Category Archives: Uncategorized

As frustrating as it may be to measure American entertainments audiences, just think about these folks, as mentioned in passing on 38 North by Yonho Kim:

Further cooperation between media organizations is critical for any informational radio content delivered to North Korea on storage devises to effectively compete with the video entertainment content now in high demand. North Koreans “are already content with watching South Korean dramas,” in the words of one defector I interviewed. Informational programs that limit themselves to dry facts would quickly lose the interest of their intended audience, a reality that necessitates the incorporation of fun and entertaining elements in the news.

Yep, all you can do is throw in some fun, some information, and toss it over the wall. A few years later, some defector might tell you about your success – or how your program fell like a bad cake.

That’s a tough job.

We’re in a world now where we’re going to need to make individual and collective decisions concerning computers. Originally, computers were used to do things that humans did not do well, such as tireless calculations, tedious bookkeeping, and similar miscellanea. But recently – say, the last 20 years – they’ve become an integral part of things that most humans can do quite well on their own.

Such as communications.

Don’t get me wrong, they can certainly enhance communications – but, like all tools, they’re value-neutral. That is, in the wrong hands, malicious or merely shallow-thinking, zealots or the painfully earnest, they can be tremendously damaging, multiplying the effects of, say, a racist note pinned to a cork board in a restaurant a million-fold. The Nazis achieved power through misinformation campaigns, as did many other groups.

Computers make that easy, and the technology nerds make it hard to detect.

But before making a decision, we need to investigate whether and how to authenticate our communications. For years before the election we knew Fox News was a source of misinformation, which was eventually verified by the work of conservative Bruce Bartlett. But since the recent election we’ve been informed that we were flooded with false news items, and that the Russians were also in the ring, unseen but hitting below the belt.

Now NewScientist (19 November 2016, paywall) is reporting on the other side of the teeter-totter, on the side that’s looking to authenticate the news – albeit a very small corner of it. Aviva Rutkin reports on the work of Digital Verification Corps (DVC) of Amnesty International:

Pictures of what look like mass graves. Videos of explosions in city centres. The internet is awash with potential evidence of human rights abuses in some of the world’s most pressing conflicts.

But it can be tough to sift the real evidence from the fakes, or to work out exactly what an image shows. This is the challenge facing the Digital Verification Corps.

Launched by Amnesty International in October, the corps is training students and researchers to authenticate online images so they can help human rights organisations gather robust evidence on modern-day crimes.

“The use of smartphones has basically proliferated, and so too has the amount of potential evidence. But the actual verification of that is critical,” says Andrea Lampros at the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center (HRC). “That’s what makes it valid and usable – and that requires a tremendous amount of people power. We can help sift through those vast amounts of material and make them really useful to human rights groups and, potentially, courts.”

How will they do it?

The first step in any investigation is a reverse image search. By searching with tools like image search engine TinEye, corps members can pinpoint when a photo was first posted online and quickly rule out obvious fakes, whether shared deliberately or by mistake.

Next the corps tries to confirm when and where the image was taken. Social media often strips out valuable metadata, and this information can also be modified. Where metadata is available, the team might use those details to quiz someone whose says the image is theirs. Does information about the type of camera used to take the photo, for example, match that person’s story?

Corps members are also trained to scour images for landmarks, like schools or mosques, which they can compare with satellite data.

This reminds me of another effort, bellingcat, subtitled by and for citizen investigative journalists. I have not kept up with them, but I do remember seeing articles on their investigations into pictures coming out of the Ukraine during the Russian invasion, and into the downing of Malaysia Flight 117. Today? This excellent post on bellingcat by Elliot Higgins addresses the same issue concerning the DVC:

The work of open source investigators frequently involves using content shared on social media. The reliability of those sources is something that is always under question, not only by the investigators themselves, but also by those who would try to discredit that type of content as being unreliable. …

The latest victims of their own efforts are the Syrian White Helmets, a rescue organisation whose members wear body cameras, and have emerged as one of the leading sources of evidence of air strikes against civilian infrastructure in the Syrian conflict.

Because of this, they have regularly been smeared by the Syrian and Russian governments, and decried as fakes and terrorists. Russian state TV outlet RT (formerly “Russia Today”), for example, ran an opinion piece on 26 October by writer Vanessa Beeley, who labeled them a “terrorist support group and Western propaganda tool”, while a separate report a week earlier questioned the White Helmets’ neutrality by claiming that they were funded by Western governments. As early as May, Kremlin wire Sputnik called the White Helmets a “controversial quasi-humanitarian organisation” which was “fabricating ‘evidence’ of Russia’s ‘disastrous’ involvement in Syria”. This Sputnik piece also quoted Beeley, as saying that the White Helmets “demonize the Assad government and encourage direct foreign intervention.”

So here’s the thing: are we all going to have to become experts at communications authentication? Is it safe to trust organizatioons such as bellingcat and DVC? How do you feel about that?

Or will the Internet as a social communications medium shrivel up and go away as people, realizing how they’re being misled, just walk away?

Where’s Walter Cronkite when you need him?

WaPo‘s Erik Wemple reports, in a disbelieving voice, on the comments of pro-Trump commentator Scottie Nell Hughes:

In an interview on “The Diane Rehm Show,” Donald Trump supporter and CNN political commentator Scottie Nell Hughes declared the end of facts. Or, in her own words: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.”

She explained that contention, too: “And so Mr. Trump’s tweet amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up. So … ” …

“One thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way, it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true.”

From 1984 (1956)
“War is Peace“
Source: Cosmic Catacombs

It’s a bit of a jaw-dropper, unless Mz. Hughes wishes to argue that she’s merely suggesting Trump supporters don’t really care about facts, just what St. Donald is saying at this moment. But it doesn’t come out that way. I think there are consequences to ignoring facts, and the only real question is how long those consequences can be covered up. For example, Trump claims to have negotiated with Carrier to remain in Indiana, his first victory in the campaign to retain jobs in the United States. From The New York Times:

The long-promised call from Donald J. Trump to the heating and cooling giant Carrier came early one morning about a week after the election, when he unexpectedly won the industrial heartland.

The president-elect warned Gregory Hayes, the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies, that he had to find a way to save a substantial share of the jobs it had vowed to move to Mexico, or he would face the wrath of the incoming administration.

On Thursday, as he toured the factory floor here to take credit for saving roughly half of the 2,000 jobs Indiana stood to lose, Mr. Trump sent a message to other businesses as well that he intended to follow through on his pledges to impose stiff tariffs on imports from companies that move production overseas and ship their products back to the United States.

“This is the way it’s going to be,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The New York Times. “Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers also.”

The libertarians, at least the honest ones, will commence worrying about how the government’s interference is going to distort the market. Between businesses running scared because they are no longer free to pursue efficiencies to higher taxes for the incentives – $7 million – that act as the carrot to keep Carrier in the state.

And they have a point. While Trump will achieve his immediate goal – for a while – by his direct carpet bombing approach, the unintended consequences will be subtle, but felt for a generation. Bernie gets at least part of it:

“He has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont wrote in an op-ed on Thursday for The Washington Post.

The question will be whether the effects of Trump’s approach will be strong enough to upset his supporters or not¹.

And this feeds back to Mz. Hughes’ statements. I misdoubt they’re accurate; I think Trump’s supporters, unable to observe directly, and no longer willing to take the media’s word for much of anything, simply disbelieve because we’re really not built for issues the size of the United States. We have to take a lot of things “on faith”, even science. And when you’re wondering how to pay the mortgage, where all those lovely jobs went that didn’t require much beyond a high school education, and someone says the media is lying, everyone’s lying, well, it may look like we’re in a post-truth world.

But we’re not.

If & when the ceiling caves in on Trump, those billboards with Obama’s picture asking “Do you miss me yet?” might even be welcomed by the more moderate conservatives; hard-core Trumpists will shake their fists and proclaim that it’s all a conspiracy. But there won’t be many of them.

Will the Democrats have a strong candidate by then?

¹The other question is whether all the national and international businesses will collude to make those demands, thus exposing Trump for being a shallow thinker.

Looks like fun.

Meanwhile in Mexico

Chandra Bolzelko writes in Reuters concerning capital cases:

Removing self-representation as a possibility in capital cases could and should be corrected for with some type of minimum standards for capital defenders. Few defendants in death penalty trials can afford a lawyer. The lawyers that are appointed for them are often unprepared, unqualified and otherwise problematic. A 2000 analysis of 461 capital cases found that 25 percent of death penalty defendants in Texas were represented by attorneys with disciplinary histories. One-fifth of people who were executed in Washington state were assigned counsel that had been or was later disbarred. The qualified attorneys who should be appointed need to be adequately compensated, but they’re not.

This denigration of the right to effective assistance of counsel is what makes it easy to allow defendants like Dylann Roof to represent themselves. If appointed counsel won’t do much better, why not let people exercise their rights under Faretta and get themselves killed? Especially when the trial will add glorious sound bites and scenes of an allegedly racist killer getting to cross-examine his African-American victims.

In the name of individual liberties that we’ve already stopped protecting, we will watch Roof’s slow, elaborate, taxpayer-funded self-harm unfold. The trial of the Charleston church shooter places us at a crossroads of Constitution and conscience. If we overturn Faretta v. California and prevent defendants in capital cases from defending themselves while providing them with qualified and paid counsel, we won’t have to choose.

I don’t doubt Chandra is accurately alluding to capital cases as entertainment, as they are for some folks who don’t trouble themselves with questions of actual guilt, or for that matter just what went wrong with the alleged perpetrator’s upbringing – ignoring the possibility of Nature being guilty, of course. Having sat on a court case involving alleged violence and drugs, I do remember the gravity of deciding the future of a young man; I would not care, in the least, to sit on a capital case.

Which all reminds me that the funding for public defenders cut by Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) doesn’t ever seem to have been restored. MPR has an updated report on Minnesota public defenders:

In Minnesota, the public defender system is the largest user of the state’s court system, representing about 150,000 cases per year.

According to the Legislative Auditor, the system operates with about 65 percent of the staff it should, thanks primarily to budget cuts under the Pawlenty administration.

A typical public defender here has 10 minutes to meet with a client for the first time “to evaluate the case, explain the client’s options and the consequences of a conviction or plea, to discuss a possible deal with the prosecuting attorney, and allow the client to make a decision on how to proceed,” according to the Minnesota Board of Public Defense.

I know a public-spirited gentleman & lawyer who aspires to be a public defender. He’s been aspiring for several years now. Between inadequate funding and outdated laws, I think the Legislature has some work to do once the MNsure mess is cleaned up. Perhaps completely decriminalizing marijuana would help. I wonder if there are statistics on how particular crimes end up being represented by the public defender office.

Oh, sorry, sorry. I’ll have to dig some more. Maybe someone could blow this up and put it on a billboard.

And put “miss me yet?” on it? Or would that be tacky?

Thanks to Steve Benen.

Concerned about changes to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure? Susan Hennessey of LawFare suggests the changes are frivolous – but are leading to something much more important:

First, a refresher on the previous state of affairs. Previously, Rule 41 included territorial venue provisions authorizing magistrate judges to issue warrants only within their district, except in a set of narrowly defined circumstances. Because prior to obtaining a warrant, authorities did not know the physical location of a computer using Tor or other anonymization services, it was unclear whether law enforcement could obtain such a warrant from any federal judge under those rules.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) features Vincent Price as a revenge killer, out to wipe out the surgical team who failed his wife in her moment of need. As an ornament to his efforts, each death will symbolize in some way the nine plagues of Egypt, although the last is not obviously completed.

I was mystified as to how a brass unicorn catapulted through the body of one victim was related to a plague, but perhaps I’ve already forgotten.

Then again, this movie is about obscurity, from deaths to the identity of the Price’s assistant; unless the editing for TV was quite destructive, the audience is never permitted to know her identity or role; she’s listed as Vulnavia in the credits, but I do not believe that name, or any other, is mentioned in the movie.

Much else is attributed airily to expertise, such as the reproduction of Vincent’s voice, himself the victim of an accident on the same day his wife died. Just how does he do that? Whose ashes were buried in his grave? How was his wife’s body, dead these 4 years, so well preserved so that he might reside next to her for eternity?

But this movie has a queerly detached feel to it. I think this is due to the fact that no great effort was made to make sympathetic characters. The surgical team is, for the most part, little more than moving targets; the police almost laughably incompetent; and Price and his assistant principally mysterious. We see events, we’re presented logic and motivations, but it’s almost academic, a quaint puzzle to be solved by the desperate chief surgeon and the police, who are principally harassed by a commissioner more interested in publicity than effectuality.

For all this, there is certainly some competency: the deaths are effective, sometimes chilling; Vincent, limited as he is by the script, still evokes some mild sympathy and even horror, his domicile full of his inventions calculated to put a chill of concern into any visitor.

Still, in the end, I felt a little empty. It failed to emotionally involve me, so I was not excited.

Israel appears to be mirroring certain regrettable aspects of the American political system. Mazal Mualem illuminates two instances, perhaps inadvertently, in this article for AL Monitor. First, she touches on extremism:

… the term “terrorist arson,” or as last week’s events were sometimes termed, “the arson intifada,” has since entered Israel’s public and political lexicon. As expected, these terms only boosted the right-wing coalition’s agenda.

James Hamblin writes about the Cuban health system in The Atlantic:

Cuba has long had a nearly identical life expectancy to the United States, despite widespread poverty. …

As a poor country, Cuba can’t afford to equivocate and waste money on health care. Much advanced technology is unavailable. So the system is forced instead to keep people healthy. This pressure seems to have created efficiency.

It’s largely done, as the BBC has reported, through an innovative approach to primary care. Family doctors work in clinics and care for everyone in the surrounding neighborhood. At least once a year, the doctor knocks on your front door (or elsewhere, if you prefer) for a check-up. More than the standard American ritual of listening to your heart and lungs and asking if you’ve noticed any blood coming out of you abnormally, these check-ups involve extensive questions about jobs and social lives and environment—information that’s aided by being right there in a person’s home.

Then the doctors put patients into risk categories and determine how often they need to be seen in the future. Unlike the often fragmented U.S. system where people bounce around between specialists and hospitals, Cuba fosters a holistic approach centered around on a relationship with a primary-care physician. Taxpayer investment in education about smoking, eating, and exercising comes directly from these family doctors—who people trust, and who can tailor recommendations.

A rather different approach to the problem of competition between nations. It used to be that humanity spent a lot of time and lives invading other countries and taking them over. That was our “keeping up with the Jones'” analog – or perhaps it’s the other way around. Nowadays, though, rather than depending on God to show the superiority of the ideology of the Motherland, now we compete on statistics: life expectancy, GDP, percentage of adult population with a college degree, to name a few.

And it appears Cuba takes this all very seriously, with a result that that they are comparable to US results in healthcare while spending about 10% of Americans per capita per annum. It’s quite impressive, of course – but to an American, to think that you’ll have a primary care doc assigned to you based on your neighborhood will seem the height of anti-Americanism – where is our choice! we shout, even as diseases we would never choose assail us. Indeed, we often choose not to visit a doctor or dentist for years at a time, convinced that we’re healthy – we talk about it at McDonald’s while eating the fad of the month, after all.

So the USA tries to compete on healthcare using a system that is seriously broken compared to a rational system like Cuba’s. And, so long as we value choice over statistics, we never will win. At least not until someone comes up with the magic pill that solves everything at a dime per dose. (Anyone remember Carter’s Little Liver Pills?)

So we should work on being honest, instead. Rather than insisting we have the best health system in the world – it’s only the most expensive – choice should be emphasized, even fetishized. And then personal responsibility should be part of it, too. Not taking care of that diabetes? Hmmmmmm. You’ll look great in this commercial.

But don’t put any money down on winning that “best healthcare system in the world” bet. Our results will never prove it.

A point unhighlighted is that of knowledge. There is a an underappreciated facet of the fetish of capitalism, and it is that certain intangible resources are infinite: time & knowledge come to mind. When it comes to capitalism & healthcare, there’s an assumption that, of course, there’ll be time to sort out which hospital offers the cheapest service, and that you’ll have time to take advantage of that – which leads me to wonder if I want healthcare that competes on price? This is not a whimsical afterthought, as the latter might be an example of the problem of knowledge, in this case that the domain of knowledge best applied to the problem of selecting medical services; Mr. Weissman’s proclamation that forcing hospitals to publish price lists will fix the entire healthcare problem is, I fear, naive. Only fools select product solely on the basis of price unless the question of quality is not relevant to the product, but sometimes the domain to apply can be unclear.

The Cubans, for all that they appear to be using coercion, are achieving greater efficiency by putting the most knowledgeable in charge of the effort: the primary care physician, who best knows medicine in at least the neighborhood, sees the entire neighborhood on a regular basis, and apparently tries to be as proactive as possible. I fear that American citizens, made up of mostly amateurs and in charge of their own health, will never match the efficiency of Cuba.

WHICH leads to the pivotal question: efficiency or liberty? The latter is one of our most sacred words, but this scenario should be a teaching moment, that no particular concept will ever have universal applicability. As we watch the GOP disassemble the ACA, aka Obamacare, an institution which has already shown greater efficiency than our free markets (another sacred word) on, at least, the statistic (twitched didn’t you?) of percentage of the population insured, it’s worth keeping in mind that society is not a machine that will always run better if only it’s lubricated with the sacred oil, blessed by God or by the proper economists, who are often treated like gods – although why the Kansan GOP elite wants to worship a fellow named Laffer leaves me a trifle nonplussed; but I should be gentler, as they’ve already made their fellow Kansans pay the price for their foolishness.

Society, whether American or not, is not some perfect machine which merely needs a bit of the proper oil now and then, but rather a creaking pile of rivets and gears, mismatched and rusty, shiny but soft metal so easily bent, predicated on assumptions concerning the needs of society that have never been well thought out, thinking that the inhabitants are rational creatures with reasonable information about the world. Yet those creatures, poor and slack as they are, rarely reach those standards, and so we see domestic violence; deceit; medical needs unmet by private corporations; frightened people deprived of their guns; people frightened of neighbors with guns; patronization on the left, met by equal force of loathing and ignorance on the right, making for a soup with a hell of a punch; & etc.

If it all worked so well, we wouldn’t have prisons.

As engineers know, you can’t have all the bells and whistles. You can’t use a Ferrarri to tow broken-down tractors back to the repair shop. We can decide to have choice, but we should know the price: replicated effort, emergency room visits for preventable illnesses, lives lost due to incompatible records; poverty; etc.

Or you can enforce systems which save more lives, at the cost of losing choice, losing liberty; and that’s the up-front costs. Libertarians worry about development of new meds if prices are government controlled, and the fear is not unreasonable. But then, it’s not clear that the free market is doing particularly well even now. But lack of choice obviates the advantage of the privileged, to some extent, and what if you’re stuck with the incompetent? Choice puts pressure on such people, to improve or get out; without choice, I would wonder if the governmental mechanisms would be strong enough to force them out.

Give me liberty! Give me efficiency!

I doubt you get to have both.

Heh.

© Victor Enrich, image from designboom.

More on this subject here.

Elon Musk may be the Pied Piper, but Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com is intent on throwing cold water all over him:

According to Musk as quoted in Electrek,

He said that the glass developed by Tesla for the solar roof tiles weigh “a third, a quarter and sometimes even a fifth” of other current concrete and ceramic roof solutions. Musk calculated that because of the weight and fragility of the current products, logistic costs and breakage are important parts of the total cost.

But that is not true of asphalt shingles, which are lighter, not fragile and easy to ship.

Now TreeHugger is no fan of asphalt shingles. They are, as I have noted before, the the cheapest and ugliest building enclosing material ever invented. But they are normal. What Elon Musk is selling is not normal or regular, but a comparable for a very high end niche product that is used for a tiny fraction of roofs on houses of very rich people, that costs between ten and twenty times the price of a normal, regular roof.

They are a normal and regular roof like a Tesla is normal and regular car.

Or, in other words, Elon didn’t do his homework.

There’s been quite a stream of countries joining the competition to become carbon neutral – and now it’s Morocco’s turn. First, they hosted COP22, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where the Climate Vulnerable Forum Vision was composed and published. Here’s one small section:

• We strive to meet 100% domestic renewable energy production as rapidly as possible, while working to end energy poverty and protect water and food security, taking into consideration national circumstances.

Now Morocco’s working on meeting that goal. From Clean Technica:

Morocco, the host country of COP22, is one of these 48 countries. Over the past months and years, the World Future Council has worked with several stakeholders in the country, developing a policy roadmap to transition to 100% renewable electricity. With the CVF´s Marrakesh Vision, this roadmap can now serve as guidance for the new government to go faster and further and walk the talk.

We’ll see if they can pull it off.

(Sami Grover on Treehugger.com covers it, too.)

While some folks still cry out that the sky isn’t falling – or at least it’s not their fault – Ohio State University researchers are looking at the latest in Antarctica glacier shrinkage:

Source: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

A key glacier in Antarctica is breaking apart from the inside out, suggesting that the ocean is weakening ice on the edges of the continent.

The Pine Island Glacier, part of the ice shelf that bounds the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is one of two glaciers that researchers believe are most likely to undergo rapid retreat, bringing more ice from the interior of the ice sheet to the ocean, where its melting would flood coastlines around the world.

A nearly 225-square-mile iceberg broke off from the glacier in 2015, but it wasn’t until Ohio State University researchers were testing some new image-processing software that they noticed something strange in satellite images taken before the event.

In the images, they saw evidence that a rift formed at the very base of the ice shelf nearly 20 miles inland in 2013. The rift propagated upward over two years, until it broke through the ice surface and set the iceberg adrift over 12 days in late July and early August 2015.

They note this has been seen on the Greenland ice cap, and is signaled by the appearance of valleys in the ice cap. It is traced to the ocean infiltrating under the ice cap, and thus speeding the melting.  The upshot?

“The really troubling thing is that there are many of these valleys further up-glacier,” [OSU Professor Ian] Howat added. “If they are actually sites of weakness that are prone to rifting, we could potentially see more accelerated ice loss in Antarctica.”

And that could result in a 10 foot jump in average sea level.

Sitting here contemplating these observations, I suddenly had a vision of Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), he of no accomplishments, twenty years in the future finally acknowledging (as the sea pours into his shoes waders in the streets of Miami) that the climate is changing – and then announcing that, despite his catastrophic failure to listen to the warnings of scientists, he would be, once again, running for the nomination of his party, with no shame, and probably still no accomplishments.

I’d say it’s a chilling vision of the future, but obviously that would contradict today’s settled science. I suppose I’ll just have to say I’m all steamed up about it.

Gardner PD of Kansas were told there might be a mountain lion in the area, so they put out cameras.

More on this unique breed of mountain lion here.

In The New York Times, the work of political scientist Yascha Mounk is reviewed. This caught my attention:

Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation,” which holds that once countries develop democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.

Which seems a little unlikely, as three variables are cited right in the definition – the institutions can be subverted, civil society can degenerate into extreme positions, possibly enabled by the wealth mentioned in the third position – and that last variable, wealth, can be affected by many things. To call such a democracy secure seems foolish from a logical point of view.

The article goes on to point out such examples as Venezuela, and I think it’s instructive to remember that the general citizenry, when the chips are down and they’re scraping bottom, isn’t going to cling to democracy absent a recent reminder of the chilling failures of the alternatives. The goal of any successful society isn’t, at baseline, to fulfill any particular ideology – it’s to be successful, to survive. If the citizenry is starving, or hopeless, or in some way dissatisfied, the ruling ideology is in trouble, and no amount of gesticulating to the God of Democracy will save it.

Quite possibly, the only successful treatment will be that most dreaded: experiencing the alternatives, possibly for generations.

So how is the United States doing? Mounk and his colleagues have developed an evaluation test.

According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com may be letting his architecture background get away from him on this one:

Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, is a booming place. It has its charms, including beautiful rivers and lakes. Development is happening everywhere, including the Meixi Lake District to the west of town. Now NEXT architects have built the Lucky Knot, a beautiful new pedestrian bridge over the Dragon King Harbour River (and a highway) in the Meixi district.

To my eye, this is gaudy. I suspect that Lloyd is marveling at something in its architecture or engineering, rather than asking, Is this beautiful? Follow the link to NEXT, above, to see more pictures.

Manichaeism:

Manichaeism (/ˌmænᵻˈkiːɪzəm/; in Modern Persian آین مانی Āyin-e Māni; Chinese: 摩尼教; pinyin: MóníJiào; Xiao’erjing: موْنِ كِيَوْ) was a major religious movement that was founded by the Iranian prophet Mani (in Persian: مانی, Syriac: ܡܐܢܝ , Latin: Manichaeus or Manes; c. 216–276 AD) in the Sasanian Empire.

Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process which takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian gnostic and religious movements. [Wikipedia]

Seen on the Rotten Tomatoes website:

A film that shows gender violence with an almost risible manichaeism and didacticism, and the information provided is visually cheesy.

Slovenia, in Europe, has made access to potable water a basic right. the guardian reports:

Source: Slovenia Holidays

Slovenia has amended its constitution to make access to drinkable water a fundamental right for all citizens and stop it being commercialised. …

“Water resources represent a public good that is managed by the state. Water resources are primary and durably used to supply citizens with potable water and households with water and, in this sense, are not a market commodity,” the article reads.

The centre-left prime minister, Miro Cerar, had urged lawmakers to pass the bill saying the country of two million people should “protect water – the 21st century’s liquid gold – at the highest legal level”.

“Slovenian water has very good quality and, because of its value, in the future it will certainly be the target of foreign countries and international corporations’ appetites.

“As it will gradually become a more valuable commodity in the future, pressure over it will increase and we must not give in,” Cerar said.

A right wing party abstained from the vote, calling it politically motivated. While the left parties celebrate, I wonder if it’s a good thing to place control of such a valuable resource in the hands of government. After all, all political parties think you’re as clean as the driven snow. If they ever reach the point of water rationing, how will they approach it?

Of course, a commercial controlling interest would also raise the hairs on my neck.

University of Bristol scientists have achieved one of those commercial holy grails – converting waste into something useful:

New technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.

No doubt many readers have already heard of Hugleikur Dagsson, but I just ran across him and like it.

Here’s more.

On Lawfare April Doss offers an affirmation of an audit of the results in the Presidential election:

[The computer and election experts’] evidence and arguments are well-documented elsewhere, so I won’t rehash them here. But it is important to note that none of these experts’ opinions are tied to the political fortunes of Republicans or Democrats. These are merely computer and election security experts offering their view that there’s some evidence of a problem. While Nate Silver and other statisticians have posited other counter-explanations for the evidence, it is to be expected that different disciplines focus on different dimensions of a problem and offer different explanation. Silver’s theory that demographics and not hacking or computer error is responsible for the deviation is number is certainly plausible, perhaps even likely. But the presence or absence of other possible explanations are not a reason to not perform an audit. When faced with a potential cybersecurity problem, the purpose of the audit is to confirm or eliminate that possibility, not because it is the definitive explanation. The voices suggesting that we don’t need an audit because the results are probably correct are missing the point.

It’s not that the probability of corruption of the election systems is high, it’s that there is a chance of corruption, and that the cost of being wrong, in this particular case, of even leaving the suspicion that our computer systems were manipulated, is too high. We need to retain confidence in our election systems, or throw them out (as I’ve more or less advocated) for either better qualified computer systems, or return to old-fashioned human systems. Speaking of Nate Silver’s (well, actually Carl Bialik and Rob Arthur) reaction on FiveThirtyEight:

Without a recount, all we can do for now is look for any meaningful difference in the three states named in the New York article between votes in counties that used paper ballots and votes in ones that used machines. That quickly crossed Michigan off the list: The entire state uses paper ballots, which are read by optical scanners. So we couldn’t compare results by type of voting in that state. Instead, we checked the six other states with a margin between Clinton and Trump of less than 10 percentage points that use a mix of paper and machine voting: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.

For each county in those states, we looked at Clinton’s vote share and whether it was associated with the type of voting system the county used, based on voting-system data compiled by a nonprofit electoral-reform group called Verified Voting and 2016 vote data from Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas and ABC News. It doesn’t make much sense, though, to just look at raw vote counts and how they differed, because we know there are many factors that affect how a county voted, both in those states and everywhere else around the country. So we separated out two of the main factors that we know drove differences in voting results: the share of each county’s population age 25 and older with a college degree, and the share of the county that is non-white.

We found no apparent correlation between voting method and outcome in six of the eight states, and a thin possible link between voting method and results in Wisconsin and Texas. However, the two states showed opposite results: The use of any machine voting in a county was associated with a 5.6-percentage-point reduction in Democratic two-party vote share in Wisconsin but a 2.7-point increase in Texas, both of which were statistically significant. Even if we focus only on Wisconsin, the effect disappears when we weight our results by population. More than 75 percent of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 23 most populous counties, which don’t appear to show any evidence for an effect driven by voting systems. To have effectively manipulated the statewide vote total, hackers probably would have needed to target some of these larger counties. When we included all counties but weighted the regression by the number of people living in each county, the statistical significance of the opposite effects in Wisconsin and Texas both evaporated.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com gives an encouraging overview on coal consumption, ending with an opinion on China:

There is one big question mark around the future of coal, and that’s China. Analysts and activists alike have been astounded by how fast coal use has plateaued in China, years ahead of schedule—driven in part by domestic concerns over air quality, and in part by a slow down in the economy. The country’s climate leadership may also step up further if the US cedes its position on the global stage. That said, China is still building a huge amount of new coal capacity. What’s interesting, however, is how much of the world’s attention on these additions is not on the pollution they will cause, but the fact that they may become rapidly obsolete. In fact, according to this report over at Fortune, the country may be throwing away as much as $500 billion on unnecessary power plants which will never recoup their value.

He didn’t address new coal power plants, however. Here’s the latest predictions on coal consumption from the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

Throughout the projection, the top three coal-consuming countries are China, the United States, and India, which together account for more than 70% of world coal use. China accounted for 50% of world coal consumption in 2012, and its coal use continues to grow through 2025 in the Reference case before beginning a decline along with slower overall growth in energy consumption and the implementation of policies addressing air pollution and climate change. In 2040, China’s share of world coal consumption falls to 46%. As a result of the slower growth and decline in China’s coal use, the world coal share of total primary energy consumption declines steadily, from 28% in 2012 to 22% in 2040—in contrast to its sustained growth from 24% in 2001 to 29% in 2009, primarily as a result of increasing coal use in China. Total U.S. coal consumption per year, which peaked in 2007, remains largely unchanged from 2012 to 2040 without the CPP but declines significantly with the CPP. Although coal consumption in China does not change much from 2012 to 2040, coal use in India and the other countries of non-OECD Asia continues to rise. India’s coal use surpasses the United States total around 2030, and its share of world coal consumption grows from 8% in 2012 to 14% in 2040.

The Sunday night, post-fencing tournament, “I cannot but drool now” movie is Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), another in this long-lived franchise. Once again, we have Godzilla, this time literally steaming himself to death because his nuclear reactor heart is slowly going critical; add to that a positively spectacular case of shingles, and it’s fairly understandable why he’s extra crabby in this episode. His home of Bass Island is gone, his son, Junior, has transformed into the final stage of the Godzilla species (possibly a species of Megalosaur) and is running around on his own, and micro-oxygen has created Destoroyah, a monster capable of turning into a little army of small monsters or assembling into the big monster. He also gets to have some lightning effects.

Yeah.

The special effects run the gamut. On the low end, Destoroyah, especially in component form, is positively awful. In assembled form, it’s not much of an improvement. In some of the Tokyo scenes we observed a marked lack of panic in a city that was supposedly under evacuation order, leading to the supposition that Tokyo residents have become remarkably blasé concerning kaiju running loose in the city. In our own metropolitan area, we imagined such traffic reports as “kaiju backup on I-94 west bound at Snelling,” but we’re not certain that Midwestern stolidness would sustain the moment in an adequate manner.

On the other end, Godzilla with shingles was remarkably effective; Junior caught in the clutches of Destoroyah lingered on the line between awesome and silly. In one shot I appreciated the allusion to Goya’s The Colossus, and it was rather well done.

Story? “Where’s Godzilla? Where’s Godzilla now? There’s trouble in the industrial section! Where’s Junior? Oh, what’s that? Where’s Junior? Where’s Godzilla? Godzilla’s been frozen with lasers! Oh, poor Tokyo! Junior’s dead! Godzilla’s melting! Oh, no! NUCLEAR POWER IS BAD!”

The last one was explicitly stated, no doubt for the defective members of the audience.

Yeah. It was good for a drooly night. If you’re functional, though, don’t waste your time on this drip of a movie.