Category Archives: Uncategorized

WaPo notes the reluctance of Congress to exercise oversight powers on the President, a responsibility of Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT):

Chaffetz never met a probe he didn’t like during the Obama administration, from Benghazi to the IRS. In September alone, Democrats complain, his committee held five days of “emergency” hearings probing Clinton’s emails and issued 12 subpoenas.

Now, as my Post colleagues have reported, several U.S. officials have confirmed that national security adviser Michael Flynn discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador in the month before the inauguration — contradicting public assurances by Vice President Pence and other administration officials. But Chaffetz has showed no curiosity about that, nor about Russia’s attempts to tilt the election in Trump’s favor, nor about much of anything Trump-related.

Instead, Chaffetz is targeting the head of the Office of Government Ethics for questioning the Trump administration’s conflicts of interest.

Chaffetz thought Clinton’s use of a private email server threatened national security. But over the weekend, Trump proved more brazen: He plotted his response to North Korea’s latest missile test from the main dining area of his Mar-a-Lago Club. Club members posted photos on Facebook of Trump and Japan’s Shinzo Abe discussing the matter and poring over documents in proximity to waiters, club members and guests.47

I’ve discussed the problems of politics as a team game here and here, but this is one facet I’ve missed – when team politics persists post-election, until one’s loyalty to the Party leader are greater than to the responsibilities you’re assigned, that you’ve titularly earned, then that’s another mark against politics as a team game. As any number of pundits, political junkies, and PoliSci professors will point out, our political system is built on checks and balances. When the key guy is asleep at the switch – or, worse yet, has a deliberate ethical failing – then the country is endangered.

Utahans, it’s time to consider recalling Rep Chaffetz. His failures over the years, from repeated investigations that come up empty (the first is fine, but when you run a bunch on Hillary Clinton and they all fail, this indicates an attempted lynching and an innocent victim), to the recent passes he keeps handing out to his own Party leadership, indicate he’s incompetent and, in the interests of providing for a better country, the good people of Utah should withdraw their support for Chaffetz and find someone better.

A hint: the first question you should ask of candidates is whether or not they believe politics is a team game, and if the answer is Yes, then tell that candidate to move on.

Are you an environmentally conscious sports car driver with a spare $125,000 to drop on your next car? Derek Markham on Treehugger.com reports on your dream car:

The Tomahawk
Source: Dubuc Motors

The Tomahawk, which is most certainly not going to fall in the category of affordable for most people looking for a new car, is described as “The most practical and high end sports car approved by Mother Nature,” and promises to be one fast and furious electric machine.

It’s a four-seater (or 2+2, for the gearheads) sports car, which some might argue makes it not a sports car, by definition, and it’s designed to be comfortable for the big and tall crowd, which is also something that seems at odds with the classification of sports car. However, no matter what the “right” classification is, there’s no mistaking the fact that the Tomahawk is a sleek and sexy clean machine that is sure to turn heads.

And with a range of 370 miles. Derek includes an interview with the company founders.

What sets the Tomahawk apart from the other high-end EVs?
The Tomahawk comfortably sits in a class of its own for several reasons.
1) It’s the only 4 seater ALL electric sportscar available on the market
2) Catered to the big’n’tall
3) It can be as practical as a sedan
4) There is practically NO maintenance
5) Much more torque thus extremely fun to drive
6) Fully connected, intelligent
7) Finally cargo space!
8) Appeals to modern families much more
9) Sick look
These are some of the characteristics, but the key word is VALUE.

Goodness, now I want one. But none for me, I fear, unless the lottery finally quits teasing… and then I’ll want a different color scheme.

Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare indulges in a bit of snark in this piece on the self-destruction of evil, in the form of Trump senior advisor Steve Bannon:

Over the first few weeks of the Trump administration, Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon has worked hard to establish himself as the would-be Grand Vizier of the White House. Bannon, the former executive chair of the winkingly white nationalist website Breitbart, was the driving force behind the executive order banning entry into the United States of immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries and now sits on the Principals Committee of the National Security Council.

Quinta is far too subtle to actually beat the point home, but I am not: applying “Grand Vizier”, a quintessential Islamic term from the Ottoman Empire days, to a self-proclaimed Islamaphobe of Bannon’s stature is quite satisfying.

Leaving aside the fun, I find her emotional mood is paralleling mine:

Three weeks ago, my libertarian panic was full-throated. I speculated that we had cause for concern that Trump might be our first president in the mold of the fascist thinker Carl Schmitt, who notoriously wrote that the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In the worst-case scenario, I worried that we would see the executive branch directly rejecting the authority of the courts.

 To be sure, I’m still concerned about how the country will fare under the presidency of Donald Trump. But Steve Bannon has proved himself to be so monumentally incompetent that I am fairly certain the Republic is safer than I could have believed three weeks ago, at least from Bannon’s flailing efforts to maximize whatever supposed contradictions he believes he has identified.Bannon isn’t an arch-villain. And he’s not the guy who’s going to destroy American democracy. Instead, as I’ll explain, he’s just an internet troll.

Mesoscale:

of intermediate size; especially :  of or relating to a meteorological phenomenon approximately 10 to 1000 kilometers in horizontal extent <mesoscale cloud pattern> [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “How Moore’s microchip law is still shaping our world,” Regina Peldszus, NewScientist (28 January 2017, paywall):

Mody’s book concentrates on the mesoscale of organisations involved in developing microelectronics because he argues it helps us get a sense of how the semiconductor sector influenced scientific knowledge-making. He shifts fluidly between detail and contextual currents, capturing the coalescence of individuals and institutions into configurations. These groupings splinter, disband and regroup after massive or minute changes, like IBM’s foray into circuits involving superconducting materials, the drying up of funding sources or the exit of a key team leader.

While perusing material on worries concerning the former National Security Advisor’s General Flynn, I ran across this exceedingly cute typo on NBC News:

Don’t miss these comments that former Gen. Barry McCaffrey made to NBC News about Trump’s pick to be his national security adviser, former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. “You know, I was very strong of my endorsement of him when he was first announced for the NSA position. I said he was correctly probably the best intelligence officer of his generation. But I must admit I’m now extremely uneasy about some of these tweets, which don’t sound so much like political skull drudgery, but instead border on being demented. I think we need to look into this and sort out what is going on here.” More McCaffrey: “I think that we need to aggressively examine what was going on with Gen. Flynn and his son dealing with these transparent, nearly demented tweets that were going out. I think it needs closer scrutiny.”

Bold mine! Although, on review, I’m not sure what Gen. McCaffrey was actually trying to say.

Which is to say, the value of the variable X is currently unmeasurable. Sure, it’s good that General Flynn is no longer occupying the post of National Security Advisor. An Islamaphobe with a reported predilection for conspiracy theories, he was worrisome because it was not clear he understood the dangers posed by the Soviet Union; indeed, General McCafferey, who had endorsed him, indicated worry about his sanity.

But the other side of the coin is: who will replace him? Will it be someone who’s respectable? Or will Trump be looking for another conspiracy theorist who looks the part of a National Security Advisor? That’s the real worry, because going through another dubious background is a wearisome task, and we’re talking about national security here – not some minor nomination (the President must make 1200+ nominations).

But, I suppose, a step in the right direction is a step in the right direction. I know the entire liberal side of the political battlefield will rejoice, which, respectfully, is a sad thing. We’re not in a war, we haven’t knocked off the Colonel in Stratego. We’re talking about a 3 star General, a man with a great career behind him, who should have known better (he was under pressure for talking to the Russian ambassador about sanction relief before the Trump Administration took power, which may be illegal). In some ways, it’s inexplicable; he may come to a very sad end, medically speaking, based on his behaviors.

But as he takes to the sidelines – and perhaps gets himself examined – we must continue to march onwards. Let’s hope the next selection for National Security Advisor is a lot more respectable. And conventional.

Roberta Cohen on 38 North presents a negotiation analysis with North Korea by analogy with Cold War negotiations with the Soviet Union. This caught my eye:

During the Cold War, the United States did not limit its discussions with the USSR to one subject—arms reduction. Instead, it insisted upon an expanded information flow between the communist bloc and the West and a more open society; and advocated for core human rights concerns—Soviet Jewish emigration, the protection of Pentecostals and other Christians, the release of political dissidents, the unification of families and the formation of human rights organizations to monitor the Helsinki Final Act. It raised these concerns in bilateral discussions and in the multilateral Helsinki process.

Non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, a doctrine espoused by the Soviet Union to shield itself from criticism was not accepted by the US in its negotiations with Moscow. Neither should it be in the case of North Korea, as increasing numbers of policy experts now point out.[3] A recent Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Task Force report suggests that nuclear negotiations could expand into broader talks and that a peace agreement and normalization of relations will have to depend on both “nuclear disarmament” and “progress on human rights.”[4] Even more cautious strategists also acknowledge that human rights must be part of any future negotiation.[5]

Of course, the Soviet Jews, the Pentecostals, perhaps it could even by argued the smaller nations, all represent homogenuous groups which presented problems for the Soviets, because they had their own power structures, their own customs, and therefore presented a danger – however limited – to the ruling authorities. I must confess that in my limited reading I haven’t really seen anything analogous in North Korea, with the exception of the families torn apart by the partitioning of Korea, and the concomitant closing of the border. I know occasionally there are attempts to evangelize North Koreans by Christians, but whether that has any impact on North Korean citizens is not in the least clear.

In a fascinating – if true – article in The Observer, John Schindler, reportedly a former NSA analyst, discusses a trend within the Intelligence Community (IC): withholding information from President Trump:

There is more consequential IC pushback happening, too. Our spies have never liked Trump’s lackadaisical attitude toward the President’s Daily Brief, the most sensitive of all IC documents, which the new commander-in-chief has received haphazardly. The president has frequently blown off the PDB altogether, tasking Flynn with condensing it into a one-page summary with no more than nine bullet-points. Some in the IC are relieved by this, but there are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn’t paying attention to intelligence.

In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.

Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.

Kevin Drum:

“Inside” reporting about the intelligence community is notoriously unreliable, so take this with a grain of salt. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. But just the fact that stuff like this is getting a respectful public hearing is damning all by itself. For any other recent president, a report like this would be dismissed as nonsense without a second thought. But for Trump, it seems plausible enough to take seriously.

Schindler writes an interesting and, if accurate, somewhat chilling piece. But how will we ever know? All you can do is stipulate it and then draw conclusions, and, frankly, with something like this, it’s hard to draw conclusions without one’s mind returning to “but…” every ten seconds or so.

Put it in the “gee, maybe” category.

Lithium-ion batteries may be getting a companion – or competitor – at some point, based on seawater. From UNIST:

Seawater batteries are similar to their lithium-ion cousins since they store energy in the same way. The battery extracts sodium ions from the seawater when it is charged with electrical energy and stores them within the cathode compartment. Upon electrochemical discharge, sodium is released from the anode and reacts with water and oxygen from the seawater cathode to form sodium hydroxide. This process provide energy to power, for instance, an electric vehicle.

While seawater batteries are more cost-effective than lithium-ion batteries, they are not quite ready for commercial distribution. Part of the reason is that these batteries have relatively low electrical power. output. To overcome this, UNIST will help design a more optimized cell geometry and standardized procedures for the battery. Together with KEPCO, the research team at UNIST plans on building cells with various sizes and shapes, thereby enhancing the charge rate of the battery by 20 Wh. Generally, a small smartphone lithium-ion battery stores about 10 Wh.

Hope they have a battery disposal plan in place before they go big-time.

Eudaemonic:

In 2013, Cole examined the influence of well-being instead. He focused on two types: hedonic, from pleasure and rewards, and eudaemonic, from having a purpose beyond self-gratification. These two aspects were measured by having participants note down their well-being over the previous week, how often they felt happy (hedonic) or that their life had a sense of direction (eudaemonic), for example. Although scoring highly in one often meant scoring highly in the other and both correlated with lower levels of depression, they had opposite effects on gene expression. People with higher measures of hedonic well-being had higher expression of inflammatory genes and lower expression of genes for disease-fighting antibodies, a pattern also seen in loneliness and stress. For people scoring highest on eudaemonia, it was the opposite. “There were surprises all around,” Cole says. “The biggest surprise being that you can feel similarly happy but the biology looks so notably different.” [“A meaning to life: How a sense of purpose can keep you healthy,” Teal Burrell, NewScientist (28 January 2017, paywall)]

Dahlia Lithwick analyzes the Trump strategy and reveals the magnitude of amateurhood Trump has reached when running a government, and it’s on Slate:

For good measure, the president added: “I don’t ever want to call a court biased and we haven’t had a decision yet. But courts seem to be so political, and it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right.” In a half-sentence-long feint at decorum, Trump said, “I will not comment on the statements made by certainly one judge.” He then continued as per usual: “But I have to be honest that if these judges wanted to, in my opinion, help the court in terms of respect for the court, they’d do what they should be doing. It’s so sad.” He also took to Twitter to suggest, again, that a future terror attack would be the responsibility of the judges hearing the appeal: [Twitter statement omitted]

To be clear, what the president is doing is blaming the court for politicizing the court. By acting like a court.

Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare is appalled to be quoted out of context by the POTUS:

You read that correctly: The President of the United States was tweeting approvingly an article describing his motivations as “invidious” and describing his actions using the phrase “incompetent malevolence.” …

It is a portrait in inconsequential and comical miniature of the incompetence and dysfunction we’ve been seeing since day one of the Trump Administration. It’s the incompetence I wrote about the day after the executive order itself emerged with virtually no vetting.

Next time, I’ll just write “some guy on Lawfare, or maybe it was Judicial Watch, says Falcon All The Way, Baby!”. But, of course, Benjamin’s quite correct – Trump has no idea how to run a professional operation, nor do his staff.

And, yet, it’s sad that we have this opportunity to laugh at him like this. We desperately need serious people running an important part of this country – the part charged with governing and defending us. He’s been profoundly unserious – he may disagree in terms of intent, but in terms of effect it’s been a joke.

And I’m saying this keeping my post concerning MLK, Jr. firmly in mind. Honestly, part of me just pities him. He’s clearly in 10 feet of water with concrete blocks attached to his ankles. He needs better people – but his entire life has been spent hiring those who look good in their position, regardless of their merit. He doesn’t appear to have a clue.

And another part is just appalled. Appalled that he took in so many Americans, so many of my fellow Americans. And that some of them, in fact a lot of them, apparently approve of his behavior. In the Gallup chart on the left, I could not capture the actual numbers, so I’ll put them here – an approval rating of 40%, a disapproval rating of 55%. Sure, pundits rattle on that this is historically unprecedented.

But, in terms of raw numbers, this is still discouraging. 40% of my fellow Americans still see President Trump as heading the right way, despite … well, I shan’t repeat myself.

GQ interviews Andrew Reynolds regarding his claim that North Carolina is barely a functioning democracy. I found this remark a trifle devious:

The op-ed has gotten a lot of blowback. You’ve been accused of claiming that elections don’t work because Republicans win too much, and the EIP has drawn criticism for its methodology when North Korea scored oddly high in a 2014 assessment. Since then, the EIP has dropped North Korea from its sampling, but doesn’t this at the very least undermine North Carolina’s score?

I want us to focus on the reality of governance in North Carolina and the election process quality, and there’s no doubt that we have serious issues. So I think it’s a red herring to pick apart the actual number, whether it should be 57 or 59, whether Cuba ranks higher or lower, whether India ranks higher or lower—let’s focus on the fact that America and North Carolina have a serious challenge to the vibrancy of their democracy.

I didn’t expect this out of CNN. Back in mid-January they published, “How MLK can get you out of your ‘Trump Slump’,” by John Blake, and I found it quite interesting. I don’t know a lot about MLK beyond the general He fought the good fight. I hesitate to call this inspirational, but it has good information on how he responded to the mistakes of the day. Here’s just one observation:

Source: Southeast Denton News

After Trump’s stunning victory, some people opposed to his candidacy vowed not to call him their president. Some cut off relationships with Trump supporters or called them all racists.

It was a new form of segregation: I shall only associate with those who share my political beliefs.

That kind of decision wouldn’t fly with King. He didn’t withdraw from his white jailers or lash out at them. It was a pattern that ran throughout his life, says David Garrow, author of “Bearing the Cross,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of King.

“King consistently distinguished between the evil deed and evil doer. He never hated anyone,” Garrow says.

“I see all these progressives filled with this hatred and loathing of Trump voters, but we never see King talk in hateful or loathing terms about Bull Connor or Jim Clark,” Garrow says, referring to two notoriously racist Southern white sheriffs.

“So much of the liberal left today is allowing themselves to be subsumed with a hate and anger that is utterly contradictory to King’s spirit.”

That is certainly true of a lot you see on The Daily Kos – a loathing for the conservatives who vote for Trump, Ryan, Gohmert, and most of the GOP. They spend a lot of their time tracking the transgressions against progressive orthodoxy, but, at least in their daily Daily Kos Recommended e-mail, which is as far as I read, there is very little time spent on actually trying to understand their enemies fellow Americans (which I emphasize) and what may motivate them. One of the most important steps in winning an argument is understanding the other side’s assumptions and logic, both intellectual and emotional – and that appears to not be important to the progressives. They seem fixated on finding transgressions, laughing at them in a sort of bulging eye sort of way, and then moving on without asking for the real motivations.

Their absolute certainty in themselves is discouraging. And the same is true of the conservative base – their frenzy over Obama was positively shameful.

As I’m sure Mr. Blake would agree, no doubt we have a lot to learn from Martin Luther King, Jr.

NewScientist (28 January 2017, paywall) has an interview with hyperpolyglot Alexander Arguelles, who estimates his fluency at 50 languages. I found this exchange fascinating:

But do thought patterns change with language?

While I don’t agree that you have a different personality when using different languages, it’s true that the structure of your thought sometimes has to be different. Because in Korean, for example, you don’t conjugate verbs according to person at all, but rather according to a wide variety of different “respect” levels that have to do with age, the nature of your relationship to the person you’re speaking with, and so on. Behind it all is a Confucian concept that if someone is six months older or younger than you, they have to be addressed differently than if they are the same age as you.

A glimpse into another world for me. They don’t ask the related question, of course, and Arguelles probably could not answer it anyways – that being, do the thought patterns of a native speaker of Korean fundamentally differ from the thought patterns of a native speaker of English. A related question would be whether he automatically changes the conjugation, or if he must think about it while he speaks.

I should probably try to learn a second language.

Regmaglypts:

“While not yet confirmed, the turkey-shaped object has a gray, metallic luster and a lightly-dimpled texture that hints of regmaglypts,” Bob King wrote for Universe Today. “Regmaglypts, indentations that resemble thumbprints in Play-Doh, are commonly seen in meteorites and caused by softer materials stripped from the rock’s surface during the brief but intense heat and pressure of its plunge through the atmosphere.” [“Curiosity Mars rover gets a close-up of mud cracks on Red Planet,” Steven Porter, MSN]

The People That Time Forgot (1977) is an amiable adventure on the continent of Antarctica – that inland section where it’s temperate and the dinosaurs still exist.

Those dinosaurs with plaster skins and marble eyes.

Anyways, the adventurers have heard – through a message in a bottle – about the temperate zone of Antarctica, and are there to rescue the message writer, named Tyler. They make it to the zone in a moderately silly aircraft, search for the dude, yada yada yada, run run run, duck and cover, and get back to the ship just in time before the entire continent explodes. Whee.

If you’re a zealous realist, just avoid this movie – it abounds in bad special effects. If you like your stories air-tight, vienkārši izvairīties no šo filmu² – this plot’s caulking is fresh-cooked oatmeal, the always disappointing¹ “instant” kind. If you like your characters to make reasonable choices, ne hoc modo elit – they seem to almost search for the bad choice to make.

But there is a certain nostalgic charm to the bad special effects. In particular, I enjoyed the ship that conveys them to the southernmost continent – I mean, it’s clearly a model, but it’s competently done, in icy weather it acquires a reasonable frosting of hoar-frost, and you can actually envision yourself on a similar ship as a pleasure cruise.

I think his beard is shorter here than when they rescue him.
Source: ComingSoon.net

But, much like the ship, you must take your pleasures piecemeal. Most memorable line: “We’re being chased by a volcano!” Most memorable body feature: The never-ending cleavage of Ajor, the native girl. Second place: the beard of the hostage of the fat green guy, played by Doug McClure. Most unexplained and useless plot twist – the masked bad guys are ugly mutants!

If this movie has any real interest, it’s in the hypothetical question – how would (pick your favorite Shakespearean-trained actor) have played (pick a role in this movie). How would Sir Alec Guinness have played the role of Tyler, the hostage?

Or would he have just tossed himself into the volcano before filming even started, agent tucked firmly under his arm?

¹Although, to be fair, we use instant oatmeal in a mixture with butter and brown sugar as a strudel for our apple pie, and it’s very competent in this role. Emotes, even.

²This language picked at random.

The United States is not the only country burdened with people obsessed with privilege – Turkey has its own burden to bear, which is compounded by the imperial ambitions of President Erdogan. In an upcoming referendum, he and his party, the AKP, are using the Ottoman Empire’s cachet to push for passage of constitutional amendments which will centralize power in the hands of the Presidency. However, they’ve run into a snag – or, more pointedly, someone who believes in privilege even more than they do – a member of the erstwhile royal family. Pinar Tremblay of AL Monitor reports:

An Ottoman military flag captured in the Siege of Vienna (1683)
Source: Wikipedia

And on Jan. 26, one of the dozens of descendants of the Ottoman House of Osman dynasty, Nilhan Osmanoglu, tweeted a video of herself declaring her support for the constitutional amendments that Erdogan wants to vastly increase the power of his office. Her endorsement of the imperial presidency was cherished by pro-Justice and Development Party (AKP) accounts, and her tweet became an instant trending topic. While attending a formal gathering Jan. 31, Osmanoglu targeted Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Kilicdaroglu, who is against the amendments, had asked voters to consider why they were not happy with a parliamentary system. Osmanoglu responded by saying Turks have had enough of the parliamentary system; in a well-crafted speech, she touched all the nerves of Turkish conservatives by blaming the traumatic events Turkey has been suffering on the parliamentary system.

Her words generated reaction from the opposition, and she became a celebrity overnight in Turkey. …

Next, she went on a talk show and confessed she considers herself blue-blooded royalty and hence would love to see the monarchy reinstated. She also went to court demanding lands and property she claims belong to her royal ancestors. She had stated on various TV shows that while Ottomans are en vogue in Turkey, she could not remain as a ghost. She declared that if the courts in Turkey fail to return the lands and property back to her family, she would take the inheritance case to the European Court of Human Rights.

In interviews, she lamented that that she has no heirloom jewelry from her family. She said that when she goes to Saudi Arabia, she is hosted as a princess, but in Turkey she is not accorded the proper protocol.

Osmanoglu’s limited education has not helped her cause. She was ridiculed by all corners of society when she claimed Napoleon (who died decades before Osmanoglu’s favorite sultan, Abdulhamid, was born) had said that “Abdulhamid is the second-richest man on earth after me.”

This all rings a bell, doesn’t it? Yeah, that one of unreasonable privilege. She doesn’t have to be knowledgeable, or work hard – she just has to be a member of the royal family. In fact, this reminds me of the general philosophy of supremacism – and what I consider its fatal flaw. Brought up American, I find her assumptions about what she deserves to be ludicrous.

And it’s not working out so well for the AKP.

Al-Monitor contacted several businessmen and Islamists, all of whom were looking for ways to disown Osmanoglu and distance her statements from the Ottoman legacy. One prominent business owner in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul told Al-Monitor, “This market dates back centuries into Ottoman times. The AKP has given us an alternative reality — an Ottomania where we thought the past could be changed. It was the alluring glory of the fantasy of neo-Ottomanism that held me loyal to the AKP, until the greedy face of this fake sultana filled my living room. The Ottoman dream is no longer comforting, but rather appears brutal.”

Indeed, Osmanoglu’s products and other kitsch images of the Ottoman dream now stand as a sign of the intellectual weakness in the AKP ranks.

So they were looking back at what they wished was a rosy past – and it’s not quite so rosy. I fear we’re doing the same dance. Folks are vulnerable to a bit of charisma the world over, aren’t they?

Democratic Governor Cooper of North Carolina wins a round – if temporarily – against the GOP in the area of Cabinet appointees, as reported by ABC News:

Cooper won the latest battle Wednesday as a three-judge panel temporarily blocked a new law that required Senate confirmation for the governor’s Cabinet members, using a process similar to what the U.S. Senate does for the president’s Cabinet choices.

The state law was passed in the waning days of GOP Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration and seen by Democrats as a way to undermine the new governor’s authority. Cooper sued over this and other laws that reduced his powers after he was sworn in Jan. 1.

Sounds encouraging, doesn’t it? But here’s the sad part:

Republican lawmakers say the state Constitution gives the senators “advice and consent” powers over gubernatorial appointments. The leaders say the public has the right to see a governor’s Cabinet face questions in an open forum.

Senators have laid out a schedule to examine Cooper’s eight picks through mid-March. They said they weren’t aiming to be confrontational and wanted to determine if Cooper’s choices were capable of performing the job, lacked conflicts of interest and planned to follow the law.

It sounds, from this faraway vantage point, actually rather reasonable. The problem, of course, is that the law was a rush job, ramrodded through the legislature after the election was decided, and is perceived as an attempt to wound a political rival, rather than a wise addition to the sober job of governance. If this had been passed a couple of years ago, there probably wouldn’t be a bit of controversy.

But it also seems likely that if the law was permitted to stand, none of his Cabinet picks would be confirmed unless they were GOP members in good standing. That’s how partisan it seems to be in North Carolina. I don’t know about the Democrats, but the GOP plays this like a game, not like adults dealing with government.

Conker:

1. a horse chestnut especially when used in conkers
2. a game in which each player swings a horse chestnut on a string to try to break one held by the opponent

[Merriam-Webster]

I ran across a mention on tonight’s episode of Great British Baking Show Masterclass, but that seemed to be a reference to a color.

Discover Magazine‘s Steve Volk has a longish article (paywall) on the problems of neonicotinoid – both physical and political – and their role in colony collapse disorder:

Dead bee, probably from the weather.

[Jeffrey Pettis and entomologist Dennis vanEngelsdorp] fed neonics to bees, then exposed that group and a neonic-free control group to Nosema, a common gut pathogen in the honeybee. The bees fed neonics proved more susceptible to Nosema. And the effect was consistent even when bees received neonics in amounts too small to be detected in their system. “The only reason we knew the bees had exposure [to neonicotinoid pesticides],” says vanEngelsdorp, “is because we exposed them.”

Beekeepers rejoiced. “They really sounded like they found something big,” says Dave Hackenberg, a central Pennsylvania beekeeper. “They were like, ‘This is it.’ ”

“We really felt confident,” says Bret Adee, co-owner of Adee Honey Farms in South Dakota. “These were the guys everyone would listen to, and now we were going to get something done.”

But nothing happened.

Well, something  happened.

“We call it the ‘whack-a-mole’ theory of bee science,” says Hackenberg, the commercial beekeeper in central Pennsylvania. “People who stick their head too far above ground on the subject of pesticides get whacked.”

This kind of talk smacks of conspiracy. However, the alignment of self-interests leaves plotting and planning unnecessary. Big agricultural companies pay many millions annually in political donations and lobbying. The politicians receiving all of this attention and money determine the dwindling budgets at agencies like the EPA and USDA.

In late 2014, EPA scientists released a study showing that neonic seed treatments produce no significant increase in crop yield. The reason is simple, even predictable: Each year, soil-based pests, targeted by seed treatments, only pop up in about 10 percent of America’s cropland. But instead of dialing back pesticide use, scientists at USDA publicly rejected the EPA’s findings.

In recent years, allegations of scientific suppression have grown louder. In fall 2015, Jonathan Lundgren, an entomologist in the USDA’s Agricultural Research office who is now the director of the nonprofit research Ecdysis Foundation, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that his supervisors levied a pair of bogus suspensions on him to prevent his publicizing the dangers of chemical pesticides.

Sometimes I think we should just ban lobbying. Lobbyists will tell you that they provide important information to the politicians who appoint the people making these decisions – but sometimes it seems like the companies are purchasing insurance plans, not providing information.

[Edit: added link to thread 2/12/2017]

Kevin Drum remarks on the opposition to Trump’s appointees:

Depending on how Nannygate and a few other things turn out, it’s possible that Andy Puzder might also look vulnerable when his hearings start. If so, I expect that we’ll see a full-court press similar to what we saw with DeVos. The key variable here is not badness—Trump’s nominees are all bad from a liberal perspective—nor demonstrating loyalty to teachers unions—that’s just gravy—but the realistic possibility of defeating one of Trump’s nominees. That’s where most people want to spend their energy.

I don’t think Kevin really takes this far enough. Why should the Democrats oppose the nominees? I see two reasons:

1. To demonstrate to Trump that he can’t just throw any sort of mud at the wall and expect it to stick. Unfortunately, that requires some GOP help and, except for the DeVos nomination, that hasn’t happened. So long as the mistaken ethic that politics is a blind team game persists, I think the Democrats will just have to hope to catch nominees in such devastating mistakes that they withdraw on their own. Incidentally, Kevin is keeping tabs on this, and in this post notes the list of withdrawn nominees is up to four as one of Flynn’s friends is being boosted off of the National Security Council, but doesn’t know why he couldn’t achieve the proper security clearance.
2. To demonstrate to their own base and the nation that they are still relevant, that Trump isn’t unconstrained. Fortunately, the injunction against the Muslim Ban Executive Order has achieved half of that – Trump is discovering the President is not the caesar, The reaction of SCOTUS nominee Gorsuch to Trump’s attacks on the judiciary is also heartening – further reactions from Gorsuch might also be a lesson to Trump to treat the judiciary with respect, although it’s not clear Trump is capable of learning from lessons.

NewScientist (28 January 2017) reports on the development of a heat-sensing biofilm, made of pectin, for use by robots. How did they test it?

The film can sense temperature changes as small as 10 millikelvin, which is twice as sensitive as human skin. It can detect a warm body the size of a rabbit from a metre away, something the researchers tested by microwaving a teddy bear and setting it at different distances from the film. Changes in temperature cause the film’s resistance to vary, which is picked up by electrodes along the edges and transmitted to a computer.

Since when did I start anthropomorphizing teddy bears? All I can think is Poor little guy, even though the actual invention is cool as well, although I’d rather see it as goggles a human could wear.

Why create a camera capable of taking 100 billion frames a second?

Why, to create a light-based version of a sonic boom, of course. LiveScience explains:

The fact that light can travel faster in one material than in another helped scientists to generate photonic Mach cones. First, study lead author Jinyang Liang, an optical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues designed a narrow tunnel filled with dry ice fog. This tunnel was sandwiched between plates made of a mixture of silicone rubber and aluminum oxide powder.

Then, the researchers fired pulses of green laser light — each lasting only 7 picoseconds (trillionths of a second) — down the tunnel. These pulses could scatter off the specks of dry ice within the tunnel, generating light waves that could enter the surrounding plates.

The green light that the scientists used traveled faster inside the tunnel than it did in the plates. As such, as a laser pulse moved down the tunnel, it left a cone of slower-moving overlapping light waves behind it within the plates.

There’s a movie of the event at LiveScience. For those who don’t want to count the zeros in a trillionth, a picosecond would be 1×10^-13 of a second. And while it’s cool what they’ve done, the practical facet of this achievement may actually rest with the laboratory equipment.

The researchers said their new technique could prove useful in recording ultrafast events in complex biomedical contexts such as living tissues or flowing blood. “Our camera is fast enough to watch neurons fire and image live traffic in the brain,” Liang told Live Science. “We hope we can use our system to study neural networks to understand how the brain works.”