Category Archives: Uncategorized

When it comes to election rigging, a reader has a comment:

Of course Trump doesn’t have a leg to stand on. But just minutes ago I heard a serious, long interview on MPR where they talked oh so gently to a woman who was a Trump supporter, who did not trust the media for information, who thought the voting was rigged. The MPR reporter missed the obvious question about how the government assures us the elections are fair, so that she could then say, well, the gov can’t be trusted. Which leads to, if she does not trust media and does not trust gov, where the hell does she get her information? She sounded “reasonable” in word choice and tone, but she was an idiot. And the media just keeps pandering to these people.

My impression is that they’ve been trained by the conservative media that if some institution isn’t one of a small collection of media, then it’s suspect. Here’s the thing – what will break the faith of a user of a particular website? I see the MPR reporter as being sort of stuck, because you can’t yell someone into sensibility as you see it – they have to find it themselves, or they’ll never have faith in the other side. All I can think is that as the divergence between the reporting and ideology from reality is the only thing that’ll do it, and even then those who are feeding on the lifeblood of the victims will do whatever they think they need to in order to retain the loyalties of those consumers.

Notice I word this so that it could apply to what might be considered to be liberal news sources as well – I firmly believe in digging at the foundations of beliefs, and this is something that should be done with any media, comparing what it reports with reality and ask whether they are congruent enough to trust as “best efforts.”

The scientist, about to get it from the queen cockroach.

The Nest (1988) explores the dangers of accelerating cockroach evolution through the application of survival pressures. Sounds like an intellectually stimulating tale that’ll educate while titillating, yes?

Don’t believe that shit.

Horrible special effects, mediocre, or worse, acting – although I liked the scientist for her impeccable coiffure in the midst of disaster and mild misanthropy, while my Arts Editor conceived a cautious liking for the exterminator – a bad, confusing plot – whatever happened to the lass with the monster headphones – and creatures that are not only developing resistance to cockroach poison, but have learned how to take over the bodies of their victims.

Cockroach-powered zombies, if you will.

Much like The Blob, their only real vulnerability is a good CO₂ fire extinguisher, but how you do that to an entire island boggles the mind. My Arts Editor took to moaning during our debut viewing.

Avoid, avoid, avoid!

Regarding the helicopters in sand pictures a reader writes:

Credit: Unknown, collected from an email.

Yikes. If there’s enough sand grains in the air to be doing that, think about what the turbine engines are sucking in — and they move at a much higher speed than those rotors.

My Arts Editor wondered if it was possible to coat the blades in something that won’t spark, but I opined that this would add to the weight of the vehicle – not a good idea.

The 2016 Comedy Wildlife Photography Finalists are now available.

Hydrogen has been mooted about as a power source, attracting interest from various engineers (including rotary engine experts – rumor has it that their Wankel has been modified to successfully run on hydrogen), but it has a few problems, such as transportation and storage. One of the biggest problems has been refinement. Like fossil fuels, hydrogen isn’t easily available in ready-to-consume form, but instead must be refined from an impure form, typically methane (CH4). This takes a lot of heat, and results in the release of that carbon atom into the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change. In fact, that makes it a non-starter.

NewScientist (8 October 2016) reports on the efforts of scientists to capture that carbon – and a breakthrough may have been achieved. Jon Cartwright reports:

After two years of trial and error, [Alberto Abánades and Carlo Rubbia, a Nobel Prize Winner, ] had what they thought was a viable reactor design: a vessel about the height and diameter of a hockey stick lined with quartz glass and stainless steel and filled with molten tin. Its external foil insulation made it look rather like a domestic hot water tank but it worked: they bubbled methane in at the bottom while raising the temperature of the tin up to 1000 °C, until hydrogen gas spouted continuously from the top.

But the real test was what it looked like inside. After two weeks, Abánades and colleagues switched off the reactor and peered in. Soot had indeed formed, but it had all floated neatly to the tin’s surface, where it could be scraped away like the slag in an ore refinery. “We could even have operated the reactor for a couple more days,” says Abánades. Last year, repeating the experiment at 1200 °C, the team managed to convert nearly 80 per cent of the methane they pumped in into hydrogen (International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, vol 41, p 8159).

Problems remain, such as supplying the power to heat it – but that may be resolvable without too much fuss. It’s an interesting advance towards a hydrogen future.

It suddenly occurred to me today that there’s a reason for panic among the GOP donors and high level administrative types in the RNC over the possible election of Clinton to the Presidency. It played out in my head in a fictional – but probable – conversation with a conservative friend in, say, four years, and basically consists of this line:

Say, she wasn’t so bad for the country.

Followed by various unprintables concerning Fox News, Limbaugh, and the others who predict disaster for the country if Clinton should become President. (I’ve actually already begun hearing of disenchantment with Fox News from a conservative friend or two. And with Limbaugh, but that’s an older phenomenon.)

I anticipate a redoubled effort to isolate GOP voters from the realities of the country as the years pass. Leaders hate to lose their leadership, and the current crop does tend to come without moral scruples.

The movie Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) is a story celebrating the strength of stories. Kubo is a boy with an ill mother, one eye, and a boatload of magic that appears to surprise no one. His other eye? Possessed by this grandfather, who wants them both. Allied with his grandfather are Kubo’s two aunts, flying about in wide brimmed hats and loaded for bear, with a haunting indifference affected by certain Chinese kung fu movies.

Kubo cares for his injured mother, who gives her life to slow down her sisters, those aunts.  He is instructed never to be without his monkey charm, later brought to dazzling life by his mother.  In the course of their story, they meet an ally encountered along the way, an amnesiac samurai who has been cursed to be a beetle.

And Kubo has powerful magic. Through the instrumentality of his shamisen, the origami paper he carries in his pack becomes flying birds, miniature samurai, a Chinese junk, even a fabulous fire breathing chicken, made at the request of an elderly villager who tells him that the comedy element it brings to his story of a brave warrior will help balance the story.

This advice-giving is echoed throughout the movie. It’s a serious movie, but it has humor as its leavening, and it brings individuality to the characters and spice to the story. Kubo excels in many aspects, but most important is that its core story, the place where everything begins, is a competently, even excellently-crafted story. In some respects this movie could even be viewed as a rebuke to the movie-making industry’s worst excesses, wherein the storyteller is not accorded the time and resources to build the magnificent story necessary to make the visual aspects of the story worthwhile.

The story is good and probably new to American audiences. As Kubo meets and overcomes various barriers, he learns from them; he internalizes those lessons to grow stronger, and perhaps a little wiser. By the time we reach the climactic penultimate scene, we may know what’s coming as the Moon-King makes his appearance, but we’re still anticipating it, and it won’t disappoint the traditionalist.

But there’s the general recognition that stories are composed of substories, and that they are as important as the primary. The beetle’s amnesia, and consequent loss of his personal story, is explicitly acknowledged as a lost story, and a deep personal loss for the beetle. Kubo himself does not exist through some family inheritance, but by working – he’s a story-teller, retelling the stories his mother has told him as she raises him. The movie echoes with the importance of stories to the culture of humanity.

Visually, the movie is a treat. A stop-action CGI movie, it appears as if everything is made of paper, and sometimes this approach is brought front and center.  A dream sequence involving the sea is palpably made up of sheets of linked paper, and of course Kubo’s musical origami is also tangibly paper. But it also functions as a double meaning, for those who know the difficulty of origami and compare it to the apparent ease Kubo has in creating his creatures using music; it leads us to wonder just how much practice was necessary for him to reach the level of mastery he has attained. We are allowed to see the magic of a constructed world, from the beauty of paper lamps as they transform into golden herons in flight, to a fearful overhead view of Kubo’s mother sacrificing herself in order to slow her malign sisters.

The music is well considered and presented, as are the voices, including rare appearances by George Takei of Star Trek fame, Ralph Fiennes and Brenda Vaccaro.

All this said, the movie is not perfect. At times the mouths move in very unnatural ways. My Arts Editor and I discussed the possibility that this was purposeful, but were unable to come to a conclusion. The behavior of Kubo in the final battle scene has a certain stereotypical quality to it, as if the visual artists had a deadline and, perhaps, couldn’t quite be as creative as necessary; I refer to the facial expressions as Kubo battles. Defiance is very good, of course, but we’ve seen it a thousand times. Something a little more intriguing would be nice.

I know I’ve harped on characters who exist for the plot, but in this case, even though they do, it’s their very nature to do so, so I didn’t actually mind it. And, in contrast, the villagers are living their lives as disaster overtakes them. The balance and contrast is actually a nice element.

But the story details could have used a little more creativity. Certainly this is context-sensitive. A plot twist used the first time is, assuming it’s effective, innovative; the tenth time, it’s just boring. And we do crave novelty. The movie often achieves novelty through the interplay of the monkey and the beetle, but when Kubo must face his grandfather alone, I found myself hoping that Kubo would not be the defiant youngster with a desperate edge, as all signs were pointing; I literally hoped that his grandfather would appear, expecting a cowed or defiant boy, and instead be met by, “Hello, grandfather. I’ve been hunting you.” When your opponent is stronger and smarter than you, then you must make them think themselves to death. (With apologies to C. J. Cherryh.) And, finally, I was not fully convinced of the plausibility of the motivations of the grandfather. It might have been better to leave those obscure, as in that of the antagonist of No Country For Old Men.

That said, the final scene, wherein the question of just what does one do with a defeated god, is quite creative (and unlikely to be reused). It is a lovely multilayered answer, playing with both the realities of such a situation, and handling it without resort to violence, and, again, a reference to the very nature of story-telling: lying in an attempt to expose a deeper truth (another apology, to V is for Vendetta this time, although I suspect the makers of that movie, or the author of the graphic novel source material, took it from somewhere else).

Strongly Recommended.

“Those everted lungs have gone toes up.” – Arts Editor

The visuals are atrocious. Here’s the original pic of the everted lungs. I’ll spare you the vision of toes up lungs.

Or maybe I’m mixing my metaphors with a razor blade. My wife sent me a collection of Amazon advertisements for wooden watches, which I can only hope is a little different from wooden nickels. Here’s my favorite (based entirely on looks) of the bunch.

But, as I mentioned to her, they look a little fragile. Given the condition of my current watch, made of metal and glass, I can’t help but wonder how many pieces this sort of watch would be in after a year.

After using digital watches for years, I find I favor the old analog dial faces more – they have a certain grace that digitals often lack. (Oh, and I always hated those watches with calculators built in. Hate hate hate.) I suppose you could make an argument that this is a responsible use of renewable materials, if in a tiny way. But then you’d risk being shouted down by those who would like to return to the old ways. The real old ways.

Go to bed at dusk, get up with the sun. When the sun’s directly overhead, eat lunch.

Not my style, though.

I happen to be wearing a Fossil watch myself. I wonder if they’ve put together a model that features a T-Rex as the hands? Or would that be jumping the shark?

(Functioning on maybe 4 hours sleep. If you can call this functioning…. but the visual of jumping a shark was in appalling bad taste and in no way will I be sharing it at this time.)

Menna A. Farouk of Al Monitor reports on two women drummers in Egypt who are working on creating an all-women drum band in Cairo, Egypt – and in the process nudging society along:

Donia Sami and Rania Omar started the first female drumming band in Egypt to challenge Egyptian society’s stereotypes and encourage more Egyptian women to take up their art.

“Art is for everyone,” Donia, 21, told Al-Monitor. “Playing any instrument is a right of every woman on earth, especially if she is passionate about it,” added the young drummer, who began to play at the age of 16 and is also studying acting and directing.

In Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, banging on drums has usually been associated with men rather than women, and performances by female drummers are seen by conservative societies as abnormal and shameful. Some people also believe that women cannot be drummers because the art requires physical strength, stamina and endurance.

“We want to change this social stereotype and let society know that women can be and do whatever they want to be and do,” Donia said.

As I enjoy a good drumming, I looked them up. Here is their Facebook page where a couple of drumming videos are to be found.

But around some stars it gets odder. Nevermind the common stories about the planets with liquid iron – that’s just heat. NewScientist (8 October 2016) reports on malformed stars and their attendant planets’ behavior:

Earth’s tilt gives our planet its seasons. But hot, massive “early-type” stars can spin almost 100 times faster than the sun, creating a midriff bulge. The gas around the star’s equator is then further from its centre, so it cools more than other parts of the star’s surface, while the poles remain hot and dense.

John Ahlers at the University of Idaho in Moscow wondered how this might change the seasons on an orbiting planet. If its orbit is angled, it would be directly over the star’s chilled equator twice in each orbit, and would have two summers and two winters a year.

Ahlers found that difference could mean the planet’s surface would oscillate rapidly between a boiling hellscape and a frozen tundra (arxiv.org/abs/1609.07106).

Altair, as seen from Mt. Wilson Observatory
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/Steve Golden

To some extent, it’s simply the thought that being closer to star’s surface actually results in a cooler disposition for the planet. And I wonder how the bulge impacts the orbital dynamics of the hypothetical planet.

In 2001, NASA/JPL provided a description of the star Altair, giving us an idea of the conditions of a midriff bulge:

Altair is a perfect example — it rotates at least once every 10.4 hours, and the new Palomar observations reveal the diameter at its equator is at least 14 percent greater than at its poles. For a star that spins slowly, this effect is miniscule. For example, our Sun rotates once every 30 days and has an equator only .001 percent greater in diameter than its poles.

By measuring Altair’s size at separate positions along its edge, van Belle and his colleagues determined that Altair rotates at a speed of at least 210 kilometers per second (470,000 miles per hour) at the equator. Future studies may pin down the speed more precisely.

For those who are interested, the speed of light (c) is 6.706×10⁸.MPH, so Altair’s equatorial velocity at its surface is nowhere near c.

And I’ll tell you, searching on stars midriff bulge returns some mighty odd images.

And, in fact, they look almost as robust as they did a month ago.

However, the Chief Tomato Picker says it’s just about time to yank them out of the ground.

And then repair the holes where the hooks were actually torn OUT of the garage by the voracious beasties.

J. Henry Fair‘s photography focuses on social justice issues. Here’s just one pic.

This outlet pipe is at the bottom of a giant waste impoundment in Florida, and forms a stream that joins the water table.

Here’s some more.

An East Coast favorite; living in Minnesota, I’d never heard of it ’til today.

Cruller:

A traditional cruller (or twister) is a fried pastry often made from a rectangle of dough, with a cut made in the middle that allows it to be pulled over and through itself producing twists in the sides of the pastry. Crullers have been described as resembling “a small, braided torpedo”^[1] and having been “a staple of the New England diet since the Pilgrims’ day”. [Wikipedia]

From “Why You Can’t Resist the Office Doughnuts,” by Tamar Haspel (Discover Magazine, November 2016):

I’ve been there. I remember afternoon meetings when there was no earthly reason I should be hungry, staring down the damn cruller. The meetings were long. I stood no chance. I am Pavlov’s dog. We’re all Pavlov’s dogs.

I’d look awful with big, floppy ears. Can I be Pavlov’s cat, instead?

… didn’t affect me personally. Certainly this blog is so minute that hardly anyone reads it. I didn’t notice any impact on any of the sites I used yesterday.

… that is, personally, not yet.

CNN/Money has a report this morning on the instrumentality of the attack:

Security firm Flashpoint said it believes that digital video recorders and webcams in people’s homes were taken over by malware and then, without owners’ knowledge, used to help execute the massive cyberattack.

Hundreds of thousands of devices appear to have have been infected with the malware.

It was a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack. Using the malware, hackers were able to flood a website with so much traffic that it impaired normal service.

We don’t have a webcam, but we do own and use a TIVO. so I now wonder if I was part of that instrumentality.

But you know what? It seems to me that, in the future, I will be part of the instrumentality. Involuntarily, but still will be stained with some of the guilt, because I will have provided the equipment, however unwillingly for an attack that compromises, at best, the livelihood of some people; at worst, people might die if an attack on a critical piece of physical infrastructure is successful.

Prototype of the Internet of Things. Image collected by the author in Faith, South Dakota, ca. 2012. Last seen headed east.

Do you know why I think this is nearly inevitable?

The predicted Internet of Things.

As we build this network creature, as it were, built of computers and refrigerators and DVRs and cars, we’re building a creature which is already cancerous, a servant that may knife us in the back at some point – or disappear without warning, without permission, at critical moments.

I face the future with a certain prickling along the base of the neck –

For all the promises in the world, my Arts Editor and I agree that some promises simply cannot be fulfilled. The United States may be the most influential country in the world, but some forces are larger than it, from population densities to wage differentials. When I hear someone like Trump telling us he’s going to fix everything, I just shake my head and wonder just how the hell he thinks he’ll get it. Nor can I have much faith in even more believable promises from either side.

As this blog post from Cracked makes clear, many small towns are in despair as sources of jobs are moving to other locations. I am conflicted concerning these problems, having reactions of varying worthiness:

• They assumed little or no change and never prepared for it in a world that is changing unceasingly;
• Preparing for change is a difficult challenge, and if you’re raising a family, damn near impossible for most folks;
• Shouldn’t we be protecting families?
• To a libertarian this is creative destruction, which they celebrate as the path to improvement and wealth;
• Yet I see no wealth for these victims;
• Who do not base their life on capitalism, the home of creative destruction, but on the community and the family.

But I am reminded there is some help out there. Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor provides an example, as reported by MPR:

Taylor and a group of investors are spending millions of dollars to convert a former beef plant into a hog processing facility, Prime Pork. They plan to open by January.

Nearly all the equipment is brand new, said plant manager Wayne Kies. Robots will do some of the butchering, including a robotic arm designed to remove ribs.

The plant will process more than 6,000 hogs a day, which makes it a medium-sized operation.

“We want to produce a quality, consistent product,” Kies said.

Taylor said his involvement with the Windom [Minnesota] facility grew out of his earlier research into opportunities in the meat business. When tough times in the beef processing industry forced a plant in Windom to close last year, Taylor was interested.

While I do not subscribe to the old acorn that the government doesn’t create jobs, I do doubt that it can save the small towns of America. Nor can billionaires – but several solutions together may do the trick. Such as UBI – would it help preserve small town America, or simply lengthen their agony?

chyron:

In the television industry, a lower third is a graphic overlay placed in the title-safe lower area of the screen, though not necessarily the entire lower third of it, as the name suggests. …

Lower thirds are also often known as “CG” or captions, and sometimes chyrons in North America, due to the popularity of Chyron Corporation‘s Chiron Icharacter generator, an early digital solution developed in the 1970s for rendering lower thirds. [Wikipedia]

Learn something new everyday. I suspect there’s a word for words like chyron, not to mention g**g1e, but I don’t recall what that might be offhand.

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com covers some wildly divergent parenting styles world-over:

One thing that sets American parents apart from the rest of the world is their widespread belief that parenting has no script. Every parent forges their own path while raising kids, prioritizing current child-rearing strategies gathered from friends, websites, and books, rather than asking their own mothers for advice. Modern ideas are viewed as the optimal way to position children for achievement in the future.

This contrasts greatly with other countries, who have highly scripted versions of parenthood. Parents understand that there is an accepted way of raising kids and they do it without questioning. While it may sound restrictive, some experts say it’s helpful and makes parents feel less out of control, confused, and overwhelmed.

“You don’t see the handwringing in other places around the world,” says Christine Gross-Loh, author of Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us. “People understand that there is a way to do things.” (via Ideas.TED)

Katherine then gives a sampling of parenting traditions. One of the more subtly different is this:

… young children in Denmark are often left outside in their strollers, wide awake, while parents shop or dine indoors — an act that would strike horror into American hearts, either for fear of kidnapping, arrest for negligence, or the child being traumatized by abandonment.

How people handle the most common of tasks can vary so wildly, and it’s fascinating.

A friend sent me pictures of the Kopp-Etchells Effect. From Wikipedia:

Abrasion strips on helicopter rotor blades are made of metal, often titanium or nickel, which are very hard, but less hard than sand. When a helicopter flies low to the ground in desert environments, sand striking the rotor blade can cause erosion. At night, sand hitting the metal abrasion strip causes a visible corona or halo around the rotor blades. The effect is caused by the pyrophoric oxidation of eroded particles and is known as the Kopp-Etchells Effect.

The combat photographer and journalist Michael Yon observed the effect while accompanying U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. When he discovered the effect had no name he coined the name “Kopp-Etchells Effect” after two soldiers who had died in the war, one American and one British.

---

The pictures are uncredited, so I will just send a thank you out in the ether for sharing these beautiful pictures of events in an awful time.

One final picture.

(h/t Jeff Norman)

This’ll be a conundrum for everyone if the effect is large enough to matter. NewScientist (8 October 2016) reports on an unexpected result of imprisoning criminals for sex crimes:

In areas where men outnumber women, there were lower rates of murders and assaults as well as fewer sex-related crimes, including rapes, sex offences and prostitution. Conversely, higher rates of these crimes occurred in areas where there were more women than men.

Ryan Schacht at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and his colleagues analysed sex-ratio data from 3082 US counties, provided by the US Census Bureau in 2010. They compared this with crime data for the same year, issued by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. They only included information about women and men of reproductive age.

For all five types of offence analysed, rising proportions of men in a county correlated with fewer crimes – even when accounting for other potential contributing factors such as poverty. The results suggest that current policies aimed at defusing violence and crime by reducing the amount of men in male-dominated areas may backfire (Human Nature, doi.org/brbb).

When women are in short supply, men perceive them as being a more valuable resource, says Schacht. Consequently, men must be more dutiful to win and retain a female partner. In an abundance of women, men are spoilt for choice and adopt promiscuous behaviour that brings them into conflict with other men, and makes them more likely to commit sex-related offences.

This has unsettling implications for the motivations for men to be non-violent, turning it from a principled, or lack, stand, to a cold-blooded market-based assessment of the risks of crime. Even divorce rates rise as men disappear into prison. The original study adds this conclusion:

In addition, although public concern over male-biased sex ratios elevating the risk for female trafficking and prostitution has risen, supporting data are lacking. In China, areas with male excess are not associated with elevated numbers of sex workers (Hesketh et al. 2005). Moreover, sexually transmitted disease rates are lowest in male-biased populations (South and Trent 2010). These trends corroborate our finding that rates of prostitution/commercial vice, which serve as a proxy for uncommitted sexual behavior, are lowest in counties where men are most abundant.

I think what bothers me the most is that, once the core principles of a person have been ascertained, predicting their behavior becomes plausible. But evaluating a market for the number of potential mates? Even if such numbers are available, neither sex is likely to track them down and use them to modulate their behavior; this makes predicting the behavior of your fellows much more difficult.

I’ve long wondered how practices in which babies of one sex are favored over that of another affect the society that encourages them, so I was interested to see that in the midst of a larger rant, Heather Hurlburt on Lawfare discusses some relevant information:

We are just at the beginning of understanding how the scarcity of young women in societies that prize male babies more highly than females affects social stability, but the first indicators are extremely worrying. We have anecdotal evidence, in the form of the interrogation of the sole Mumbai attacker to be captured alive, that the compelling argument for joining an extremist group was the opportunity to earn money and status that would allow him and his brothers to afford bride prices. Young men, in other words, face a particular gender dilemma in societies where their path to adulthood—and women’s value to their families—is still expressed through a bride price.

Societal constructs of masculinity may have important impacts on whether and how much sexual crimes feature in warfare. And researchers find as well that young women are more likely to participate in violent movements in societies where women’s roles are severely restricted.

In the absence of statistical studies of this sort, which must be quite difficult to conduct, the best argument I have come up with against those who, in our society, would relegate women to the kitchen, is fairly simple-minded. Fill in with a picture of noted American traditionalist Phil Robertson in the following:

PR: Women should remain in the kitchen.

ME: Ah, so you’re for treason against America?

PR: What?! No, I’m for traditional American values! It’s what make us great!

ME: And cripples us.

PR: What are you talking about?

ME: It’s not about being tough, it’s not about being traditional. It’s about being smart.

PR: Huh?

ME: Restrict half the American population from contributing their intellectual firepower to America, and we’re crippled.

PR: Oh, bullshit!

ME: Ever wonder why we didn’t really start dominating the world until the 1920s? There are other factors, but key was the freedom of our woman to explore new options, write, invent – do all those things that are important to our development. When everyone contributes in the way that best suits them, we fly. When we tell everyone what they’re going to do, based on their gender, we’re going to droop because efficiency is impaired, morale is shot, and we start to fall behind. The ‘traditionalist’, in pursuit of the mythical happiness of yesteryear, is really a detriment to the survival of his country –

At this point I get punched out in this particular fantasy. The point is that most arguments about gender-neutral freedom (such a hoity-toity phrase I just made up) balance on concepts of justice, and while those are important to make, they can be difficult to win when others are waving around tradition and religious books. But once you point out the tangible benefits of making everyone truly equal, then eyes start to open. Compare to other societies such as, say, Afghanistan, where women struggle just to get an education – and it seems like the country spends half its time killing each other, don’t appear to invent anything of interest, etc.

Personally, I figure in those sorts of countries the men are just afraid of the competition from the women.

Mainly ‘cuz I’m not sure if they’re transformers…

In The Gorgon (1964) my Arts Editor and I found a good, but not great, murder mystery, involving both terror and horror. A well-staged traditional approach to a mid-19th century European village in a nameless country, people are dying after being attacked – and presenting odd symptoms to the local medical authorities. But when one of the victims is an out of town young artist, his family becomes involved. His father and brother are sturdy, determined men, much to the dismay of the locals, and when their ally, Professor Meister (Christopher Lee), becomes involved, hell begins to break loose.

The acting is more than acceptable (I particularly liked the fight scene, sword against candle holder – quite exciting!), the makeup erratic. The problem lies in the story. In the main, it’s OK, as we see the back and forth of the mystery of the murders and the mysterious reticence of the locals and the constabulary. However, this reticence is never explained; it feels more like the director wanted a mysterious atmosphere, and this was how he was going to get it, logic be hanged. Similarly, too often the characters exist to fulfill the plot – if any of them have interests outside of the story, those will be secrets never hinted at hear. The result is a certain lack of … empathy with the characters. And this despite a good cast, although Lee is simply too young to pull his part off.

We enjoyed it, but in the end I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to see it.

Georgy Toloraya covers the recent developments in North Korea on 38 North:

The North Korean nuclear dilemma has evolved far beyond the issue that sanctions originally sought to counter. While Pyongyang has achieved unprecedented nuclear and missile advances during US President Barack Obama’s administration, the basis for that leap forward was established during Kim Jong Il’s rule. The former leader was far more moderate and inclined toward compromise than his son; he preferred not to provoke his opponents with excessive nuclear and missile demonstrations and only presided over two nuclear tests and a handful of missile tests—quantities inadequate for the deployment of operational weapons. Kim Jong Il appeared to restrain the North’s nuclear development in hopes that diplomacy would finally work, and reasonable members of the US establishment would overrule US and South Korean conservatives with a strategic decision to recognize and coexist with North Korea.

That decision never came during Kim Jong Il’s lifetime, and the less patient Kim Jong Un seems to have adopted none of his father’s limits on pressuring the United States and South Korea. Still, the Obama administration did not initially anticipate the level of progress Pyongyang has achieved under its guiding principle of “strategic patience,” which relies on the false assumption that the regime is nearing collapse. In line with this thinking, Washington has answered North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests by trying to increase the North’s economic and political isolation.

But despite a decade of sanctions and related international steps, North Korea has succeeded in acquiring a significant new nuclear potential while still achieving modest economic growth. Rather than prompting calls for a new method to deal with the North’s nuclear program, experts are now rationalizing that the restrictions were never tough enough.

It’s difficult to envision a first-strike nuclear attack on North Korea, even with great provocation – but that’s just my view; I have to wonder what a President Trump might do. Or, more to the point, what his “experts” might recommend in order to solve the North Korean problem.

I claim no expertise in the realm of North Korea or war, really. My sense is that North Korea, once it has sufficient nuclear arms, could actually contemplate completing a cessation of war treaty with South Korea and its allies (including the United States), although if that would result in a loss of face for the leadership of either Korea, then it wouldn’t be possible. Even so, North Korea could consider reducing its conventional armies, and that would help its civilian economy a little more. Georgy notes the apparent goal of the civilian sector:

Through my conversations in Pyongyang, I got the impression that the economic planners are seeking a new paradigm of development. This approach does not appear to be based on restoring its outdated heavy industrial potential,[9] but rather on “jumping over” the re-industrialization phase to a more knowledge-based economy. This concept demands educational capabilities that North Korean engineers have already demonstrated with the country’s indigenous nuclear and missile achievements. “Construction of a powerful civilized state” with an emphasis on science and technology now seems to be the focus of all government policies.

No measurement of the percentage of the civilians who have received training adequate for participation in a knowledge-based economy is given, and probably none is available even from sources such as the NSA – North Korea is a notoriously difficult society to evaluate. This makes it difficult to evaluate the likelihood of North Korean success in transitioning to such an economy. It may also imply more openings to the outside world as a knowledge based economy is implicitly about open communications – and that, I should think, would have implications within North Korea as well. How much does the North Korea leadership depend on the careful segmentation and isolation of the subject populace in order to survive? A knowledge-based economy’s prospects of success may be in proportion to the inverse of that estimated value.

Georgy’s recommendations for continued handling of North Korea:

What does this mean for a new US administration? Washington is free to recognize the failure of former policies, but it cannot look to war as a viable alternative. It must instead devise a strategy aimed at finding a new balance of interests and reconciling desirable outcomes with what is possible. A restart of the diplomatic process—ideally in a multilateral format that would enable all interested actors to benefit—could at least bring about a freeze on further North Korean nuclear and missile development. Little hope is left for North Korean capitulation, and a new search for compromise should start—the sooner, the better.