Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

Hoover Dam – Where the obsessed come to die?
Need to work on our advertising materials.

The flick 711 Ocean Drive (1950) presents itself as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers, both societal and individual, of gambling, claiming that its making was opposed by American criminal elements and required the support of law enforcement. Be that as it may, this is an interesting, but not mesmerizing, tale of an electronics repair man whose understanding of early telecommunications gear permits him to help gambling syndicates better service their customers, from gathering legitimate information for bookies to less savory practices. From their, he climbs the ladder, ever jumpy, always looking for the latest advantage, to the sadness of the various ladies, until he meets a fatal bullet because of his staggering insistence on cleaning up on every last dollar owed him.

There are good elements to the movie, such as the cinematography, story, acting, and dialog. The illustration of how his technical skills and innovation help drive the gambling enterprise are curiously reminiscent of later shows in that it’s more than a wave of the hands, it’s actually quite believable – you end up nodding your head and muttering, Oh yeah, that makes sense.

But the main failing of this movie (besides the puzzling title) are the characters. They differentiate, they’re not hard to tell apart, but they don’t breathe. They don’t engage with the viewer. The lead is not some sympathetic, fatally flawed hero out of Shakespeare, driving us to weep at his mean obsession with money – his obsession with money is his only strong character trait. He abhors love, and the women who try to save them fail. There’s little to sympathize with in this guy. The other characters are similarly unengaging. They have no life outside of the plot, really.

The movie is listed as noir, but it’s not, because a noir film shows believable, likeable characters driven into disaster by the choices of themselves or, even better, others. In 711 Ocean Drive, you only get one of the two.

And it’s not really enough.

How the times change. At one time Netanyahu and the right wing in Israeli politics thought they had a close partisan in the White House. But as Ben Caspit noted two weeks ago in AL Monitor, it’s all been sliding away:

Some in Israel are watching with consternation as the Trump administration takes shape. Almost all of the leading supporters of Israel mentioned as possible candidates for senior positions have been left out of the administration, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former UN Ambassador John Bolton and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The only real pro-Israel appointment is David Friedman, and with all due respect to the prospective ambassador to Israel, what Israel actually needs is a presence in the Pentagon and the State Department. Instead, it has Defense Secretary James Mattis, who declared that the capital of Israel is Tel Aviv, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has never visited Israel and has close ties with the Arab world because of his past work in the oil industry.

The euphoria in Jerusalem is dissipating. On Jan. 28, Netanyahu tweeted his support for the construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico, writing, “President Trump is right.” Although the tweet got him into hot water with the Mexican government and Mexico’s Jewish community, Netanyahu has no real regrets. It is important for him to stay close to Trump and become his best friend as quickly as possible. Only after the two men meet will it be known if this is possible.

It’s disturbing to me that my first thought was that the two of the three best allies Israel were hoping for are not particularly attractive, physically speaking (I think Romney is quite distinguished looking, but he never had a chance with Trump – he didn’t hand over any green, and rather famously bashed Trump during the campaign, which are the number three and two metrics Trump appears to use in appointments). I mean, regardless of the fact that Guiliani appeared to be a shrill, grasping partisan, rather than a dignified personality appropriate to an important Cabinet post, to me it was his physical deportment which would fail his case with Trump.

And it appears that Netanyahu’s expectations are coming to naught. as The New York Times reports on his very recent meeting with Trump:

President Trump jettisoned two decades of diplomatic orthodoxy on Wednesday by declaring that the United States would no longer insist on the creation of a Palestinian state as part of a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians.

Hosting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for the first time since becoming president, Mr. Trump promised a concerted effort to bring the two sides together, suggesting a regional effort involving an array of Arab nations. But he said that he was flexible about how an agreement would look and that he would not be bound by past assumptions.

“I’m looking at two-state and one-state” formulations, Mr. Trump said during a White House news conference with Mr. Netanyahu. “I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one.”

At the same time, Mr. Trump urged Mr. Netanyahu to temporarily stop new housing construction in the West Bank while he pursues a deal, echoing a position past presidents have taken. “I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit,” he told Mr. Netanyahu.

While it’s true Trump did not endorse the two state solution disdained by the Israeli right, what he basically said was, I don’t care, you guys figure it out. That leaves Prime Minister Netanyahu with a critical question: Does the United States have my back? The shock of the Obama Administration declining to veto a United Nations resolution critical of Israeli settlement building lead to Netanyahu angrily charging the United States with instigating the resolution. From The Guardian:

Israel has escalated its already furious war with the outgoing US administration, claiming that it has “rather hard” evidence that Barack Obama was behind a critical UN security council resolution criticising Israeli settlement building, and threatening to hand over the material to Donald Trump. …

“We have rather iron-clad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” Keyes said.

Doubling down on the claim a few hours later the controversial Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, went even further suggesting it had gathered evidence that it would present to the incoming Trump administration.

How will Netanyahu proceed? What if Trump just ignores Israeli affairs, distracted by his own woeful nuclear meltdown? Is this when the Israeli right wing will just annex all of the lands in question and hope the world will just shrug?

Netanyahu has a lot to think about, now that he’s found that Trump isn’t a mature leader.

Cisgender:

Cisgender (often abbreviated to simply cis) is a term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. Cisgender may also be defined as those who have “a gender identity or perform a gender role society considers appropriate for one’s sex.” It is the opposite of the term transgender. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Privilege in the land of Sojourner Truth’s slavery,” Rev. James Rowe, Steps Towards Racial Justice, Metropolitan New York Synod, ELCA:

I say occasionally because as a white, male, cisgender person I have the privilege to be able to not think about such things because who I am as considered the norm for our society. And not thinking or speaking about these things is the preferred societal, “normal” thing to do. When I talk about my white privilege in my predominately white privileged world, I get pushback from others.

Having just watched parts of the Trump news conference on Colbert, I can only say that Trump is today’s Yogi Berra, who once famously said

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

Trump seems to have the same ability to hold two opposing concepts in his brain at the same time. The mark of idiots, geniuses, and wits.

As it happens, my Arts Editor alerted me to a flagrant case of fragmentary information by the local Fox affiliate, Fox 9. CityPages’ Mike Mullen has the low-down on this low behavior:

To clarify: One set of folks holding signs and chanting was protesting against Planned Parenthood, saying the vilified chain of clinics should no longer receive any federal funding. These people numbered “a couple of hundred,” according to the Associated Press, and as many as 400, the Star Tribune reports. That small crowd says Congress should block Medicaid and any federal grants to Planned Parenthood because providing abortions accounts for some 3 percent of its work.

They were utterly outnumbered by a counter-protest in favor of Planned Parenthood, a neatly aligned demonstration that drew from the massive Women’s March in St. Paul a few weekends ago. On Saturday, that side numbered well into four-digit figures, as high as 6,000, according to a St. Paul Police Department estimate.

It’s in these types of situations that TV stations love to rush to the helo-pad and get the chopper up and buzzing above the crowd — or crowds, in this case. From that vantage point, they’re really the only ones who can take it all in.

You’d think.

Most of the images Fox 9 used to cover Saturday’s rallies showed close-ups of believers on other side, often contrasted with their opposite numbers in the same frame. Then one image depicts an overhead view of both sets of protesters.

And… whoa! From this angle, it looks like the two sides are even!

If you want to see his picture, follow the link. Intriguingly enough, Mike also notes that the local ABC affiliate, KSTP, did not mention the vast disparity in the size of the crowds – and takes them to task. (My favorite channel for news, WCCO, gets kudos on the other hand.) It appears more than one journalist – or editor – needs a refresher course in basic honest journalism.

Now, I could natter on about the basic dishonesty in not providing the complete picture, and how this shapes attitudes which might be significantly different if the full picture was provided.

But Mike does it so much better.

Mathematical accuracy matters in this fact-challenged era, as does pictorial honesty. Give the real numbers and an unvarnished view of the scene.

Let your reader or viewer deny what they’re seeing, turn up their collar to hide from the truth’s chill wind. Some still will. But you owe them a chance to know what’s right.

Go, Mike!

On Lawfare, Jane Chong expresses her anger at the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Nunes of California:

Nunes’s aggressively pro-administration posture has included over recent weeks hitting out at the IC and downplaying the Russian threat. He suggested back in early January, for example, that partisan politics accounted for the IC’s conclusion that “Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-Elect Trump’s election.” When, during an interview, Chris Wallace quoted one of Trump’s tweets and pointed out the then-President-elect didn’t exactly sound “ready to crack down on the Kremlin,” Nunes defended Trump’s comments, arguing that “he wouldn’t be the first president to want to be buddies with Putin.”

All this marks a 180-degree turn for Nunes who, as recently as last spring, declared on CNN that “[t]he biggest intelligence failure that we have had since 9/11 has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia.” Under the Obama administration, Nunes called out the IC, the White House, Congress and U.S. allies for being suckered into negotiating with Russia and “misjudg[ing] Putin for many, many years.”

And it’s turns like the one Jane describes which are quite baffling to any reasonable person. I can’t help but hope this will eventually be another stake in the coffin of team politics and mindless straight ticket voting, because that’s what I see as the necessary predecessor to the current national debacle taking place not only in the White House, but in the House of Representatives as well.

Jane’s conclusions?

Even now, in fact, key Republicans specifically entrusted with oversight matters are attempting to turn the page on harms that by no means necessarily end with Flynn’s resignation. For example, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah)—who, like Nunes, was an aggressive proponent of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and has been startlingly silent on ethical issues under Trump—declared yesterday that he has no intention of further probing Flynn ties to Russia. “It’s taken care of itself at this point,” he said, just before the Times broke its story. Note how much less careful this comment was than that offered by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who stated, in response to questions about whether further congressional investigation is necessary, “I’m not going to prejudge the circumstances surrounding this, I think the administration will explain the circumstances that led to this.”

At some point, the House of Representatives and its House Intelligence Committee chairman are going to need to face the oversight music, however reluctant they are to do their part to orchestrate it.

Unfortunately for those constituents unhappy with his performance, he appears to be in a safe Republican district:

Nunes’ district was renumbered California’s 22nd congressional district after the 2010 Census. With redistricting, Nunes lost most of eastern Tulare County to the neighboring 23rd District. The 22nd also has an Hispanic plurality (44.8%). Based on recent election totals, it remains predominately Republican. In the 2012 and 2014 elections, Nunes won 61.88% and 70.58% respectively against Democratic opposition.^[16]

No 2016 update yet to Wikipedia. However, if a significant number of his fellow Party members were removed from power in the next election, it might serve as a lesson to him.

Which I mean in a most admiring way:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8oqPR5-GLuA

So I want to know – is this a result of a diktat from above? Or the result of someone’s artistic vision?

In WaPo, conservative pundit Jennifer Rubin notes how many American international businesses do not find Trump’s Muslim travel ban palatable. Her final thought:

Perhaps this will mark a watershed, the time when businesses refused to be bullied. In the midst of a populist political earthquake, they heretofore have been circumspect in defense of trade, immigration and the rule of law. That may come to an end. They are figuring out that Trump’s strong-arming and irrational policies are bad for the bottom line.

Trump and his low-information voters may not get it, but the U.S. economy is integrated with the rest of the world. Our businesses are global and rely on markets, employees around the globe and smooth travel to be profitable and, in turn, to hire more U.S. workers. That’s the fallacy at the heart of Trump’s know-nothing economics: We can’t turn back the clock, pull up the drawbridge and tell the world to get lost without severely damaging our economy. Maybe one of the billionaires whose wealth far exceeds Trump and who has built an international, public company (where profits and losses cannot be hidden) can explain it to him.

I don’t think this is entirely fair, given the reaction of businesses to the so-called “Religious Freedom” laws passed in Indiana and Georgia, as well as the reaction to North Carolina’s HB-2 law – each state was threatened with the cancellation of business, and North Carolina has suffered quite a lot of business loss.

And we need a metric for measuring just how many businesses are international. Corporations vary in a number of dimensions, so counting on the fingers doesn’t work. Maybe sales, maybe employees (so, not to irritate Constitutional Originalists or anything, but how do you count a robot?), maybe net profits? So does that gas station down the street count?

Or am I picking a nit? I work at a huge international company, but a lot of people also work at grocery stores. Perhaps the big clue here is “Our businesses are global …”, which is a lurking contradiction. As companies go global, the nationalistic urges fade as the potential for profit appears to be everywhere.

Universal Basic Income once again occurs to me, but I shan’t expand on it here, except to wonder if it’s a promise or a mirage. It might allow the free enterprise urge to flourish once again in currently depressed areas, though.

If you have to deny it, you must be doing it.

“I’m not ranting and raving, I’m just telling you you’re dishonest people.” President Donald J. Trump [CNN]

And the idea that CNN, a mainstream media organization, would, even could, put together a “best lines of the President’s press conference” article and fill it this full of embarrassing gaffes, lies, and incoherencies … historians must be drooling to start writing the chapter on the Trump Administration. And the Ph.D. theses … the mind spins!

This feels like it’s coming to a rapid end. Hopefully, he’ll just climb into the Presidential helicopter one day and go vacation on a sleepy island somewhere, never bothering us again. I don’t want a more dramatic ending than that.

Mustafa Akyol notes Turkey’s slide away from liberal democracy and into the cult of the strong man in AL Monitor:

Another dramatic scene is set in the year 1961. Turkey is under the rule of a secularist military junta that has overthrown the democratically elected Democrat Party government. The young boy who bravely recited the Arabic call to prayer is now a pious Islamist with a “cause.” A truck full of soldiers heads into his modest neighborhood, where they break down his door and arrest him as he is praying. For added drama, the man’s aged parents try to stop the soldiers and save their son. They are viciously thrown to the ground, in a scene reminiscent of Nazis in Holocaust films.

Meanwhile, a young boy in the neighborhood has been watching all this with sadness, but also with a certain wiseness, knowing that these dark days will pass. At that point, Erdogan’s voice is heard reciting a line from a famous poem: “Don’t leave this nation without a hero, my God.” That boy is the young Erdogan, the very hero that “this nation” — Turkey’s religious conservatives — has been waiting for for a century. That, apparently, is the message of “The Chief.”

A certain irony, since apparently Erdogan had faked his diploma in order to begin his ascent to power. Akyol’s conclusion?

Many of Erdogan’s supporters will likely be moved by the eagerly awaited film, whose trailers have had more than 130 million hits. The historical irony will probably be lost on most of them that the early Turkish Republic that they so despise was characterized not only by a heavy dose of secularism, but also by a cult of personality, not unlike their own, around Kemal Ataturk. In the 1930s, when Ataturk dominated Turkey, statues of him were erected across the country to the extent that the words “statue” and “Ataturk” became synonymous in the public’s mind.

Now, a century later, Turkey has another cult of personality in the making, at the hands of the very people who for decades ridiculed the cult of Ataturk. Statues are out of fashion these days, but a much more influential form of art is available for the mission: film. “The Chief” is just the beginning. The producer has proudly noted that “The Chief II,” “The Chief III” and several other films are being planned for the series. They will all be launched on Feb. 26, Erdogan’s birthday. After all, his birthday must be a special day for the entire nation.

I don’t know enough about Turkey to really comment, but it sure sounds like a nation with a significant number of frightened people who want someone to protect them – at any cost.

I hope they don’t end up with a cost that cannot be borne.

Some people like horror movies, and some people like dinosaurs, probably for the same reason. NewScientist (4 February 2017) reports on a new discovery which makes me shudder even as it delights me:

The newly unearthed fossils from the Transylvania region of Romania date from 70 million years ago. They reveal a little-known azhdarchid, Hatzegopteryx, with a short, massive neck. Much stronger than others in the same family, it probably feasted on bigger prey, such as dinosaurs the size of a small horse (PeerJ, doi.org/bxvs).

“The bones we are taking out of Romania show a much more robust and massive animal than we previously imagined,” says Mark Witton at Portsmouth University, UK. Hatzegopteryx would have been an apex predator, a bit like T. rex. With a jaw half a metre wide, it could have swallowed a small human or a child, says Witton.

A small horse!

An azhdarchid is part of the Pterosaur family, the big gliders you often see in various dinosaur movies and documentaries. One, in fact, shows up The People That Time Forgot, trying to get at the people in the flying machine (I shan’t grace it with the more modern appellation airplane), although they made the mistake, I think, of calling it a pterodactyl – if I remember my childhood model building proper, the pterodactyls had the tails with the diamond-shaped bone mass at the end, while pteranadons did not, so I think it was a pteranadon.

The azhdarchid even have a blog dedicated to them, Azhdarchid Paleobiology, although it doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2008, sad to say. The lovely illustration to the right comes from that blog. A quick perusal shows some comparative illustrations. An illustration on a Scientific American blog shows them the size of giraffes! Now I’m feeling small. And helpless. Maybe I shouldn’t sleep tonight.

Casuistry:

1. a resolving of specific cases of conscience, duty, or conduct through interpretation of ethical principles or religious doctrine

2.  specious argument :  rationalization

Noted in this 9 Chickweed Lane comic.

A reader comments on possible impeachment:

I doubt he’ll fire Bannon, since Bannon is the guy actually running the show. The Republicans just need to gird their loins and impeach him, knowing that Pence will give them just about everything they want anyway, with a lot more stability and professionalism. Or at least, I sure hope. How does a new VP get appointed?

This is controlled by the 25th Amendment. Short version: any nominee must be approved by both Houses. From Wikipedia:

Section 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

Section 2. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Section 3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.^[3]

I’ve wondered if a President could dismiss a Vice-President. No mention here.

A President Pence would also require a lot of supervision, but at least, from the debates, it sounded like he has a proper wariness of Russia.

My Arts Editor and I had a discussion of the situation and I raised the point that a positive of all this is to wake up a lot of people who prefer to ignore politics, get them involved, maybe even up the quality of candidates running for office. All speculation on my part, of course – but I can hope!

I’ve encouraged friends to run from time to time, and have encountered some quaint rejoinders, along the lines of I’m too shy to Are you kidding? No, I’m not.

Professor Eric Posner of The University of Chicago Law School speculates on the impeachment of Trump, and gives the current attitude of the court system:

If Trump was trying to intimidate the courts, he failed. They are openly contemptuous of Trump. Here is Judge Robart, the “so-called judge”:

As the government argued for postponement, the judge referenced Trump’s tweet reacting to the 9th Circuit ruling saying he would “see you in court.”

“I’m a little surprised since the President said he wanted ‘to see you in court,’” Robart said, later adding, “Are you confident that’s the argument you want to make?”

DOJ lawyer Michelle R. Bennett said: “Yes, your honor.”

Robart is mocking the president. Meanwhile, a district judge in Virginia has found that Trump likely acted out of animus when he issued the travel ban. Passages in her opinion and the Ninth Circuit opinion brim over with disgust at the Trump administration’s lack of professionalism. The respectful formalism of traditional presidential power opinions is gone.

He notes Trump’s problems with other critical institutions: the press, government agencies, various civil society groups, and Congress. He thinks impeachment may come before the end of his first term.

NewScientist (4 February 2017) reports on progress in communicating with people with “locked-in” syndrome, which can be brought on by ALS and other neurological diseases. This caught me by surprise:

The team used the device to ask the four people if they were happy. “They say that life is wonderful,” says Birbaumer.

Many people, including some medical professionals, assume that paralysed people have a low quality of life. Birbaumer says that in his experience, this isn’t true.

Some research suggests locked-in people are unable to process negative emotions, says Chaudhary. “They’re only processing positive emotions, and if that happens, you’re basically happy all the time,” he says. “We don’t know why that is, but it seems as though the brain is trying to protect itself.”

I’ve often felt – along with many other scientific types – that Near Death Experiences (NDEs) are merely the result of a malfunctioning brain. I had never thought of a malfunction which simply kept the consciousness happy, though.

Here’s a quick summary of the story:

Smoking saved my life!

(From a colleague who went in to CAT scan of his lungs to check on the progress of COPD caused by smoking earlier in his life, and came out with a diagnosis of a thoracic aortic aneurysm, for which the usual symptom is the victim drops dead. He’ll be having surgery.)

I see CNN is reporting on its Politics blog (which does not appear to permit linking to individual entries) that Trump will be holding a rally in Florida this weekend:

Trump will hold a campaign-style rally Saturday in Melbourne, Florida.

Trump will rally supporters at an airport hangar at the Orlando Melbourne International Airport, the same venue where he held a campaign rally in September.

This may be an attempt by Trump to rejuvenate enthusiasm for his tenure in the White House – and his own self-image.

This may be more than just a curious side item. This may be pivotal (and it seems so strange to say that before an entire month has passed in Trump’s tenure) for Trump.

I’m reminded of something I read long ago (possibly in this, but I’m uncertain) about the iconic German arms maker Krupp. They were one of, perhaps the, major arms manufacturer for the Kaiser during World War I. Keeping in mind this may be an apocryphal story, very, very near the end of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II came to the main Krupp plant and gave a speech concerning the war. He was met, if memory serves, with utter silence. Not a speck of enthusiasm was shown.

He abdicated not long after, shocked by the response and discouraged.

If Trump doesn’t see excited crowds, happy & supportive, he may fall apart and resign – or change his role within the White House from chairman of the board to … something else.

If he’s recharged by the visit, on the other hand, then no major changes are likely.

But it’s worth keeping an eye on it. My guess is that someone will arrange to have a big, happy crowd show up, and Trump will charge away happy as a clam, reassured of his magnificence.

In the meantime, I note the withdrawal of his nominee for Labor Secretary and boss of CKE Restaurants, Andrew Puzder, who apparently had his own set of ethics questions which he couldn’t overcome. Does this count as a scandal, or just another dumb idea from Trump? But Trump’s Gallup approval rating remains stuck at 40%. What else will it take to see that break through into the thirties?

As the great GOP hope executes a flaming dive into the ocean, the GOP political machine bumbles on. I received an email accusing Landrieu (of Louisiana), the Clintons, Obama, and Sanders of misuse of funds recently. Not having a lot of patience for this sort of thing, I decided to pick only Sanders to do the usual additional research; I will just assume this previous post will cover Clinton. Here’s the outtake from the mail concerning Sanders

Source: my mail. Gotta like his grin.

… and Bernie Sanders who shortly after ending his 2016 presidential bid bought his third home a $600,000 lakefront vacation house<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__heatst.com_politics_bernie-2Dsanders-2Dbuys-2Dhouse_&d=DwMFAg&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=nAkEahZnmPDovIEQUz2sMw&m=kKweGL9U_hYpOMS0DXDyIxP5x1UGtBH5w-x5hjBzuFU&s=tDiY3bbwAjnzNzQHNI2FQcmFjnVJOpVb8q8e2i5trdY&e=>on

Bernie Sanders Buys $600K Lakefront Summer House in Vermont

urldefense.proofpoint.com

Feel the bling.

Jack Goldsmith on Lawfare is worried the Trump Administration will be too weak to deal with crises, rather than too strong (that is, autocratic):

In November I argued that “the permanent bureaucracy, including inspectors general and government lawyers; the press; civil society; Congress; and courts … will operate in much more robust fashion to check President Trump than they did to check President Obama,” and that “Trump’s seeming indifference to the rule of law and his pledges to act unlawfully will cause the checking institutions to judge all of his actions with much greater scrutiny and skepticism.”  That is precisely what has happened.  Consider just a few events:

The Flynn resignation.  The Flynn resignation was the consequence of two vital checks on the presidency.  First is the “powerful permanent bureaucracy in the intelligence and defense communities that transcend administrations” and that consists of individuals with “deep expertise, trans-administration interests and values, and deft infighting skills that enable them to check and narrow the options for even the most aggressive presidents.”  These officials have been pushing back against Flynn (and Trump) since November, most recently (at least before Flynn’s resignation) in their refusal to grant a security clearance to one of Flynn’s closest deputies.  The Flynn resignation never would have happened absent leaks by “current and former U.S. officials” in numerous agencies and the White House that laid out the whole tawdry affair, at least as we know it thus far.  Given Trump’s manifold heresies, it is not surprising that “national security leaking, already widespread, [would] increase a lot under Trump” since the “vast majority of the permanent corps in the intelligence and defense bureaucracy [are] on edge to ensure that Trump does not violate the law or their values (and, ultimately, their institutional self-interest), and it will leak at the slightest hint of illegal action.”

A more comprehensible statement with regards to Obama might have been interesting. From my point of view, which (for new readers) sees Obama as a President very much in the mainstream of America, the bureaucracy didn’t have to check Obama; his list of mistaken uses of American power, inside and outside, is probably exceedingly short.

From reading Mr. Goldsmith, one might say that leaks to the press have a valid role to play in a functioning democracy, and from that it leaves the problem of leaks in quite an ambivalent light. I can easily feel sympathy for any Administration that has possibly critical plans exposed by leakers out for personal gain; but when an Administration is caught indulging in an unethical or illegal ploy, then we see the value of leakers.

Mr. Goldsmith explains his point:

But these days I am more worried about—and I think we should all to some degree be worried about—a too-weak Trump presidency.   Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is (as usual) quite right when he says that “The American Constitution … envisages a strong presidency within an equally strong system of accountability.”  The accountability system is working in overdrive; it is the presidency I am worried about. …

The U.S. government cannot work well to respond to society’s many complex problems—many things that need to get done cannot get done—without a minimally staffed, well-organized, energetic, and competent Executive branch.  Right now we don’t have such an Executive branch.

In combination with Quinta Jurecic’s piece on government by troll (Bannon), it does make clear that the chronic disorganization wrought by Trump is not working well so far; it may not last long enough to ever achieve positive results.

But then, it’s never been clear that Trump has ever been a wildly successful individual, despite his bombast.