Unsightly Mental Blemishes

When it comes to the American health system, whether before or after the ACA legislation was approved and implemented, there’s a lot of debate as to its relative quality, with what might be best called the corporate conservatives espousing the view that it’s the best in the world, while those who have watched insurance company premiums rise rapidly, particularly pre-ACA, along with prescription prices and, in general, health costs, suggest that whatever quality it may be, its cost of access makes it second-rate. The latter folk also point at comparative surveys which indicate the American health system doesn’t produce world-leading outcomes.

For my money, these public debates produce far more heat than light. Each side tends to turn it into a shouting match. Conservatives, particularly the political animals, tend to simply shout louder and louder about how it’s the greatest in the world, as if it’ll make their points true. Liberals treat each element of the debate as if they’re independent variables, which they are not (and the less political conservatives point this out, such as the libertarians). As an example, conservatives will suggest that the American capitalist model of a health system motivates corporate entities to pursue the creation of better medicines, so if we shift to a more socialist model, as many on the left advocate, this may mean that the expensive and long-term research required to create a single effective medicine will become a far less attractive investment target. The liberals, at least in the big public debate, simply ignore the point, and I don’t try to follow the more reasonable debates where they might address this point – because I’m not even sure where to find such debates.

So things like the Medicare-for-All debate with its flapping of hands about costs is less interesting than it should be to me. For the participants, it’s accounting and cost curves; for me, it’s a potentially complex health system ecological problem in which the actions of the participants may influence the behaviors of entities which produce medicines, while we’re currently in a system in which certain medicines are no longer produced or researched. There are many, many factors to consider – Do companies with profitable chronic treatments stop researching actual cures? Is it valid to compare our health system outcomes to anyone else seeing as most medical treatment research is American funded? – I find the zealotry often exhibited by partisans of both sides completely inappropriate and a sign of the basic unseriousness of such people – whether their name is Cruz or Sanders.

What brought this out? Well, the COVID-19 outbreak, and I’ll turn to Steve Benen, as he provides both the information and a relevant observation:

At first blush, this Miami Herald story may seem like a report about a local guy who caught the flu. But the closer one looks, the more interesting it becomes.

After returning to Miami last month from a work trip in China, Osmel Martinez Azcue found himself in a frightening position: he was developing flu-like symptoms, just as coronavirus was ravaging the country he had visited. Under normal circumstances, Azcue said he would have gone to CVS for over-the-counter medicine and fought the flu on his own, but this time was different. …

So why did this story generate national attention? A couple of reasons.

Let’s start with the fact that Azcue ended up with expensive medical bills, not because he’s uninsured, but because he has what the Miami Herald charitably described as a “very limited insurance plan.” Or put another way, he has one of the “junk plans” the Affordable Care Act tried to eliminate, but which Donald Trump and his team are quite fond of. Consumers are attracted to the low costs of these coverage plans, right up until they get sick.

In Azcue’s case, within weeks of being sent home, he started receiving thousands of dollars in medical bills — with more likely on the way, because he was treated by some out-of-network physicians — in addition to instructions on his medical history. Azcue’s private insurer wanted him to prove that his flu wasn’t related to a pre-existing condition. …

As for the other angle of interest, what happens when the coronavirus outbreak spreads in the United States and many Americans — who are either uninsured or under-insured — avoid seeking medical care because they’re concerned about bills they can’t afford?

The Herald spoke to Georgetown’s Sabrina Corlette, who explained, “When someone has flu-like symptoms, you want them to seek medical care. If they have one of these junk plans and they know they might be on the hook for more than they can afford to seek that care, a lot of them just won’t, and that is a public health concern.”

This highlights a point which doesn’t get the attention it deserves, and that’s how health is not an independent condition for each of us, but rather our health, and our conduct, has the potential to impact those around us to a devastating degree. It gets worse – for those of us who are world travelers, and there are so many in that class, the potential to wreak havoc with a highly contagious pathogen is really quite amazing.

Up ’til now, the most vivid example of this concept has been the struggle of anti-vaxxers to not be subject to vaccinations, and how the impact of unvaccinated carriers of ancient scourges such as measles and mumps can be devastating for those who are vulnerable, such as infants not yet eligible for vaccination, and those with compromised immune systems that dare not accept vaccinations.

Someday, we may repeat the anti-vaxxers parade of frantic denial with a hypothetical COVID-19 vaccine, but at present we’re seeing a different aspect of health system vulnerability, as Benen makes clear: an individual’s choices being detrimental to the society around them. Simply, given the cost of reasonable insurance, individual A, who may be poverty-stricken due to circumstance, will decide to save money by taking advantage of a Republican-sponsored “junk plan”; when they find themselves ill, possibly with the disease du jour, and they realize that the expense of treatment for something they may not have will ruin them, then they refrain from any authoritative treatment.

Now they’re spreaders. Hello, individual B who brought the soup to the sickly individual A. Your Good Samaritanism will be the death of you. Literally.

So this gives some weight to the argument that a more socialistic approach to the health system is appropriate. The argument over the potential of treatments being discouraged, vs the potential for having to bury several million corpses, and the economic damage that their sudden loss of contribution, is a worthy argument to have.

But way too vivid for my taste.

I’ve mentioned Brexit a time or two on the blog with sentiments ranging from mild doom, to the Russians will sure love this, to sympathy for the pro-Brexit base. But Andrew Sullivan, in the second part of his tri-partite weekly diary entry, wants to push me a little further along the path of embracing Brexit:

The surest economic forecasts made in the 2016 referendum campaign were that Brexit would be a catastrophe for the British economy. This was the view not only of the Remain campaign but of the U.K. government itself. The Treasury published a formal set of prognostications about Brexit’s economic impact in 2016 and they were grim: a recession immediately after the vote to leave, a jump in unemployment, and a soaring deficit. This was not a warning about the possible long-term future economic impact of Brexit, but about the immediate aftermath of the vote. And the Treasury was wrong. In the following three quarters, they predicted a cumulative decline of 0.3 percent, which would put the U.K. formally into a recession. In fact, growth has increased by 1.4 percent. There was no recession; and none has subsequently arrived.

Unemployment was 4.9 percent in mid-2016; in early 2020 it’s down to 3.8 percent, a near record low. More interesting is the employment rate: “The number of employed people rose by a sharp 180,000, its strongest in two years, and helped push the employment rate to another record high of 76.5%.” So Brexit has brought a bunch of people previously outside the workforce inside it, and generated more jobs than ever before. Compare Britain’s unemployment rate with France’s (8.1 percent) or Italy’s (9.8 percent) or Spain’s (13.8) or, more broadly, the eurozone (7.4).

Growth? Last year, the U.K. had slightly higher growth than the rest of the E.U., and the IMF just predicted that the U.K. economy would also grow marginally faster than the eurozone countries for the next two years, as long as there isn’t a screwup in the transition out of the E.U. During the referendum campaign, leading Tory and Leave politician Michael Gove was widely mocked for saying that Britons “have had enough of experts” when talking about the economy and Brexit. But it turns out that 51 percent of the people were right and almost all the experts were wrong.

Impressive, and, on its face, egg all over the face of numerous pundits, including myself, but we’re only a month or so into post-Brexit. Why are they even bothering to make and publish measurements? To my non-economist eye, this looks like eagerness exceeding good judgment.

So why the jump? It may be real, but it may also just be a “sugar high” as various entities adjust to new realities.

The employment numbers are probably real, though. As Sullivan points out, now the Brits control immigration, and masses of unskilled workers are no longer flooding the labor market. As a result, so long as employers need more unskilled workers, they’ll have to draw from who is already present, and that will, at least initially, force unemployment numbers down.

So Brexit remains an ongoing story. As it continues, a neglected substory, I predict, will be that of the proper selection of metrics to measure its consequences. It’s common to look at employment numbers, GDP, wage growth, and other measures of economic activity – but are those appropriate to measure the affects of a movement that restricts the free movement of people across borders in order to bring the appearance of control over their lives to the pro-Brexit base?

And those measures rarely, if ever, measure advancements in quality and new products. How do we tell if Great Britain is falling behind? Or advancing faster? There are some metrics, such as health metrics, but no overall metric – and perhaps that’s just as well. The quality to be measured is too diverse.

I was a little surprised to have a red flag hoist its little fluttering textile over my head while reading this article on a controversy concerning Federal passports:

When was the last time the United States faced a true existential threat?

Yeah, it’s been a very long time. Most Americans, if they’re aware of it at all, only know about World War II through books. The Cold War? While the experts were very well aware that we were teetering on the edge of an existential abyss, and certain scientists used the prop of the Doomsday Clock to make explicit the dangers of nuclear war, I honestly think that only a small proportion of the population understood – in their bones, as the old saying goes – that everything could disappear in nuclear dust if thing went awry. I know, growing up in that era, I was not in the least concerned. It was words, words, words, and while I understand some people came out of that era terribly traumatized, I was not one of them.

And how do people who have never faced a collective existential threat react in the realm collective actions, aka choosing national leaders?

Well, I think we’ve been seeing that for the last 25 years. They increasingly vote for what they want and what threatens their way of life, and who best represents that, rather than an assessment of what threatens the nation and who has the best policy proposals for approaching the problem.

And Donald Trump has, as his central theme, the message that No, you don’t have to change, my opposition simply is trying to victimize you. He is firmly in the camp that nothing has to change, everything will go on and on and on. After all, within his limited lifetime it has, hasn’t it?

This tallies with this report by Garrett Graff at WIRED:

While vacancies and acting officials have become commonplace in this administration, the moves by President Donald Trump this week represent a troubling and potentially profound new danger to the country. There will soon be no Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, director of national intelligence, principal deputy director of national intelligence, homeland security secretary, deputy homeland security secretary, nor leaders of any of the three main border security and immigration agencies. Across the government, nearly 100,000 federal law enforcement agents, officers, and personnel are working today without permanent agency leaders, from Customs and Border Protection and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

The nomination of Richard Grennell to the post of Director of National Intelligence, a post that he apparently is not even legally qualified to occupy, is simply another symptom of Trump’s belief that change is unnecessary because there can be no existential threat because … he’s never lived in an America which has experienced such a threat. He lacks the imagination to see any threat except from the political forces that call for change. It doesn’t matter who occupies the DNI post, just so long as he’s loyal to Trump.

This is why the Climate Change crisis, an existential threat to our form of civilization, and possibly to humanity, runs into denial, although these days it’s changed from denial that it’s happening to denial that it’s humanity’s activities that are causing it.

Because to accept that scientific finding that climate change is anthropogenic would be to accept that a lifestyle has to change.

And climate change is only just beginning to involve dramatic effects. World War II involved invasions, mass deaths, and other terrible events. Climate change is a lot more subtle, although storm damage has to get our attention – if only locally. Lost shoreline some more. When Miami goes away?

We’ll see if the citizenry finally realizes there’s some existential threat out there.

We think we’re so cool with our upright bipedialism -well, I prefer cheetahs, myself – but this mudskipper, a fish, is actually hopping across the water.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2232580-watch-this-fish-hop-across-the-surface-of-water-and-climb-on-land/?jwsource=cl

Awfully darn cool.

If you’re a techie who has a casual interest in the black hats, the malefactors of the computing world, this video might be of interest. This is of Defcon 21 (2013), of which I’ve never attended but find somewhat interesting. This particular video covers some of the more difficult-to-defend attacks, because the vulnerabilities aren’t so much human errors as nature creeping in on our digital landscape. These are errors caused by heat, radiation, electrical problems, and (my Dad’s old favorite!) cosmic rays.

For example, the speaker notes that the temperatures some server farms operate are going up, and this is causing more environmentally caused errors in the servers. I connect this to our energy usage in terms of air-conditioning – in other words, if we want to reduce energy consumption, it may be necessary to endure a less secure digital world.

Or, like I already do, be more ready to go to a store and pay with cash, rather than sending those credit card codes on the wire.

It’s the essence of nationalism, isn’t it: believing the product of the group is more deserving than the product of another group because it’s from the group. It’s like a sugar rush, it makes everyone feel great until the final measurements come out, and you discover your clinging to that inferior product has left you in second place … or worse.

Dead.

There, melodramatic enough for you? Well, here’s the master of second-best, as incoherent as ever, at it again:

“By the way, how bad were the Academy Awards this year? Did you see it?” Trump said at a rally in Colorado Springs, to boos from the crowd. “And the winner is a movie from South Korea — what the hell was that all about?” …

Trump said at the campaign rally: “We got enough problems with South Korea, with trade. On top of it they give them the best movie of the year? Was it good? I don’t know.”

“You know, I’m looking for like — let’s get ‘Gone With the Wind,'” Trump said, referring to the 1939 Civil War epic that won eight Oscars. “Can we get like ‘Gone With the Wind’ back, please? ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ So many great movies.”

“Sunset Boulevard,” released in 1950, was nominated but did not win the best picture Oscar, but managed to nab three others. [NBC News]

A non-American company makes a top-flight movie, wins awards, and Trump can’t stand it? Tough shit, sonny boy. Advocating we be second-raters and that’s good enough? I’m tired of xenophobia and all that inferiority-complex victimhood attitude brings out.

You don’t like that choice, Trumpy-boy? Go and make a movie that’s worth an Academy Award! (I can see the self-promotion now.) But don’t sit there and make gibble gabble about a movie you didn’t even see just to tear up a crowd.

I’d say it’s shameful, but you wouldn’t even understand.

Having just viewed the Cat Got Your Brain episode of Shaun the Sheep, I now understand why the space aliens, after their friendly anal probes of yore, have failed to follow up with a more formal meeting and announcement of their presence.

Obviously, we have no respect for space aliens and their accomplishments.

(Filed under: Odd Things Hue Watches When He’s Ill)

For those of us who crave closure to the stories that make up our lives, here’s one regarding the Well Fargo debacle of 2016 (starting here, last thread entry here):

Wells Fargo, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, agreed Friday to pay a $3 billion fine to settle a civil lawsuit and resolve a criminal prosecution filed by the Justice Department over its fake account scandal. …

None of the money to be paid to the government under this settlement will go to compensate customers. But officials said Wells Fargo has separately made efforts to compensate victims for potential losses — such as fees they might have been charged or harm to their credit ratings, if any.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said $500 million of the settlement would be used to compensate investors who responded to the bank’s promotion of its “cross-sell” strategy — selling more products and services to existing customers. …

The agreement was reached with the bank itself, not with any individuals responsible for the fraud. But last month, the bank’s former chief executive, John Stumpf, was fined $17.5 million by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for his role in the scandal. Other former bank executives were hit with smaller fines. [NBC News]

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised this was released on Friday, the black hole of the news cycle.

Will Wells Fargo learn any lessons from it? Short term, sure. Long term? I lose more and more faith in the long term institutional memory of corporate entities as the drive for profit causes those concerns, barnacles on the idol of money, to be stripped away as useless.

Nummy, nummy ….

One of the more difficult genres of story to review are what I might call black surrealism, and that’s where Delicatessen (1991) exists. It’s a movie which repays close attention because the detail the storytellers use is creative and thorough, but not necessarily repeated for the benefit of the casual viewer – in other words, you have to pay attention.

And  you have to read the captioning, because this is in French.

In some alternate Universe, nuclear war came and went in the 1950s, and folks somewhere in France are short of food & hope. In an apartment building cum butcher shop, though, there’s meat, meat you don’t want to examine for its origins, paid for in grain, the new currency. The butcher, Clapet, has become a rich man, but this doesn’t make for a happy family, between a wife who despises him – I think – and a daughter, Julie, who is terrified of, well, everything. As one of the guests is exiting, a new guest arrives, Louison, a former circus star, who now offers to fix up the apartment building in return for living space.

Seeing both sides of the argument.

Things become crisply confusing quite quickly, as everyone in the apartment building reacts to the new guy: a chance for a way out, more wealth, a new sexual partner, meat. And then enters the … militant underground vegans.

Plenty of detail, plenty of plot mystery, and some good acting. Possibly my favorite was around for only a short time: I call him Mr. Eyes.

It requires a sense of whimsy, a willingness to play with taboos, and a lack of nausea; if you appreciated Eating Raoul (1982), then this is the surreal second cousin that dropped some acid.

Enjoy.

It’s always surprising when a seasoned pundit like Erick Erickson, former editor of far-right Red State and now editor, I think, at The Resurgent, proves to be quite naive about the nature of the far right. I somehow have ended up on his mailing list, and found this in my mail:

I confess to being aggravated by the Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins race. It is a race that should not be. While I very much like and respect Doug Collins, I trust Governor Kemp who appointed Loeffler to the Senate. The race is dividing the Republican Party at a time it needs to be united.

Loeffler was appointed by Kemp to the Senate seat of Johnny Isakson (R-GA) a few months ago, not on the basis of experience, of which she had none relevant, but apparently based on the fact that, as a successful business woman, she has quite the funds available – or so the theory goes. Rep Collins (R-GA) was recommended for the appointment by President Trump, presumably as a reward for Collins’ vociferous support of Trump in the House, but Kemp chose Loeffler.

It is actually a blessing in disguise that the idea of a primary got scuttled. Republicans in Georgia have a history of not voting in races where their preferred candidate lost. Undoubtedly, a number of Cagle supporters in 2018 refused to vote for Kemp, causing the Kemp and Abrams race to be closer than it should have been. If Collins and Loeffler had a primary, some supporters would skip that race in November.

Now, at least, there will be a full Republican turnout in November for the President, David Perdue, and in the Loeffler and Collins race. If we must do this, however, please stop making it about Stacey Abrams.

And it would appear Erickson has decided the President is A-OK. Another conservative who endorses 16,000+ lies.

Two weeks ago, people close to Collins pushed out the picture of Senator Loeffler with Stacey Abrams at a WNBA event in Atlanta. The implication is that Senator Loeffler and Abrams are close. That led the Loeffler team to push out pictures of Collins hugging Abrams. Then outside groups weighed in with a recent video of Collins talking about his friendship with Abrams. In fact, the two are so close that Abrams named a character in one of her romance novels “Doug Collins.”

Does it really matter? I like Stacey Abrams too. I, like Collins, disagree with her on pretty much everything politically. But I interviewed Abrams for an hour during the 2018 race and she was one of the best interviews I have conducted. She offered comprehensive answers, was self-deprecating, and had a great sense of humor. One can disagree with Abrams politically while also recognizing she is a fine person.

The reason this race has devolved into a silly contest over who hugged Abrams the hardest is because Senator Loeffler and Congressman Collins agree on virtually every issue. They agree on life issues, second amendment issues, tax issues, regulatory issues, military issues, impeachment, the President, and any other issue one might toss at them.

The underlying presumption is that Loeffler is only pretending to be a conservative. This calls into question both Governor Kemp’s judgment and Loeffler’s integrity. Despite Loeffler’s strongly conservative record since joining the Senate, those around Collins would suggest she will “grow” in office once unencumbered by an election. Of course, whoever wins in 2020 will be back on the ballot in just two years.

This also ignores that Collins too has had issues in office. Collins has an 81% lifetime rating on the Heritage Action for America scorecard, having only a 75% in the 2017-2018 period. In the present congress, Collins has an 88%, but trails all the other Republicans from Georgia except Rob Woodall from the metro Atlanta area. Among other issues, the Heritage Foundation says Collins has been bad on immigration and supported an amnesty proposal.

And is this “Heritage Action for America” organization, of whom I’ve never heard, really worth paying any attention to? If they’re as xenophobic as … Collins has been bad on immigration and supported an amnesty proposal … suggests, then, in the context of its name, this organization must be exceptionally rich in irony.

I actually was fine with the Collins vote. I only bring it up to note if we are going with the “Loeffler may be bad eventually” or hugged Abrams scenarios, Collins will see the same leveraged against him. That makes this race so frustrating — two good candidates with identical views on the issues claiming we cannot trust the other. Ultimately, I do trust Brian Kemp and his judgment so I will go with Loeffler, knowing Collins would be just as good.

Let’s skip the off-topic bit about trusting Governor Kemp (R-GA), whose ethics are highly suspect. Erickson should be embarrassed to say he trusts Kemp, but we’ll move on.

No, what fascinates me is Erickson’s tone-deafness about the Republican way of doing things these days. Republican politics’ biggest lever is that of hate. Let’s not mince words; when a far-right House member like Mo Brooks (R-AL), ambitious to move to the United States Senate, is accused of being a Pelosi pal and supporter of the Islamic State (!) by members of his own Party, we’re simply talking about a cannon usually reserved for the Democrats being turned on their own siblings. When the issue of abortion, a doubtful issue of fallacious reasoning, is weaponized such that a candidate is judged on that issue to the exclusion of all else, not only ideological but even operational (competence, honesty, etc), that is the politics of hate.

When Newt Gingrich (R-GA) is a guiding star of the Party, that’s hate.

Or, more accurately, that’s the willingness to do anything to win, including employing the tools of hate.

It should come as no surprise that Stacy Abrams (D-GA) becomes a symbol of anti-association, because she’s a Democrat.

Quick, let’s associate Loeffler with Abrams! Why? Well, she’s a Democrat, a kissing cousin of the Devil Incarnate! Yes! A DemonLovingSocialistCommunistGunHatingBabyKillin’LiberalSecularUmmmmmLetMeGetOutMyListIt’sGettingSoLong … oh yeah, Democrats haven’t done nothing for America in oh so long!

Erickson is upset that his team isn’t playing like a team? That some of them refuse to vote for the rival who won the primary?

This is the fruits of winning at all costs. Trumpism, with its emphasis on toughness and never admitting to being wrong, actually plays right into this philosophy.

Folks lose the perspective of considering their rivals to still be Americans, or even Republicans. Or even Democrats – I skim The Daily Kos spam mails very lightly, but you can’t miss the cries of He’s not a real Democrat, kick his ass out! The partisans do tend to lean that way, regardless of ideology.

But, back to the point, it’s just going to get worse for Erickson if he wants everyone to play nice. The Republicans are no longer trained to have that sort of temperament; it’s all about absolutism: everything is free market, abortion rights are abominable sins, and because God is with us we’re never wrong.

The fruits of these attitudes is what Erickson sees in the Republican Party today, tomorrow, and right up until the Republican Party burns to the ground.

Like I’ve said before, someday the Republican Party will consist of three members, and two will be on probation due to suspicion of them being RINOs.

I have finally thought of a real use for an artificially intelligent entity around the house!

This young lady, Peeper by name, …

… likes to yowl on these winter mornings, doubtless complaining of the cold outdoors and her shortage of long fur. It’d be great for her to be occasionally surprised by a small, mouse-like creature that will scamper out upon hearing the yowl of anguish, pounce on her tail, run tantalizing out of reach, and disappear under a door. Surely this is within the capabilities of an AI robot!

Of course, if this AI actually has self-agency, this might qualify as a cruel and torturous practice, as being chased by a cat five times your size might be terrifying.

If, on the other hand, the AI is aware the cat can do little to harm it, then perhaps it’ll be amusing for it.

And then boring.

Back to the torture thought again.

And then if the mouse has WiFi, it becomes Yet Another Security Hole (“have you had your YASH today?”) to worry about.

How embarrassing that would be – almost as good as that Las Vegas hotel that suffered a data breach via its fish pond thermostat.

This is today’s unsettling development for the political world:

I am pleased to announce that our highly respected Ambassador to Germany, @RichardGrenell, will become the Acting Director of National Intelligence. Rick has represented our Country exceedingly well and I look forward to working with him. I would like to thank Joe Maguire….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2020

He may be highly respected in Trump’s eyes, but not anyone approves. Steve Benen, for example:

To know anything about Richard Grenell is to know he spent several years annoying people as a prominent internet troll. I generally try to avoid blocking people on Twitter, but even I found Grenell’s juvenile antics so grating that I took advantage of the platform’s “block” feature.

After one exasperating exchange in 2012, the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel asked him, “Shouldn’t you eventually get a job and quit trolling people?”

Seven-and-a-half years later, the notorious online pest has a job …

Here’s the thing: Donald J. Trump’s idea of successful is far different from most everyone else’s. The key is in the labeling of Grennell as an Internet Troll:

In Internet slang, a troll is a person who starts quarrels or upsets people on the Internet to distract and sow discord by posting inflammatory and digressive,^[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses^[2] and normalizing tangential discussion,^[3] whether for the troll’s amusement or a specific gain. [Wikipedia]

Stubborn aggressiveness? Never apologize? For Trump, these are positive character traits, and the fact that Grennell is neither respected nor effective are, at best, secondary negatives; they may not even register with Trump.

For Trump, “losing,” like McCain supposedly did, is the anchor that will sink you. So long as you can slither out of every difficulty, you’re a winner, and that’s all he cares about.

And that’s not acceptable in any sector of society, frankly speaking. As a diplomat in Germany, he could do little damaged in his incompetency.

As the replacement for Dan Coates, former Director of National Intelligence? I suppose it’ll depend on how well the bureaucracy in the various intelligence agencies can ward him off.

It’s a sad mark of the times when I wonder if the Administration is carefully manipulating its leaks. The trigger? The step following this post:

The president’s post-impeachment behavior has alarmed Attorney General William P. Barr, who has told people close to the president that he is willing to quit unless Trump stops publicly commenting on ongoing criminal matters, according to two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. It also has appalled several legal experts and former officials, who have said his direct intervention in legal matters risks further politicizing law enforcement at a time of fraying confidence in the Justice Department. [WaPo]

As I noted before, Barr has little use for all those who are secularists: Those who think our society is better off as secular. I’ll only be impressed if he resigns in the next two weeks.

Right now I’m inclined to think this is all just careful manipulation of public opinion by a President who lives for doing just that.

I loved this WaPo article by Jeff Smith on how the Amish consider questions of technology integration with their society:

When a church member asks to use a new technology, the families discuss the idea and vote to accept or reject. The conversation centers on how a device will strengthen or weaken relationships within the community and within families. Imagine if the United States had conducted a similar discussion when social media platforms were developing algorithms designed to amplify differences and then pit us against one another, because anger drives traffic and traffic drives profits.

Friends of mine belonged to an Amish church in Michigan. One of the church members wanted to purchase a hay baler that promised to be more efficient, even as it enabled him to work alone. The members discussed the proposal — yes, the new machine might increase productivity, but how would community connections be affected if he began haying without the help of others, and what would happen if his neighbors adopted the same technology? The risk to social cohesion, they decided, wasn’t worth the potential gains.

In other words, they put the health of the community above the advantage of the individual; contrast that to greater America, where simply acknowledging there is a community can be a struggle, much less asking if a given advance is actually damaging to the community. When the algorithms are designed to drive division and dollars, as Smith notes, why should a community accept it? In a sense, this is an instance of the Precautionary Principle, incidentally a subject for mockery in the libertarian movement of the ’90s.

But – as a member of the first generation of social media^[1] users, back in the 1980s, I was attracted to the new community we were building precisely because the more traditional, real-life, community within which I was embedded was, more or less, toxic. Stratified, riddled with religious theologies for which I had no respect (I found them boring when they weren’t terrifically ridiculous), consumeristic, mixed with a liberal dose of hormones, for me social media was a rescue.

Then again, those BBSes were far more true to the concepts implicit in the naive use of the phrase social media than today’s behemoths of the same category. Many of us, nearly terminally shy, began coming out and meeting in public, dating, getting married and divorced. While I’m sure this happens with Facebook as well, we did it without commercials or nuanced algorithms that would cause political anguish – we did that to ourselves on the up and up.

So, in the end, it’s possible that a hypothetical Amish community might accept a BBS of the varieties popular back in the 1980s, while rejecting those of today.

And, I think, for good reason.

¹ aka Bulletin Board Systems.

President Trump has issued another pardon:

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order granting a full pardon to former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. related to a decades-old corruption charge, the White House said Tuesday.

DeBartolo, who presided over one of the greatest dynasties in football, pleaded guilty to failing to report a felony when he paid former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards $400,000 to help secure a casino license. DeBartolo had to pay a $1 million fine and was given two years probation in return for his testimony against Edwards, a Democrat. [NBC News]

There are some opinions out there on this. Steve Benen, for instance, notes that a big name said something nice about Trump:

But let’s not overlook the fact that the White House announced the presidential pardon this morning at an event with several NFL legends — including Jerry Rice, Jim Brown, Ronnie Lott, and Charles Haley — in attendance.

In fact, Jerry Rice, the Hall of Fame receiver, told reporters, “I take my hat off to Donald Trump for what he did,” referring to the DeBartolo pardon.

And if I had to guess, that was the principal reason this happened. Trump seems pleased when celebrities say nice things about him, and no one should be surprised when images and quotes from this morning’s event show up in the president’s re-election campaign advertising.

I wonder if Rice will get a nice present in his Christmas stocking – or if he’s so beholden to DeBartolo that he had to say that.

A few others were also pardoned: Blagojevich, imprisoned for corruption, Kerik for corruption. Kevin Drum admits to bewilderment and a bit of anger:

I have no special opinion about whether any of these people deserve a pardon—though Kerik sure as hell seems an unlikely choice. What I do object to is the random pardoning of well-known people who happen to catch Trump’s eye. There are lots and lots of ordinary schlubs who deserve a pardon every bit as much as these more famous folks, but they’ll never get one.

But it’s worth noting a minor note of concordance: bribery. What did President Trump implicitly endorse a few weeks back? Bribery. International bribery.

Listen, conservative readers. Presumably, you’re for the free market. If you approve of Trump, what are you thinking? He doesn’t like the free market, it should be obvious, it’s hurt him too many times. Right now, he’s endorsing crony capitalism of the worst sort: if you’ve got the cash, then, hey, go ahead and bribe that official. Maybe it’ll be the Big T himself, eh?

Better that than some honest competition, yeah? Oh, too bad if you’re a competitor who doesn’t have as deep of pockets.

So that’s what these pardons are really all about – an concerted effort to begin defining corruption out of existence – at least, if the person engaged in the behavior is a conservative.

When it comes to rules, religions are rarely moderate. There’s little wriggle room: Thou shalt not worship other Gods. Period. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Period. Not even a little bit.

Good? Bad? That’s in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, although I have a certain sympathy for some of these positions. But when this attitude leaks into politics, not only does it lead to a no-compromise mindset that results in governmental freeze, it also leads to dangerous policy moves – for the citizenry. Steve Benen has a lovely example:

For much of the last few years, Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to ease rules on mercury pollution from power plants, not simply as part of a general hostility toward environmental safeguards, but specifically to help the coal industry, which the president sees as a political ally.

What I did not expect, however, is for the Republican administration to go further down this road than even the industry expected or wanted. The Washington Post had a striking report on this yesterday.

For more than three years, the Trump administration has prided itself on working with industry to unshackle companies from burdensome environmental regulations. But as the Environmental Protection Agency prepares to finalize the latest in a long line of rollbacks, the nation’s power sector has sent a different message: Thanks, but no thanks.

The article noted that Exelon, one of the nation’s largest utilities, told the EPA that its effort to change a rule that has cut emissions of mercury and other toxins is “an action that is entirely unnecessary, unreasonable, and universally opposed by the power generation sector.”

Coarse fixations on fine-grain issues inevitably results in bad policy. Here we’re seeing it in regulations, as a frequent refrain from the Republicans is Regulation is bad!

It’s not hard to find others. Taxation should leap right to mind, as illustrated by the Kansas debacle I far too frequently reference. Another is the 2017 Federal tax reform bill, which independent economists have waved off as ineffective – and measurements of the economy have confirmed as not reaching its pie-in-the-sky goals.

But I note a party suffused with religion, primarily the evangelicals, married to a set of political positions with an absolutist tenor that is absolutely inappropriate and marks adherents as second-raters. This is what Barry Goldwater warned us about – and, for those of us older than I, doesn’t he look like a moderate these days?

Next time you run into a Republican screaming we’re overregulated, point him at that Post article, and then tell him that, no, he’s not done doing government. Not even close. Government doesn’t guarantee corporate profits; it tries to ensure citizen safety as balanced against freedom, etc.

The Fake (1953) is a nice little whodunit centering around a da Vinci painting that is the target of a gang of art thieves. They’re trying to get around American private detective Paul Mitchell, assigned by the da Vinci owner to watch over it. The thieves are clever, using head fakes to get Mitchell’s attention, and then stealing it when he bites.

It doesn’t help that the Tate Gallery in London, where this is all going on, happens to employ a beautiful young woman who’s smart, writes books on art, and has an eccentric father who happens to paint as well – in fact, very well, indeed. Which all leads up to the question: where do Mitchell’s interests lie, and how deep in is the father?

Unfortunately, this little thriller doesn’t pursue these sorts of questions very deeply, which leads up to a fairly surprising ending. But it’s all fun, unless you’re an Arts type who profoundly objects to how the da Vinci is being displayed at the Tate – ignoring much of the story in the outrage.

So, in the end, it’s more or less fluffy, but fun.

No, I won’t string you along: I doubt AG William Barr will be resigning any time soon. In case you quite sensibly took yourself away from all news sources over the weekend, the response from alumni of the Department of Justice to the interference of the Attorney General in the sentencing phase of the Roger Stone case has been to write a letter  demanding his resignation. It has more than 1100 signatures, all from DoJ alumni. I think this gets to the meat of their grave concerns, although I’m tempted to quote it in its entirety:

And yet, President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle, most recently in connection with the sentencing of President Trump’s close associate, Roger Stone, who was convicted of serious crimes. The Department has a long-standing practice in which political appointees set broad policies that line prosecutors apply to individual cases. That practice exists to animate the constitutional principles regarding the even-handed application of the law. Although there are times when political leadership appropriately weighs in on individual prosecutions, it is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case. It is even more outrageous for the Attorney General to intervene as he did here — after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court.

Such behavior is a grave threat to the fair administration of justice. In this nation, we are all equal before the law. A person should not be given special treatment in a criminal prosecution because they are a close political ally of the President. Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.

This is an important letter, of course, as it includes professionals who have served in both Democratic and Republican. But I doubt Barr will pay any attention to it. Barr, I think, comes from a part of society which is so certain of its own rectitude that it openly loathes other factions:

Among the militant progressives are many so-called ‘progressives’, but where is the progress? We are told we are living in a post-Christian era, but what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system? What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And what is the system of values that can sustain human social life? The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of fulfilling the role of religion.

This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion & traditional values. [ClashDaily]

And, in Barr’s mind, it’ll be those “Secularists” and other representatives of a government required to be secular that are calling for his resignation. When Barr accepted nomination to the Trump Administration, he did so rejecting the traditional Founding Father values upon which the United States was built and to which it aspires – mutual tolerance. He believes he sees destruction of traditional culture, and its replacement with chaos. That justifies any autocratic action necessary to stop.

And he’s the stopcock on the chaos he sees all around. This letter is merely static for him.

As of last night, the Wuhan virus, now known as 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease, has taken more than 1700 lives – 900 since last I mentioned this. Some countries have shut down economic links with China, and I think this incident illustrates a weakness of the free trade concept pushed by libertarians and many Republicans of 20 years ago.

Free trade tends to lead to specialization on a national level, as countries who are better at, or have more appropriate resources, concentrate on doing what they do well for export; but other products that don’t fall into that specialization are neglected – after all, you can use your profits from the specialization to buy all that other stuff. Or, more bluntly, those domestic industries who find they can’t compete with the foreign competitors get wiped out, while you wipe out the foreign competitors who can’t keep up with you. This all works out great for those who are in the right industries, or cut sweet heart deals with the government to get bought out as they find they can’t compete. And everyone important is happy in both the public and private sectors.

Right up until economic links are cut for non-economic reasons. While war is a popular reason for terminating those links, it’s also something that we can, with some effort, control, either through negotiation, or by kicking out the obstreperous individuals.

But when it comes to disease, we’re not nearly as much in control. Sure, we can and do work on it, trying to develop vaccines and cures, but none of this is guaranteed, and, barring unexpected miracles, it takes time. I think most of us understand that in the abstract, but NewScientist (8 February 2020) brings it home with this simple paragraph:

Even if the virus remains largely in China, there would be global consequences. According to Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota and his team, 153 crucial drugs, from blood pressure pills to stroke treatment, are mostly made in China, and there are fears the virus could affect their production and export.

Profits are great, profits are wonderful – right up until we look like a mastodon stuck in the La Brea tarpits. I fear that we may be finding that NAFTA and its ilk have lured us into a situation where our international economic ties, which I generally view favorably as being detrimental to the more war-like inclinations among us, may turn out to have a nasty downside that not many analysts foresaw – or, at least, never mentioned in my hearing way back when the rubber hit the road and Clinton signed NAFTA.

If you’re dependent on medicine to get by, you may want to check where it’s produced. I don’t advocate hoarding – I’d probably hypothetically get in trouble – but it’s always best to be informed so that, if necessary, you can consult with your doc about alternatives before you need them.

And I’d sure like to hear if your doctor has even thought about this aspect.

Sobriquet:

A sobriquet (/ˈsoʊbrɪkeɪ/ SOH-bri-kay) or soubriquet is a nickname, sometimes assumed, but often given by another and being descriptive in nature. Distinct from a pseudonym, it typically is a familiar name used in place of a real name without the need of explanation, often becoming more familiar than the original name. [Wikipedia]

Used in yesterday’s Word Of The Day. How meta.

The 1 February 2020 issue of NewScientist contains a collection (here and here, but behind a paywall, I should imagine) of short articles which, essentially, express the anguish quantum physicists feel as they continue to try to figure out how to connect gravity with quantum mechanics, understand the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, i.e., what the hell does it mean to say that it requires an observer to force the probabilistic wave function to collapse to reveal the exact location of a quantum particle, hell, to even know if there is a reality.

One seldom considered question, however, is how exactly models ought to seek to explain reality. Some, such as general relativity, take some known quantities about nature – the position of a planet, say – and predict what will happen next. Quantum theory takes a different philosophical approach, assigning probabilities to future outcomes we might see. …

Some physicists are now exploring whether a similar approach can help us make headway. For example, constructor theory starts from the idea that the essence of reality is information, and then sets out what kinds of things are possible and impossible. It is early days, but it has already made predictions in circumstances that defeat other theories, such as the behaviour of quantum particles in a gravitational field.

I was awfully darn tired – and a little sick – when I started reading through this one morning, and hazily connected it to my own private theorizing that we are, ourselves, a computer simulation. Then I came across this:

IN OUR quest to understand reality, there is an elephant in the room. How do we know that the reality we are in is real? The suggestion that we could be living in a computer simulation isn’t just a Matrix-style science-fiction idea. It is a hypothesis that has been discussed and debated by philosophers and physicists since Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford floated it in 2002. If its startling but logical conclusion is correct, it renders decades of intellectual endeavour obsolete and, ironically, takes us back to the beginning.

Nice to know that other people harbor weird paranoias like mine. Oh, wait, they take their’s to new extremes:

Bostrom’s simulation argument says that if humans could one day create simulations of the universe populated with conscious beings, then in all likelihood we are living in such a computer-generated universe. The argument assumes that, eventually, enough computing power will exist to create simulations of human history that are detailed enough for the simulated people in it to be conscious. If so, then, statistically speaking, we are more likely to be living in a simulation, because simulated people would vastly outnumber unsimulated ones. That is especially true if simulated people make their own simulations ad infinitum in an endlessly nested reality.

Nice, I’m almost certain a simulated creature! Although I’m not sure our limited experience bears out Bostrom. Think of our attempts to simulate a chemical reaction – get much beyond 3 or 4 atoms and the calculations become too laborious.

Skipping over my trivial objections, I’d like to move on to what my sickly, tired mind came up with that morning. We run simulations for tangible reasons, from weather forecasting to predicting chemical reactions to archaeological modeling to, yes, quasi-entertainment and learning skills, such as flying the latest aircraft.

So, if we are ourselves entities in a quasi-computational simulation of some sort, what is the goal of the entities who created this environment? What are they trying to achieve? (Let’s skip over the quasi-ethical question of whether we should comply with their/its purpose, which makes my head hurt thinking about the number of people who think the answer should automatically be Yes!).

Before burping up my thought, let’s add in one other area of interest, that of the semi-related, poorly labeled field of artificial intelligence, aka machine learning (ML). I gave my ad hoc definition of ML here back in 2018:

My observations of ML, on the other hand, is that ML installations are coded in such a way as to not assume that the recipe is known. At its heart, ML must discover the recipe that leads to the solution through observation and feedback from an authority entity. To take this back to the deferment I requested a moment ago, the encoding of the discovered recipe is often opaque and difficult to understand, as the algorithms are often statistical in nature.

One of the largest known stars, Betelgeuse, has recently dimmed and become warped. Will it soon go supernova? Such a thought is still more comforting than wondering if we’re all just a big simulation by someone trying to figure out the nature of their own reality.

So, is it possible that the purpose of our simulation is to discover the nature of reality? Just as we have difficulty understanding reality, is it possible that the creating entity has encoded the observed facts on their ground into our simulation and then manipulated us into trying to figure out how reality really works?

And what if that entity got an observation improperly encoded?

I think I’d better go back to watching Xena: Warrior Princess, because the existential angst these physicists are feeling is as nothing compared to my existential angst at thinking I may be a … bug. Flaw. Miscue. Eeeek.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email, just now read, that caught my eye. I shall reproduce the important part and summarize the balance:

50 Pics That Sum Up The Hell On Earth That Is Taking Place In Australia

One of the prima donna actresses in the big awards show was running her mouth off about this being caused by Climate Change. They never pass up a chance to run their mouth. The last I heard they had arrested 43 arsonists responsible for this carnage. If ever there was a reason for public executions this would be it.

Followed by numerous heart-rending pictures.

Notice how nonchalantly climate change is dismissed. This sleight-of-hand paragraph evokes the natural emotional response to Hell, the loathing the conservative has for those darn Hollywood liberals, associates climate change with that loathing, reinforces it, then provides a replacement, and far more immediate, reason for the wildfires, and then seals the deal with a reference to public executions.

The problem, of course, is that the replacement wildfire origin doesn’t work as a dismissal of climate change, now does it? Sure, arsonists start fires. But do most fires run rampant like this?

No.

They need an environment that is tinder-dry. This paragraph doesn’t provide the context that Australia has been hotter every summer for years, and that drought has been a problem – and it’s quite plausible, if not proven, to conclude that a chronic pattern such as that could be driven by climate change.

It’s interesting how emotion is used to invoked “common sense”, often associated with rationality, in an attempt to discredit a scientifically accepted fact. It really leaves the observer wondering what the author of this missive thinks will be the final result if they are successful – do they really think that this is all a hoax?

Do you enjoy a good rant? Cruising the Cut, Episode 3, had my Arts Editor howling with laughter, as the guy, David Johns, loses it over the cushions on the narrowboat he’s just purchased.

I’ve not had any luck finding the episode online, unfortunately; we watched it on Amazon Prime.