Category Archives: Uncategorized

A few pics of the Christmas tree…

And the Christmas poinsetta.

In Israel the power of social networks is being used to kill off the practice of soft punishments for men in power. Mazal Mualem on AL Monitor has the story:

The first whistleblower, the woman who became the symbol of the Facebook fight against sex crimes, was Israeli soldier May Fatal. Fatal submitted an official complaint that the commander of the Givati Brigade in which she served sexually harassed her and forced her to engage in indecent acts. She chose to reveal her identity on Facebook on April 27, 2015, after the details of a plea bargain reached between the military advocate general and the commander, Liran Hajbi, were reported in the media.

Fatal’s post went viral, prompting extensive protests across the internet. A veritable army of young women and mothers launched a campaign against the deal, and finally succeeded influencing the outcome of the affair. Hajbi was eventually not only punished, but also demoted and dishonorably discharged.

Another trailblazer in November that same year was religious journalist Rachel Rotner, who came out against one of the rising stars of the religious Zionist HaBayit HaYehudi, again through the medium of Facebook. She posted that the chairman of the party’s parliamentary faction, Knesset member Yinon Magal, sexually harassed her at his sendoff party when he left Walla! News. Before his election to the Knesset, Magal was the senior editor of the site, which meant that he was Rotner’s editor too.

Party leader Naftali Bennett summoned Magal for a talk that same day, and within a week, Magal resigned from the Knesset. It all happened without the involvement of law enforcement. Magal, who is also an internet personality, realized that in an age in which women’s struggles reverberate so extensively, he would have a hard time functioning as a public figure, especially in a religious party.

The positive aspects are undeniable, but it is a form of mob justice – so how are false accusations handled by the mob? So far, it appears that the social networks are activated after a guilty plea or verdict is returned, and the punishment is thought to be inappropriate – most of the time. The Magal case may not fit that description, as law enforcement was never involved.

It also provokes questions of whether we see the same problems and solutions in the United States? We’ve certainly seen some attempts, notably concerning judges who hand down lenient sentences for rapists. Whether these have been effective is a question for which I’ve seen no answers. And the United States is, at two magnitudes larger than Israel in terms of population, a less coherent society.

Cloverfield (2008) is a movie shot entirely from the viewpoint of hapless, powerless civilians in the midst of a kaiju attack. Over the eternity of a single night, we see how the attack begins, endures, and ends as the civilians strive to survive, take care of each other, and even achieve wondrous accomplishments, while a city rains down its pieces around their ears. Their hand-held camera captures intriguing bits and pieces, and, in the end, we’re left with our questions, foremost being What would I have done?

All aspects of this movie are good – special effects, acting, story, characters – although you may not appreciate the latter all that much.

If you enjoy us against the monster movies, then this is a must-see. If you don’t, it’s still an interesting show, unless you like your movies to have an obvious moral, in which case you may not think much of this movie.

And pay attention during the last scene.

… but will we be zagging in a couple of weeks? I freely grant my knowledge base when it comes to Israel and the Middle East is quite limited, but I’ve felt for some time that the encroachment of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land is a form of illegal annexation. I neither celebrate nor condemn the news today of the Obama Administration’s reaction to a UN resolution, from CNN:

The United States on Friday allowed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction to be adopted, defying extraordinary pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in alliance with President-elect Donald Trump.

The Security Council approved the resolution with 14 votes, with the US abstaining. There was applause in the chamber following the vote, which represented perhaps the final bitter chapter in the years of antagonism between President Barack Obama’s administration and Netanyahu’s government.

In an intense flurry of diplomacy that unfolded in the two days before the vote, a senior Israeli official had accused the United States of abandoning the Jewish state with its refusal to block the resolution with a veto.

I’ll watch with great interest. As the Israeli government has swung farther and farther to an aggressive and religious right which believes they have a divine right to the land, they also seem to believe they deserve unconditional protection from the United States. Given that much of the population of Israel derives from the remnants of the European Jewry exterminated by the evil of the Nazis, acting as a protector is certainly in character for a United States that has, at least in part, its own dreams of Godliness – silly as they are¹.

However, that transfers a certain moral responsibility to ourselves, and regardless of one’s religious aspirations, reality is that acting as if you’re the chosen of God can get you smacked down. The importance of international law cannot be over-stressed when the alternative is a bloody war.

¹In reality, we’re neither better nor worse than most countries, and those who have suffered at our hands have certainly a right to paint our hands red with blood – while keeping in mind that the reverse also holds true.

Humanity is a murderous species, truth be told.

The conservative experiment in Kansas has cost the GOP 13 state legislative seats, The New York Times reports:

Brett Parker, an elementary school teacher and rookie politician, was a Democrat running against a Republican incumbent in a Republican state that the Republican presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump, clinched by 20 percentage points.

In spite of all that, Mr. Parker will be sworn into the Kansas House of Representatives next month, one of 13 legislative seats the Democrats picked up here.

In this election year, voters across Kansas leaned firmly to the right at the federal level, but showed far more nuance when it came to their state. In parts of Kansas, they punished conservative legislators linked to Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax-cutting doctrine, instead gravitating toward moderate Republicans and Democrats like Mr. Parker who blame the governor and his legislative allies for imperiling the state’s finances and putting public schools at risk.

So not only were 13 seats were lost, more, not enumerated, went to moderate GOPers – who, given the methods of today’s GOP, could be tomorrow’s DFLers. Per usual, the conservatives will blame outside forces:

Here, conservatives attribute much of the strain to downturns in the agriculture and energy industries, both central elements in the Kansas economy. Others question whether the cuts and deficits are symptomatic of a political swing that went too far to the right.

“The pendulum finally snapped,” said Brian Brown, a Republican who lives in Mr. Todd’s House district, but who spurned his own party and volunteered for Mr. Parker’s campaign.

But as noted in a previous post to this thread, that excuse is dubious. At some point, it’s necessary for mature adults to admit that reality has up and slapped you in the face. I know all about the conservative kant about lower taxes, governments never create jobs. etc. – I read it for years in REASON Magazine. At some point, you have to take a step back and evaluate your beliefs in relation to the facts on the ground. In contrast, this post (which is mostly just a pointer to this Daily Kos post) remarks upon the prosperity of Minnesota, which has not pursued a conservative economic agenda. It suggests that a strong infrastructure and well-educated citizens matter more than lower taxes – both problems in Kansas.

Complicating matters, the Kansas Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a lawsuit challenging the adequacy of state funding for public schools. The Supreme Court justices, many of whom conservatives tried unsuccessfully to oust in last month’s election, could order hundreds of millions of dollars in additional education spending.

The DFL remains the minority party for votes along party lines. The moderate GOPers have a chance to distinguish themselves through leadership by allying themselves with the DFL on key issues – we’ll see how ambitious they may be, or if the RINO throwers intimidate them into line.

Or maybe the RINO-throwers will be asked to leave the party.

As I perused Steve Benen’s MaddowBlog piece on Sean Spicer’s appointment as White House Press Secretary, I began to speculate on Mr. Spicer’s ability to understand what he’s in for – and if he doesn’t understand, then if he’ll ever figure it out. First, just one of Steve’s observations on Mr. Spicer’s … loose connection to reality:

More recently, after Trump was caught lying about voter fraud in this year’s presidential election, Spicer said, “There was a Washington Post story not too along ago that showed the number [of fraudulent votes cast] could be as high as 14 percent.” The Post hadn’t actually published any such piece; Spicer was completely wrong.

With Mr. Spicer’s accession to one of the highest profile posts in the world will come one of the highest levels of fact-checking anyone experiences. Does he understand that he’s moving from a political sphere where the truth is only valued in relation to its conformance to ideology and its usefulness in moving tribal members to a public sphere in which facts matter? Does he understand that attempting to formulate public policy based on lies will have negative consequences – if not for you, then for someone else?

And when he comes down for the last time from the mountain and discovers that people, outside of his own little political sphere, just don’t care about his opinions, and consider him one of the worst occupants of his position, will he be able to understand why?

Or is he just too much of an ideologue? I suspect so; given how often he’s wrong, I do not think he loves truth.

With apologies to The Simpsons TV show for using the enchanting word embiggen.

Jason Goldman, @WhiteHouse Chief Digital Officer, comments on the digital institution We The People, the site used to create and maintain petitions to the White House.

A half million petitions. Over 40 million signatures. Hundreds of responses. We the People has been a remarkable experiment in a new kind of democracy: transparent, accessible, and responsive. A way for anybody, from anywhere, to send a message directly to the White House — and, if they collected enough signatures, to receive a direct response. When we launched in 2011, we were excited to bring a new level of transparency and access to the Administration, but we weren’t sure what would happen.

I’m very proud of the work that was started by the Office of Digital Strategy years before I joined — and where we’ve taken We the People since.

Half a million petitions – I had no idea. Mine was one of them – a failure, but a good failure. And the future?

While we’ve taken every step possible to make it easy for future administrations to carry on this tradition, it’s ultimately up to the incoming team.

You could see this as part of the political wars – an attempt to open communications with those currently living in their Fox News echo chamber. I’ve seen nothing on how well it worked.

This quote may turn out to be a little haunting:

“Citizens should be engaged and empowered. That those in power should serve the people, not themselves.” — President Obama, video message to the Open Government Partnership Global Summit, December 12, 2016

President Obama’s always had a clear vision of what government should be, and it’s a good one. I doubt Trump shares it. It would be a matter of morbid fascination to introduce the mythical truth drug into President-elect Trump and then ask him his opinion of the purpose of government.

From a friend….

Mark Pulliam of American Greatness, a Constitutional Originalist of finicky opinion, has some definite thoughts on who the Illegimate Justice should be:

As the volume, scope, and burden of federal regulations—laws enacted by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats—continue to grow, critics have begun to question the constitutional foundation of the administrative state. Noted constitutional litigator Chuck Cooper and Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger (who wrote a 2014 book called Is Administrative Law Unlawful?) have made a powerful case that administrative agencies, as currently constituted, violate the constitutional separation of powers, echoing arguments that Justice Clarence Thomas has made in recent opinions. Trump should appoint justices in the mold of Thomas, who are willing boldly to reconsider prior SCOTUS decisions that have mistakenly granted the federal government powers in excess of its constitutional limits.

Not all of the candidates on Trump’s short list fit the bill. Some lean toward the Wilkinson model of excessive deference, and others lean toward the libertarian model of insufficient deference. For example, 11th Circuit judge William Pryor, widely regarded as a front-runner, is on record as describing New Deal commerce clause precedents as “defensible.” Granted, federal court of appeal judges are not expected to critique Supreme Court precedents, so the significance of this comment is limited. More troubling is Pryor’s concurrence in a decision that upheld the exercise of federal jurisdiction over an assortment of stray cats belonging to the Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, on the ground that the cats “substantially affect interstate commerce.”

In contrast, 10th Circuit judge Neil Gorsuch has thoughtfully questioned Chevron deference and even suggested that Chevron is “no less than a judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty.” I haven’t done enough analysis to endorse (or oppose) any particular candidates, although in my opinion the list could profitably be expanded to include some additional prospects, such as D.C. Circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh and Senator Ted Cruz. Bottom line: President Trump faces a momentous decision. Let’s hope he chooses wisely.

On the one hand, you have to have some sympathy for Mark concerning an opinion in which a pack of stray cats are considered to affect interstate commerce. On the other hand, it all dries up when he mentions Senator Cruz as a good pick.

And maybe it’s out there.

Wait, there’s more! Matt Novak on Gizmodo has collected more pictures from this Russian fisherman’s Twitter feed – see here.

So looking at these – ya gotta wonder if there’s a conspiracy theory group out there dedicated to believing the deep-sea scientists are just making these up in order to get more funding – or notoriety! I mean, goodness. This one looks like something an ambitious 5 year old might make. (Decompression may have been unkind to this guy.)

Hope he’s not swimming through my dreams tonight.

The Seattle Times notes that our privacy dike appears to be a little holey:

A federal board responsible for protecting Americans against abuses by spy agencies is in disarray just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board will have only two remaining members as of Jan. 7 — and zero Democrats even though it is required to operate as an independent, bipartisan agency. The vacancies mean it will lack the minimum three members required to conduct business and can work only on ongoing projects. Trump would have to nominate new members, who would have to be confirmed by the Senate.

The board was revitalized after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures on the scope of U.S. spying in 2013. It notably concluded that the NSA’s phone surveillance program was illegal.

Since then, it has been crucial in ensuring members of Congress and the public have a window into the highly secretive and classified world of intelligence agencies. But it’s unclear if Trump will support robust intelligence oversight. During his campaign, Trump appeared to support strengthened intelligence overall and surveillance of mosques, but he’s more recently expressed distrust of intelligence agencies. The Trump transition team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lovely. I bet they didn’t even know it existed. But then, neither did I.

Paul Rosenzweig doesn’t think Trump cares, either:

Anyone who thinks that filling the PCLOB’s 3 or 4 open slots will be an early priority of the incoming Trump Administration will also be interested in the bridge I have available for sale in Brooklyn. [Though, to be fair, filling the board was unlikely to be a high-priority for the Clinton Administration either.] Best guess: The board is unable to function for all of 2017 if not longer — and that can’t be a good thing for governance.

A group of your friends sit around the long table, the remnants of a luscious pot-luck still clinging to the tablecloth. But now the game has been taken out, the wine bottles rescued, and the rules read to the assembled. Now play begins. The treasure in the box, a thick pile of cards, is placed on the table, and someone takes a card from the middle and flips it up for all to read.

“Impeachment“. The card is white on black, and, unlike most, it has pink stripes. This one’s important.

You stare down at your pad of paper, gnawing on your lip, then the eraser on your pencil. That queer rubbery taste distracts you. The adrenaline courses through your body as you consider your innate cleverness coming to the fore, but how to give it your personal stamp? Duplicate another’s answer and you both lose your points. The timer clicks, faster and faster, and finally you scrawl something down. The timer stops just as you finish.

“OK, everyone, how will Trump spin this to his base?”

The answers come around the table, with two canceling out at the vote of the assembled: “Trump says Impeachment? No, impatience – after four years, the economy hasn’t recovered yet – Obama always lied about the economy.”Yours is not one of those, and in fact draws some laughter:

“Impeachment? Oh, that’s the new peaches and cream dessert that great New York City restaurant invented just for me!”

And the important phase of each round: the best answer. The assembled vote on the best answer, and your breath catches in your throat:

Will you be the Trumpmeister? Can you lie like the master?

Ah, warm showers can be so nice. So many ideas come to me in the shower. Perhaps I should send this idea off to Milton-Bradley. I have no idea if this is good enough to count as a claim to this idea… actually, CAH would be more to hip to it.

As no doubt we’ve all heard – at least those of us without selective hearing – it turns out Trump was lying again. From CNN:

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to “drain the swamp” — leading chants of the phrase at his rallies — part of an anti-establishment, anti-Washington message that was predicated on rooting out corruption and bringing an outsider’s perspective to government.

But since the election, the phrase has been turned against Trump with biting irony.

Critics have used it to assail Trump’s high-level appointments of Wall Street and DC veterans, like former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary and Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Ron Klain, a former Obama administration official, tweeted, “Sure, Drain the Swamp. Congrats to all you outsiders who thought that Hillary Clinton was too establishment.”

Turns out he was just replacing one brand of alligator with another. And while their corruption is in the future, and so cannot yet be criticized, I think we can expect it to happen. Why?

Because we’re talking about amateurs and businessmen. And to them, it’s not even corruption, it’s just “how you do business.” I’m neither kidding nor condemning; it’s simply that, for them, it’s all buy and sell, that’s how their minds work, that’s the optimization of their methods. They don’t have the training, the culture, the understanding that we’re not in government to make money, but to execute the goals of government – and without accomplishing those goals, the whole country will gradually fall apart.

The anti-government rhetoric of the last several decades is seeking a roosting place, and it may have finally found it. Don’t anyone look up or you’ll get you-know-what in your eye, all unadvertised.

From The New York Times:

As the grimy, gray smog spreading across northern China settled on the town of Linqi, its schools received a “red alert” notice to cancel classes and protect children from the acrid haze. But Linqi No. 1 Middle School decided it would go ahead with exams it holds outside.

On the school’s small sports field, at least 400 children sat or knelt this week in front of stools used as small desks, answering questions about math, English, Chinese and physics. It is common in China to hold exams outdoors, to deter cheating. But in this case, the students were bathed in cold, filthy air so dense that those at the back of the soccer field seemed like ghostly imprints in the air.

This is what would happen to us without the Environmental Protection Agency. And Trump wants to nominate someone who disdains its work.

Cocob on The Daily Kos sings the praises of Governor Dayton (and Governor Brown of California), concluding:

The reason Gov. Dayton and Gov. Brown were able to radically transform states economies into is simple arithmetic. Raising taxes on those who can afford to pay more will turn a deficit into a surplus.

On the subject of building with wood, Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com is reporting that Minneapolis has a new wood building, called T3. His conclusions:

There is much that is open for debate in that and the other claims. It’s not the largest*, it’s not the first, it’s hardly tall, and it is not some fancy new Mass Timber Construction, it’s good old post and beam with mill decking.

But hey, who cares. It is, no doubt, a great example of how the new can learn from the old to make better buildings and better cities: it is not too tall, it feels urban, built right up to the street. The rusty steel gives it a gritty industrial look right from the start. It is, as Michael Green describes it,

…a modern interpretation of the robust character of historic wood, brick, stone, and steel buildings with the additional benefits of state of the art amenities, environmental performance, and technical capability.

And we could use a lot more of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdjHWYuyRwI&feature=youtu.be

The T3 website is here. The builders note:

Our goal is to deliver the warmth and authenticity of a brick and timber building, with all the benefits of new construction. In addition, using wood to construct T3 generates numerous environmental benefits. The heavy timber throughout T3 actually absorbed C02 before being harvested and there are fewer carbon emissions during the manufacturing process compared to steel, concrete or masonry.

The site includes a link to a TED talk where the architect, Michael Green, discusses building skyscrapers out of wood. StructureCraft has its own report and this lovely photo:

Photo: Ema Peter via StructureCraft

I’ll have to find some time to visit. The address listing is 323 N Washington Ave, Minneapolis.

Daoud Kuttab canvases opinions concerning Trump’s Ambassador-designate Friedman’s assertion that the consulate will move to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in AL Monitor, and the reactions are uniformly negative. Here’s one:

Hanna Issa, a Palestinian expert on international law and a resident of Jerusalem, told Al-Monitor the United Nations has in various ways stressed the special status of Jerusalem. “This definition was made clear in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Resolution 181, and a year later, the status of Jerusalem was reaffirmed in a separate resolution, UNGA 303, in December 1949,” he said.

In the 303 resolution, Jerusalem and its nearby towns of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour were declared part of a UN-supervised international city. Issa noted that the US would not only be going against its own positions, it would be in direct violation of numerous other UN resolutions. He cited 11 UN Security Council resolutions that all say East Jerusalem is an occupied territory “and reject the annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel.”

I suspect if this is thrown in Trump’s face he’ll just threaten to withdraw from the United Nations – and his base will bark accordingly. This is the danger of the theory that experts just get in the way – people who know so very little dabble in a hotspot and, before you know it, people are dead – maybe your own people, even. You can’t just take it to court.

The bad cardboard cutouts killed the good cardboard cutouts. The good cardboard cutouts trash the bad cardboard cutouts. The good cardboard cutouts showed a little bit of cleverness. The bad cardboard cutouts? No, not that I could see.

That’s Rogue One (2016).

If you’re a boy at heart, then you’ll love the movie. Overwhelming odds, certified bad guys, self-sacrifice – at least in American culture, this is the heart of boy culture.

But for the rest of us? Midway through the movie, I honestly found myself wondering – have we seen the bedroom of any of the bad guys? The living room? I mean, what the hell is motivating the bad guys, anyways? Heck, I saw Episodes 1-3, which purport to show the creation of Darth Vader – and it was unimpressive enough that now I don’t remember. Why is he so hell-bent on exterminating the rebels?

At least the rebels are given some motivation in the form of a hellish bit of violence rained down on them.

All that said, the movie’s not a complete loss. The visuals are stunning and dramatic, the space battle was rather clever – for the good cardboard cutouts, at least. The bad cardboard cutouts tended to stumble over themselves a lot. And I suppose a devoted fan would argue this constitutes a face of evil, the one in which evil tends to defeat itself.

But, in the end, it’s just a boy movie. Maybe watching Bogie recently, the moral ambiguities, the facets of movies which really make them great stories, has spoiled me for something like this – but, in the end, will we be talking about Rogue One – or any Star Wars movie – in 20 years because of the issues it raises and explores through the movie? Or just because it was new and different, and Disney ended up spending a lot of money to make even more money?

My money’s on the latter.

Former Milwaukee conservative talk-show host Charlie Sykes writes about the disaster enfolding the GOP in The New York Times:

For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton — that he was a secret Muslim, that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.

And this is where it became painful. Even among Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of betrayal.

When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection retribution. As the summer turned to fall, I knew that I was losing listeners and said so publicly.

Note another conservative being run out of the GOP by the RINO-wielders, and an acknowledgement of the echo chamber effect. I fear the GOP base will actually have to touch a live wire, i.e., see their fantasies erupt into nightmares, before they’ll begin to question their knowledge-base – and then there’ll be even more uses of RINO, to purify the party. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can live in denial with Trump. Influence peddling has already started, and if the government swamp has been drained, the replacement water has a distinct oily sheen to it. How badly will the next four years hurt? Or will the next election cycle, in two years, already result in a change?

And when will we once again have a sane, valuable conservative party? At the moment, most of the elected officials seem to have sucked down the Kool-Aid.

(h/t pollwatcher @ The Daily Kos)

In a prior post on this thread, I expressed curiosity concerning the motivations of the players in this grisly tragedy. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has now indicted four more officials, according to CNN:

… and one is the Center For Inquiry (CFI), publisher of Skeptical Inquirer. From a funds seeking email received today:

 •  Betsy DeVos, the private school vouchers enthusiast tapped to lead President-Elect Donald Trump’s education department, once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to “advance God’s Kingdom.”

•  And take a look at this video of Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence, taking to the floor of the US House of Representatives to denounce evolution.

•  Just last week, Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s EPA director, had harsh words for Trump’s pick for the EPA: “I don’t recall ever having seen an appointment of someone who is so disdainful of the agency and the science behind what the agency does.”

•  And President-Elect Trump has met with anti-vaccination groups, and has made it clear that he sees a connection between vaccinations and autism.

Crusaders against church-state separation, climate science deniers, intelligent design proponents, and anti-vaccination activists used to be at the fringe of society. Now they are poised to run the country. Make your voice heard by giving a year-end gift that ensures we have the resources to fight.

Become a member, or give an outright gift… has it ever been more important than right now?

Just thought I’d point out that CFI fights the good fight, and you may want to help fund it.

NewScientist (3 December 2016) reports that Dutch policemen are now trialing augmented reality systems so that experts remote from crime scenes can direct first responders in their investigations:

You’re the first police officer to arrive at the scene: a suspected ecstasy lab. There’s drug paraphernalia everywhere, but which piece of evidence could be most helpful for your investigation? Then, a massive virtual arrow appears, pointing out a bottle of chemicals, accompanied by a note saying: “Bag this please”.

And what happens when an officer, following directions, suffers injury or death? Will the remote expert have counseling? And do these augmented reality systems carry their own vulnerabilities? How hard are they to hack?

Not that I’m nervous or anything.

… is the name of a blog which I ran across today while reading on FiveThirtyEight. Turns out they keep an eye on retracted papers. From a quick interview with FiveThirtyEight:

The first Retraction Watch post was titled “Why write a blog about retractions?” Five years later, the answer seems self-evident: Because without a concerted effort to pay attention, nobody will notice what was wrong in the first place. “I thought we might do one post a month,” Marcus told me. “I don’t think either of us thought it would become two or three a day.” But after an interview on public radio and media attention highlighting the blog’s coverage of Marc Hauser, a Harvard psychologist caught fabricating data, the tips started rolling in. “What became clear is that there was a very large number of people in science who were frustrated with the way that misconduct was being handled, and these people found us very quickly,” Oransky said. The site now draws 125,000 unique views each month.

From their current latest entry:

It has been a tough couple of years for surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, once lauded for pioneering a groundbreaking procedure to transplant tracheas.

After a series of documentaries prompted his former employer, Karolinska Institutet (KI), to reopen a misconduct investigation against him, KI has today released one verdict regarding a 2014 Nature Communications paper: guilty.

KI said it is contacting the journal to request a retraction of the paper, which has already been flagged with an expression of concern.

The government of India has apparently decided to take on a mega project in order to solve its problem of too much water in one place, while not enough in another. From T.V. Padma in NewScientist (3 December 2016):

The Interlinking of Rivers scheme, which government officials say is to get the green light from India’s environment ministry “imminently”, will create a water network 12,500 kilometres long – almost twice the length of the world’s longest rivers, the Nile and the Amazon.

Some 14 rivers in northern India and 16 in the western, central and southern parts of the country will be linked via 30 mega-canals and 3000 dams, costing $168 billion. In the process, 35 million hectares of new arable land will be created, as well as the means to generate an extra 34,000 megawatts of hydropower.

Geologists and ecologists are concerned, but India has its worries. From The Hindu, earlier this year:

For the purposes of monitoring, the CWC divides India’s rivers into 12 major basins. The largest of them – the Ganga basin – is not the worst case. The CWC figures for April 28 show storage to be 7.8 BCM. While that may be less than the 10.6 BCM storage at the same time last year it is 22.8 per cent more than the decadal average of 6.35 BCM.

However the numbers for the Indus basin and the Krishna basins are far from inspiring. The Indus this year is 35 per cent and the Krishna 67 per cent less than their 10-year normal.

The most updated estimates of per capita water availability in India’s river basins show stark inequality. The Brahmaputra basin, for instance, can annually support nearly 13000 cubic metres per person, whereas the Mahi has a scarce 260 cubic metres per person.

The Guardian estimates …

This year, 330 million Indians have been affected by drought. State governments used emergency measures to deliver water by train in the western state of Maharashtra; in other areas, schools and hospitals were forced to close, and hundreds of families were forced to migrate from villages to nearby cities where water is more easily accessible.

And Oblity provides this lovely diagram, along with an overview:

So what is the cost of the project? It’s in Quartz’s title of an article on the subject, “Why India’s $168 billion river-linking project is a disaster-in-waiting“. They interview a number of local experts, such as Professor Rajamani of Jawaharlal Nehru University:

The interest in river-linking now is due to the big bucks involved in it for dam builders. A canal is not a river and it cannot support an ecosystem. What happens to everything that is living in the river? When water flows, there are a number of factors associated with it. There are micro organisms and there are marine life. We are taking away all of that by building dams and diverting water for something that is not even natural. When you build dams, you are displacing too many people. What will they do? They land up in slums in cities. River-linking is a social evil, economic evil and will ultimately lead to collapse of civilisation.

Perhaps a bit of hyperbole. However, I do wonder if this is just a way for the current ruling party to secure its place through the provision of jobs on a long term basis.

The Diplomat reports on India’s neighbors’ reactions:

The ILR program’s Himalayan component envisages construction of reservoirs on the principal tributaries of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra in India and Nepal, and involves transfer of water from the eastern tributaries of the Ganga to the west, apart from linking the Brahmaputra to the Ganga and the Ganga to the Mahanadi.

As the Ganga and Brahmaputra are transboundary rivers, India’s proposed engineering of their waters would impact Nepal and Bhutan, where these rivers originate, and Bangladesh, the lower riparian country.

Nepal and Bhutan fear that, as in the case of other river projects in the past, India will pressure them to cooperate with the ILR through building dams and other storage infrastructure. There is “strong popular opposition to this idea” in these countries, Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden, has pointed out.

Such opposition could weaken already fragile ties between India and Nepal.

Bangladesh, meanwhile, is deeply apprehensive over the diversion of water from the Ganga’s tributaries upstream, and the Brahmaputra and Teesta rivers to the Ganga, as this would reduce water flows into its territory, increasing salinity of the water, rendering the soil unfit for cultivation, and resulting in the desertification of large parts of the country.

And, finally, back to NewScientist for one of the more unexpected potential results of this project:

[Chittenipattu Rajendran at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangaluru] says that the dams required by the scheme would push down on Earth’s crust, adding extra strain and possibly increasing the risk of earthquakes in the already quake-prone Himalayas.