Category Archives: Uncategorized

The cultural struggles in Iran have analogies in the United States – but are far more sharply delineated, due to the overtly religious nature of the country. Take this report by Rohollah Faghihi in AL Monitor:

Hard-liners say [President Rouhani’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ali] Jannati is crossing the red lines of the 1979 Islamic Revolution’s values, while Reformists charge that he is retreating in the face of criticism and attacks by conservatives.

During the past decade, concerts have rarely made waves, but ever since Rouhani took office, concert organizers have repeatedly faced obstruction and consequent cancellation.

To avoid concert cancellations, which damage Rouhani’s approval ratings, the administration has issued a circular to prevent other state bodies such as the judiciary and the police from calling them off. The circular states that the police isn’t allowed to stop concerts. Jannati has said that based on the new law, singers shall request permission to hold a concert from the Ministry of Culture, while the police is only to deal with traffic around the venue. In response, the deputy head of Iran’s armed forces, Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, ordered the police to continue “dealing with ethical and misbehavior anomalies in places, including concert venues.” …

The judiciary and police in the province have recently stopped planned concerts by acclaimed traditional singers such as Shahram Nazeri and Salar Aghili. Explaining the cancellation of Aghili’s concert, Khorasan Razavi’s General Prosecutor Gholam-Ali Sadeghi said, “There were some problems regarding the content and performance of concerts, as well as the outfits of the audience. … This led to different classes of people [such as] seminarians and senior clerics complaining to the prosecutor’s office about concert performances in the religious capital of Iran.”

The hardliners may even be upsetting the notoriously conservative Supreme Leader Khamenei:

” … Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei is an artist, poet, musicologist and scholar.”

The supreme leader has in the past expressed his views on music and concerts. In a notable speech two decades ago, he said, “The music in our region hasn’t been used for higher goals, which is in contrast to the path of music in Europe. You know that I am naturally anti-Western. Nothing in the West fascinates me. At the same time, I approve of the positive characteristics of the West. One of those attributes is music. … Informative and meaningful music has long existed there. … In the West, sometimes a nation has been saved by music.”

Properly abstracted, it’s battles over power cloaked in religion.

Reminds me of the history of the Vatican.

I’ve been pondering whether or not to respond to an email missive I received a few days ago. On the one hand, it’s a deceptive crock of shit, which I detest especially when it’s used to attack anyone. On the other hand, I get tired of digging through crocks of shit, and no doubt my readers tire of it as well.

But it’s bugging me.

So here’s the mail in totality:

The problems begin and end with context, specifically those of President Truman and of the Clintons. Let’s set them.

President Truman, successor to the Presidency after the death of President Roosevelt in 1945, was a machine politician, which is to say he worked for the Democrats and did what he was told until he achieved higher office. Not that he lacked leadership skills, as he demonstrated in his military service during WW I, rising to Major before discharge, but his political career was more to fill positions that needed filling than as a standout politician; even his selection to run for VP was as a second choice.

His education was undistinguished, not attaining a college degree.

Finally, his environment: a world devastated by two World Wars. While certain individuals, such as the Kennedys, were wealthy, there wasn’t a lot of loose change waiting to be swept up by casual janitors, and Truman wasn’t even willing to do that – refusing corporate endorsement opportunities, etc. As a poor businessman prior to his political career, he had little to build and live on, and basically survived on the Presidential pension.

A reader comments about water & cities:

“It is not overly dramatic to say that the world’s “use once and throw away” attitude has enabled a slow-motion water apocalypse.”

I posit that our population is already beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth; we’ve been borrowing from the future in our usage of water, crop land, forests, and hydrocarbon fuels for decades.

Someone needs to develop a virus which causes sterility in all post-infant humans alive today, so that there is not another birth until those infants (and those in gestation) grow to adulthood. And even that might not be enough of a dip in population. I suspect the “adjustment” will be a lot more nasty than that fanciful notion when it comes.

In my darker moments I figure it’s going to be a nasty plague which will leave the survivors with two tasks: burying the dead and learning how to restrain our reproductive capabilities to stay within the carrying capacity.

How we step over the “all [human] life is sacred” line, without justifying casual murder, will be quite an accomplishment. Cordwainer Smith approached that problem in his two Norstrilia stories – when a child reached the age of majority, they were examined by representatives of the government (the “Instrumentality”) as to whether they would be contributing members of society, and those who didn’t pass were humanely killed. The criteria were skipped over, as it wasn’t really the point of the series.

I suspect we’ll never get there, and will instead discover population dynamics apply to humans as well as deer, wolves, and other creatures which consume resources. We’re just good at dodging the bullet, as it were.

Controversy has come to a subject that’s a kissin’ cousin (sorry) to sex robots – child sized robots and allied Virtual Reality (VR) constructs for pedophiles. Aviva Rutkin reports on it in NewScientist (13 August 2016):

But what if dolls like these could help rather than hurt? Ron Arkin, a robotics engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Kate Darling, who studies human-robot interaction at MIT argue that virtual reality and sex robots might function as an outlet to redirect dark desires towards machines and away from real children. If it works, it could help past offenders reintegrate harmlessly into society as well as helping prevent those who have never offended from doing so.

I’m puzzled – should these two be considered expert on what is basically a psychological subject? But here’s one:

… [Patrice Renaud, a psychologist at the University of Montreal, Canada,] began to wonder if VR pornography could do better, and avoid the moral concerns posed by real pictures. In a series of experiments, he and his team showed that non-deviant men and sexual offenders both responded realistically to VR stimuli. …

But so little is known – what will happen if a pedophile is given free rein with a child sized sex robot?

But Renaud cautions that it may also have the opposite effect: a bot could normalise the behaviour and promote “the need to go further and to cross the line with real victims”.

A real dilemma. We may have a treatment for pedophilia to hand – or a tool for removing the last restraint for those who’ve not indulged. And we really don’t know offhand. If there’s some way to discover which we have, without exposing a pedophile to it, then that’s the way to go – but what if there isn’t? What if it’s just a matter of trying it?

Do you do it?

Adding to the swirl of Saudi Arabian politics are concerns about the impending American Presidential election, as Bruce Riedel reports in AL Monitor:

Trump is a scary unknown for the Saudis. His vitriolic anti-Muslim rhetoric and tough talk about countries that preach radical Islam is seen as a threat. They noticed that in his foreign policy speech last week, Saudi Arabia was not included in the list of friends of America (Trump listed Israel, Egypt and Jordan but none of the Gulf states). He did talk about how poor Saudi visa vetting let al-Qaeda extremists into the United States before 9/11.

Trump promises to tear up the Iran deal but he seems to be in cahoots with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has no foreign policy experience and his advisers aren’t known for their expertise on the Gulf. Trump has also said that the United States should have kept Iraq’s oil wealth after the 2003 invasion, a very alarming precedent for the kingdom.

Clinton, as secretary of state, is a well-known figure in Riyadh. The Saudis are much more comfortable with her and her advisers, and have a long history with the Clintons. They were extremely disappointed that Bill didn’t press Israel harder and tougher in 2000 to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict when they thought he would. Instead, he blamed the Palestinians.

Clinton sought to advance political reform in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, which helped prompt the Saudi intervention on the island. She was part of the Obama team that dumped Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. She backed the Iran deal. Riyadh expects a Clinton White House to be a continuation of Obama, whom they soured on years ago. Continuity is not what the Saudis are hoping for in US policy.

So the Saudi royal family is rather gloomy – neither candidate looks sympathetic to their concerns. Which are …

Riyadh sees the ever closer relations between Iran, Russia, Syria, Hezbollah and Shiite Iraqis as a fundamental shift in the strategic environment in the Middle East. One Saudi commentator with close connections to the royal family labeled the Russian deployment a strategic “shock” that demonstrates how badly the United States underestimated Iranian and Russian aggressive intentions.

The Saudis always feared the Iran nuclear deal would end Tehran’s pariah status and give it more strategic options. Saudi efforts to buy off Moscow have been a failure. …

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir is a veteran America watcher. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef is the most pro-American prince since King Fahd. As defense minister, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has sought to reassure Washington that he is ready for prime time despite his inexperience. Riyadh has bought over $110 billion in arms from Obama. But there is no confidence in the Saudi leadership about the future of American leadership. Meanwhile, Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are growing closer. Saudi paranoia about Iran is exaggerated but nonetheless a reality unlikely to change.

Note the sweet red limbs of this babe of the Swiss.

Swiss Chard, it is.

For those who worry that the United States is becoming a vast land of intolerant shitheads, here’s a bit of relief: CNN reports on a waitress stiffed out of a tip because the customers thought she was an illegal immigrant (she was born in the USA), and how the community rallied around her:

When locals heard what happened, a group of residents wrote a note to the waitress.

“We appreciate and value your hard work in taking care of the people in the community…you are the one who belongs in downtown,” the Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance letter said.

Included with the note: a tip. A substantial one.

Gotta hope the folks who indulged in this fine fit of xenophobia heard about the response. To me, it’s a profound violation of American ideals of generosity towards those who work with and for us to treat the waitress in such a thoughtless hostile manner.

For the record, the Pew Research Center reports illegal immigrant flow has been falling under the Obama Administration:

Which, on first blush, suggests we’re returning more illegals home than are entering. However, there are other factors, such as deaths, voluntary returns, and no doubt others that don’t occur to me at the moment.

While I have not written about it here, any time I see the word Mycoremediation (the use of fungi to degrade or sequester contaminants) I get a little excited because, well, because it’s using a natural ability of nature to clean up after ourselves, with a hopefully justified presumption that the mushrooms produced are either edible, or can be disposed of safely. And, of course, there’s no extra use of energy, noxious chemicals, or mechanical displacements. I first heard about it years ago in connection with the removal of diesel fuel contaminated soil, possibly as far back as my BBS days, and I keep hoping it’ll come into greater use.

So I was pleased to see Treehugger.com cover the use of fungi to safely handle the disposal of smartphone batteries. Take it away, Megan Treacy!

Researchers at the University of South Florida have created a process for extracting lithium and cobalt from lithium-ion batteries that is straight from nature. The researchers found that fungi can safely and simply extract the metals from used batteries, keeping the materials out of landfills and ready to be reused in new batteries.

The batteries are first taken apart and the cathodes are pulverized. Then three different strains of fungus — Aspergillus niger, Penicillium simplicissimum and Penicillium chrysogenum — take over.

“Fungi naturally generate organic acids, and the acids work to leach out the metals,” explained Jeffrey A. Cunningham, Ph.D., the project’s team leader, to the American Chemical Society. “Through the interaction of the fungus, acid and pulverized cathode, we can extract the valuable cobalt and lithium. We are aiming to recover nearly all of the original material.”

Processes used to recycle batteries and other electronics can require high temperatures and harsh chemicals and can be unsafe. The fungi are able to recover the valuable metals safely and, as a bonus, it’s very inexpensive.

The process isn’t quite as efficient as I’d like to see, and the extracted material isn’t ready for re-use – but it’s a step on the path, and a really cool step.

Grave of the Vampire (1972, aka Seed of Terror) is a study in twin morbid fascinations, but unfortunately for the movie makers, it’s not how they wanted it to be. The story of a vicious, ancient vampire who occasionally rapes his victims rather than drains them, his victims, and his inadvertent son who hates him, kills him, and tragically then inherits both his powers and his lusts.

The good part of the movie is, despite how the above sounds, the story. At each commercial break my Arts Editor and I would stare and each other and say, “I can’t imagine where they’re going with this!” From the detective who we thought would be the hero of the day, but ends up … well, metaphors fail me … to the student who, upon attending the vampire’s class in folk-tales, decides that he must be a vampire, and that she’d like to be his vampire wife as well, the movie has several twists that have you at least wondering which rabbit hole we’re going down next.

The bad part of the movie? The actors, whoever they were (not a single name I could recognize), who were, for the most part, so wooden you could have built a shed out of them. Little chemistry, leaden delivery, their delivery left us wondering how they ever completed this movie. The son of the vampire appears completely disinterested even when women are coming on to him, staring into space as if he’s wondering why he ever took this acting job. Worthy of a treatment by MST3K, they’re so bad.

So, if you have a certain curiosity about films that are just so bad, yet in some ways vaguely competent, this might be one to see.

A reader identifies the green car:

Three portholes on the side? Six-cylinder Buick Roadmaster. Hard to pin down the date without a view of the grill, but start with 1949.

Thanks.

Sally Adee at NewScientist (13 August 2016, paywall) covers how some cities and water mix poorly:

Beyond Rio, evidence of our disregard for the wet stuff is all around, and it is starting to bite. Beijing has sucked so much water out of the ground that the city is sinking by 11 centimetres a year. That’s positively glacial compared with parts of California’s Central Valley, which are dropping by 5 centimetres per month.

In Connecticut, nuclear power plants have shut down for lack of water to cool the furious reactions inside, and coal power stations in India have shut due to droughts.

China has been facing water issues for decades, but a point was put on the issue this May when the citizens of Lintao, of 200,000 people and located basically in the center of China, found they no longer had water. From Marketplace‘s Rob Schmitz:

Lintao is in Gansu province, in China’s arid northwest, situated along the Tao River, a tributary of the Yellow River. The combination of a drought and a surge of urban development means the city’s underground water supply has dwindled to dangerously low levels, leaving tens of thousands of people without easy access to the precious resource.

Experts fear Lintao could be a sign of things to come.

“Four hundred Chinese cities now face a water shortage. One hundred and ten cities face a severe water shortage. This is a very serious problem,” says Liu Changming, a retired hydrologist for the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

China is home to more than 20 percent of the world’s population, but it contains only 7 percent of the world’s fresh water. Liu, who advises China’s leaders on water policy, says all of China’s so-called “water scarce” cities are in northern China, home to half a billion people, and a region that contributes nearly half of China’s economic growth. Former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao once called northern China’s water shortage “a threat to the survival of the Chinese nation.”…

According to Wang Shucheng, China’s former minister of water resources, at current rates of water extraction, many cities in northern China — including Beijing, home to more than 20 million people — will run out of water in 15 years.

Wang said this 11 years ago.

Rob goes on to detail several water transfer projects, but explicit is the question: what about those who were consuming the water now being transferred? Implicitly, are we beyond carrying capacity? The South China Morning Post covers a report by The Nature Conservancy, summarizing it thusly:

Not sure what it is exactly. Should have asked the middle aged lady dressed as a flapper if it was hers’ – and if we could get to pose with it. But here’s what we have.

(Edited to remove double link)

NewScientist (13 August 2016) reports that if you’re a mouse with Down’s Syndrome, doctors may be able to help you:

Several compounds have improved memory and learning in a mouse version of the condition, suggesting that its cognitive effects can be changed. Until recently, this idea was unthinkable, says Mara Dierssen at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain. …

People with Down’s syndrome seem to have fewer neurons in some brain areas, fewer connections between neurons, and altered neuron behaviour.

In both mice and people, a molecule called NKCC1 seems to be involved. Reducing levels of this compound in neurons taken from Down’s syndrome mice makes them sprout more connections, Laura Cancedda of the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa told the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, last month.

In 2015, her team found that using a drug called bumetanide to block this molecule made Down’s syndrome mice perform as well as other mice in memory tests. The drug is already used to treat heart disease, and trials in adults with Down’s syndrome are set to start towards the end of this year, says Cancedda.

There’s been some evidence suggesting Prozac given to pregnant women carrying a Down’s child may be helpful. This has led to an interesting blockade in testing:

[Carol] Tamminga [at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center] has now begun a small placebo-controlled trial of Prozac in pregnant women. However, she has found that many families would rather try Prozac themselves than risk being allocated to the trial’s placebo group. “Those who are potentially interested in doing this are doing it anyway,” she says.

When my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and recommended for an experimental study, it was not a blinded study, so we knew which arm he landed in, and I recall vividly our relief that he was in the arm in which the new treatment would be studied; the other arm was a standard treatment. Given the morbidity of pancreatic cancer, it seemed going experimental was the best approach.

Since Prozac is easily procured, I can see how desperate parents would decide on self-medication, despite the dangers and unknowns.

Finally, and reminiscent of some in the deaf community, comes objections from those who value Down’s Syndrome patients for themselves:

Rather than trying to develop drugs, it would be better to change our education and work systems to enable people with Down’s syndrome to live fuller lives, says Simone Aspis at the UK campaign group Changing Perspectives.

I glanced around the Changing Perspective website but didn’t find anything on this subject. To me, not working on resolving the disability seems like madness, unless you believe there’s a divinity which has commanded that a child shall have a severe disability. That, too, seems like madness.

The Vampire (1957) is an old fashioned tragedy: a man is cursed through no fault of his own, and, despite his best efforts, will meet his doom at the hands of the gods Er, a pill – well, that lacks punch, doesn’t it? But I might as well say it: Much like Oedipus, his fate is seemingly inescapable.

In this case a doctor in a small town is accidentally dosed with the experimental pills developed by a researcher to regress animals to more primitive states. As the evening comes along, he (inexplicably) changes into a monster that attacks whoever is nearby, indulging in an exceptionally neat neck nibble which results in their death. He awakens at home, restored physically and amnesiac, but soon tormented with visions of his fatal actions.

His victims, meanwhile, after dying decompose at an accelerated rate due to the virus the doctor carries in his saliva. It certainly takes care of any untidy extra vampires, but why this is necessary is not clear.

Finally, horrified at his nightly excursions, he decides to be honorable and commit suicide, but is delayed in this effort by a valiant nurse who he then terrorizes as he makes one more trip into the land of terrors. Eventually the police intervene and he’s put down. Uh, killed.

There is little to think about in this movie. Don’t take the pills your daughter brings you, perhaps? The characters are living their everyday lives or fighting for them; little growth is achieved. And as medical pills are substituted for the remarks of an oracle, it’s difficult to place it in a greater context. Oedipus Rex, which my Arts Editor and I saw on the stage at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival last year, is a play of horror, which in my view was written to enforce respect for the gods. This movie is more about the random horror that can occur in the most placid small American town – and it’s just not all that convincing. He can struggle all he likes – but the scriptwriter is implacable in his plans.

This is not to condemn everything. Cinematography, audio, and makeup are all good, and the acting is at least competent (although the psychiatry professor is miscast – he comes across as almost a good old boy, rather than an academic). But the story is at fault, as it throws away a couple of interesting characters without exploring them, and fails to develop the other characters to any great degree.

Perhaps others will like it more, but I cannot recommend it.

Carl Engelking on Discover Magazine’s D-brief blog is reporting the possibility there’s an Earth-like planet orbiting in the Proxima Centauri system – the closest such system to our own, at 4+ light years.

The ante for hyping a new exoplanet discovery is a little higher these days, but if rumors are true, this one makes the grade: astrophysicists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) plan to announce they’ve spotted an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in its habitable zone. This, according to an anonymous source quoted in a report that appeared Friday in Der Spiegel.

“The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface—an important requirement for the emergence of life,” the source said.

Carl throws a little cold water on the flames of curiosity:

Although media reports say the rumored planet orbits in a region that’s potentially favorable for life, these smaller stars are less stable, and Proxima Centauri is known to have violent flares at times. Its occasional tantrums have made astronomers skeptical of finding life around red dwarf stars in the past.

Dental calculus is a hardened form of dental plaque. In an offline article for Archaeology entitled “Worlds Within Us,” (September / October, 2016, pp. 38-43) Samir Patel reports on a new branch of archaeology – the intersection of field archaeology, dentistry, and genetics:

The mouth is the microbial equivalent of a rainforest, teeming with creatures, interspecies warfare, cataclysms. Some of these residents for a film on your teeth, colonies stuck together with DNA, proteins, and polysaccharides. Left unbrushed, this plaque, for reasons that aren’t really known, occasionally fossilizes in your mouth to form tartar, dental calculus. Calculus is tough and almost universally observed clinging to the teeth of adult skeletons discovered at archaeological sites. For many years this material was ignored, discarded, and otherwise overlooked, as were human bones prior to the introduction of modern archaeological practices. …

Now? With the increase in understanding of the microbiome, the web of life becomes a more salient concept. Although not the first sample published, the Dalheim burials has had a rich yield.

[Christina] Warriner and her coauthors – 32 in total from a range of disciplines – catalogued, from the mouths of four medieval individuals, 40 opportunistic pathogens, including species associated with cardiovascular disease, meningitis, and pneumonia, as well as what might be the oral ancestor of modern gonorrhea. They sequenced the entire genome of Tannarella forsythia, a cause of periodontal disease. They saw dietary DNA from pigs, cruciferous vegetables, and bread wheat. They looked for proteins as well, and found ones associated with pathogen virulence, others produced by the human immune system, and beta-lactoglobulin, a durable dairy protein.

Etc etc. A veritable hoard of information which will further shape our perceptions of the environment and living conditions of our ancestors. Will our insistence on clean teeth deprive future archaeologists of information about us?

Deb’s been a little frustrated with our broccoli plant.

Maybe ‘cuz it grows up with big leaves – but nothin’ to snack on.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press covers the rampaging duck here.

From an offline-only article in Archaeology entitled “Romans on the Bay of Naples,” by Marco Merola, comes the word lapilli:

A team of archaeologists and conservators worked to remove mud and lapilli (small stones ejected by a volcanic eruption) and to expose and clean the stunning wall  paintings emerging from the debris.

Having been to Naples, Herculaneum, and Pompeii many years ago, I was fascinated by the article, picturing the work near the magnificent Bay of Naples, wondering just what the villa looked like in its day.

Before the lapilli started falling.

A reader observes the Trump memorabilia and revolts me:

If that actually was Trump if could feed a lot of hungry people.

Oy. Who would have such poor taste?

A reader draws a connection between Minnesota and the Met Opera:

Why does this sound exactly like the Minnesota Orchestra, except the musicians did back down? Yeah. I still think the management at the M.O. [Minnesota Orchestra] are a bunch of crooked bastards. Like so many other idiots, they pissed in the soup and won’t be forgiven or forgotten for many decades.

I suspect Scott would agree that the situations are remarkably similar. However, I do not agree that it won’t be forgotten, because management is not the face of the Minnesota Orchestra – it’s the players. In 10 years, perhaps 15% of the audiences will remember the hiatus and who caused it. Hopefully, in 20 years the current management team will be entirely gone, and the replacements will be better – and not drawn from the business world. And the audience, by and large, will neither remember nor care. Just a few – hopefully the important ones.

Like Scott and you.

When Obama took office one of his goals was the shuttering of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. From MTV:

A long time ago, Senator Barack Obama explained why the detention facility at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay needed to close. “Our legitimacy is reduced when we’ve got a Guantanamo that is open,” he said during a debate in June 2007. “Those kinds of things erode our moral claims that we are acting on behalf of broader universal principles.”

More than eight years later, after getting a significant promotion, he hasn’t changed his mind. “For many years it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay does not advance our security,” President Obama said on Tuesday at the White House. “It undermines it. … This is about closing a chapter in our history.”

Upon announcement of the transfer of 15 more detainees to the United Arab Emirates (leaving 61 still resident, from a high of nearly 800), Benjamin Wittes publishes a comment on Lawfare:

First, this is a significant accomplishment, in my opinion. Getting detainees out of Guantanamo is very hard. There is both an intensive internal review process and, for those detainees who clear that process, there’s the additional hurdle—sometimes a very time-consuming hurdle—of finding a country that will take the detainee subject to the security and humane assurances that the review process and other U.S. legal and policy constraints demand. The result are two backlogs: the backlog of detainees who cannot be cleared for transfer, and the backlog of detainees who are cleared but cannot be removed. This one action clears 43 percent of the second backlog. Before it, there were 35 detainees at Guantanamo cleared for transfer; now there are only 20.

Second, with this transfer, Obama is getting rather close to the point at which keeping Guantanamo open looks just plain silly. I’ve never much cared whether Guantanamo closes or not. I dislike the symbolic politics of the “Close Guantanamo” movement about as much as I dislike the chest-thumping symbolic politics of the Guantanamo-is-toughness crowd. If Obama manages to remove a substantial fraction of the remaining 20 people cleared for transfer and Hillary Clinton maintains his policy of not bringing new detainees to the site (Donald Trump promises to revitalize detention there, so if he wins the presidency, the point is moot), the notion of maintaining an entire detention facility for the long-term detention of as few as 40 or so detainees will become increasingly hard to sustain. Guantanamo is not Spandau Prison, and it doesn’t make much sense to maintain it for the sake of maintaining it.

Just plain silly. How much longer will Congress obstruct the closing of Guantánamo Bay?

The ACLU is not entirely happy with the Administration’s approach to rendering Guantánamo Bay meaningless:

SkepticalRaptor on The Daily Kos writes about those who are pushing the “medically unfit” rumor about Mrs. Clinton:

Who’s behind the medically unfit Hillary Clinton myth

According to the article in Breitbart, “The executive director of a physicians’ organization questions how the mainstream media can ignore signs of what could be a traumatic brain injury in the Democrat nominee for president.”

Wow, that sounds serious. And from someone who heads a “physicians’ organization.” That person must be running the American Medical Association. Or maybe they head the American Neurological Association, because they mentioned traumatic brain injury.

That would be no.

The person behind this trope is Dr. Jane Orient, who has some official position with the physician organization, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She is also the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JAPANDS), published by AAPS. The journal does not have an impact factor, and does not appear to be indexed in PubMed.

It’s a full on attack, which is to be expected on a progressive’s website – but not inappropriate, if the facts as presented are valid. They suggest Dr. Orient is operating outside of her specialty, possibly outside of ethics, and is part of an organization which is anti-vaccine, etc.

Given the same set of knowledge about biomed and the rumors about Mrs. Clinton, I would have taken a far different approach to writing about it – I’m not nakedly partisan, I just think Trump’s a disaster.

All that said, this is the sort of sniping at the Clintons that has been going on since the beginning of Mr. Clinton’s Administration, if not earlier. I recall sitting in a Mazda dealership’s service waiting area, reading an article out of REASON Magazine, my mouth literally hanging open as the article explicitly said that Bill Clinton, sitting President of the United States, was an emotionally damaged child, and was only operational in combination with Hillary. From someone who had personally examined Bill? No, no. Just from what they’d seen on TV.

From a magazine with the word reason in its name.

REASON mostly published interesting material, so that was part of the shock – this was pathetic, and also damn long – much longer than their average feature article. But I wonder how many readers just lapped it up, since I’m sure a substantial portion of the readership was rabidly conservative. How many understood the absurdity of publishing that article in a magazine named Reason – and how many just nodded and added it to their mythos?

I gave up on REASON shortly after Matt Welch took over as editor. While a good columnist, when he assumed the top editorial position the magazine became excruciating to read: deeply anti-Obama without using actual reason, and switching to columnists whose command of the art of writing was so bad that I couldn’t evaluate their facts or reasoning abilities. I don’t know if this was Matt’s fault, or the publisher, who for a long while was Robert Poole, a well known conservative engineer. In any case, with my marriage imminent, it seemed like a good resource-eater to be rid of.

They have Godzilla. It destroys cities.

We have … a big rubber duck.

Image: http://www.thebigduck.us

According to Lake Superior Magazine, it’s due in Duluth right now.

As if a dozen or so tall-masted ships arriving in Duluth would not generate enough buzz, the organizers of Tall Ships Duluth 2016 have signed up another iconic maritime figure for the summer festival.

The “World’s Largest Rubber Duck” will be joining the galleons and schooners at the August 18-21 event.