Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Lawfare, Susan Landau finds herself advocating for securing communications now that Donald Trump is the President-elect, and to objections that this will cripple national security, she has an answer:

Protecting the privacy of speech is crucial for preserving our democracy. We live at a time when tracking an individual—a journalist, a member of the political opposition, a citizen engaged in peaceful protest—or listening to their communications is far easier than at any time in human history. Political leaders on both sides now have a responsibility to work for securing communications and devices. This means supporting not only the laws protecting free speech and the accompanying communications, but also the technologies to do so: end-to-end encryption and secured devices; it also means soundly rejecting all proposals for front-door exceptional access.  Prior to the election there were strong, sound security arguments for rejecting such proposals. The privacy arguments have now, suddenly, become critically important as well. Threatened authoritarianism means that we need technological protections for our private communications every bit as much as we need the legal ones we presently have.

Enabling encryption without exceptional access will not prevent law enforcement from doing its job. When the world went encrypted twenty years ago, the NSA claimed it was “going deaf.” But then the agency found other ways to collect intelligence (“NSA has better SIGINT than at any time in history,” according to its former director Mike McConnell). As many have observed, law enforcement will be able to find other ways to conduct investigations even without exceptional access.

Protecting our ability to communicate in private is vital. Congress must respond accordingly. Anything less threatens the very foundations of our republic.

Reminiscent of the libertarians claim that we’ll always find a way to get something done while lowering the cost, if only given the freedom to try. But it does become another piece of technology subject to failure and subversion, without the least little peep – at least for the non-specialist. It’ll be up to the specialists to make secure communications work with little or no notice by the users.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com has news on the coal front:

Just as much of the world languishes in uncertainty over the future of a low carbon transition, the Globe and Mail reports that Canada steps up and announces an almost complete phase out of coal for electricity by 2030 at the latest. And this comes just a week after the UK confirmed its coal phase out plans, and France does too.

The France report catches me by surprise, so I checked it out. The Inertia‘s Alexander Haro provides some information:

François Hollande, the French President, stood in front of delegate at the UN’s annual climate change meeting and promised that France will have no coal-powered power plants by 2023.

Which makes sense – France is nuclear power rich, which is carbon-neutral once the plants are actually built. Until maintenance begins …

We have a couple of scandals today. First, CNN/Politics is reporting that Hillary won’t be locked up:

Recently, my Arts Editor and I spoke with an emigre from India, who told us about India’s decision to be rid of certain denominations of currency as those denominations are used to implement various corrupt practices. They are known as black money. Now LinkedIn publishes a column by Subodh Mathur, an economics professor, who suggests this particular choice may turn nasty for India:

In the meantime, there is a serious risk that demonetization will lead to a decline in the GDP. While we could analyze this policy intervention from a theoretical perspective, it is simpler to look at it from a common sense perspective.

The starting point is that many people will simply not declare the full amount of the black money that they have. Such a declaration would run the risk of further investigations by the Government about how the money was acquired in the first place.  As a result, they will have less money to spend.

A considerable part of the black money is used to pay for luxury-type goods and services, such as weddings, vacations, eating out, jewelry, and expensive clothes. Consider the lavish expenditures on weddings – specially important because the wedding season is just ahead. Much of the expenditures on food, saris, jewelry, invitation cards, decorations, cars, etc. is paid for by black money.

And the ripples continue.

It’s an interesting commentary on the perceived size of the illicit markets – not illegal products, but untaxed. So, assuming this does happen, what’s driving this? A few years ago I read a fascinating book named Being Indian, by Pavan Varma, a former diplomat who had spent a lot of time outside the country, and as a result gained an interesting viewpoint on his own society. I don’t have it handy, but I do recall noting that the myths of India do not encourage following the rules. I’m still a little astounded at the size of the black economy implied.

tectiform:

Sample tectiforms.
Source: Bradshaw Foundation

Between 2013 and 2014, [Genevieve] von Petzinger visited 52 caves in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. The symbols she found ranged from dots, lines, triangles, squares and zigzags to more complex forms like ladder shapes, hand stencils, something called a tectiform that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feather shapes called penniforms. [“Hidden symbols,” Alison George, NewScientist, 12 November 2016, paywall]

In an article by Aviva Rutkin (NewScientist, 12 November 2016, paywall) exploring the some tentative schemes for using Big Data, she begins with a relatively innocuous scheme to discount car insurance for first time buyers if the buyers will give the insurer (Admiral Insurance) access to their Facebook profile, known as firstcarquote. It was aborted before it ever made it out of the corral. But then comes this doozy:

Facebook itself may even be interested in finding ways to score users: it has already worked on theoretical projects that aren’t too different from firstcarquote. Last year, for example, Facebook patented an “authorisation and authentication” method that could allocate loans according to the credit scores of your Facebook friends. If their average score is above a certain threshold, your loan application will be processed; if not, you’re out of luck.

Can you imagine the churn as people begin to upgrade their “friends” list to better their chance to get a loan? And then dump those friends who might drag them down? I’m envisioning the development of Facebook ghettos, schisms widening between those with good credit scores and those without. First we were sliced by our political views, then diced by our credit needs.

Source: The Mingary Castle Restoration blog

On the bright side, it may result in more people learning to live without credit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the individual, although some industries would hate it. (Now I’m visualizing the Wicked Witch screaming about the solvent qualities of anti-credit. I’m a little short on sleep.)

In the end, Facebook might try to compensate by examining your former friends and trying to factor them in, but it sounds like a short term fix to me. While Facebook is too big to be destroyed by any single mistake, if they were to take a step like this, one of their walls would start to crumble.

More news on the Dakota Access Pipeline / Standing Rock, but this time from a commercial news source. WDAY / WDAZ reports on Nov 20:

On Lawfare, Timothy Edgar advocates that you learn all about Masha Gessen, a journalist-survivor of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Shortly after last week’s election of Donald Trump as president, she published a remarkable essay, Autocracy: Rules for Survival.  Her number one rule? Believe the autocrat.

Whether or not Trump becomes an autocrat will depend on whether Americans finally begin to take the things he says seriously.  If he does not mean them, let him say so.  Don’t dismiss them because you think they are foolish or funny or because you simply do not believe what you are hearing.

So what has Mr. Edgar unsettled? He provides this link, where Mr. Trump is documented to have said,

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just said the US should consider “closing up” the internet to curb radical extremism. Trump, a man that routinely claims everyone in charge of the US is stupid, believes that as president he could just call up Bill Gates to help him shut off the internet. Trump floated the idea at a campaign rally at the USS Yorktown in South Carolina tonight as a way to stop ISIS “jihadists” from recruiting Americans to commit acts of domestic terrorism. The idea is so dumb it almost has us, too, at a loss for words.

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet,” Trump said. “We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”

Mz Gessen’s number one rule is reminiscent of (apology, apology) Adolf Hitler, who infamously (if reportedly incoherently) published his plans in Mein Kampf. However, I hesitate to take the lesson to heart, as I’m not so sure Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov, Nikita Khrushchev, or many others published their plans; Hitler may be an exception. However, there is a great advantage to that simple honesty – those who are desperate and looking for earthly salvation may find it in those honestly spoken plans, and by implementing them, you guarantee their loyalty. A little honey on the knife, as it were.

So what tool would Mr. Trump use in the event? Mr. Edgar is a lawyer and expert in cybersecurity, and thus he knows about Section 606 of the Communications Act of 1934. His opinion on Mr. Trump’s options for shutting down the Internet?

Section 606 has never been applied to the internet, but there is nothing in the law that explicitly says it cannot be.  The question is whether the government’s statutory authority over traditional telecommunications under 606 extends to the internet.  The issue is similar to the question of whether the FCC can use its regulatory authority to impose “net neutrality” rules under other provisions of the statute.  In June 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC’s power to impose “net neutrality” rules.

If Trump wants to “close that internet up,” all he will need is an opinion from his Attorney General that section 606 gives him authority to do so, and that the threat of terrorism is compelling enough to override any First Amendment concerns.  It is critically important that a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee ask Trump’s nominee, Senator Jeff Sessions, what he thinks about this issue.

If such a thing happened, would the corporations have the clout to force it to be re-activated? Would the citizenry riot? Or would they be too stunned? Or even in favor, as some trumped up (apology, apology) excuse is given?

I am provoked to think about why Trump was elected (barely), as in the large number of Americans in desperate economic straits, with various others – Trump has said he’ll bring back all those jobs, so let’s assume he’s going to try. What if he fails? Do those folks give up on him in 4 years, or vote for him again because of his honey-smooth approach with them? How do the Democrats generate an appeal to them while holding their coalition together? It should be quite an interesting dance, starting just about now.

We’re already reaching a point where I want to take a shower everyday with the single purpose of washing the feeling of slime off my eyeballs just from reading the political news. Consider this small item, courtesy Steve Benen on MaddowBlog:

This is the same controversy in which Trump faced allegations of bribery when Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) dropped a probe into “Trump University” after the Trump Foundation made an illegal campaign contribution to the Florida Republican. Bondi is now a member of Trump’s transition team.

Even if it’s innocent as the driven snow, it looks like a quid pro quo (for those who prefer old-fashioned colloquialisms, you wash my back and I’ll wash yours comes to mind). Smells like it. And there’s smoke. Now we just need a good investigation.

Unfortunately, most voters, participating or not, ignore government as much as possible, so they’ll not get the good shock to the system that Trump will introduce after Obama’s scandal-free Administration. Counting the Trump University scandal (noted earlier in this thread), the only real question is whether Trump’s scandal count will put him in the lead with regard to the number of scandals in an Administration before he even assumes office.

That would be an impressive accomplishment.

The social sciences are often inexact and controversial, full of observations and speculative, inexact theories, because we are inexact creatures. Nevertheless, as I find honor killings to be repulsive and, quite honestly, inexplicable, when an article professing a usable theory on their existence popped up in NewScientist (“Reputation is everything”, Emma Young, 12 November 2016, paywall), I was quite intrigued.

Anthropologists and social scientists distinguish between what are sometimes called dignity cultures and honour cultures. Dignity cultures value people simply by dint of being human. Here, people seldom turn violent at the first hint of a challenge to their reputation, instead ignoring it or perhaps seeking redress in the courts.

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy opines that all voices should be heard – no matter how repugnant they may be. The scenario? A presentation at Cal State Northridge (CSUN) on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and its interruption – and termination – by a collection of Armenian students. The latter’s statement:

Our presence at these events will send a clear message to the Turkish community that college and university campuses are not incubators for denialists. Treating college campuses as breeding grounds for Turkish nationalist ideology is offensive for the number of Armenian students who attend these colleges.

A more detailed defense of their activities is also mentioned. Eugene’s opinion?

Prof. George Gawrych’s book, “The Young Ataturk: From Ottoman Soldier to Statesman of Turkey,” won one of the Society for Military History 2014 Distinguished Book Awards. And yet it turns out that even a faculty-invited scholar with impressive credentials isn’t allowed to speak at CSUN. Naturally, no speaker should be shouted down this way, whether he wrote an award-winning book or not — but the stature of Gawrych’s work is just a reminder of how deeply the movement to suppress speech has spread at American universities. (Something similar, by the way, seems to have happened the next day at Chapman University.)

In NewScientist (“There She Blew!”, 5 November 2016, paywall) Lesley Evans Ogden reports on research on the whale population strength just prior to the advent of mass whaling:

Using Bayesian statistics to account for uncertainties in modelling population dynamics, Smith and his colleagues have also reconstructed the historical abundance of these whales. Their analysis suggests that before widespread commercial whaling, southern right whales around New Zealand numbered somewhere between 29,000 and 47,000 – a range corroborated by the genetic diversity we observe today. Following 19th-century harvesting, they almost disappeared, with mature females plummeting to 40 or fewer individuals in the early 20th century. None were seen between 1928 and 1963. And although numbers are now slowly recovering, the population still hovers at no more than 12 per cent of pre-exploitation levels.

Morgana Vighi at the University of Barcelona, Spain, has also used logbooks to track the fate of southern right whales in the south Atlantic. Looking at entries from whaling grounds off the coast of Argentina and Brazil, she charted a decline between 1776 and 1923, as well as seasonal north-south and inshore-offshore movements. “In the early period of whaling, the sightings were spread along the coastline of South America,” says Vighi. Now things appear different. Chemical signatures she has found in modern bone samples from whales living off Brazil and Argentina suggest that whaling may have caused a schism, splitting what was a single population into northerly and southerly groups.

At the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier, Ana Rodrigues and her colleagues have estimated historical numbers of north Atlantic and north Pacific right whales. “The logbooks are an amazing data source,” she says. Her team has concluded that before commercial whaling, the former numbered between 9000 and 21,000, and the latter between 15,000 and 34,000. So intensively were north Pacific right whales hunted that the population crashed after 1840. “In 10 years, they nearly exhausted the entire stock,” says Rodrigues.

And to what logbooks do they refer? Those at the New Bedford Whaling Museum:

Welcome to the general citation search page for the logbook and journal collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library. The Museum’s logbook and journal database has been recently updated and can be downloaded (an excel spreadsheet) by clicking on the the text link. This database is not set up for detailed subject searches. However, subject searches are possible through the Search Library page of the Museum’s website.

If citizen science appeals to you, you can help translate old weather logs here.

Source: www.davesandfordphotos.com

Actually, it’s David Sandford, and he does cool pictures. Here’s his website. I suspect this comes from his Lake Erie collection.

Seiche:

A seiche (/ˈseɪʃ/ saysh) is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Seiches and seiche-related phenomena have been observed on lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, bays, harbours and seas. The key requirement for formation of a seiche is that the body of water be at least partially bounded, allowing the formation of the standing wave. [Wikipedia]

The editors of The Arabist are not alarmed by the election of Trump for its impact on the Middle East:

But there is an argument to be made that, while Trump’s impact on the US may very well be dire, it will not mark such a significant shift for the region. First, Trump’s foreign policy ideas are basically non-existent. He will draw in advisors with radical and biased views, to be sure, but this happened before under George W. Bush and other administrations haven’t exactly been impartial mediators on many issues (see Israel-Palestine). Trump backing Assad or staying away from conflicts such as Yemen and Libya or seeking to extract a kind of tribute from the oil producing state of the Gulf can be seen as a more forthright departure from existing policy, not a radical departure. Indeed the thing to fear the most is geopolitical uncertainty, amateurism and military adventurism. But again, nothing entirely new. Only the idea of the “Muslim ban” offers something that pretty much draws universal condemnation in the region. The likes of veteran commentators AbdelBari Atwan, whose post-election commentary is reproduced below, are making these points. They likely underestimate the new and innovative forms of damage a Trump presidency could wreck.

Their analysis of why he won?

Americans, as this election has demonstrated, are tired of their schizophrenic governing elite, which fails to understand their concerns, problems and ambitions. This is why they put their trust in this “rebel” against the political establishment and gave him their votes.

We in no way disagree with the many who condemn this man, or with the numerous criticisms of his personality and behavior, but at the end of the day, judgment resides in the hands of the people and at the ballot boxes. It is hard to imagine how a millionaire who travels by private plane and luxury yacht could present himself as the representative and defender of the rights and demands of the poor and marginalized. However, the frustrated of America believed him and entrusted him with their votes, perhaps because he is candid and spontaneous, unlike the ruling establishment’s professionals and politicians.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if the American election’s discouraging result gives authoritarian governments thinking of transitioning to democracy (yes, this is sometimes peacefully achieved) a reason to hesitate.

What can one say about Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)? Evil space invaders (who are real jerks, too) that bring their own monsters, mutants on Earth that are related to the space invaders, mummified monsters that are part cyborg, monster lobsters and mosquitoes, popsicle-Godzilla, his son, and Mothra – all we’re missing is a flying kitchen sink.

Oh, yeah, that’s there, too.

Hey, even a Russian guy to shepherd the Japanese around. Some kung-fu action. A bit on free will.

In case you suspect the plot is not compelling, you’re right. The monsters are kind of fun, but really, the only reason I watched this one is because the cats wouldn’t let me sleep in this morning.

Ooooosh.

The venerable Theatre in the Round is showing Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Nile until December 13th. This is light entertainment, centering around a boat trip up the Nile around the beginning of the 20th century, and the question of who murdered the richest woman in England. The traveling maid? The old, very proper woman?

How about the Communist who isn’t what he appears to be?

While I was a little disappointed with the lead – he seemed to have only one expression – in general I enjoyed myself. There’s nothing deep intended, and nothing deep found; an evening’s pleasant entertainment at the Twin Cities’ oldest continuously operating playhouse.

Have fun.

Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003, aka Godzilla × Mothra × Mechagodzilla: Tokyo SOS) pits Godzilla against Mothra and a damaged Mechagodzilla in another duel in Tokyo. This time, Mothra’s groupies appear to warn the Japanese that Mechagodzilla, built using the bones of a previous Godzilla, should be returned to the sea, because, well, humans shouldn’t touch the souls of dead creatures.

Please don’t eat anything!

Kinda puts the kibosh on eating, vegan or not, ya know?

Other problems – Godzilla seemed to change during this movie, for no apparent reason – perhaps old and new rubber suits were employed; Mechagodzilla can’t get past looking like a large, plastic doll; characterization remains a challenge, although it’s somewhat improved. I liked the repair guy.

On the other hand, the special effects are much improved over the old, first generation Godzilla movies, and the destruction of Mothra is really spectacular. Speaking of Mothra, the update to this monster is quite attractive, giving it – her? – a more graceful movement and a nice color scheme. And a subtle update to Godzilla, wherein rather than just emitting the vastly bad breath, but has to build up to it, is actually a nice touch.

But in the end, the mysticism, while perhaps appropriate for the original Japanese audience (does Shintoism postulate everything has a soul?), is merely annoying to me, and so the plot seems to twist arbitrarily.

It’s pleasant in a bland sort of way, but not compelling.

A reader is triggered by my coverage of the Skeptical Inquirer interview with climatologist Michael Mann:

There is a lot of data out there including faked data….there is information like this about global warming:

https://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=3

“COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.

FACT: The HadCRUT3 surface temperature index, produced by the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, shows warming to 1878, cooling to 1911, warming to 1941, cooling to 1964, warming to 1998 and cooling through 2011. The warming rate from 1964 to 1998 was the same as the previous warming from 1911 to 1941. Satellites, weather balloons and ground stations all show cooling since 2001. The mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8 C over the 20th century is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas (“heat islands”), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas (“land use effects”). Two science teams have shown that correcting the surface temperature record for the effects of urban development would reduce the reported warming trend over land from 1980 by half. See here.

There are a couple of points to address here.

1. Concerns about fake data are very important, but claims of same must be backed up by evidence, and there is none produced here. As a non-climatologist, I have to depend on the scientists involved to detect any fraud, either through directly checking the measurements, or by the failure of predictions dependent on that faked data not cropping up. As it happens, measurements of increased greenhouse gases appear, to my untrained eye, to be correlating with increasing world-wide temperatures. But to just wave the flag out there without the most serious, sober evidence of same is intellectually unjustifiable; it’s simply waving a red flag to distract from telling problems in their own defenses.
2. We’re all aware of the rules of the Internet era – know your sources. Mine are from the science arena, where the entire purpose is to study the nature of reality. My reader cites an organization named Friends of Science. This is from their About Us section:
   

   Our Goal:

   To educate the public about climate science and through them bring pressure to bear on governments to engage in public debates on the scientific merits of the hypothesis of human induced global warming and the various policies that intend to address the issue.

   Our Opinion:It is our opinion that the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change.

   Friends of Science is a non-profit organization run by dedicated volunteers comprised mainly of active and retired earth and atmospheric scientists, engineers, and other professionals. We have assembled a Scientific Advisory Board of esteemed climate scientists from around the world to offer a critical mass of current science on global climate and climate change to policy makers, as well as any other interested parties. We also do extensive literature research on these scientific subjects. Concerned about the abuse of science displayed in the politically inspired Kyoto protocol, we offer critical evidence that challenges the premises of Kyoto and present alternative causes of climate change.

   Of course, there’s their critics. The Deep Climate blog of Canada (Friends of Science is located near Calgary) dug into Friends of Science back in 2009:

   Of course, the rest is history, although perhaps not as well known as it should be. Friends of Science went on to become  a well-oiled propaganda machine, so to speak, with major projects run by Harris  and Morten Paulsen (ex-Fleishman-Hillard). And after a hiatus brought about by closure of Barry Cooper’s “research” conduit at the University of Calgary, Friends of Science has returned with a vengeance. The run up to Copenhagen has seen a cross-Canada tour from contrarian Lord Chrisopher Monckton, as well as a deceptive national radio ad campaign.

   Wikipedia, with all the usual caveats about publicly editable material, but also keeping in mind the citations lend it some authority, has this to say:

   Friends of Science (FoS) is a Canadian non-profit advocacy organization based in Calgary, Alberta. The organization takes a position that humans are largely not responsible for the currently observed global warming, contrary to the established scientific position on the subject. Rather, they propose that “the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change,” not human activity. They argued against the Kyoto Protocol.^[1] The society was founded in 2002 and launched its website in October of that year.^[2][3] They are considered by many to promote climate change denial. They are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry.

   [Latter bold mine.] This brings to mind two points. A) Definitive sourcing can be a difficult challenge; if, in fact, the definitive sourcing is all one cares about, then the most sensible approach would be to permit the fossil fuel industry to continue to function, burning more and more fuels that release, and see what happens; and, B) there is taste reminiscent of the tobacco lobby’s defense of the tobacco industry through obfuscation in my mouth. We now know the fundamental dishonesty that took place in order to defend the profits of Big Tobacco, and all of its employees (which is an important point, since we’re really all in this together). That lesson in how entire industries will evade responsibility and engage in dishonesty because of the money involved is always something to keep in mind when evaluating sources and their assertions. However, it does put any industry or company in a bit of a quandary – how can it defend its turf in a responsible manner?

   That’s one of the functions of a disinterested observer. In theory, government can fulfill that role, but in practice, agencies responsible for such evaluations are often subject to ‘capture’.

3. 

   Source: NASA Global Climate Change

   So FoS then makes a series of assertions concerning the accuracy of data. Am I going to rebut these claims? No, I’m a software engineer, and this is deep muck. I did contact a climate scientist of my acquaintance, hoping for some help, but he’s both retired and in the middle of moving his household to a new home, and so he only provided some resources on global temperature. First up is NASA‘s Global Climate Change page, which clearly shows a growth in world temperatures. It also has a spectacular time series from 1884 to 2015, showing temperature changes around the globe. Then there’s NASA‘s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which appears to have quite a few resources.

   Finally, for a historical view of climate change, he suggests the American Institute of Physics perspective on the history of climate change. I’ll quote an introductory paragraph.

   Tracking the world’s average temperature from the late 19th century, people in the 1930s realized there had been a pronounced warming trend. During the 1960s, weather experts found that over the past couple of decades the trend had shifted to cooling. With a new awareness that climate could change in serious ways, in the early 1970s some scientists predicted a continued gradual cooling, perhaps a phase of a long natural cycle or perhaps caused by human pollution of the atmosphere with smog and dust. Others insisted that the effects of such pollution were temporary, and humanity’s emission of greenhouse gases would bring warming over the long run. All of them agreed that their knowledge was primitive and any prediction was guesswork. But understanding of the climate system was advancing swiftly. The view that warming must dominate won out in the late 1970s as it became clear that the cooling spell (mainly a Northern Hemisphere effect) had indeed been a temporary distraction. When the rise continued into the 21st century, penetrating even into the ocean depths, scientists recognized that it signaled a profound change in the climate system. Nothing like it had been seen for centuries, and probably not for millennia. The specific pattern of changes, revealed in objects ranging from ship logs to ice caps to tree rings, closely matched the predicted effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

   No doubt, some are legitimately wondering how long this gentleman has been a member of the Democratic Party. He is a card-carrying, lifelong Republican.

   Here’s the real point. Science is a community devoted to the study of reality, where one makes a name for themselves not by going with the flow, but by looking for something out of place, explaining the inconsistencies. Suspicion of some vast conspiracy is nonsensical. It would be found out, if not by people defecting from it, then eventually by simple measurements and failure of predictions. But the measurements, independent of each other, all line up, from the commonly accepted temperature changes to CO₂ measurements. Some of the predictions have been confirmed, such as the thinning of the ice cap of Greenland, while the prediction of hurricanes assaulting the American eastern seaboard may still have a ways to go. Given the mixed record and the rising temperatures, I’d put that down to prediction being a hard nut to crack.

   So I really have a hard time accepting assertions that the science community is wrong on such an important subject. The “skeptics” don’t operate with the best possible practices; they have motivations ranging from the religious to the financial to disbelieve; and they don’t seem to appreciate that the world changes as time passes, and if we’re disturbing it in some way, then those changes may be traceable to us. It appears that the scientific objections have been robustly rejected, and this is how I expect science to work: assertions made, problems found, adjustments made, more objections, those overcome, and an eventual convergence to a general agreement. That’s what I see.

My congratulations on those who made it to the end of this post 🙂

Here’s an interesting proposal from overseas for helping to save the planet from climate change, via rfi

On the one hand, I could see a President Trump digging in his heels and not taking the hint, even proposing subsidies to impacted companies; I might even sympathize, seeing as family members tell me I’m a contrarian¹. On the other hand, 1-3% hardly seems strong enough to get the message across; it should be punitive, so 10-20% might make more sense, just to beat some sense into those bloody Americans.

In the end, I suspect the difficulties of multinational companies will cause this proposal to be stillborn. But as a symbolic thought, it’s quite interesting.

(h/t Iberian on The Daily Kos)

¹Strictly speaking, a non-scientific assertion, since it’s non-falsifiable

When it comes to political arguments, getting together and shouting slogans is a time-honored tradition. I’m a political independent whose seen the responses to both sides, and to my view, the message matters. If you don’t get it right, the political independents, as well as the opposing side of the argument, begin to discount you. I know that my evaluation process includes the knowledge that both sides start with a disdain, even loathing, for the other side, and while they may have good intellectual arguments behind those walls of muck they’re hiding behind, it takes some digging and – almost literally – nose holding to get there.

Source: Labor 411

So here’s a particularly execrable example of this from the liberal side. It commits a particular type of logic error, the name of which escapes me, of “if a then b; b, therefore a“. The situation, in fact, is quite complex. There is resource scarcity, skilled labor scarcity, demand, competition, and other factors which will influence prices up or down. And everyone knows this.

I mean, this poster is really quite an appalling specimen that is almost designed to bring down an avalanche of disrespect for all the wrong reasons.

The counter-argument might be that this poster isn’t meant to convince the other side, but rather to rally the liberal side against corporate greed. This is my Arts Editor’s position, in fact. The problem is that if the argument is this bad, then your own side becomes dispirited. Leaders of both the actual and would-be varieties are permitted errors, but not obvious errors that make the other side laugh and sneer.

And that’s really the problem, isn’t it? The first step to convincing the other side to take you seriously is to present arguments that are convincing and, if you’re lucky, are borne out by reality. This isn’t one of those arguments. It’s damaging to the liberal’s side. And that’s a shame, because the liberal side has a lot of good arguments to present.  There’s no need to adopt bad ones like this.

Yesterday we finally received our first snow of the season, after weeks of very high temperatures; I don’t expect this snow to stick, although each night the 7 day forecast isn’t as high as it was before. The garden has gone from a riotous gaggle of competing plants to a barren wasteland.

Except for these kale.

phantosmia:

If his phantosmia, or smell hallucinations, are driven by a lack of reliable information, then real smells should help him to suppress the hallucinations. He has been trialling sniffing three different scents, three times a day. “Maybe it’s just wishful thinking,” he says, “but it seems to be helping.” [“You are hallucinating right now to make sense of the world,” Helen Thomson, NewScientist, 5 November 2016, paywall]

“If (the Trump White House delivers), we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.”

Steve Bannon, as noted in CNN/Politics