by those hoping the aviation industry jobs return. Unlike manufacturing, that’s not so hard to do.

I do find it appalling that he can’t put together a decent Cabinet, but he can run out and start campaigning for the next election. Already. Hasn’t he heard of being competent?

Seriously, probably not.

National Review republishes a column by Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon which includes a throw-off line he may regret:

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution — its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the “least dangerous branch,” now presume to think they know more about America’s national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.

I bolded the part that I nearly burst out laughing at. Did this guy really buy it when then-candidate Trump declared himself much smarter than the generals who run the wars we stumble into?

But, more importantly, we elect Presidents as managers and leaders – not deep experts on national security, foreign relations, and all the other responsibilities of the Executive. We expect them to hire experts to take care of those areas. We do expect a certain familiarity with all those issues – it’s almost staggering how much – but I don’t expect them to be deep experts. Indeed, an election selects the person who best convinces the people who are geographically important (in our system, at least) that the general policies they support are best for the nation.

That’s a far piece from being a national security expert.

So, yes, some of the judiciary may in fact know more than the President. But, more importantly, they appear to think Trump didn’t follow the proper legal rules when he created the travel ban executive order – me, I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll defer to those experts. So this has the tone of the outraged Trump partisan, not the sort of sober analysis we need.

Kevin Drum beats his, er, drum a little bit on his favorite topic – leaded gasoline:

… Britain’s violent crime rate peaked about 15 years after it did in the US. Second, it dropped a lot faster than it did in the US. Why?

Because, first, Britain adopted unleaded gasoline about 13 years after the US (1988 vs. 1975). And second, because it phased out leaded gasoline a lot faster than the US. Within four years Britain had cut lead emissions by two-thirds, which means there was a very sharp break between infants born in high-lead and low-lead environments. Likewise, this means there was a sharp break between 18-year-olds with and without brain damage. In 2006, nearly all 18-year-olds had grown up with lead poisoned brains. By 2010, that had dropped substantially, which accounts for the stunning 40 percent drop in violent crime in such a short time.¹

This is one of the reasons the lead-crime hypothesis is so persuasive. Not only does recorded crime fit the predictions of the theory—both in timing and slope—but it does so in many different countries. What other theory would predict a gradual drop in violent crime between 1991-2010 in the US and a sharp decline in violent crime between 2006-10 in Britain? Especially considering that the US and Britain have entirely different policing, poverty rates, race issues, etc.?

Is there a similar hypothesis with regard to lead paint?

This is a bit new to me, so I decided to look at a similar cause-effect argument for the drop in the crime rate, this regarding a drop in the 1990s – the abortion legalization argument of Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame). Basically, he correlates the legalization of abortion in certain states and countries with a drop in the crime rate 20 years later – when the aborted fetuses would have begun committing the crimes which were not committed. A defense of this hypothesis by Levitt in 2005 is here.

But this has not gone undisputed. Besides the hate mail Steven and his co-writer, Stephen Dubner received¹, there’s also been scholarly argument (good!). Psychologist Steven² Pinker has attacked the hypothesis and favored a crack cocaine hypothesis, instead. From an undated post (perhaps 2013) on the Uncertainty Blog, which I copy mostly for my own benefit, is a quote from Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature:

To begin with, the freakonomics theory assumes that women were just as likely to have conceived unwanted children before and after 1973, and that the only difference was whether the children were born. But once abortion was legalized, couples may have treated it as a backup method of birth control and may have engaged in more unprotected sex. If the women conceived more unwanted children in the first place, the option of aborting more of them could leave the proportion of unwanted children the same. In fact, the proportion of unwanted children could even have increased if women were emboldened by the abortion option to have more unprotected sex in the heat of the moment, but then procrastinated or had second thoughts once they were pregnant. That may help explain why in the years since 1973 the proportion of children born to women in the most vulnerable categories – poor, single, teenage, and African American – did not decrease, as the freakonomics theory would predict. It increased, and by a lot.

I wonder what women – especially mothers – think of that criticism.

Mostly, the point I’m making is that the leaded gasoline hypothesis is interesting – even fascinating – but at best I suspect it’s just one in a suite of causes, some Nurture, some Nature. I don’t think this hypothesis is a settled question just yet. In fact, in my mind it raises questions of a more basic nature – that is, if our minds were totally undamaged by the environment (and our families), would we be more or less likely to engage in anti-social behaviors? (This is an appeal to the old philosophical position that we were perfect, even angelic, before we were stained by “progress” – advanced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I find it dubious myself.)

Heck, get right down to it: what constitutes “not damaged”? Can this be defined without reference to social agendas? Can it be defined in terms of evolutionary biology? Is there a completely objective definition / framework?

¹Which was unsurprising, although I recall hearing an interview, way back when, with Levitt in which he admitted to a great deal of surprise when the hate mail started arriving. Since abortion is considered to be evil incarnate by a sizable percentage of the population, its employment should never have a good result. Some folks can’t stand results that upend principles, and don’t react in a rational manner. C’est la vie.

²All of this correlates with the Stephen Colbert principle, elucidated last night, that the world is run by, err, Stephens. No doubt assisted by Stevens. He cites senior President Trump aides Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller as at least two examples to bolster the obvious.

Actually from 2009, but I was fascinated – how to assemble a Boeing 737.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SE71NJl-naY%3Fautoplay%3D1

We were introduced to the work of The Four Humors several years ago at the Minnesota Fringe Festival when they put on a screamingly funny rendition of Lolita. It played with tropes of Lolita, which is about a middle-aged professor’s sexual obsession with his step-daughter, by casting as Lolita a 6 foot tall, 260 lb man, half-shaven, who wore a shirt about a size too small, and was suitably coarse about the whole thing. The entire audience was caught on the horns of a man who wanted to make passionate love to a virginal young girl, who just happened to be represented by a man who makes no apologies for who he is. The cognitive dissonance provides the humor.

So we were looking forward to seeing what The Four Humors would do with the Oscar Wilde classic The Importance Of Being Earnest. This is the classic broad Victorian farce of two London men with convenient lies, who find those lies no longer so convenient when it comes to courting women with arbitrary requirements. There is much to and fro as the men attempt to satisfy their women, all while dancing around the impositions of the imposing Aunt Augusta.

In retrospect, the fact that Earnest is already a farce should have been a clue – achieving the same heights of surprise attained in Lolita might be more difficult. And, in fact, our expectations were not satisfied.

Which is not to say this is an unworthy production! If you simply desire to see Earnest, this is certainly a competent production of the classic. There are minor problems, of course – Wilde’s dialogue is nearly a “patter”, if you take my meaning, and several times the cast wasn’t quite up to the task – enunciation was slightly off. Fortunately, there was only a small attempt from the cast of producing a British accent. The casting of Christian Bardin, a female actor, as Jack was certainly interesting, but we found the contrast in heights between her and Ryan Lear, who plays Algernon, to be distracting, although at one point the two exchange an accidental kiss, which I do not believe is part of the script. I wondered if there was going to be a subtext to this production, perhaps playing off of Wilde’s predilection for homosexual behavior, for which he was infamously imprisoned and broken.

On the other hand, the butlers (played by Jason Ballweber) were quietly delightful, and Brighid Burkhalter’s disinterested delivery of her dialog declaring her passion for Jack was a lovely descant to the lively exclamations of Jack and Algernon. And the staging of the play at The Southern Theater consisted of adding a temporary audience area opposite the traditional seating, effectively turning this into a thrust stage, and adding an important element of intimacy for the audience.

In retrospect, the only real problem with the play was our own too-high expectations of what this troupe might produce.  When faced with a play which is a farce already, making a farce of a farce is a challenge which might wilt the strongest spear of broccoli. So ultimately the fault lay with us. Having already seen what may have been their best work (Lolita), we now saw them try a different path to the same pinnacle, and they didn’t quite get there.  Don’t get me wrong – it was still a pleasant romp on a warm winter’s night.  Perhaps the fault lies with the selection of play.  Maybe if they had selected a more serious or mundane play and applied their magic, the result would have showed more of the Four Humors spark.

Might we suggest a Four Humors adaptation of Oedipus Rex?

The Importance of Being Earnest plays at The Southern Theater February 17-25, 2017.

Late this evening CNN/Money is reporting that The Trump Organization has won an important legal victory in China – control over an important trademark:

China legal experts say they think Trump’s political ascendancy most likely played a role in the trademark decision.

“I’ve got clients who have fought these same cases time and time again without success. For this rapid turn of events, it does seem to be more than just a coincidence,” said Dan Plane, a China intellectual property expert in Hong Kong. “What’s striking about the Trump decision is the timing. I think it’s reasonable to assume that politics played a part — without Trump even necessarily asking for it.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington told CNN that the case was handled in compliance with China’s trademark law.

I realize that China claims they followed their normal procedures, including a three month waiting period for competing claims to the trademark. But it’s impossible to forget two facts:

1. Trump has not, as I understand it, severed himself from The Trump Organization. Most importantly, and once again as I understand it,  he is the financial beneficiary. If The Trump Organization has won control of a value trademark in China, that benefits Trump.
2. The Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which reads
   

   No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.

Taken together, this may possibly be interpreted as putting Trump in legal peril. I have no idea what the punishment might be, but as it may leave Trump with yet more mud on him, it makes it worth speculating on the motivations of the Chinese – if we accept this was an act of malicious aforethought. I think we can at least consider this is a reasonable assertion because the Chinese government, like most governments, has a strong preference for predictable behavior by its peers in other countries. Trump appears to be a random motion machine – it’s not a question of whether he’ll choose between any of five closely related options, but instead whether he’ll choose the forbidden option, such as tossing a nuke at an offshore island.

Or bragging about his electoral victory one more time.

Indeed, we could even consider this a gift from the Chinese, since they are giving us yet another reason to get rid of him, a good sound reason, grounded in the Constitution. That would be the optimistic interpretation.

The pessimistic interpretation? That we’ve officially arrived at banana-republic status. How’s that, you say? Because now we’re a country that’s being batted back and forth by China and … Russia. Think about it. Russia, who is now widely acknowledged to have meddled, at Trump’s invitation, in the last Presidential election. Hard-ass Clinton would have pushed Russia to get out of the Crimea, would have continued to punish them through low fossil fuel prices – she’s smart, knowledgeable, hard driving, and experienced. Russia didn’t want that.

So they arranged for Trump to win, against all odds. This isn’t even controversial.

But China and Russia are rivals. They’ve been rivals for centuries. Even when it was the Soviet Union and Red China, they were rivals. Both have large amounts of national pride.

And I don’t think it’s hard to postulate that China doesn’t like the idea of a United States of America controlled – or at least strongly influenced – by Russia’s Putin. And then Trump’s repudiation of the One China policy shook them up, and while his craven back-tracking may have salved their wounds, the lesson was learned. Trump may hurt China.

And how to spike the gun? Well, supposedly the United States is a nation of laws. So … dump a bunch of money on him and see what happens. They can’t be sure – I kinda doubt it, in fact – that the GOP will start impeachment proceedings based on a violation of the Constitution, but it’s worth a shot, especially if Trump has a legitimate claim on the trademark in question. But they may see this as a good shot, since he’s looking fairly weak right now.

But I’m not entirely comfortable being a shuttlecock in this badminton match.

Have you been exposed to Trump senior aide Stephen Miller yet? For my money, he comes across extremely odd. Consider this statement, provided by WaPo but available from dozens of sources:

The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

If I had to guess, I’d say he’s completely surrendered to the charisma of Presidential power – and is finding quite distasteful the idea that there may be severe limits on what his President can do. This might fit in with the research on personalities attracted to autocratic personalities (I can’t seem to find that link – a little help?). He’s smart, bright, and traumatized – as we find out from Politico‘s in depth report on Mr. Miller:

The 9/11 attacks hit when Miller was a junior at Santa Monica High School. The event shocked him to his core and left him feeling isolated in his patriotism, lost in a sea of peacenik liberalism. “During that dreadful time of national tragedy, anti-Americanism had spread all over the school like a rash,” he reminisced in a column called “How I Changed My Left-Wing High School.” “The co-principal broadcasted his doubts about the morality of the air strikes against the Taliban to the entire school via the PA system. One teacher even dragged the American flag across the floor as we were sending off brave young men to risk their lives for it.” Miller describes contacting conservative talk radio personality Larry Elder, and going on his show to complain about this school. Thus began a cycle that would repeat itself over and over in high school and college: Miller would clash with school administrators over a perceived leftist conspiracy—the school not saying the Pledge of Allegiance, say—then escalate the conflict by taking it to a conservative talk show, infuriating the administrators but yielding a compromise in Miller’s favor. After his appeal to Elder, for instance, the Pledge of Allegiance would now be said twice a week, though that was still not enough for Miller. “Policy dictates it should be said every day,” he wrote in a local paper.

If you want a little deeper look, Andrew Sullivan decides to draw a link between Miller and – himself. It’s an interesting look into Andrew’s mind, at the very least, especially since many on the far left heartily detest the man.

I feel like I know Stephen Miller, the youthful Montgomery Burns who lectured the lügenpresse last Sunday morning in his charm-free Stakhanovite baritone. I feel like I know him because I used to be a little like him. He’s a classic type: a rather dour right-of-center kid whose conservatism was radicalized by lefties in the educational system. No, I’m not blaming liberals for Miller’s grim fanaticism. I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate. Before too long, they start adopting brattish and obnoxious positions — just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers. After a while, you’re not so much arguing for conservatism as against leftism, and eventually the issues fade and only the hate remains.

Think of it in some way as reactionary camp. Think Ingraham and Coulter and Yiannopoulos. They are reactionaries in the classic sense: Their performance-art politics are almost entirely a reaction to the suffocating leftism that they had to endure as they rose through the American education system. As a young, lonely conservative in college, I now wince at recalling, I threw a Champagne party to welcome Reagan’s cruise missiles to Britain. Of course I knew better — and could have made a decent argument for deterrence instead of behaving like a brattish dick. But I didn’t. I wanted to annoy and disrupt the smugness around me. If you never mature, this pose can soon become your actual personality — especially when you realize that it can also be extremely lucrative in the conservative-media industrial complex.

Miller may only last as long as his boss, which I do not anticipate being all that long – although just achieving the Presidency is enough of a miracle to make you wonder if Trump could complete a term. And what can you do about smugness? Part of the makeup of the human race is competitiveness, and the need to broadcast any superiority that you achieve – in order to attract more support and possible mates. So lefty kids who think they have improved on the status quo tend to get a little smug and self-righteous. And then grow up to be the same, even.

But it’s an interesting peek into Mr. Miller. I’ll bet he goes to extreme measures to support and prolong Trump.

In NewScientist (4 February 2017, paywall) Michael Le Page reports on the use of wood burning stoves to avoid fossil fuels – and how they add substantially to London pollution. And then comes the kicker:

Credit: Canadian Off The Grid

So do the health impacts outweigh any climate benefits? Astonishingly, there might not be any climate benefits, at least in the short term.

Burning logs is often touted as being carbon-neutral. The idea is that trees soak up as much carbon dioxide when growing as they release when burned.

In fact, numerous studies show that wood burning is not carbon-neutral, and can sometimes be worse than burning coal. There are emissions from transport and processing. Logs are often pre-dried in kilns, for instance.

Burning wood also emits black carbon – soot – that warms the atmosphere during the short time it remains in the air. Most studies ignore this, but [Eddy Mitchell at the University of Leeds, UK] and [climate scientist Piers Forster, also at Leeds] calculate that over 20 years – the timescale that matters if we don’t want the world to go too far above 2°C of warming – soot cancels out half the carbon benefits of all wood burning.

For home wood burning, the figures are even worse. “On a 20-year timescale, wood stoves provide little or no benefit, but they do on the 100-year timescale as they remove some of the long-term warming effect of CO₂ emissions,” says Forster.

The devil is in the details, evidently, and not, uh, in the stove. The findings are still controversial – but something to think about if you’re wondering about wood burning stoves. Incidentally, the picture source is from a blog posting in early January 2014, complaining that the EPA was preparing to ban wood burning stoves which did not meet standards, and quotes a press release:

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for wood stoves that would reduce the maximum amount of fine particulate emissions allowed for new stoves sold in 2015 and 2019.

Maximum emissions would be reduced by one-third next year and by 80 percent in five years, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.

Fine particulate pollution is made up of solid particles and liquid droplets that measure 2.5 micrometers in diameter or less. The EPA currently certifies non-catalytic wood stoves if they produce less than 7.5 grams of fine particulate per hour.

Fine particulate absorbed by breathing has been linked to heart attacks, decreased lung function and premature death in people with heart or lung disease.

The proposed EPA regulations would reduce that to 4.5 grams per hour for stoves manufactured after the regulations go into place next year.

I don’t know if the first set of regulations went into effect, or if the second is still on the specified schedule.

We encountered the work of Nadia Alenov at The Russian Tea House today.

For me, some pictures are lovely for their sense of motion. Nadia appears to go the other way, achieving attractive still lives in her photographs.

More of her work is here.

This time it’s all about word selection. I’m a little shocked to read this passage by Shannon Stirone on Astronomy.com (via 3 Quarks Daily, which I love for its name):

Astronomy may be the oldest natural science in the world. Before humans ever took to systematically studying the skies, we were craning our necks upwards, observing the curious movements of some bright points of light, and the stillness of others. Civilizations around the world have incorporated astronomical observations into everything from their architecture to their storytelling and while the pinnacle of the science is most commonly thought to have been during the Renaissance, it actually began a thousand years earlier and 5,000 miles to the East.

Err, no. Pinnacle means “the highest point of development or achievement” [M-W]. In astronomy, that would be, ah, today.

Now, perhaps Shannon meant a period of time in which the discovery of astronomical knowledge was the fastest relative to what we knew, but even that would be debatable – it could still be today. And, frankly, I don’t know what word to use for that concept, just off-hand.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com speculates that the oil industry is more vulnerable than is generally acknowledged, based on an analogy of how slashing demand for coal by 10% reduced the industry’s credit-worthiness:

Headlines like these are coming so thick and fast these days that we have to pick and choose which ones we write about. Individually, they are all just a blip in the global picture of oil demand, but collectively it won’t be long before they really start to add up. And when they do start to add up, it won’t take too much cut in demand to radically reshape the future prospects for oil.

Of course, all of the above stories are about adoption of existing technologies at current pricing. But what if prices were to fall further, and faster, than they have so far? Wards Auto is reporting on conversations with auto industry insiders who say electric vehicle batteries should be under $100 per kilowatt hour by 2020, and $80 not long after that. That’s a figure well below the $125 per kilowatt hour that the Department of Energy set in 2010 as a target for cost parity with internal combustion engines.

And once we reach cost parity, there’s little that can be done by dropping tax credits or removing other incentives, to slow the march to electrification.

This sort of ties in with my thought that Americans are not entirely of the subspecies homo economicus – that is, we are not always controlled by the most economical choice, but rather make choices based on other criteria.

Abstractly speaking, the use of economics to guide choice is a common proxy for future survival prospects, but they are only a proxy. Recognition of the importance of the environment, or of climate change, or any of a number of allied topics, in our personal futures, or those of our children, can lead to discarding economics as the primary mode of making a decision in favor of a more direct decision designed to preserve what is perceived as important for future generations.

As this spreads through a substantial, if still minor, part of the American population, I expect more electric cars to be sold, along with other environmentally friendly travel choices, even in the face of higher prices (compared to fossil fuel based choices) for those options. Economics will continue to play a role, especially for those members of the population who remain in the homo economicus group, and an overwhelming role for some, especially those of very limited resources or whose education has been such as to make economics the be-all and end-all of life – but for others who’ve learned there’s more than one way to view the world, they’ll be the ones who discard economics in favor of a more full view of the future.