Category Archives: Uncategorized

Even folks not on the ACA can get hurt if the ACA is out and out repealed, as Joan McCarter on The Daily Kos notes:

[The ban on insurance caps is] probably gone with Obamacare repeal. Along with children up to age 26 being on their parents’ plans, employers with more than 50 workers having to provide insurance, free preventive care, affordable coverage regardless of whether you have a pre-existing condition, and seniors saving billions on prescription drugs. All in jeopardy now. “We view everything as being threatened right now,” said Kathy Waligora, director of the health reform initiative of EverThrive Illinois. That’s for the 156 million Americans who have employer coverage as of last year.

I was chatting with a Mayo Clinic programmer yesterday and he said Mayo’s executive team is not happy with the ACA, primarily because of Medicare reimbursements shrinking. I don’t know if that’s an official position or just scuttlebutt.

Steve Benen comments on right fringe House member Trent Franks’ (R-AZ) opinion that the theft of DNC materials by the Russians are less important than their release:

… a far-right Donald Trump ally for most of 2016, appeared on MSNBC earlier today and echoed Putin’s talking point:

“I’m all for doing what’s necessary to protect the election here, but there’s no suggestion that Russia hacked into our voting systems or anything like that. If anything, whatever they may have done, was to try to use information in a way that may have affected something that they believe was in their best interest.

“But the bottom line, if they succeeded – if Russia succeeded – in giving the American people information that was accurate, then they merely did what the media should have done.”

I get the feeling Trent Franks hasn’t thought this one through.

Maybe the congressman is confused about the basic details of the controversy. Someone – Russian agents, according to U.S. intelligence agencies – stole Democratic materials by way of a cyber-attack and released those materials in order to subvert the American political system.

There’s two problems with Steve’s remarks.

First, he’s letting Franks set the assumption that the leaked material was actually accurate. We don’t know that. All we know is Wikileaks released something. Frankly, we need a national conversation regarding the trustworthiness of such leaked material, since, by its nature, it cannot be verified. Honestly, we don’t know if the Russians just made shit up. In general, the same applies. Is Wikileaks actually one of the greatest con games ever concocted?

Second, the leaks really aren’t the problem. The real problem was the concerted Russian effort to subvert our news culture with its own versions of the news, tuned to discredit Russia’s greatest foes and support Russia’s allies in American culture. This has been documented and strikes me as far worse than the ethical confusion, real as it is, of Rep. Franks.

This all leads to the collapsing morals of the Fox News conservatives. Voting for a man whose lies per day during the campaign overwhelmed fact checkers, leading to Trump trying to ignore the Russia controversy, as noted by CNN:

Here are the foil lamé decorations, front and back.

This one’s currently still in use.

Jeff de Boer engages in, uh, well there doesn’t seem to be a word beyond Art.

Source: BoredPanda

That’s for a cat, and it’s cat sized. Here’s another:

Source: JeffDeBoer.com

More fascinating work here. Look in Galleries.

Politicians of all stripes are always claiming success, because admitted failures are rarely re-elected, and (just in case you haven’t stumbled across on your own) Trump appears to be striving for an Olympic medal in this event1, taking credit for a number of job creations and movements with little excuse, as Kevin Drum (among many others) [insert your adjective here, such as gleefully or in horror] notes:

The skepticism in these headlines turns out to be warranted. Trump did indeed desperately try to take credit for this, and you will be unsurprised to learn that he was lying. First of all, Sprint announced these jobs back in April. Here’s the Kansas City Star: “Sprint Corp. is launching a nationwide service to hand-deliver new phones to customers in their homes. The Direct 2 You service, which first rolled out in a Kansas City pilot, will lead to the hiring of about 5,000 mostly full-time employees as it spreads nationwide.”

Second, the Japanese owner of Sprint, Softbank, announced in October that it was creating a huge tech investment fund.

Third, in December, Softbank’s CEO announced the fund again after a meeting with Trump, and said that one part of the whole package was the creation of 50,000 new jobs. Today, Sprint reluctantly conceded that its 5,000 jobs were part of the previously announced 50,000 jobs.

And finally, these jobs were announced yet again today.

That makes four times these jobs have been announced. Donald Trump was responsible for none of them.

Let me move off on a more general tangent, though. It’s inevitable, even good, to fail. It indicates you’re working on a hard problem. Programmers fail all the time. So do artists. Other professions may fail less often (which reminds me of a horrid anecdote from many years ago, as I heard a software guy from India moan that he should have gone into civil engineering, as buildings were always falling down in India and no one was ever punished for it).

And governing is no different. Sometimes you try something hard and it fails. But a politician may not get re-elected if some project she or he champions fails. So then they go off and bury it.

It’s a conundrum. Almost makes term limits sensible.

Clean Technica is reporting, even celebrating, the move of Statoil out of it fossil fuel assets in Canada and into offshore wind in the US:

Norway’s state-owned Statoil oil and gas company won the right to develop an offshore wind farm in US waters last week, practically within hours of selling off its tar sands oil assets in Canada. The new wind area is off the coast of New York State, hard by New York City, which makes it a high status, high visibility site for the global energy giant.

Similarly, Sami Grover on Treehugger.com is also excited:

… is about perfectly designed to make my little TreeHugging heart sing: Norwegian oil and energy giant Statoil has spent the end of 2016 selling off its assets in Canadian tar sands, and securing rights to develop a gigantic offshore wind farm off the coast of New York State. …

But to emphasize the point, Statoil is state-owned by Norway, a country. I stop the sentence there to emphasize the point: Statoil is, to some extent, controlled by an entity which has more than just profit on its mind. More formally, Norway has a responsibility to assure the survival of its citizens in the future.

This is important in that most of the climate change offenders are public companies, such as ExxonMobil, and they are not necessarily concerned about climate change and the environment in general; their shareholders clamor for profits.

So I hesitate to become excited that this may be the start of a sea-change.

It does, however, bring to mind the problems that will occur if & when the sea-change comes: a multitude of workers out of work. Of course, there will be new jobs in the cleaner energy industries, but will there be enough? Will adequate retraining be provided, or do those who worked to provide us with energy just get pushed off the oil platform and told to swim for it?

Three cats, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, David Bowie, and many others gone – and a very bad election.

I’m a little terrified of catching the news now.

Can’t wait for this year to end.

It may be the end of the practice saber lamé as it proves that resistance is, ummm, one way to the eternal barcalounger. On its way from competition to Social Security, my Arts Editor has used it as a casual canvas. While we wait to hear about one more road to salvation, or possibly hell, here’s the front side – quite reserved, I’d say:

And, far more dramatic, here’s the back side.

The practice foil lamé is much more ambitious. Someday we’ll have to post pictures of its kraken.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com delivers a history lesson on the United States interstate system – and what Trump’s comment on nuclear arms may portend for our future:

On this thread, this is a rather amazing article from The News & Observer, entitled “North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy.” It’s not hyperbole – the author, Andrew Reynolds, is a political science professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who helped found the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP). First, about EIP:

… my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.

And so what happens? He’s asked to evaluate the North Carolina elections.

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Well, we knew North Carolina and its GOP were a special place – but at this juncture maybe it’s a special needs place. I’m not quite sure what “integrity of the voting district boundaries” might mean, but …

… no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

The professor is, I think, outraged, and has a prescription. Here’s one of the points:

Last, elected officials need to respect the core principles of democracy – respect the will of the voters, all the voters and play the game with integrity.

Integrity, meaning respect for your opponents.

Meanwhile, I am quite happy I’m not a user of the cloud, such as Amazon Web Services. How does that connect to the North Carolina issue?

Because a state that does not respect democratic principles generally doesn’t have principles at all, and that would mean any confidential data in the cloud that happens to be stored on computers located in North Carolina – a state with a certain amount of technology companies, such as Wells Fargo – is only as safe as technology can make it, not as safe as the law can make it.

And that’s important.

Of course, the GOP will scream foul, but this is a respected political science professor, not some obviously biased report. Sure, he could have a hidden agenda, but that would have to be revealed to invalidate this finding.

And as this sinks in, it’ll be interesting to see if the corporate world takes notice and pushes North Carolina to resume democratic ideals. Since the GOP has abandoned democratic principles, they are left with the only fuel for their own self-respect, at least in the secular world, being prestige, and in the United States there’s a significant amount of prestige associated with having big corporations in your State. If they start walking away, the state and the GOP, the responsible political entity of the last decade, will lose prestige.

A lot of it.

State legislators of the GOP persuasion may wish to postpone trips outside of North Carolina until they clean up this mess.

Paul Rosenzweig on Lawfare reports on some tactics under consideration if the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine falls through:

The Palestinians want a full state — with all the independence that entails. But the Israelis won’t permit that. They are scarred by the Intifada and the violence of that time still resonates strongly. Their idea of a state is a partially independent entity that remains subservient to their control for security matters. The two of these ideas just don’t mix.

That has led some Palestinians (particularly younger ones) to suggest a one-state solution: Agree that Israel has won and owns the land, and then wage a civil/human rights campaign to gain equal rights and treatment. “You want us,” they might say, “you got us. Now give us free health care; free education; and the right to vote.” I’m not sure if that position can be sustained — it is premised on passive civil resistance that is not culturally attractive — but if it can it would pose a deep problem for Israel. It’s commitment to liberal democracy would run straight into its commitment to a Jewish state — and I don’t know which would give way. My guess is that if the Palestinians called the Israeli bluff the Israelis would have to fold — and simply admit that they plan to occupy the West Bank as a protectorate for the foreseeable future. That, too, is not sustainable.

My bold. Would this result in a natal race, an attempt to out-reproduce the other side?

A key assumption is the commitment to a liberal democracy – not at all clear to me in a government so deeply entangled in religious demands. Paul then adds in the recent American refusal to veto a UN resolution condemning the illegal settlements:

The final straw, if you will, is the changing US policy that seems in these last days of the Obama Administration to be almost schizophrenic.  The outgoing President, perhaps in a fit of pique or perhaps in order to create his own facts on the ground, has allowed the UN Security Council to condemn Israeli settlements as unlawful — a change in US policy that is almost as earth-shaking as the President-Elect’s abandonment of the one-China policy.  Meanwhile, the President-Elect had lobbied against the resolution and has named as his envoy to Israel an appointee who strongly favors expansion of the settlements.  The US embassy may move to Jerusalem.  This radical shifting of American policy, after years of stability, can only be further unsettling in an already unsettled environment.

nutation (astronomy):

In astronomy, nutation is a phenomenon which causes the orientation of the axis of rotation of a spinning astronomical object to vary over time. It is caused by the gravitational forces of other nearby bodies acting upon the spinning object. Although they are essentially the same effect operating over different timescales, astronomers usually make a distinction between precession, which is a steady long-term change in the axis of rotation, and nutation, which is the combined effect of similar shorter-term variations. [Wikipedia]

Noted in A Matter of Degrees, by Gino Segrè.

The New York Times covers some particularly provocative commentary:

Carl Paladino, a western New York builder, one-time Republican candidate for governor of New York and political ally of President-elect Donald J. Trump, came under fire on Friday for racially offensive comments about President Obama and the first lady, who Mr. Paladino said should be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe.”

Mr. Paladino’s comments were published in Artvoice, a weekly Buffalo newspaper. They came in response to an open-ended feature in which local figures were asked about their hopes for 2017.

“Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford,” said Mr. Paladino, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2010, making an apparent reference to the Hereford cattle breed. He said he hoped the disease killed the president.

The title of this post is merely an attempt to give Mr. Paladino the benefit of the doubt, as it’s not entirely clear this is a racist comment; on balance, it’s far more likely that his only source of news is Fox News and sources closer to the fringe. He also claims he was merely trying to draw attention to President Obama’s “transgressions.” It may be time to consign him to a nursing home.

The Trump campaign disavowed his remarks.

Mattang:

Stick charts were made and used by the Marshallese to navigate the Pacific Ocean by canoe off the coast of the Marshall Islands. The charts represented major ocean swell patterns and the ways the islands disrupted those patterns, typically determined by sensing disruptions in ocean swells by islands during sea navigation. Most stick charts were made from the midribs of coconut fronds that were tied together to form an open framework. Island locations were represented by shells tied to the framework, or by the lashed junction of two or more sticks. The threads represented prevailing ocean surface wave-crests and directions they took as they approached islands and met other similar wave-crests formed by the ebb and flow of breakers. Individual charts varied so much in form and interpretation that the individual navigator who made the chart was the only person who could fully interpret and use it. The use of stick charts ended after World War II when new electronic technologies made navigation more accessible and travel among islands by canoe lessened. [Wikipedia]

Noted in a review of an exhibition of maps from the British Library in NewScientist (10 December 2016):

Inevitably, the categories can overlap. Better, perhaps, to get lost amid the cartographic cornucopia than try to follow a fixed path like the earnest pipe-puffing ramblers on the covers of inter-war OS maps. The leaps between culture and context yield mind-stretching views, as when Harry Beck’s “electrical circuit diagram” of the 1931 London Underground shares a space with a mattang, a navigational stick chart from the Marshall Islands. This time-honoured seafarers’ aid not only locates islands with a schematic audacity to rival Beck, but even indicates ocean swell.

This evening’s repast was Critters (1986), starring Dee “Hysteria” Wallace Stone, Mitt Romney, the lusty but more or less useless daughter, the plucky son, and a supporting cast including the eternal fat sheriff, “Forgetful” Davros from Doctor Who, a bar full of bellilgerent bowlers, and half the cast of the Tribbles episode of Star Trek.

Yeah, that half.

A sure-fire candidate for MST3K, the movie chronicles a pair of bounty hunters tasked with killing escaped convicts. The convicts make it to Earth and begin consuming … oh dear. That poor cow. Bull. Whatever it used to be. Anyways, the convicts scamper about looking like black tribbles, until it’s time to eat, in which case they suddenly have red eyes and fangs.

And grow faster than our plucky young hero once they get some chickens into them.

For all that, there’s some humor here. For one thing, the bounty hunters appear to be part of a big hair band. For another, the convicts have a certain awareness of the silliness of the whole thing, in contrast to this poor farming family, who plays the whole thing straight with a script which, unlike a Brit script, never takes advantage of the straightness to milk it for laughs. But it’s kinda weird that the special effects creatures get the best lines in the film.

Oh, well. We watched in mounting horror as the minuscule special effects budget was stretched way beyond credibility, as the milquetoast family scrambled for its life, the cat, the dead boyfriend (oops), the shotgun, the hammer, the couch (mmmmmmm, that couch is good eatins!)  … might want to ask them if they’re related to Fran Tarkenton, famed Vikings’ scramblin’ quarterback.

Honestly, I don’t know why we watched to the end. There was little enough to recommend it.

In what may be the spread of the North Carolina plague, Vermont Public Radio reports on an attempt by outgoing governor Peter Shumlin (D) to appoint a new member of the Vermont Supreme Court – before the retiring member actually, ummm, vacates:

In a Friday ruling, the Vermont Supreme Court temporarily blocked Gov. Peter Shumlin from appointing a new justice to the court.

According to the order from the court, the temporary halt to Shumlin’s appointing power comes after a legal challenge from Republican Rep. Don Turner, the House minority leader.

Shumlin is attempting to fill the vacancy that will be left by Vermont Supreme Court Justice John Dooley, who is leaving the job. Critics, including Turner, say Governor-elect Phil Scott should fill the vacancy once he takes office in January.

The supreme court seat in question will not be vacant until Dooley’s official retirement in April. Since Scott will be governor in April, Turner challenged Shumlin’s legal authority to appoint a new judge to fill a vacancy that will not exist during Shumlin’s tenure as governor.

The governor’s successor is Phil Scott (R). It appears that stretching the bounds of credibility is becoming something of a political sport this season, following in the footsteps of the North Carolina GOP-dominated legislature’s attempt to strip certain powers from the incoming Democratic governor. It’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs these days – paranoia dominates both sides of the aisle.

First Liberty has announced its filed for certiorari with SCOTUS for the case of …

… LCpl Monifa Sterling, a Marine convicted at a court martial in 2013 for refusing an order to remove Bible verses from her personal workspace.

The IB Times reported during previous, military court appeals:

Sterling was charged after she refused to take down a single Bible verse she used to decorate her cubicle in three locations. She later told the court she had posted them in a triangular shape to represent the Holy Trinity. …

“This is a case of insubordination,” Brian Keller, the attorney representing the federal government, told a five-judge panel Wednesday during the hearing. The judges are expected to weigh the arguments and release their decision later this year.

So it’s not entirely clear to me if the issue is the display of religious verses, or failure to obey an order. First Liberty, a conservative group devoted to religious freedom, suggests the issue is the former:

First Liberty attorneys argue that Sterling’s right to post Bible verses is protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, a federal law that should apply to all American citizens.

But so far, every court to hear Sterling’s case has claimed that RFRA doesn’t protect Sterling’s right to display a Bible verse.

Chris Rodda on HuffPo points out that Sterling had also been court-martialed for other charges unconnected with the Bible incident, such as refusing the orders of a superior officer and lying about a medical treatment, and suggests this is all trumped up:

The Seattle Times reports that the Washington Supreme Court has ruled that psychiatrists can be sued for the actions of their clients:

The family of a Spokane woman who was murdered along with her son can pursue a lawsuit over whether the killer’s psychiatrist should have done more to protect them, the Washington Supreme Court held in a case with implications for mental-health professionals around the state.

Rebecca Schiering and one of her sons, Phillip, were shot by her ex-fiance, Jan DeMeerleer, in 2010. DeMeerleer, who also wounded another of Schiering’s sons in the attack, then returned to his own home and killed himself.

Schiering’s family sued the killer’s psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Ashby, and Spokane Psychiatric Clinic, alleging they were negligent in their treatment of DeMeerleer and that they should have done more to protect the victims. Ashby knew his patient had previously expressed homicidal and suicidal ideas, but found no “real clinical problem” in their most recent meeting, three months before the killings.

In a 6-3 opinion, the Supreme Court held Thursday that the lawsuit can go forward. The majority said mental-health professionals must act with reasonable care to identify and mitigate the dangerousness of psychiatric patients.

There is no real simple answer to questions like these. The profession of psychiatry is not an exact science. But this must have some frightening implications for psychiatrists, psychologists, and those who aspire to those professions. As the article notes, this could result in a far more conservative approach adopted by practicioners, with more involuntary committals, as well as more second-guessing.

Gino Segrè is a physicist fascinated with the concept of temperature, to the point where he’s written a history of it, entitled A Matter of Degrees. It’s interesting, and here’s one of the better parts encountered so far. All typos are mine.

But there is some evidence that fever enhances the functioning of the immune system; white blood cells, the system’s agents, move more rapidly as temperature approaches 104 degrees, but that’s only one of the possible reasons for the evolution of the fever response. P. A. Mackowiak has suggest that fever sometimes plays a protective role: a mild infection heals rapidly with perhaps a slight enhancement of the immune system, but a raging high fever that leads to a rapid death of the afflicted individual helps limit the spread to the individual’s kin of a violent contagious infection.

Hmmmmmmmm! Biological evolution applies to populations; individuals are merely the constituents of the populations, not the epitome.

And that’s a good thing. In case your latest memory of the theory of human migration into North America is the Clovis First model, you’re out of date. American Archaeology editor Michael Bawaya writes in the Editor’s Corner column of the Winter 2016 issue (article offline only):

Source: National Geographic

The subject of the Americas’ colonization had long been the exclusive purview of archaeologists, but then some geneticists dared to butt in. … If the first Americans arrived roughly 16,000 years ago, as geneticists seem to think, how could they have occupied a site in South Carolina that an archaeologist claims is 50,000 years old? …

… fashioning all this disparate information into a model, even a remotely plausible model, is beyond the most nimble of minds. The Clovis First model is dead, but now what?

So if you happen to run into a Paleo-Indian archaeologist, don’t even bother to ask.

[typos mine] For a scientist, questions are better than answers! So this lack of consilience is really a positive, giving impetus to future archaeologists.

Coincidentally, my Arts Editor and I once wrote a novel (unpublished) in which the demise of the Clovis First model plays a small part.

Continuing this thread on Israeli settlements, I ran across this article from an angry Akiva Eldar in AL Monitor concerning funding distribution in Israel these days:

In a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the [Union of Local Authorities] warned that a planned 230 million-shekel ($60 million) cut in the budget of the Interior Ministry, which funds local governments, would result in the collapse of some of these weak municipalities in Israel’s “social and geographic periphery” and directly affect the services they provide to local residents. The cut stems from a Dec. 18 government decision to slash 1.25%, or 1.2 billion shekels ($313 million), across the board from its annual spending over the next two years, including on health, welfare and education services. …

In accordance with a policy that proves that crime pays, the public coffers, meaning the inhabitants of Israel, will lose another 130 million shekels ($34 million). That’s the price tag of getting a few dozen criminals living in the unauthorized West Bank outpost of Amona, on stolen Palestinian lands, to obey a court order to vacate their trailer homes and move to an adjacent hilltop also not under the sovereignty of their state. In northern Tel Aviv, across from the railroad station on Arlozorov Street, dozens of law-abiding citizens live in frayed, rain-drenched tents (forced out of apartments they could no longer afford). No one offers these homeless Israelis an iota of the aid that the government is pouring into the “legal” settlements — as the government calls them, in defiance of international law — in the occupied West Bank and the outposts there. The price of the deal with the settlers of Amona also includes the cost of demolishing dozens, perhaps hundreds of houses built without permits by Arab-Israelis in their communities within Israel’s sovereign borders. According to recent reports, that’s what Netanyahu promised the Jewish lawbreakers from the settlement movement in a compromise outline for the evacuation.

In the post-shame era, the government doesn’t even bother concealing the source of the millions that it will hand over to the Amona squatters. The Finance Ministry proposal presented to the Cabinet said the budget cuts are needed, among other things, to fund the Amona deal. One might say that 130 million out of the 230 million shekels being cut from the budgets of 190 disadvantaged local councils are destined for distribution to 40 squatter families. Truly distributive justice.

Lately I’ve been seeing religious groups as simple power structures, hierarchies built on notions of supernatural beings. The purported inclinations of those beings, deduced from subjective experiences, writings of mystics, and out and out fraud, are used to build the rickety ladders of the hierarchy, climbed unsteadily by the ambitious and power hungry.

The dangers of building a power structure on anything but reality – actions are taken on twisted, unshared notions of justice and right, damaging those truly in basic need, while those whose only need is satisfaction of religious sensibilities get the resources destined, in the case in Israel & by any sensible being, for the first group.

Humans are social creatures, drawn to groups for protection. Here we see a nation, originally secular, but transforming into a religious nation, which is no longer protecting its citizens, but only those favored by the power structure in place because those favored have chosen to climb the ladder already surmounted by those in power. The favor is bestowed upon only certain subgroups, and so does Israel betray those most in need, and brings shame upon itself.

All this assuming Eldar’s assertions are facts. I’m in a particular mood this morning.

On another tack, I notice that categorizing groups into power structures thrusts atheists back into a position that some of them detest. They often protest that they are different from religionists on the basis that they do not believe in God (or, like me, do not know, although based on lack of evidence, the position of the religionists seems grim). However, as they form their own groups, even as they’re based on their vision of reality, unexpectedly slippery as that can be (compare the a-religious philosophies of libertarians and communists – both supposedly based on reality), they are forming just another power structure. Built to protect, operating as a competitive arena in some form, the differences only lie in their underlying assumptions; the outcomes may measure the conformance of their vision of reality with reality itself.

Sally Adee interviews André Spicer in NewScientist (10 December 2016) regarding the increasing concern corporations have for our health:

So what is this obsession in corporate culture with enhancing health and happiness?

There’s always been debate over whether a happy worker is more productive, but a more interesting question is how employers are now intervening to “make things better”. In the last decade or so, they’ve suddenly become interested in employee happiness and are designing workplaces to make the physical space itself increase happiness. One company built a workplace to look like a pirate ship.

But most interventions involve the employees themselves. BP gave each employee a Fitbit. It was a gift and using it was optional, but increasing numbers of companies are now insisting you use these things. At a hedge fund in London, the traders have to wear them, plus record things such as their diet and sleeping habits, and then the employer correlates that with their trading activities. At one Swedish utility company, if you don’t go to the gym as part of your working week, you get paid less.

I know my Arts Editor was periodically harassed concerning her health habits before she retired, with money dangled to buy her cooperation – although she was notably dour about those episodes. I work at a large engineering firm, and while there’s an occasional corporate email about taking care of our health, it hasn’t risen to the level of active intrusion into our lives.

I suppose I should be horrified, but this bit amused me instead:

So this is all about companies squeezing everything they can from their staff?

That’s one aspect. The second part is a cultural shift – what psychologists or philosophers would call category mistakes. Employers are starting to equate physical fitness with corporate competence. It’s this idea that if you’re slim and running marathons, you’re going to be a fantastic CEO. From 2001 to 2011, the proportion of CEOs in the US who ran marathons doubled, and you can be sure those marathons are featuring on their CVs. Give employers a choice of two CEOs with exactly the same skills and they’ll almost always choose the slimmer one. Your hobby can no longer be the community garden or whatever you’ve been doing. You have to be running marathons.

I also know that the Mayo Clinic offers an expensive, thorough, quick examination for CEOs – visualize a Formula 1 pit stop where all the tires get changed.

I don’t have the reference handy, but as I recall they mentioned that one CEO came in and left with an acute leukemia diagnosis and a bottle full of pills – and off he went back to his duties just a few hours later.

André is quite dour himself in interpreting these developments, especially in the light of automation threatening many jobs, as well as the new 5 AM to 9 PM work cycle:

So that explains this new economy built around self-enhancement, happiness and the body?

Yes, that’s one way of creating new forms of employment when knowledge-economy work is in decline. We are transitioning to the body economy. It’s also simply capitalism: what do you do when all other sources of growth have been exhausted? You turn to people’s private lives and you begin looking into their bodies and psychologies. You turn their minds and bodies into something you can sell.

Leads one to wonder if automation will be increasingly met with brickbats. Perhaps it’s time to consider how to decide which tasks should be automated. Keep in mind the hidden difficulties with such proposals, for which I have two examples, that computers used to reference mathematicians, not the modern digital wonders that have replaced them, and that we used to employ many secretaries and clerks whose duties today are automated. Was it wrong to automate those jobs out of existence? Nowadays it seems quite normal, doesn’t it? So while I’m tempted to propose that jobs that are very dangerous or very difficult (read: damn near impossible, such as flawlessly calculating mathematical tables) should be eligible for automation, whereas everything else isn’t, I do not feel it is truly a workable proposal.

Considering it honestly, either

1. The libertarians are right, and that by freeing up people from boring and dangerous tasks, we’ll create new jobs with a more creative flare;
2. Or (1) used to be true, but there’s a limit to how long this can go on.
3. [I’ve managed to forget what I had dreamed up here.]

I also can’t help but notice how corporate competition appears to be limitless – rather like that of biological evolution, albeit on far more rapid and plastic basis. Are their endpoints in biological evolution? I think you’d have to assume endless geological stability, and that doesn’t really exist on the time scale of evolution.

sorus:

A sorus (pl. sori) is a cluster of sporangia (structures producing and containing spores) in ferns and fungi. This New Latin word is from Ancient Greek σωρός (sōrós ‘stack, pile, heap’). [Wikipedia]

Noted in the Aperture column of NewScientist (10 December 2016):

THESE glowing orbs harbour the progeny of a strange life form. Their goal? To propel that progeny as far away as possible so it can conquer new habitats. An explosive launch will eventually help them disperse their contents.

They are the sporangia of fern plants, found on the underside of their leaves, or fronds. These sporangia grow in clusters called sori and are seen here under a fluorescence microscope, which uses a higher-intensity light source than conventional microscopes and labels the specimens with a fluorescent substance. This results in beautiful images that enhance the 3D features of small specimens: the sporangia don’t normally glow like this.

Follow the link for the pics.

Anything can be used in the culture wars, can’t it? For example, this lovely effort to commemorate World War II, The Fallen, which remembers, in a brief sort of way, the 9000 people lost on Normandy’s beaches during D-Day.

Yes, those are representations of dead bodies.
Source: The Fallen

Andy Moss and myself from Sand In Your Eye developed the idea of the Fallen Project together to mark Peace Day.  The objective was to make a visual representation of 9000 people drawn in the sand which equates the number of Civilians, Germans Forces and Allies that died during the D-day landings, 6^th June during WWII as an example of what happens in the absence of peace.

The email mostly just uses the pictures on the website sans text and then adds its own subtly nasty comment:

What is surprising is that nothing about this
was seen here in the US.
Someone from overseas had a friend that sent it
with a note of gratitude for what the US started there.
Please share with others who understand
“freedom is not free–nor has it ever been”

Well, no. Both Fox News and the Huffington Post (both ends of the political spectrum) covered it. And the mail is introduced with this line, which clarifies the hidden agenda nicely:

A large percentage of our country doesn’t know of or care about Normandy.

This serves to define an appreciative audience which is better informed, even superior, to the general run of American citizenry. In combination with the end note, the group marks itself as a patriotic group, firmly rooted in history and all that’s good.

The problem? It’s divisive. It doesn’t appeal to our reason, but to our emotions, to the xenophobic emotions which drive our current cultural divides. And by creating a xenophobic group, those who choose to belong to it become vulnerable to the next emotional hook, that perhaps some political figure is also part of the group and should be voted for, without further consideration, at the next opportunity.

We saw an example of this during the recent American Presidential campaign when Mr. Trump was asked to name his favorite book from the Bible. His fumble was apparently not fatal.

But this is sadly un-American. We like to consider ourselves the best and brightest, but we’re not when we’re letting our emotions run our lives. Best comes from reason, not conspiracy theories and finger-pointing and all that rot.