Category Archives: Uncategorized

Shlomi Eldar reports on the ongoing violent dislike between groups in Jerusalem:

Jerusalem restaurant owners claim that members of the radical right group Lehava — the Hebrew acronym for Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land — are threatening them with violence if they employ Arabs. In addition to making threats, Lehava activists have also carried out a series of violent attacks in Jerusalem against Arab laborers, taxi drivers and passersby. The attacks began soon after three Israeli youths were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinians in the West Bank in June 2014, and according to city restaurateurs, there has been a dramatic rise in such incidents since then. They claim that dozens of Lehava thugs go “Arab hunting,” especially on Thursdays, when yeshiva students begin their break for Sabbath, and on Saturday evenings, when they head back to their seminaries.

“It has become routine,” the owner of one of Jerusalem’s better known restaurants told Al-Monitor, requesting anonymity. “Each one of us restaurant owners knows that Thursdays and Saturday nights are terrible days on which we declare an emergency alert.”

And so they want to drive out the Arabs.

I will not be live blogging this debate because of other plans, but I hope to record it and conduct a faux-live blog later that evening.

All of a sudden it’s Duterte news, and it’s not particularly good, but not surprising – nasty little bullies tend to gravitate towards big power centers as a natural part of life. With this in mind, Lawfare has this report:

For at least the past month, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has sharply critiqued United States military policy and suggested a cooler relationship with Washington, pivoting away from his predecessor’s closer relationship with the United States. At the same time, however, President Duterte has been ambiguous about to the extent to which he believes bilateral relations should change. A series of statements from the past week add to this uncertainty.

On Monday President Duterte said that he would “open alliance with China and . . . Medvedev,” though he recognized that it was not time to “really break ties” with the United States. He also claims to have told Prime Minister Medvedev that “I’m about to cross the Rubicon between me and the United States, at least for the 6 years” and that “I will need your help in everything – trade, commerce – and I will open up.” Asked to clarify these statements, Duterte expressed concern that the United States would not aid the Philippines if attacked. The President also explained that he intended to open economic, not military, alliances with China and Russia.

Given Duterte’s recent election, one must assume that a substantial portion of the Filipino electorate supports his distaste for the United States – which is unfortunate. A nation of 100 million is nothing to sneeze at.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com discusses a life lesson:

I have learned this the hard way. When I built my first condo in Toronto, the penthouse had a balcony that was on top of a unit below. When the window washers threw their lines over the handrails on that balcony, it bent the handrails in, penetrating the membrane, letting in water to the unit below and costing me $16,000 to repair. One silly mistake and there you go. There is a reason that although I was a strict modernist, I have come to respect and admire traditional detailing and design; Through the course of history architects have learned how to cope with these kinds of issues. It’s why traditional buildings have roof overhangs and cornices; they are all there to keep water off the walls. They are there to provide multiple levels of protection and insurance so that it still keeps the water out even when caulks or membranes fail.

Balancing the new with the old.

On our recent vacation trip up the North Shore of Minnesota, we took to photographing mushrooms. We saw them in two places, the first being a small rest area on Congdon Blvd around 92nd Ave. The Wayside mushrooms have been uploaded to iNaturalist.org and tentatively identified as mostly gilled mushrooms; one has been identified as Fly Agaric, poisonous and psychoactive.

The location.

Possibly pre-stepped on.

Gilled Mushroom.

Just a mushroom so far.

Fly Agaric.

No comments so far.

The balance of the mushrooms were photographed in Cascade River State Park, Minnesota. They will be submitted to iNaturalist soon as I can get myself put together to do it.

Blurry, but just too cool to omit.

Ditto

In some activity for this long dormant thread, The New York Times publishes a report on some research on the performance differences between appointed and elected judges:

… any number of studies have found that elections can affect judicial behavior.

One released last week, for instance, found that elected judges are less likely to support gay rights than are appointed ones. The effect was most pronounced in cases decided by judges who ran in partisan elections.

That seemed the case on Friday, when Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was suspended for the rest of his term for ordering the state’s probate judges to defy federal court orders on same-sex marriage.

Appointed judges who must face retention elections also have reason to be sensitive to public opinion. In 2010, voters in Iowa removed three State Supreme Court justices who had joined a unanimous opinion allowing same-sex marriages.

Earlier studies have shown that judges facing re-election are more likely to impose harsh criminal sentences, including death sentences.

Further results for gay rights and the judicial system:

… the results lined up predictably: the more political the selection mechanism, the less support for gay rights. State Supreme Courts whose justices were elected in partisan elections supported gay rights 53 percent of the time. The number grew to 70 percent for nonpartisan elections, to 76 percent for retention elections and to 82 percent for appointed systems.

This motivates me to evolve my thinking on this issue since the last time I addressed it. In the blunt-force thinking of populism, it seems only natural that judges should be elected rather than appointed – thus permitting the correction of a system possibly prone to corruption by the appointing authority. But, as experience shows, an electoral process exposes the republic to a different set of befouling influences. Sometimes it’s difficult to remember that the vote is not given to the electorate because they are wise, but as a mechanism of buy-in: the disenfranchised citizen is more likely to riot than the voter who at least had the opportunity to join the discussion and select a leader, even if their favored candidate has lost.

A judge subjected to electoral pressures has, as a boss, not just the electorate, but even more importantly, those who are most strident: the ideologues who strive for some specific goal, whether it be adherence to a religious position, or defense of noxious industries, or some other goal repugnant to the Republic as a whole. Sometimes the electorate is even persuaded to elect those strident, wrong voices. And the citizenry may not be aware of the negative repercussions of such positions; indeed, as in the case of Alabama Supreme Court Chief Judge Moore, his predilection to place religion above state places the Republic at risk – even if he doesn’t think so, history is not on his side.

A judge who is appointed, and once appointed immune to dismissal without cause, must instead adhere to the judicial standards instituted by the judiciary. Of course, this can protect the awful seat-holder to an unseemly degree, but on balance, it seems likely that the greater good is served by the appointee better than the elected. Their independence from zealot and fad is greater, and they may ignore the licit influence of those who do not put the Republic ahead of themselves. (Neither is immune to illicit influences, whether they be the carrot or the stick.)

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court is elective in supposedly non-partisan elections. Mother Jones‘ Pema Levy reported in 2015 on how the court has transformed into a conservative bastion:

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC [the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce] are top players in a years-long undertaking by Walker and his allies to create a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that is friendly to conservative policies—an operation that has included spending millions on ads, ending public campaign financing for Supreme Court elections, rewriting the court’s ethics guidelines, and amending the state’s constitution. This effort has led to one of the most partisan and dysfunctional judicial bodies in the country, a court with liberal and conservative justices who won’t appear together in public. And it could well end up benefiting the conservative groups under investigation should the jurists they helped elect rule the probe should stop.

“This large amount of money and special interests has impacted the workings of the court, the reputation of the court, and how it’s interacting internally,” says former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske, who served on the court from 1993 to 1998.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC first began pouring millions into state Supreme Court elections in 2007, when the groups spent an estimated $2.9 million on ads backing conservative candidate Annette Ziegler for an open seat on the Supreme Court and attacking her opponent. Total spending on that election topped $5.8 million, four times the previous record for a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. The following year, the same groups spent more than $2.7 million on ads aimed at unseating sitting Justice Louis Butler, a liberal, and electing conservative candidate Michael Gableman. The election was so nasty that racially-tinged ads released by Gableman’s campaign were compared to the infamous Willie Horton spot from the 1988 presidential election.

Naturally, the thought of Governor Walker, a conservative icon and GOP Presidential candidate, whose tenure as governor has been marked by uproar and failed promises, appointing Supreme Court justices must bring one up short. However, as ideologues will often fail and be removed by disillusioned voters, so term-limited judges can also be removed, if only by time – and often, as in the case of Judge Moore, they can be removed for good reason. That is the thing about religious zealots and ideologues: they are so certain they are right, or so greedy for power, that they forget there are standards to be met, and punishments for not reaching them, that can be invoked upon them, even if they are convinced they are God’s gift to mankind.

I don’t normally talk about my job or my employer – a large engineering firm – but I thought the letter from the company’s President on the new fiscal year was very interesting for this paragraph:

Looking ahead, fiscal 2017 will not be any easier. This is not so much about us. We are doing fine, our customers like us, innovation and productivity are good. It’s more about what I would summarize as “geopolitical issues”: the rise of populism and nationalism, global migration, war and terror in some regions of the world, as well as uncertainties about what impact the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have. These developments do not help create an environment that encourages investment and expansion.

(My bold.)

Mr. Trump and President Duterte in the Philippines are consummate populists. It’s good to see at least one company willing to stand up and call them out for being disruptive and bad for the economy – because they’re bad for social stability – even if it’s only to their employees.

Keeping everyone up to date on our apple harvest…

Yep, there it is.

I just like the picture.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/

From CNN:

Saturday’s developments come less than a week after Trump appeared to indicate that he had not paid federal income tax over an unspecified period during a debate with Clinton. The Democratic nominee accused the billionaire of refusing to release his returns because he wanted to hide how little tax he had paid.

“That makes me smart,” Trump replied, and also said that any tax money he had paid would have been wasted by the federal government.

Isn’t this a cause and effect switcheroo? Saving money on taxes doesn’t make you smart, it just makes you slightly wealthier, if only momentarily – if he ran off to a casino and lost it on the slots, the result is insignificant.

But perhaps this is part of a mindset wherein we judge folks based on their actions – a meritocracy, if you will.

Look at me, I didn’t pay taxes, that must mean I’m smarter than the doofus down the street who paid.

Of course, he must make the assertion because, at some level, he must be aware there are alternative interpretations; but, as a businessman, through and through, who’s completely assimilated the ethics & morality of the private sector with, apparently, no regard for the public sector, it never occurs to him that government provides a number of services from which the Trump empire benefits: from the fact that we’re not someone’s colonial bitch, police services, judicial services (or is it too ironic to mention those in view of his various legal entanglements with those he’s screwed over?), even the much despised EPA, which helps lead the way in keeping the air breathable – indeed, at age 70, he should be thankful, since the haze we see over Beijing would have undoubtedly killed him if it were over New York City.

No, none of this occurs to him. He’s swallowed a right-wing fringe meme hook, line, and sinker.

It would be squandered too, believe me.

That’s all he can see on his own. He apparently has no clue that government is better than no government. He’s firmly a creature of the private sector, and without a clue as to why the public sector exists, its responsibilities and processes, he has little qualification for the position. He’ll just run it like a company, and that will end up being a disaster.

trona:

Trona (trisodium hydrogendicarbonate dihydrate also sodium sesquicarbonate dihydrate, Na₂CO₃•NaHCO₃•2H₂O is a non-marine evaporite mineral.^[3][4] It is mined as the primary source of sodium carbonate in the United States, where it has replaced the Solvay process used in most of the rest of the world for sodium carbonate production.

The word “trona” entered English by way of either Swedish (trona) or Spanish (trona), with both possible sources having the same meaning as in English. Both of these derive from the Arabic trōn, which in turn derives from the Arabic natron, and Hebrew נטרן(natruna), which comes from ancient Greek νιτρον (nitron), derived ultimately from ancient Egyptian ntry (or nitry). [Wikipedia]

And its use? Treehugger.com’s Katherine Martinko explains:

An article on Grist recently addressed this topic, explaining how baking soda is mined. It comes out of the ground in the form of minerals nahcolite and trona, which are refined into soda ash (a.k.a. calcium carbonate), then turned into baking soda (a.k.a. sodium bicarbonate), among other things.

(Bold mine.) Katherine goes on to note the environmental impacts of the mining and processing of trona, vs the positives of baking soda.

I was interested to see the Wikipedia’s entry on trona’s etymology:

The word “trona” entered English by way of either Swedish (trona) or Spanish (trona), with both possible sources having the same meaning as in English. Both of these derive from the Arabic trōn, which in turn derives from the Arabic natron, and Hebrew נטרן (natruna), which comes from ancient Greek νιτρον (nitron), derived ultimately from ancient Egyptian ntry (or nitry).

I’d run across natron as being used in ancient Egyptian mummification rituals – it helped with the drying process. So, in some sense, that baking soda you were using this morning happened to also be used in drying out human bodies millenia ago.

Miss Peeper, master fundraiser

As we picked tomatoes in the alley this morning, Peeper became despondent over our absence, came to the other side of the fence, and began fulfilling her name – peeping. She runs it up and down the upper scales, this despondent, I’ve been abandoned, tone to her voice that breaks your heart.

Deb observed that she’d be a perfect fund-raiser on the phone.

Morning fruits, night delights?

And here are some of the fruits of our morning’s labors.

I was peripherally aware of the goofiness in the Philippines, but somehow never commented on it for this thread. But let’s set the stage first: The Philippines is a nation consisting of roughly 7,641 islands in the Pacific Ocean, a population of 101 million, and a dominant religion of Roman Catholicism. With roughly 116,000 square miles available, density runs to 870 people / mile² – assuming all the area is livable. For comparison, world wide density is 35 / mile².

And their government? Formally, Constitutional Republic. Informal? Scary as hell.

Current President is Rodrigo Duterte, former mayor of Davao City. During his campaign for the Presidency, he pledged to fight crime, as noted by DW in an interview with Jasmine Lorch:

DW: Rodrigo Duterte promised a “bloody war” against criminals during his election campaign. Now that he has been elected, what concerns might human rights groups have with his promise to bring about justice?

Lorch: Duterte has not put forward a concrete plan to reduce poverty in the Philippines

Jasmin Lorch: National and international human rights groups have criticized Duterte’s approach to security and human rights since his time as mayor of Davao City. During Duterte’s tenure there as mayor, the city became home to notorious “dead squads” that indiscriminately targeted criminals, street children and critical activists.

During his presidential campaign, Duterte even boasted that he had personally killed criminals. Activist groups have rightly stressed that if human rights and due judicial process are ignored in the fight against crime, the justice system – and ultimately the Philippine’s democratic system – could be undermined.

And how is he implementing this? WaPo reports:

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday compared his campaign to kill criminals to the Holocaust, saying he would like to “slaughter” millions of addicts just like Adolf Hitler “massacred” millions of Jewish people.

“Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now, there are 3 million drug addicts. … I’d be happy to slaughter them,” he told reporters early Friday, according to GMA News.

“You know my victims, I would like to be, all criminals, to finish the problem of my country and save the next generation from perdition,” he said.

The comment was a response to critics who have likened him to Hitler. (Anestimated 6 million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust.)

Since Duterte swept to power in July, more than 3,300 Filipinos have been killed, either gunned down by police in late-night drug operations or felled by assassins, often after being named by police.

Victims of the extra-judicial killing spree are drug suspects — or those misidentified as drug suspects —named on police lists and targeted before they are charged or given the chance to stand trial. Often their bodies are dumped by the roadside with signs that read “pusher.”

And I suppose his supporters love him for it, but it’s the art of the brute who knows no better. And what will his supporters do when he finds reason to apply the same methods to some group of them? Then they find reason to regret their support. But, as with Trump and others, it seems people are looking for their “strong leader” with little thought as to methods being applied to themselves.

One of the options often used to wisely consume water is recycling: collecting water that has been used once, often by residents for excretion, clean it, and send it back for more use. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Not always, as Anthony King reports in NewScientist (17 September 2016, paywall):

Excreted and flushed through our sewage works and waterways, drug molecules are all around us. A recent analysis of streams in the US detected an entire pharmacy: diabetic meds, muscle relaxants, opioids, antibiotics, antidepressants and more. Drugs have even been found in crops irrigated by treated waste water.

The amounts that end up in your glass are minuscule, and won’t lay you low tomorrow. However, someone prescribed multiple drugs is more likely to experience side effects, and risks rise exponentially with each drug taken by a person over 65. So could tiny doses of dozens of drugs have an impact on your health?

“We don’t know what it means if you have a lifelong uptake of drugs at very low concentrations,” says Klaus Kümmerer at the University of Lüneburg, Germany.

Even what we might consider fresh water isn’t so fresh:

Paul Bradley of the US Geological Survey and his team checked streams in the eastern US for 108 chemicals, a drop in the bucket of the 3000 drug compounds in use. One river alone had 45. And even though two-thirds of the streams weren’t fed by treated waste water, 95 per cent of them had the anti-diabetic drug metformin, probably from street run-off or leaky sewage pipes (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/bqdb).

Back in 2013, Scientific American reprinted a report from Environmental Health News on the efficacy of water treatment facilities:

Only about half of the prescription drugs and other newly emerging contaminants in sewage are removed by treatment plants.

That’s the finding of a new report by the International Joint Commission, a consortium of officials from the United States and Canada who study the Great Lakes.

The impact of most of these “chemicals of emerging concern” on the health of people and aquatic life remains unclear. Nevertheless, the commission report concludes that better water treatment is needed.

“The compounds show up in low levels – parts per billion or parts per trillion – but aquatic life and humans aren’t exposed to just one at a time, but a whole mix,” said Antonette Arvai, physical scientist at the International Joint Commission and the lead author of the study. “We need to find which of these chemicals might hurt us.”

The NewScientist report explored the possibility of less stable drugs (i.e., shelf-life), which might make pharmaceuticals more resource intensive (in my view), so I wonder if an alternative would be to require the pharmaceutical companies to also do the research to discover how to remove the remnants of their drugs from the water supply – or to guarantee the human body completely absorbs it. Extra points if they can report that common treatment options already remove the drug remains.

From the 60 Seconds column of NewScientist (14 September 2016):

A newly identified parasitic worm has been named in honour of US president Barack Obama. The thread-like blood fluke, called Baracktrema obamai, infects freshwater turtles. Its discoverers say they admire Obama, and that, to the people that study them, parasites are beautiful (Journal of Parasitology, doi.org/bqfk).

Oy.

I hate it when I become vertiginous in my chair.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=f1BgzIZRfT8%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_embedded

In connection with this post, I present boine:

Of or pertaining to the boas.

YourDictionary

Discover Magazine’s D-brief blog covers a 3-in-1 fossil:

An image from the study showing the juvenile snake that ate a lizard that ate an insect. The arrow points to tip of the lizard’s snout. (Credit: Krister T. Smith)

It’s not often that paleontologists uncover a fossil that reveals what its dinner ate for dinner.

Working in Germany’s Messel Pit, a prehistoric volcanic lake, researchers found an insect inside of a lizard inside of a snake (a snalizect?), all preserved for posterity in ancient sediment. It’s essentially a prehistoric turducken, although not one you’re likely to serve up at Thanksgiving dinner.

This particular example of fossil-ception let researchers peer into a 48-million year old food chain, and bolsters theories about the dining habits of this particular species of snake, likely belonging to the genus Paleopython.

For those who love dense, academic prose, this is from the original article by Krister T. Smith and Agustin Scanferia on Springer Link, aka Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments.

The distorted skull is seen in left dorsolateral view (Fig. 2c), but CT reconstructions allow the observation of most of the ventral side of preserved bones (Fig. 2b). The edentulous premaxilla exhibits long transverse processes as in most boines. The frontals bear a conspicuous thin supraorbital shelf, which confers a quadrangular shape in dorsal view. This configuration can be observed in Palaeopython fischeri, as well as in juvenile and adult boines.

I’ve not heard of this phenomenon, but Spaceweather.com supplies information, both current and what they plan to research:

Researchers have long known that one of the van Allen Radiation Belts dips down toward Earth over South America, creating a zone of high radiation called “The South Atlantic Anomaly” (SAA). Since its discovery in 1958, the SAA has been shape-shifting, growing larger and intensifying.  A map published just last week in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Space Weather Quarterly outlines the anomaly with new precision:

When a spacecraft in low-Earth orbit passes through the anomaly, “the radiation causes faults in spacecraft electronics and can induce false instrument readings,” explains Bob Schaefer of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, lead author of the paper reporting the results. “We actually used these spurious signals to map out the radiation environment at an altitude of 850 km.” …

According to orthodox thinking, the SAA reaches down from space to within about 200 km of Earth’s surface. Below that altitude, its effects should be mitigated by the shielding of Earth’s atmosphere and geomagnetic field. To test this idea, Spaceweather.com and Earth to Sky Calculus have undertaken a program to map the SAA from below using weather balloons equipped with radiation sensors.  Next week we will share the results of our first flight from a launch site in Chile.  Stay tuned!

For those wondering about a correlation with Earth’s gravitational anomalies, here’s a recent map from the European Space Agency:

ESA Gravitational Map (from UniverseToday)

Doesn’t look strong from this visual inspection.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964, American title Godzilla vs. the Thing, and included extra footage – this may be the version I saw) contains the elements of a good film, mixed together with a potato masher, and laid out for all to see. A giant egg has floated into the fishing village’s harbor as part of a destructive typhoon. The village mayor claims it and then sells it to a notorious entrepreneur and his shadowy backer, forcing the scientist and journalists who come to examine it to leave. The egg is placed in a huge hot house where it’ll be exhibited for crass commercial purposes.

Two tiny people appear to claim the egg, but their supplications for its return fall on the deaf, greedy ears of the owners, and they reluctantly leave; as they go, the journalists get a glimpse of the Thing, a gigantic butterfly whose egg it is.

As the ground is cleared for a project of some sort (I forgot what), from the muck and mud appears GODZILLA, who proceeds to do what GODZILLA does – stomp the village flat. The Japanese defense forces rally to cast Godzilla forth, but fail. The US Navy is called in, but, in an incoherent sequence, they fail as well (although, unlike the home-town Japanese, they suffer no casualties – a lost opportunity for the film makers, who could have had Godzilla clutching plastic model ships to his breast – throw in another typhoon at the same time and the visuals would have been stunning).

Goya’s Colossus

It’s worth taking a break from the summation to note that some fairly awful special effects produced a sharply focused city-scape in the foreground, with a mobile, fuzzy, faded-out Godzilla in the background, resulting in a surprisingly effective & creepy sequence of Godzilla moving through a city proper. In some bizarre manner, it reminds me of the great Spanish artist Goya’s painting Colossus¹, a mundane village in the foreground, a monstrous, sketchily seen creature passing in the night … although Godzilla wasn’t exactly passing peacefully.

In any case, as towns and villages fall to the monster, a deputation is sent to the island of the two tiny people who claimed the egg, asking for assistance in killing Godzilla. After a brief squabble or two, the Thing agrees to help, as its final act. At this juncture we see a gesture to the nature of Evil, as the entrepreneur, suddenly destitute, beats his shadowy backer up and then steals the money from the backer’s floor safe. With money-lust in his eyes and Godzilla literally looming in the distance, as seen (quite effectively) through a window, he turns his back on the backer, who pulls a gun and shoots him dead. Then the backer grabs the money, but Godzilla, who apparently really zips along, smashes the building, ending the life of the backer. Thus does evil always destroy itself in its unbridled lusts. Godzilla is often a morality play.

Godzilla menaces the egg, but the Thing arrives just in time to distract Godzilla (I hesitate to guess Godzilla’s gender, if I may be so irrelevant), engendering an epic battle (the Thing generates tremendous blasts of wind, confusing Godzilla …) which sees Godzilla distracted, and the Thing dead. Somehow, Godzilla knows that an island just off the coast has a collection of teachers and children Who Must Be Destroyed, and so he abandons his mission to destroy the egg to swim to the island in search of his prey. This gives the little people time to sing to the egg, causing it to burst and give forth …

Mothra larvae (from MothraKingdom)

TWO MOTHRAS! (Larvae?)

Yep, that’s your plot twist of the day. They plunge into the sea in pursuit of Godzilla, catch up to him on the beach, ensnare him in what appears to be spiderweb; Godzilla rolls off a cliff (wait, they’re on the beach, right?) and falls into the sea.

But is he dead? Have they failed in their mission?

The movie suffers from continuity problems, dialog problems, stereotype problems, special-effect problems (it was particularly deflating to see Godzilla’s breath literally melting the scenery as well as the military’s tanks), problems, problems, problems. But there’s a tangible plot, with some real cause and effect results, and if Godzilla’s appearance is less traceable to events and more to metaphorical requirements, well, take your complaints to the Customer Service desk.

You know who will be manning it.

¹Colossus may have been painted by an apprentice of Goya.

The only thing that has changed for Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare with respect to the upcoming election is his anxiety level:

What’s more, many of Trump’s voters are going to vote for him because of national security, not despite it. They are going to vote for him believing that Trump is the “tough” candidate. They are going to vote for him believing in his conflation of terrorists and the victims of terrorism. They are going vote for him believing that “a wall” to keep out migrants has something meaningful to do with national security. They are going to vote for him having accepted at some level his apocalyptic account of confrontation with the Islamic world and his insistence that all we need is greater willpower and more firepower for victory to be ours.

The radical disparity between elite policy views of Trump in the national security arena and the apparent resilience of his support certainly has parallels in other areas. But the national security side is different both in the degree of alarm and in the degree of unanimity. This is the area, after all, where the president has the most latitude, and it’s an area where non-partisan expertise is still valued and attitudes tend to be least partisan.

What has happened here? How have we come to a place where at least partly in the name of national security, a huge swath of the electorate is about to vote for a man when a wide community of practitioners and scholars considers it obvious that his views, actions, words, and very psyche threaten national security?

Maybe it’s time to sue Roger Ailes, former CEO of Fox News, for the deliberate deprivation of the American electorate. Doubt that? Here’s Bruce Bartlett, prominent conservative, taking Fox News apart. Not subjectively, but objectively. This should worry every person who thinks they’re a conservative and suckles at the Fox News teat.

Steve Benen on MaddowBlog notes that one of the salient features of Mr. Trump’s campaign is its complete lack of policies and plans if it should win the Presidency:

“I think the American people, the American voter, will be bored to tears if that is in fact the way [i.e., detailed plans and policies] this thing goes,” [top Trump campaign advisor Sam Clovis] said.

It’s a valuable insight, if for no other reason because Clovis’ comments make clear that Team Trump is deliberately avoiding a substantive campaign debate over the issues. For the Republican candidate and his team, it’s a feature, not a bug.

In May, Politico quoted a campaign insider saying Trump didn’t want to “waste time on policy.” The Trump source added at the time, “It won’t be until after he is elected … that he will figure out exactly what he is going to do.”

A month later, the candidate himself added that “the public doesn’t care” about public policy.

Which leaves me with the odd vision of two candidates of this type slugging out, differentiating on … just exactly what? Who can make the biggest promise? Who can shout out bizarre promises the loudest?

Sounds like Extreme Populism, a position that the GOP would have disdained just years ago.

Wait, that’s sort of what happened during the GOP primary. And Trump won that, mostly through crude, even ludicrous promises, and by promising all over the map – from increasing the military while cutting taxes to building the biggest wall ever seen. He overwhelmed the media and his opponents by being outlandish.

Here’s the thing. I remember watching that field of candidates grow to 17, and hoping SOMEONE acceptable would show up. What did I see? Failed corporate executives, a Dominionist, a governor under investigation for corruption, another who left office after destroying all of his office computers (and then he tried to ride the Kim Davis spectacle to victory), a wet-behind the ears Senator with no, Z E R O accomplishments … ok, I admit to a brief moment of hope when Dr. Carson joined the fun, but he swiftly proved that, no matter how bright his medical accomplishments glinted, they did not translate to political wisdom – just another fringe-right flake.

But – they were all appealing to a conservative base that has not been trained to think rationally. Those who can have been chased from the party. This lead to the acquisition of the nomination by someone who best appealed to a base who feels, rather than thinks.

And that characterization does not apply to the rest of America. While some of us are even flakier than the GOP, most of us think. And Clinton has come forward with policy specifics that can be considered, evaluated, and judged. From that, we can deduce she was not lying when she said she was prepared to be President.

That willingness to act like a mature political candidate, aware of the tough job ahead of her, should be enough to get the votes of not only those who think Clinton really is the best, but from those who were disappointed that Bernie didn’t win, from the ex-Republicans tossed from their party, even from those considering Gary Johnson as an alternative – because Governor Johnson has been flubbing his big chance to shine.

American’s perception of crime rates may be completely off, but according to the Pew Research Center, support for the death penalty has dropped:

Even as support for the death penalty has declined across nearly all groups, demographic differences remain: Men are more likely to back the use of the death penalty than women, white Americans are more supportive than blacks and Hispanics, and attitudes on the issue also differ by age, education and along religious lines.

More than half of men (55%) say they are in favor of the death penalty and 38% are opposed. Women’s views are more divided: 43% favor the death penalty, 45% oppose it.

A 57% majority of whites favor the death penalty for those convicted of murder (down from 63% last year). But blacks and Hispanics support it at much lower rates: Just 29% of blacks and 36% of Hispanics favor capital punishment.

Which is interesting in how to explain it. Is it an advance in moral thinking by a significant number of Americans? Or – due to the misperception of skyrocketing crime – have many Americans concluded that harsh punishment actually doesn’t work? And the racial gap is interesting, if explainable – if you don’t trust law enforcement to arrest the proper person for a crime, then why ask for harsh punishments for the probable innocents?

Or perhaps the existence and publicity surrounding The Innocence Project, and those who’ve been proven innocent by them, has served to remind folks that enforcing a death penalty against those who may be innocent is risking the greatest injustice of all.

Limnology:

… is the study of inland waters. It is often regarded as a division of ecology orenvironmental science. It covers the biological, chemical, physical, geological, and other attributes of all inland waters (running and standing waters, both fresh and saline, natural or man-made). This includes the study of lakes and ponds, rivers, springs, streams and wetlands.^[1] A more recent sub-discipline of limnology, termed landscape limnology, studies, manages, and conserves these aquatic ecosystems using a landscape perspective.

(Wikipedia)

We saw this sign on the north side of Duluth, Minnesota.