Category Archives: Uncategorized

A reader responds to the analysis of authoritarians:

In addition to making a slight change in how we raise our children, we could also address the things which cause their fears.

I’d argue that it’s likely that children raised with a growth mindset (see Carol Dweck’s research) instead of a fixed mindset would be less authoritarian-responsive, in addition to just being happier, more productive and successful adults. That will take a long time to accomplish, however (change the conventions for parenting and schooling and then pass an entire generation of kids into middle age where they can influence policies — so minimum 30 to 50 years). Our civilization may not last that long if this goes completely unchecked.

We can do things about some of their fears, though, such as economic stability, jobs and terrorism. Fixing things like “corporate personhood” and Citizens United would go a long way to helping citizens feel like government is responsive to them, rather than in the pockets of “elites”.

For another insight into the minds of Trump supporters, check out this blog post from Cracked’s David Wong. It seems fairly logical and has the additional positive of being written from someone who’s been there.

Boris Karloff hosts Black Sabbath (1963), an Italian-made trio of short movies. All three share the same traits: excellent staging in the typical style for the genre, which perhaps some might find trite, but I thought was entirely appropriate for these stories: decaying furniture cluttering rooms housing decaying characters whose endings are mostly foul. The acting is adequate, and in some cases more than adequate. Lighting and makeup are quite good, illuminating faces, bodies, entire rooms in effective ways.

But the stories! Ah! These are less than adequate, for they lack some of the basics of story-telling: logic and empathetic characters. That these are stories of horror means that supernatural monsters, full of lusts rare and improper, may appear, but in order to bring even the beginnings of horror, even terror, to our nerves requires a certain sympathy for those who are about to suffer for their own moral defects; the nearest I could find to a gesture of empathy is that the victims are either female, or young males, and thus perhaps a cultural requirement is that we feel empathy for such; but this does not work for me, and I have to wonder if this is an Italian characteristic, as Italian movies often seem to skip this step.

And logic. There is, of course, the suspended logic of the horror movie, the supernatural ignoring the otherwise ironclad rules of physics in their quest to invert the quivering nerves of their victims; but here I speak of normal, everyday logic: characters that act and react in expected ways, that we understand how at least some do, while others may be ciphers that are eventually revealed. Sadly, these characters appear to be dragged about by their collars, the plots plunging them hither and yon.

So, to the stories.

The first concerns a woman who must prepare a dead woman for burial. As she does so, she filches a large ring, tearing it from the late owner’s finger with a fury. Perhaps she is poor, but we don’t know. But the corpse is monstrous, terrifying. The woman then returns home to her apartment, and is presently terrified by the dripping of water, the creaking of doors. Before much time passes, she, too, dies; the next morning, other apartment dwellers find her and call the police. The caretaker tells the police she shooed everyone away and has touched nothing, knowing how the police work.

But the ring is gone, and madness is entering the eyes of the caretaker…

The second story concerns a classic stalker, first the phone ringing with no one on the other end. The terrified woman answering the phone finally entices the caller into speaking: it’s Frank. As in Frank, who died six months ago. Their connection? She stole him from another woman, whom she now calls, begging for help. Would I call her in the same situation? No, no, no! But she does, and the woman done wrong shows up as if … the plot requires it. Soon, the first woman falls asleep. Will there now be vengeance? Can the second woman speak like Frank?

No.

Frank himself breaks into the apartment silently, and strangles the woman done wrong. But the first woman has a knife and soon buries it in Frank. So now Frank is dead, which seems to distress the woman. Whoever she is. And how did Frank end up alive, before becoming dead again? We don’t know. Frank … ly, we don’t care.

The third story, starring Boris Karloff, involves a special breed of vampire called the Wurdalak, which only feasts on the blood of loved ones. Sounds horrific, doesn’t it? Lots of story potential. Oh, wait. What happens when you run out of loved ones? “I drained my wife last night and now I’m feeling a bit peckish. Oh, that’s right, I have a son for today’s meal. Hmmm, does the cousin count for tomorrow?” OK, let’s turn on the old “suspension of disbelief”… So, see, Boris’ 4th shepherd was murdered by a local bandit, so Boris decided it was time to kill the bandit; why it took 4 is not clear. But he tells his sons that if he’s not back in five days, he should be considered a Wurdalak and not permitted to come into the house; kill him if you can.

How does Boris know this? I dunno. It’s dumb.

So he comes back on the fifth day. Soon enough? Not soon enough? The sons don’t know, the wives or whatever they are, they won’t express much of anything, but that dog howling in the background, eh, he doesn’t get a vote. Then there’s this traveler who is going somewhere and has fallen in love with the, ah, buxom figure of one of the woman. Because, ah, you know, buxom. There ain’t no other reason for his sudden onset of love, I’m tellin’ ya.

Yeah, this isn’t going to end well.

If you adore Boris, sure, see it. It’s got bits of humor. But, really, it’s not worth it.

Postscript: I see in the Wikipedia entry that the Italian version of this is actually regarded rather highly. It may be worth seeking out that version, especially if it’s dubbed. Apparently this American version has been sculpted for the American sensibility of the early 1960s.

We’re not quite sure what these are, but we like ’em.

A reader remembers his visit to Mammoth Site:

If I remember the story properly when [my wife] and I went there, a contractor had bought the land for development and found the big bones. He sold the land to the university of South Dakota for $1.00 to make it legal. One of the provisions was to open the site to teaching young kids and anthropology students, t [sic] how to remove fossils properly. Among the things they found were several Colombian Mammoths, Wolly [sic] Mammoths, American lions, and 2 faced bears, ancient sea shells. Well worth the trip!

Mammoth Site remarks they’ve discovered a number of Columbian mammoths as well as several woolly mammoths, which were an Eastern seaboard denizens – apparently Hot Springs marked a meeting point for the related species.

Play any appropriate music in the back of your mind…

I had the keys to your heart
But I ain’t got them no more
‘cuz I broke them off in your anus
as you slunk away out the door …

Credit to my Arts Editor for her efforts on improving my sordid beginning…

Taphonomy:

By studying the bone bed’s taphonomy [i.e., studying what happened to an organism between the time of its death and the time it was excavated], researchers can determine the environment of deposition and gain a clearer insight into the world of the mammoths.

From ESRI, the makers of ArcGIS, “The most powerful mapping software in the world.” They supply the mapping software used at Mammoth Site.

Mammuthus columbi,  13′ tall, 10′ long, the majority resident of Mammoth Site. Credit: Dinopedia

A friend reminded me of a lovely experience my Arts Editor and I had in 2012 on a road trip to the area of Mount Rushmore – a visit to nearby Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota. This is, as I recall from the docent’s presentation, part of a sinkhole into which the mammoths would occasionally fall. The sides were steep, the sinkhole deep, and the mammoths could only swim and scrabble at the edges for so long.

Today, a building has been built over the sinkhole, making the experience of visiting the dig site pleasant all year round, and includes (or at least during our visit) a restaurant next door.

Mammoth Site excavation

The bodies piled up, as one might imagine. Today, the bone bed is 67 feet deep; on our trip the docent gave out the lovely story that their probes had gone down to their limits, which I do not precisely recall, and at the deepest, they were still pulling up evidence of fossilized animals.

In the picture here on the right, we can see a mammoth in the throes of excavation (click on it for a larger version). Even to my untrained eyes, the spine is clearly visible. But gender?

Probably male.

I don’t know this from a visible cue, but, again, from the docent’s presentation: at the time, all mammoths so far identified were male. Elephant society is matriarchal in which females and juveniles roam in herds and the bulls roam freely, so if we assume mammoths used the same structure, then it makes sense that the free-roaming bulls occasionally fell in, while the queens, who in today’s elephant species are repositories of knowledge and become more valuable to the herd as they age, would lead the other females and juveniles away from the known danger.

Mammoth Site excavation

As an adjunct theory, and probably immune to confirmation or falsification, I have to wonder if the mammoths, particularly those found in the sinkhole, had access to fermenting fruit. It is not unknown today to see animals consume fermenting fruit and then act as if they were drunk. There’s a certain tragic eloquence to the idea of a drunken male mammoth stumbling into the sinkhole, thus to perish for the appreciation of paleontologists and their groupies a few thousand years later.

Predator skeleton found at Mammoth Site.

Mammoth Site is easy find, located within the city limits of Hot Springs, and its scope is not limited to mammoths, but rather to whatever is found at the site, which includes many species, from prairie dogs to mid-size predators to this fearsome critter. It makes for a pleasant day-trip for those of us fascinated by the creatures of yesteryear – Go!

CNN is reporting on the latest Trump suggestion concerning the final debate:

NewScientist, One Per Cent (1 October 2016):

We’re putting the smarts into more and more things these days: thermostats, toothbrushes – and sex toys. But not everyone is happy with these gadgets’ data hoovering habits. A US user is suing the maker of We-Vibe, a vibrator that can be controlled by an app, for collecting personal data without her knowledge. This allegedly includes details such as when the We-Vibe was used and the settings selected.

Warfare and sectarian conflicts are not the only source of tensions in Iraq. As Adnan Abu Zeed reports in AL Monitor, a Turkish dam on the Tigris River is causing worry in Iraq:

Severe drought is affecting agricultural lands across Iraq because of the low levels of river water. Iraqi officials have raised the alarm on the negative impact of the Turkish Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2016. …

Of note, Turkey has cut off water on more than one occasion in the past, and it caused a major humanitarian crisis every time, prompting dozens of families to flee their residences in the Ramadi area in Anbar province, where the Euphrates River flows.

In further evidence of Ugaili’s statements, Furat al-Tamimi, the head of the parliamentary Water and Agriculture Committee, told Al-Monitor, “Turkey will escalate its systematic water ban into Iraqi territories, which would take a heavy toll on agriculture, following the completion of the dam’s final stages.”

He added, “Iraq has been objecting to the dam project, but to no avail. Upon completion, Iraq will lose about 50% of the Tigris River.”

Tamimi talked about an “anticipated meeting between parliament and the minister of water resources scheduled for October to discuss plans and procedures to address the risks of the dam construction and the negative effects on irrigation and agriculture.” He added, “Parliament will also host officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to look into diplomatic efforts for international lobbying against the dam project.”

An October 2015 study by the World Resources Institute revealed that Iraq ranks 21th on the list of countries that are threatened by water crisis, despite having two rivers flowing in its territories.

I’d say that not having control of the source of the rivers makes one vulnerable. International Rivers covers the negative aspects from the Turkish side:

The proposed Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River in Southeastern Turkey is one of the world’s most controversial hydropower projects. If built, it will displace up to 70,000 people, drown the 10,000 year-old city of Hasankeyf, and destroy valuable biodiversity. …

National Geographic gives a quick historical overview:

Since it was first proposed by Turkey’s State Water Works in 1954, the Ilısu Dam has had a troubled history.

In 1982, the hydroelectric dam was incorporated into Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP): a regional development plan consisting of 19 hydroelectric plants and 22 dams. It was slated for construction on the Tigris River, in a village of a few hundred people.

But controversy soon erupted around the project. In addition to the village of Ilısu, the 10.4 billion-cubic-meter reservoir created by the dam would flood 400 kilometers of Tigris ecosystem, displace more than 25,000 people, and flood 300 archeological sites, including the 12,000-year-old town of Hasankeyf.

One of the diseases that lands high on my “oh, crap” list is Naegleria fowleri, or the amoeba that enters its human victims by the nose, often while they’re swimming in a lake, and destroy their brain – and is virtually incurable, with only a couple of known survivors. So while reading an article in NewScientist (1 October 2016) on some progress on discovering why it prefers brains (over, say, toe-nail clippings), I was dismayed at the final thoughts on the subject:

This could become a more urgent problem in the coming years – infections are predicted to rise as the climate warms.

And yet another reason to take climate change seriously – I mean, who wants a world where half the epitaphs are “I died because my brain was eaten by amoebas”?

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com reports on the travails of the dairy industry:

If you ever felt like crying over spilled milk, now’s the time. Dairy farmers in the United States have dumped more than 43 million gallons of milk between January and August of 2016. This milk has been poured into fields, manure lagoons, and animal feed, or down the drain at processing plants. According to the Wall Street Journal, this amount of milk is enough to fill 66 Olympic-sized swimming pools and is the most wasted in at last 16 years.

The problem is that the United States is in the midst of a massive dairy glut. Farmers responded to a shortage two years ago that is now catching up with a nation unable to absorb the quantity of dairy being produced. Prices are so low – down 36 percent from in 2014 – that “many can’t even afford to transport raw milk to market at current prices.”

Which strikes me as a classical example of a positive feedback loop – a phrase to which most engineers respond with a twitch and a shake of the head: “Can’t live with that.” The problem is that the feedback loop of information is not properly modulated so that farmers know how many can go into dairy farming without flooding the market and forcing many of them out.

Of course, libertarians would just shrug and say this is a good thing, but in reality it’s inefficient and a depressing situation for the farmers involved – and which then leads to a scarcity situation down the road. Just think roller coaster, without the fun.

Not that I have any solutions to offer. The free market has brought many advances to agriculture, as with many other fields, but when it comes to food, rather than, say, computers, I get a little twitchy. I recognize that a mercantile system merely leads to stagnation, politicization, and eventually revolution; but the solution has its own host of fleas.

I only hope the fleas don’t carry the plague.

A report in the NewScientist 60 Second column (28 September 2016)  leaves me wondering:

A synthetic form of alcohol aims to give you all the buzz minus the hangover. The drink, known as “alcosynth”, is designed to mimic the positive effects of alcohol but without the nausea or throbbing head, claims its creator, David Nutt, at Imperial College London. His 90 or so patented alcosynth concoctions must go through clinical trials before being offered to the public.

So, how about the impaired judgment? But apparently the liver’s not a problem, Professor Nutt tells The Independent:

The Imperial College Professor and former government drugs advisor told The Independent he has patented around 90 different alcosynth compounds.

Two of them are now being rigorously tested for widespread use, he said – and by 2050, he hopes alcosynth could completely replace normal alcohol.

“It will be there alongside the scotch and the gin, they’ll dispense the alcosynth into your cocktail and then you’ll have the pleasure without damaging your liver and your heart,” he said.

If it doesn’t impair your judgment and destroy your memory, it may not be the choice of alcoholics. Roger Ebert, the late, famed movie critic, was an alcoholic and wrote about it:

I’ve known two heavy drinkers who claimed they never had hangovers. I didn’t believe them. Without hangovers, it is possible that I would still be drinking. Unemployed, unmarried, but still drinking–or, more likely, dead. Most alcoholics continue to drink as long as they can. For many, that means death. Unlike drugs in most cases, alcohol allows you to continue your addiction for what’s left of your life, barring an accident. The lucky ones find their bottom, and surrender.

So what will alcosynth offer to the alcoholic?

The Web knows all.

The announcement that the United States would response “proportionately” to the alleged hacks by Russia of the American electoral process (by which I encompass both the Democratic database as well as various State-level electoral processes) has drawn various responses. First up is Susan Hennessey on Lawfare, who covers the uncertainties of cyberwarefare episodes and provides a lot of interesting thoughts on the situation:

Public attribution is itself a significant government response and elucidates some of the administration’s sensibilities regarding line-drawing. But it also raises a difficult question about how we should think about what we are responding to. It appears that the trigger for the Obama administration was the targeting of election infrastructure and the threat to actual or perceived electoral integrity. But it is unclear that the type of election system intrusion thus far at issue—probing and scanning but not disrupting—would have been enough to warrant a response by itself. By linking the two activities together and to an overarching motivation—to interfere with the electoral process—the Administration is signaling that its response is to a course of conduct, not a single event.

Taking a broad view is sensible where Russia undertakes hybrid actions—intrusion into computer systems (malicious cyber activity) combined with the strategic release of documents (information warfare)—as well as larger efforts to undertake many distinct activities to achieve an overall goal—to sow distrust in the US electoral system. But the broad view here—where individual “below established threshold activities” combine to cross the threshold—also requires knowing what to group together.

We simultaneously engage Russia in cyberspace in a great many contexts, just as we do in diplomacy. And not everything is related. As Jack noted in a recent panel at Yale Law School, when we step back, it’s hard to know where the DNC and related leaks fall in the deterrence cycle. Are the leaks Russian retaliation for US action, such as imposing sanctions for Crimea? Or are the leaks intended by Russia to be a deterrent response to US cyber espionage? Or is this, as the White House statement would indicate, just a general attempt by Russia to see if it can sway the US election in its favor? Intelligence collection can answer some of those questions. But persistent uncertainty is a feature of cyber conflicts that is unlikely to ever resolve entirely.

It’s worth reading the whole article. She also provides this link to the US policy on cyber deterrence – which I have not read.

Karl Bode on techdirt prefers to attempt to occupy the moral high ground:

We’ve noted several times how launching cyberwar (or real war) on Russia over the recent spike in hack attacks is a notably idiotic idea. One, the United States effectively wrote the book on hacking other countries causing all manner of harm (hello, Stuxnet), making the narrative that we’re somehow defending our honor from shady international operatives foundationally incorrect. And two, any hacker worth his or her salt either doesn’t leave footprints advertising their presence, or may conduct false flag operations raising the risk of attacking the wrong party. …

Again though, the very idea that the United States would be “responding” is fundamentally incorrect. We’ve been engaged in nation state hacking and election fiddling for decades, happily hacking the planet for almost as long as the internet has existed. We use submarines as underwater hacking platforms, the U.S. government and its laundry list of contractors routinely hacking and fiddling with international elections and destroying reputations when and if it’s convenient to our global business interests. Our behavior in 1970s South America giving tech support to Operation Condor is the dictionary definition of villainy.

He is probably correct on the technical aspects, although I’m no expert. However, on the stickier aspects, I do not think past moral indignities that stained our country’s honor, as repugnant as they were, and even eventually counterproductive, requires us to bare our breast to the bloody blade of the assassin. Perhaps we should examine the histories of all countries, and then demand that each sacrifice in proportion to their past crimes?

It’d be one poverty-stricken world after that exercise.

We might be better served by examining how poorly the previous behaviors have served us in the long run, ruining our reputations, etc, and then vow to do better in the future. And if Russia is indeed involved in this mess, respond. Perhaps Karl should review the behavior of Russia in World War II.

Here are some questions to consider and answer, if only in your head. Attribution of these questions will come later.

1. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders?
2. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
3. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
4. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?

A distracting picture of a fall leaf; it has no other significance

OK, so what’s the point? My Arts Editor sent me this article by Amanda Taub on Vox that explores the scientific research on the rise of the far-right within the GOP, what it meant in the past, and what it means for the future. This is some fascinating research:

[PhD student Matthew] MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.

He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator.

Meanwhile, Professors Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt and Jonathan Weiler of University of North Carolina were publishing a book on the same subject:

Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which “activated” authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

So the questions posted above come from that article and are considered a very slick way to elicit the information necessary to build the personality profile of a person with respect to their responses to an authoritarian figure. It’s quite interesting to consider how much you think your style of raising a child will affect their adult lives; from a discussion with my AE last night, and a long-ago discussion with my Mother, I know that some people can break free of their childhood training, especially if they perceive it as detrimental to their personal well-being; but in my experience, most people are more likely to build on, even strengthen their own training – so long as it has some perceived value in their lives.

A good summary of the typical ‘authoritarian’:

What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality. The scale of the desired response is, in some ways, what most distinguishes authoritarians from the rest of the GOP.

The article has way too much to summarize and talk about in a mere blog post, so I’m going to skip to one of Amanda’s conclusions as of the most interest to me:

To my surprise, the most compelling conclusion to come out of our polling data wasn’t about Trump at all.

Rather, it was that authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.

If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the “action side” of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.

And that means Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics, with potentially profound implications for the country.

And so Amanda, and perhaps her professors, worry about a de-facto 3-party system.

But it doesn’t have to be so. If, in fact, this research is verified, it can also be acted on. And that will raise a lot of questions. By acting on it, I mean identifying processes by which we train children to not have these characteristics, or at least minimize them. But this, of course, raises questions of freedom: the freedom to raise our children as we wish. While that freedom is somewhat limited, as society comes to certain communal conclusions concerning corporal punishment, vaccinations, schooling, and other matters, our freedom to raise children is fairly remarkable, for both good and bad. I think attempting the social engineering that would reduce the salience of these particular motivations in individuals prone to them may be resented and actively fought by those who already have them and are raising children in their mode. After all, why should society have the right to judge an individual as being ‘authoritarian’ (or, more accurately, ‘authoritarian-responsive’), and to classify them as … undesirable?

I know I’d resent it.

So this research, like most good research, starts with one question and will leave a herd of them in its wake. They may tax the liberty-loving, even as those who they may protect do not appear to be liberty-loving in themselves.

When it comes to the public information about the upcoming election, readers have opinions. First up:

After the revelations about the bias of the press, the polls have less meaning. I really hope Trump wins by a landslide to again prove how biased these polls are.

I’m not sure which press my reader is reading. My impression is that, until recently, the mainstream press, not just Fox News, has been groveling at Trump’s feet. (Actually, even Fox News has started barking, to their minor credit.) During the GOP primary it was widely known that the Trump campaign was spending relatively little money. From the far-right The Blaze (or possibly InsideGov.com, from a note on The Blaze story):

Total Spending: $71,087,144
June Spending: $7,800,248
Total Vote Count: 13,706,642

Donald Trump’s campaign, half of which he financed himself, got a lot of bang for its buck. His financial efficiency may be attributed to the media, which gave him substantially more coverage than any other candidate.

(For those who are curious, he spent $5.19 per vote received during the primary, while John Kasich spent $4.57/vote to attain the (empty) title of most efficient GOP contender. Jeb Bush? $126.70. Poor old Lindsey? Oh, go look for yourself.)

The point being, if there was any bias during the early campaign, it was towards Trump. Now that we’ve transitioned into the general election and have watched the lies spew forth from Trump, I (like many others) argue that the general mainstream press is not biased towards either candidate, but is rather doing its job finally – calling out the candidates when they lie. If they have a bias, then the best bias they can have is to the truth. Facts on the ground. If Trump says he was never for the Iraq war, and the news organizations produce tapes of news shows where he’s for the war, then they should say as much, right to his face. Ditto with Clinton. According to the fact-checkers, she’s harder to catch on a lie – apparently she’s less likely to lie than Trump.

Another reader responds to the first:

What “revelations” about the bias of the press? You mean like the bias of Fox TV and virtually every talk radio show out there? Or maybe the bias of the entire Murdoch media empire?

And on the topic of polls another reader responds:

Why do the polls have less meaning?

And what recent election has proven that the polls are biased? 4 years ago the right was saying the polls were biased and Romney lost by what the polls said he was going to lose by. Get a grip man.

Insofar as the polls track the final results fairly closely, and especially the results of aggregators like FiveThirtyEight, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a landslide absent a black swan event. I expect Clinton is too professional to let that occur.

And one more comment in reaction to getting a grip …

On himself, not on the nearest female.

Hah!

It’s been a surreal year, and now it just got a little bit more surreal – but this time it doesn’t involved Donald Trump, but instead our next diplomat extraordinaire – Lindsey Lohan. Amberin Zaman reports for AL Monitor:

Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Over the past week, images of the American actress, singer and model visiting Syrian refugee camps — cradling babies and sporting an Islamic-style headscarf — have been splashed across the pages of pro-government media outlets. Lohan’s compatriot Angelina Jolie has visited the same refugee camps along the Syrian border several times, but she never elicited the gushing enthusiasm afforded Lohan.Why the discrepancy? Because Lohan has waded into Turkish politics in a big way, spouting, among other things, one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s worthier mantras: “The world is bigger than five.”

For Lohan’s American fans who need help deciphering Erdogan’s shorthand, it means the permanent membership of the UN Security Council should be expanded beyond its current five states, ostensibly to include Turkey. The fate of millions of people, Lohan solemnly observed in an interview with the pro-Erdogan ATV channel, should not be decided by five countries.

In another interview, with pro-government newspaper Haberturk, Lohan praised Erdogan for his handling of the July 15 coup attempt. The Turkish people truly respected him, she said. Lohan also gave Turkey’s tottering tourism industry a boost, asserting, “Turkey is a very safe and livable country.”

Nothing, however, will have won over more Turks than her tweeting “Terörü Lanetliyoruz,” which translates, “We curse terrorism.”

Some days you just want to hide in the back yard and not come out for a while.

By now, we’ve all heard about the recent trouble at Wells Fargo:

• 5300 employees fired for creating two million unauthorized customer accounts since 2011.
• The customers affected charged millions in fees against the illicit accounts opened in their names.
• John Stumpf, Chairman & CEO of Wells Fargo, fired effective immediately with no additional severance package.
• Stumpf to forfeit $41 million in unvested stock options, one of the largest bonus clawbacks in history according to the Wall Street Journal.  (Note:  He’s only forfeiting options that have no current value.  He keeps his vested options in the amount of $134 million previously paid as bonuses.)
• Wells Fargo fined $185 million for their actions (which, incidentally, isn’t that much for a company that reported a net income of $22.9 BILLION in 2015.)
• New CEO Tim Sloan promises to reform bank practices.  Whatever that means.

Pardon me if I don’t put too much faith in his promise of reforms.

Here’s the thing: I worked for Wells Fargo for 19 years,  In that time I witnessed the bank, first as Norwest, later as Wells Fargo (and then as Wachovia in all but name) evolve from a bank that was…well… a bank, offering checking, savings and loan accounts to private citizens and businesses, into a retail store, selling financial products.  By the end of my tenure at Wells, if you were a banker, teller, broker, financial advisor, loan officer or manager for the bank , your yearly bonus (if any), performance rating, opportunity for advancement, and salary were directly tied to how many financial products you sold each quarter.

The standard as stated by Wells Fargo was to sell eight separate financial products to each customer that walked through the door. If your customer had less than eight Wells Fargo products (things like Investment banking, securities, private, commercial and student loans, asset management, retirement products, health savings accounts, etc.) then as a good salesperson, you were expected to get them “up to speed”.  In fact, your job depended on it.  So much so, that many Wells Fargo “store” associates felt the need to game the system in order to meet their quarterly sales goals.

And the Wells Fargo powers-that-be have known for years that there was a problem. A problem large enough that every employee in every division in Wells had to take the same “Ethics” training course every year– a course where it was explained in detail how to game the system and how doing so would be wrong.  It was an online how-to for making those sales goals, with the caveat that if you were caught, you’d be fired.  If you were caught in a public manner, it would also mean loss of reputation for the bank, possible federal fines and loss of bank charter, lower stock prices, and so on.  You know… all those things that the bank really cares about…  Profit.  Net worth.  Stock price.  Power.  Prestige.

Thankfully, I spent the last 11 years in the Technology Division at Wells, so my desk was somewhat sheltered from the “sell, sell, sell” mentality. I helped develop the financial products that our bankers were supposed to push.  “Wealth Management” is still a phrase that makes my teeth itch.  I saw firsthand what the real goal of the bank was:  not to help the average citizen realize his or her financial goals, but to enhance the power, prestige and net worth of those in charge, at the expense of the drones on the bottom of the heap.  Because when it comes right down to it, offering up as scapegoat  5300 drones and one CEO is not too great a price to pay to ensure that the power, prestige and profit endure.  That’s business, right?

Yeah, that’s business. But it’s not right.

Banking used to be a service, as in “Financial Services”. They used to offer a safe place for the individual to house their money, so that it wouldn’t be stolen.  And while banks were keeping all our money “safe”, they were allowed to use it.  Often times, they’d offer interest as an incentive for being allowed to use our money.

In time, the bank came to regard those deposits as the bank’s money. The bank’s profits. The bank’s success.  And by extension, the officers of the bank shared in that success in very tangible ways.  The bank became the entity, with people working for the bank, instead of the bank working for its people.

And so we come to now, where the dreadnought that is Wells Fargo, in pursuit of ever-increasing profits, rolls over anyone in its way: its own employees, its leadership, its investors.

Until Wells Fargo abandons its greed and returns to a Service model, nothing will change.

Banking and Retail Sales do not mix.

We were walking about the neighborhood a couple of days ago, and I happened to notice a rather pretty leaf, and I pointed it out.

By the time we’d made it home, my Arts Editor had a compressed stack of leaves an inch thick.

Here’s a few pictures of them …

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, and renowned analyst of polls, gives his analysis of the polls since the second Presidential debate:

We’re spending a lot of time these days diagnosing whether Donald Trump’s position in the polls is merely bad or still getting worse. Most of the evidence on Wednesday — which included the first dusting of state polls since the second presidential debate, on Sunday night — fell into the “still getting worse” bucket. Trump’s chances are down to 14 percent in our polls-only forecast (against an 86 percent chance for Hillary Clinton) and to 17 percent, a record low for Trump, in our polls-plus forecast. …

Trump now trails Clinton by 6.5 percentage points in our popular vote forecast — by comparison, he was 4.6 points back of Clinton a week ago, on Oct. 5, before the videotape or the second debate. So he’s moving in the wrong direction as time is running out. While a Trump comeback is still mathematically feasible — Trump’s 17 percent chance in the polls-plus model, as we’ve pointed out before, is the same as your chances of losing a “game” of Russian roulette — it wouldn’t really have any good precedent in recent American presidential elections.

Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium has been forecasting a Clinton win for quite some time:

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s PEC win probability hit 95%.

In last night’s debate, the 2005 candid video of Donald Trump saying what he does with women was still on everyone’s mind. In response, he brought up many topics beloved by Republican rank-and-file voters: Bill Clinton, Benghazi, emails…it was a veritable Greatest Hits of 1996-2016. The likely consequence of this scorched-earth strategy is that Republican leaders are trapped. All their base (R) belong to Trump. This will reverberate downticket.

This seems like a good time to reveal one of the Princeton Election Consortium’s own secrets. Thankfully, it does not involve an Access Hollywood video.

Here it is: poll-based Presidential prediction is not very hard.

I guess that is a pretty boring secret. Sorry.

It is an interesting irony that poll aggregation got popular in 2008, a year when there was not that much suspense in the Presidential race. That year, Barack Obama led John McCain for almost the entire campaign season, with the possible exception of the week after the Republican Convention, where Sarah Palin stole the show. That ended up with a 7-percentage-point popular win, and an electoral outcome of 365-173.

And if you want some of that winning progressive-style cheerleading, floridageorge on The Daily Kos provides a roundup of the polls since the second Presidential debate here, which follows individual states.

And what does it mean to Donald Trump? Courtesy CNN:

With Hillary Clinton extending her lead nationwide and in key battleground states, Trump is toying with what might be called “poll denialism,” giving his supporters license to dismiss the discouraging data.

“Even the polls are crooked,” he said at a Monday night rally, expressing disbelief that he is losing to Clinton in Pennsylvania. “Look, we’re in a rigged system.”

Trump has only topped Clinton in one scientifically conducted poll in Pennsylvania since it became clear he would be the GOP’s nominee back in April, while Clinton has been in the lead in 18 of them. In the most recent polls, Clinton holds a double-digit lead there.

His campaign has already been caught distributing a FiveThirtyEight map showing he’d be winning – if suffragism had failed back in 1919. Problem is, they had stripped the context from the map so the donors they were soliciting would think they’re winning.

If he gets blown out in a landslide, what’s he going to do? Claim every state but Alaska has somehow been corrupted? Or just sell the TV rights to the campaign’s retrospective for a ridiculous sum?

It has a certain aesthetic to it.

http://https://youtu.be/WREXBUZBrS8

For SaveTheFood.com.

(h/t Katherine Martinko @ Treehugger.com)

It appears the current North Carolina administration, assuming it retains power in the upcoming election, is planning to continue to defund education, as has been discussed in the past here. A North Carolina reader and educator sends a report entitled “McCrory administration asks schools to submit plans for $173 million budget cut,” from NC Policy Watch:

Request comes despite large state surplus and big unmet education needs

After years of complaints of paltry spending on public education in North Carolina, public school leaders say they may soon be facing another round of devastating cuts.

School officials say a late August memo from Gov. Pat McCrory’s chief budget officer signals that all state departments, including the public schools, must soon present options for a 2 percent cut in their 2017-2019 budget, roughly a $173 million loss for North Carolina schools.

Having talked with our NC educator, I know they’re already operating on a shoe-string, so this would further endanger the quality of education delivered to the children.

And this from a GOP administration which supposedly cherishes family values, one of which would supposedly be that children should be well-educated. In the absence of churlish thoughts, it’s a bewildering exercise to contemplate.

In view of the earlier absurd note (embedded in a long post here) from University of North Carolina board member Steven Long, “We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand,” this report from the above article drew some hearty guffaws at its glib attempt to justify this potential action:

[Andrew Heath, state budget director for Governor McCrory] could not be reached for a phone interview this week, citing the ongoing cleanup from Hurricane Matthew, but he told Policy Watch in an email that the Aug. 26 memo is simply following “longstanding and prudent budget development process employed by” his Office of State Budget Management, or OSBM.

If this guy had any courage, he’d just say that the Governor wants to squeeze the nuts of the teachers’ union a little tighter, make the schools a little less effective, with a long range plan of introducing for-profit schools. Then they have faith that profit will drive good education. Is there any evidence that for profit schools outperform traditional, state-funded schools? While a well run for-profit will certainly outperform a poorly run traditional school, I am not aware of any strong evidence of for-profit showing persistent out performance, and I’d be suspicious of such a claim – interested readers may want to consult this post. In a nutshell, and something even I’m getting tired of writing (and persistent readers are no doubt tired of reading), the processes of the private sector are not optimized for the goals of the education sector – and that will usually result in sub-optimal results.

But apparently they have no balls, as the article goes on to note that some sort of odd subterfuge is being employed to obscure this deprivation from the North Carolina electorate.

Screenshot from RealClearPolitics

So how is the election looking for McCrory (R)? His opponent is current NC Attorney General Roy Cooper (D). The current polling shows McCrory may not be returned to office – he appears to be 4.6 percentage points behind, according to the RealClearPolitics polling data, as displayed to the right. However, Cooper is not over 50%, so McCrory might still pull the election out of the fire.

But if he does lose, I surely hope Cooper turns out to be an outstanding Governor. The recent devotion to turning education into a profit center (see previous posts in this thread to see the admiration of North Carolina’s methods by private education advocates) has certainly put a dent in North Carolina’s standing in education and may negatively affect children growing up in the State for years or even decades to come.

[Edited 12/10/16: fix typo.]

Deb & I unexpectedly lost a young friend today, Shante Benford. My FB posts:

I am heartbroken at this unexpected news. I had known Shante since her days in high school, she was a delightful in conversation as well as on the strip, and her loss will be devastating to her family.

RIP, Shante.

Deeply saddened at the sudden loss of Shante Benford. For those too young to know her, she was a fencer full of laughter and happiness, who I had the pleasure of directing in high school meets several times, and many more times of actually fencing her. Shante had a fiancee and a one year old daughter. Her mother, Maria (also known as Elena), still fences from time to time at TCFC.

I will miss her.

I hadn’t seen Shante more than sporadically over the last few years, as she graduated from college, had a child, and planned to marry, but each time it was as if she wasn’t aging – still so happy and delighted with her life, thrilled to see her friends. It’s a shock to lose someone so young, so full of life.

I feel a little older tonight.