Unsightly Mental Blemishes

This Politico report from three weeks ago keeps nudging me to mention it, because it indicates political feelings on the other side of the Atlantic can run almost as high as they do here in the United States:

French left-wing parties have spiraled into a bitter fight over whether white people should be asked to shut up – or be banned outright – during meetings about minority issues.

The controversy erupted after revelations that a left-wing student union, called UNEF, organizes meetings that are off-limits to white members.

Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor and Socialist presidential hopeful, stepped in Wednesday after a candidate from the same party, Audrey Pulvar, failed to condemn such meetings.

“The field of politics is not a therapy session, it’s the domain of the universal, where we seek unity, and defend our secularist values,” Hidalgo said on BFMTV.

Pulvar, a Black former news anchor running under the Socialist banner in the upcoming regional elections, said on Sunday that white people should not be banned from discussion groups on minority issues, but that “they can however be asked to keep quiet and be silent spectators.”

Asked whether she would have said the same thing, Hidalgo said “obviously not.”

The clash over non-white discussion groups has reignited a debate in France about the growing influence of U.S.-style identity politics, and how it challenges the country’s existing political traditions.

Much like societies which suppress an entire gender’s voices, I think the left will find that suppressing white voices on minority issues, while no doubt giving non-whites a sense of control and authority, also loses them the diversity of views the white community brings to whichever issues matter to them.

Moreover, the suppression of a large portion of the potential participants means those voices of a more radical persuasion now have a more pronounced platform from which to make their case. It’s one thing to be a single radical voice against a million far more reasonable voices, but when it’s one voice against one hundred other such voices, then the advocacy has a better chance of succeeding – regardless of its worth or lack thereof.

And if there is a community of voices that is being silenced or ignored, and it earned it through the natural errors of humanity, historical or contemporary, then if those one hundred opposition voices that are not being silenced happen to be singing in harmony with the silenced & ignored, well, now they, too, are ripe to be ignored as well. Distrust is a fume of the devil, alluring with a false logic that drives people mad.

Leaving only the radical voice to be believed. And people often greatly hunger to believe; not to intellectually evaluate and analyze, but to believe. To believe in something different from a distrusted group, right or wrong.

Something around which the historically wronged community can rally.

This is a fundamentally illiberal position. Liberalism philosophically values debate. Not positions, but their clash. Silencing voices for reasons of anger and hatred is not acceptable in the search for progress, improvement, and justice. It leads to second-rate solutions – or worse.

I don’t know a thing about the European Left, but it sounds like they are discovering the foolishness of illiberalism.

They’re very tough:

But a little hard to find. Like, oh, Sasquatch. I’ll always have a place in my heart for MIB, though.

[Image shamelessly stolen from the American Jewish History Museum Store.]

When it comes to political discourse, I fear the idea of mature, thoughtful discourse has been replaced with stir-up-the-base statements, regardless of the speaker’s political loyalties. Consider this statement from the acting chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in response to a recent SCOTUS decision that didn’t go their way:

Our front yard apples are beginning to bud!

A bit of a dark day, but a lovely promise.

Too bad those front yard apples tend to be too wormy to eat.

The novel … Nominative Determinism. The opening:

“Here,” said the doctor as he handed me the black brew, “this is from Nicaragua and should cure what ails you.”

I glared at Dr. Rich darkly, bleakly wondering if I could possibly finish the proffered drink – and how much it would cost me.

In so many ways.

When it comes to police officers having to carry insurance, Dr. Rashawn Ray notes that settlements paid by civil authorities often hurt historically disadvantaged communities:

Because Chicago budgeted only about $20 million for police misconduct settlements, it used what are informally called “police brutality bonds” to cover its $225 million in settlements. Unlike other bonds, police brutality bonds often do not affect a city’s credit rating. And again, this money does not include the lawyer fees, which cost the city $13 million in 2015 alone. In addition to aiming to implement changes related to police training, deescalation, and the use of force, then-Mayor Rahm Emmanuel proposed increasing appropriation funds to cover police misconduct settlements.

Even more egregious are the financial implications of the funding for bond fees, appropriated funding, and civilian payouts for police misconduct more broadly. In a 2018 report, the Action Center on Race & the Economy described police brutality bonds as “financial instruments that transfer resources and extract wealth from Black and poor communities to Wall St., through the fees banks charge cities for the bonds.” Moreover, funding that should go toward education, work infrastructure, and health care is fueling police brutality of those same disenfranchised people in underserved neighborhoods, as is the case from Inkster, Michigan, to Gage County, Nebraska. [Lawfare]

A requirement that police officers carry brutality insurance would reverse the flow of money, resulting in Wall St. paying the families of those abused by the police. Wall St. won’t like that, and so we might see reformation come not from riots – but from people with a lot of money to lose or win.

There is also a second model:

Under the police department insurance model, the premium is paid by the municipality. To increase accountability, the premium should come from the police department budget. Departments with more misconduct settlements should not simply be given higher yearly budgets to cover higher premiums. Instead, the premium costs should be taken into account when departments ask for budget increases.

I do not think this is as potentially effective.

It seems the realm of cryptocurrencies is mutating. I’ve been basing some of my thoughts on the widespread observation that “mining” the basic tokens is becoming more and more costly in terms of power consumption. This, evidently, is beginning to upset some of the cryptocurrency users, who are advocating for a new paradigm for producing said tokens:

William Entriken, one of the authors of the NFT protocol for Ethereum, a popular alternative to bitcoin, says NFTs aren’t inherently bad, but that rapacious speculation is pushing them and cryptocurrencies down a destructive path as their carbon footprints rise.

Most cryptocurrencies rely on “proof of work” to secure their networks, meaning that computers must perform huge numbers of calculations to “mine” new currency and verify transactions on the blockchain. This uses large amounts of electricity – bitcoin’s annual power consumption is comparable to that of Finland.

Investing money into cryptocurrencies – either through simple speculation or by purchasing expensive artwork – boosts demand and therefore prices, says Entriken. That makes mining that cryptocurrency more profitable, but also more difficult, increasing carbon emissions.

Entriken contrasts cryptocurrencies with carbon offsetting, in which people pay to have carbon emissions removed from the atmosphere. “Bitcoin is the opposite of that. When you purchase bitcoin you’re purchasing carbon creation credits,” says Entriken. “When you purchase the $50,000 [of bitcoin] somebody else is directly putting that much carbon into the atmosphere. Ethereum is the same.”

He has called for Ethereum to switch from a proof of work (PoW) approach to a proof of stake (PoS) approach, which would remove the need for intense calculations by allowing the owners of existing coins to control the network, rather than the owners of the computing power. It is estimated this could cut the total energy demands of Ethereum by 99 per cent. “You have to switch to proof of stake. Proof of work should be illegal,” says Entriken. [NewScientist (3 April 2021)]

So what is “proof of stake”? Investopedia:

The Proof of Stake (PoS) concept states that a person can mine or validate block transactions according to how many coins they hold. This means that the more coins owned by a miner, the more mining power they have.

If this sounds puzzling, keep in mind that miners compete with each other – and all the losers in each competition are wasted energy. By limiting the field for each miner, there’s less competition and less waste.

On the other hand, there’s also less pressure to find new optimizations for mining.

But in a field that is coming under increasing pressure because of energy consumption, I suspect that concern is secondary.

Sans-culottes:

The sans-culottes (French: [sɑ̃kylɔt], literally “without breeches“) were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. The word sans-culotte, which is opposed to that of the aristocrat, seems to have been used for the first time on 28 February 1791 by officer Gauthier in a derogatory sense, speaking about a “sans-culottes army”. The word came into vogue during the demonstration of 20 June 1792. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Federal judge keeps Capitol rioter in jail because Trump keeps peddling the Big Lie“, Darrell Lucus, The Daily Kos:

We’ve seen Donald Trump talk himself into trouble too many times to count over the years. Well, if we’re to believe a federal judge, he may have talked one of the sansculottes who stormed the Capitol in his name into an all-expenses-paid stay in jail pending trial.

I had no clue at all.

There are many ways to reject science, of course, and quite often there’s a cost to that rejection. In this case, it’s the fear of gene engineered food crops, as noted in NewScientist (3 April 2021):

[Emma Kovak at the Breakthrough Institute in California] and her colleagues have now worked out what the change in carbon emission would have been if the adoption rates of five key GM crops – soya bean, maize, cotton, rapeseed and sugar beet – had been as high in Europe as they were in the US in 2017, which has a much more favourable view of genetic engineering.

The team used data from a global metastudy of GM crops and previous studies of land-use change to calculate the 33 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent figure. This is a substantial amount, equivalent to 8 per cent of all the EU’s agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in 2017. For comparison, total global emissions from all human activities are around 100 million tonnes of CO2 per day.

And does this cost get advertised? Probably not. The emphasis with be on Frankenfoods and the terrible dangers associated with gene-engineered foods – whatever those might be.

And I’m sure they hope it’s lucrative. Jann Bellamy on Science-Based Medicine provides the relevant criticism and this pointed quote from a proponent’s paper:

But how does it “work”? From 5,000 papers collected in a literature search of the China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database, the authors of this article

summarized that TCM effect mechanism of catgut-point embedding therapy includes the effects of needle retaining and embedding, harmonizing yin and yang, balancing zangfu organs, promoting meridian qi, regulating qi and blood, tonifying for the deficiency and reducing for the excess, strengthening the antipathogenic qi and eliminating pathogens. From the point of view of western medicine, the effect mechanism of catgut-embedding therapy refers to recovering nerve function, regulating neural reflex, increasing human immunity, improving local circulation, inhibiting the release of inflammatory factors, reducing apoptosis, regulating cellular factor and improving body metabolism. It was found that the effects of catgut-embedding therapy were not only related to the effects induced by common acupuncture, but also to the persistent treatment through prolonged stimulation duration, especially in the treatment of chronic diseases with many systems involved.

In case you hadn’t taken your daily quota of sheer gibberish yet today.

Catgut acupuncture. How do these people waste their time so?

In case you wonder if the Georgia Republicans are justified in claiming they’ve liberalized voting laws, here’s Stacy Abrams eating Senator Kennedy’s (R-LA) lunch on the question.

"Ok, I get the idea. I get the idea" — Stacey Abrams gave Sen. John Kennedy waaaaay more than he bargained for when he asked her to list off provisions of the Georgia voter suppression bill she objects to pic.twitter.com/PP7s7ZltMS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2021

A helpful compendium and aid to a nuanced issue.

Dike:

But if magma travelled from [Mercury’s] core through its mantle, finally solidifying to form a crust on the surface, that could have stirred up the core. Usually, volcanoes are fuelled by many small veins of magma called dikes, but Mercury may have been cooled by melted rock flowing through larger tubes called heat pipes. [“Mercury may have shrunk because magma was being piped to the surface,” Leah Crane, NewScientist (3 April 2021)]

The last of the first spring flower pictures.

Can’t quite guess? It’s lungwort.

The big Foxconn plant that was going to save Wisconsin’s bacon and make then-Governor Walker (R-WI) a serious national political force continues to … shrink:

Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn is drastically scaling back a planned $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, confirming its retreat from a project that former President Donald Trump once called “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Under a deal with the state of Wisconsin announced on Tuesday, Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to $672 million from $10 billion and cut the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000.

This’ll continue to be a blight upon everyone involved. It’s quite possible Walker will never hold elective office again.

This Politico report on a recent SCOTUS decision is from three weeks ago and demonstrates … well … I’m not quite sure:

In a little-noticed 8-0 decision, the Supreme Court just lodged a blow to large corporations. The rare, unanimous outcome marked a distinctly progressive pivot on a thorny jurisdictional question that has bedeviled plaintiffs in corporate liability cases for decades.

But the most significant effect of the decision might be the message it sends that the court, with its decisive 6-3 conservative majority, is not condemned to predictably partisan splits.

Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court consolidated two cases brought in connection with accidents involving vehicles manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. The plaintiffs alleged that Ford was at fault, and brought the cases in the states where the accidents occurred and the motorists had resided: Montana and Minnesota. The Montana resident was killed when a tread separated from a rear tire of her 1996 Explorer, causing the SUV to land upside down in a ditch. The Minnesota resident suffered serious brain damage when, while a passenger in a 1994 Crown Victoria, his airbag failed to deploy after the driver rear-ended a snow plow.

Ford tried to get both suits thrown out on the rationale that they could only be brought where Ford designed, manufactured or sold the cars; personal jurisdiction, as it is known, is an area of constitutional law that historically has given corporations a home-field advantage when defending product liability claims, among others. Given the court’s pro-business track record in these cases, Ford had reason to be sanguine about the outcome. Instead, the unanimous ruling departed from the court’s solidly conservative trajectory stretching back over 40 years.

So SCOTUS is slapping Big Business in the face, and that includes the entire conservative wing, with the exception of Justice Barrett, who did not hear the arguments.

Is this Chief Justice Roberts getting the conservative wing together and telling them to cool it in the interests of keeping the Court relatively non-political?

Or did Justice Kagan’s arguments simply carry the day?

This is important because a Court that pays attention to image, while not a new behavior, has to be part of a counsel’s fact-base when deciding on how to spend their clients’ or employers’ money.

On the other hand, I can certainly see requiring large corporations such as Ford to come to the consumers’ local Court. If they’re willing to sell in that jurisdiction, then they’d better be ready to be sued there as well. Yes, these are used vehicles in these particular suits, but the car manufacturer has a substantial presence in the consumers’ residential locations.

So remember, if you need to sue Big Business, you may be able to do it in the comfort of your own district – and it may be due to a desire to keep the Court looking non-political.

Reminiscent of Ghostbusters, isn’t it?

Last we saw our trusty heroes, Fin Sheppard had just blown up a tornado composed of menacing fish, and his former wife, April, has found his actions, while perhaps unconscious of personal danger, at least useful in that said whirling vortex of doom has collapsed. Sharknado 2:The Second One (2014) finds our heroes bound for New York City in a jet liner.

And, as they come swooping in on the ol’ Apple, something’s on the hunt. Something that goes bump in the night.

And it wants revenge.

But family and red shirts friends await them, wanting to indulge in all those touristy things, like baseball, and hot dogs, and getting bloody stumps bandaged up. Who will survive? And who will become a bloody smear, suitable only as a hors d’ouevre?

Silly and heart-breaking (why do all the hot ladies think Fin is hot?), and replete with guest stars, Sharknado 2 is for that night where you want nothing of significance to happen.

From WaPo in an article on a paleontology dig that is yielding results suggesting T. Rex hunted as part of a pack:

The researchers are still exploring why the tyrannosaurs would have hunted together but believe a collective effort helped them compete against large, plant-eating dinosaurs.

No! T. Rex may have competed with other predators for prey, but they don’t compete with the prey itself.

They just eat them.

And just for fun …

This letter from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) is a bit startling:

Dear Woke Corporate America,

I hope you are all having fun with your virtue signaling. I hope you are enjoying trying to one-up each other and showing how woke you can be, all the while believing that you are more sophisticated and morally superior to the hard-working people of this country.

You must have loved the accolades from your elitist, left-wing peers when you took the MLB All-Star Game from Georgia. What a fun day for you on Twitter. Congratulations.

Never mind that you have destroyed working people’s jobs and hurt people who haven’t worked since COVID-19 took a member of their family or destroyed their small business.

You get texts from your elitist friends praising you for your courageous stand when you support “mostly peaceful” movements that loot small businesses, set fire to government buildings, and take the lives of innocent people.

It goes on with brazen threats of what’ll happen in 2023 when the Republicans win back Congress: no more corporate welfare, etc etc.

I must say that it’ll be getting chapters in future history books all of its own.

I suppose the Republicans see their strategy of changing election laws to disadvantage non-Republican voters as possibly their last gasp before they’re forced to do normal politicking – that is, putting forth policies that the public likes, finding people who are more honorable to run, have competency, and that sort of thing.

The stuff that they’ve gradually become worse and worse at.

The American relationship to its territories – such as American Samoa, Puerto Rico, D.C., etc – is a bit fraught because they are infamously lacking in Federal representation, one of the foundation stones of the United States. The Democrats would like to make at least some of them States, as Steve Benen notes:

The Democratic-led House is expected to vote this week on the “Washington, D.C. Admission Act” (H.R. 51), which would welcome D.C. as the nation’s 51st state. The plan entails carving out a new federal district — limited to the National Mall, to the west of Capitol Hill — where there are no residents, while making the rest of D.C. a state.

But after some discussion with my Arts Editor, we more or less agreed that it doesn’t sit so well with us making D.C. into another State, even if lawmakers as diverse as Goldwater, Nixon, and Biden have been in favor of the transition. We’d rather see D.C. be made part of one of the local States and attain representation, as well as control of the National Guard, in that way. The lack of control inherent in the uneasy relationship between D.C. and the Federal government was a major issue during the January 6th insurrection.

But it occurred to me today that we could take an aggregate approach. This would consist of making all extant territories, not otherwise with Representation, into an ad hoc State, duly allocated its two Senators and however many Representatives in Congress as is appropriate. D.C. could either become a core member of this unnamed State, or it could become part of one of its neighboring States; Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and all the others could also have, at their option, be part of the ad hoc State, or become a State of their own.

That might be a good compromise for  my competing dislikes of a city-state and of some American citizens lacking full representation at the Federal level.

He can’t help but dribble out some more every time he opens his mouth:

[former President] Trump was asked in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity set to air Monday night whether GOP congressional candidates should run on the so-called make America great agenda.

“If they want to win, yes. We’ve expanded the Republican Party,” he said, citing the electoral gains he made among Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election. “If you want to win and win big, you have to do that. You have to do it.” [The Hill]

[Bold mine.]

Wah Wah Wah …

Yes, that would be the Republican Party’s popularity plunging under President Trump.

But Spaceweather.com sets me straight:

Researchers once thought that Southern Lights were exact counterparts of Northern Lights on the opposite side of Earth. Indeed, the physics is the same. Energetic particles rain down from space, causing the atmosphere to glow green, purple, and pink. Simultaneous observations of Earth’s poles from space, however, show that auroras dance differently at the two ends of our planet–an assymetry that researchers are only beginning to understand.

The upshot: Southern Lights may be present even when Northern Lights are not. Monitor the Amundsen-Scott camera for updates.

Keeping in mind that magnetic fields have polarity and that the Sun’s magnetic field flows out with the solar wind, I can see that the interactions will be different in different locations on the Earth magnetic field. The details escape me, though, as I did poorly in college physics.

And there’s a fascinating pic at the link above.

If you’ve got an anti-electric vehicle Luddite in the family, perhaps in a few years you can give him this for a Christmas present – an electric tugboat:

Does your old baby need to be replaced finally?

Crowley Engineering Services has released the design details for the first fully-electric tugboat with autonomous capability for the U.S. market.

Crowley is promoting the design as a sustainable and high-performing solution for ship assist and harbor services in any port. It leverages a large battery system and power saving technology enabling a fully-electric mode of operation while producing zero air emissions or greenhouse gases. The 82-foot tug will provide 70 short tons of bollard pull, with an Azimuthing drive propulsion system with two 1,800 kW motors and a 6 MWh battery. [gCaptain]

A perk of all-electric:

With no exhaust stack, the tug has 360 degrees of visibility from the pilot’s station, allowing the operator to see without obstruction.

It just might win over that old curmudgeon of a relative.

CNN is reporting former Vice President Walter Mondale has passed away. He was one of the good guys. May he rest in peace.

When it comes to bitcoin, Megan McArdle is a believer … in utility:

Most of the value of a bitcoin has accumulated in the past 12 months, as the price of a bitcoin increased almost tenfold since April 2020. Yet underlying that value — bitcoin’s real-world, non-speculative, non-hobbyist uses — are things such as transferring money out of countries with currency controls or dealing in certain illicit goods or offering an alternative to currency in countries experiencing hyperinflation. In these contexts, it looks less like a currency than a substitute for expensive jewelry — something small, reasonably durable and highly valuable, which is thus relatively easy to move across borders undetected or to store and liquidate in case society collapses. But at least jewelry is pretty to look at in the meantime.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if that isn’t the right analogy. Maybe techno-utopians just like looking at bitcoin the same way brides like being able to see two months of their spouse’s work flashing on their hand. And what’s wrong with that? [WaPo]

I’ll be keeping an eye out for other skeptical opinions on cryptocurrencies. Given how wrong I’ve been about Paypal (“What unique utility does it have?”), unpublished, I’m looking forward to someone unveiling why I can’t live without cryptocurrencies.