Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Which man should I have next?

I gotta say that I think the genre of humorous noir has to be one of the smaller categories of story out there, but I’ve finally run across one example. Another Man’s Poison (1951) uses a steady drip, drip of dry humor to accentuate the poor choices made by the lead characters of this story. Janet, a murder mystery writer, lives in one of those large Scottish mansions, writing her highly successful novels, with a secretary to type them up, and a housekeeper.

She also has an estranged husband, and on this stormy Friday night, her secretary and housekeeper gone for the weekend, the husband happens to be sitting in a chair in front of the fire in the great room.

Dead.

Conveyed home from the village pay phone (her phones are out) by the local veterinarian, she finds a strange man in the living room. He wants to see her husband. Why?

Her husband shot a man during a bank robbery committed by the two. And the stranger, George Bates, doesn’t want to take the blame for the likely murder committed by his partner.

But Janet doesn’t want any part of this mess, because, well, her husband met his untimely demise at her hands. A wee bit of poison, you see. Some sharp dialog, not to mention motivations, and soon the dead husband has been tossed into a nearby lake, and the stranger is permitted to stay the night.

Meanwhile, remember the phone call? Well, that was to her secretary, or more accurately, her secretary’s fiancee, because Janet, not to put too fine a point on it, is also in the business of swooping in on men vulnerable to highly successful women, such as herself.

And that ride home from the village pay phone? That vet, Dr. Henderson, has his own finely honed sensitivities. When George, the intruder, assumes the part of the estranged husband, who supposedly has been away in Malaya, Henderson would surely like to know what became of the tan he should have.

The metaphorical toilet bowl of doom which defines the noir genre is, in this case, wide, slow, but, as ever, inevitable. We watch as one bad decision after another ruins lives until bodies begin to litter the landscape. In fact, even literally.

And it’s well done. Perhaps the most grating part of the movie is the occasional assertion that Janet is beautiful, when, at least to modern sensibilities, she is not. Played by Bette Davis, she’s tenacious, aggressive, not afraid to go after what she wants, and not a wilting flower.

If you’re a noir fan or a Davis fan, you should see this for the sheer pleasure of it. For others, the pacing is not quite to modern tastes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Make some popcorn, settle in with a sweetie, have a bit of patience.

And try not to distrust your partner afterwards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkIcePp8WyY

A bit of fractal art from the late stages of our 2019 garden.

An old friend managed to drop this Atlantic article by Jerry Useem from 2017 in my path recently, and I found it fascinating. It’s all about Hubris Syndrome:

“Hubris syndrome,” as [Lord David Owen] and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

It’s fascinating how the mind can allow itself to be molded by the reactions and assertions of those humans with which it interacts. My Arts Editor used to work for Wells Fargo during the reign of CEO John Stumpf, and Useem’s description of a Congressional hearing to which Stumpf was invited is more than interesting:

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

Sure. The environment was not congratulatory, he was not being told he was a success – in fact, the implication was that he was a failure. And, it appears, he had no experience with being a failure – helicopter parents, take note! Totally lost at sea comes to mind.

But it’s not just attitude – it’s physical:

Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

And it’s arguable that by losing those capabilities, one is losing survival characteristics in many situations. It suggests, unsurprisingly, that survival characteristics are context-dependent, much like morality. But I hadn’t guessed that a brain changed physically, and perhaps irreversibly, due to the environment – and let’s call it the toxic environment – of constant positive reinforcement.

It makes me wonder about parents who experienced failure as children and decided their kids shouldn’t go through such trauma, because it was just so awful. Not having any of my own, of course, I can’t really say anything important on the matter. But the phrase helicopter parents, so sorry to repeat myself, doesn’t exist without examples of the phenomenon being present.

[H/T TF, I think]

Former FBI Director Jim Comey, or his ghost writers, seems to have a talent for clearly stating situations. I liked this one, from his recent opinion piece in WaPo:

Professor Adler evidently sneezes whenever he thinks of big government as he disses the Paris climate change agreement. Because of compromise after compromise, it wasn’t the greatest deal in the world, but I don’t think Professor Adler quite understands the side-points of such an agreement:

NBC News is reporting that former Attorney General and Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) will be filing paperwork to run for his old Senatorial seat:

Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions intends to announce this week his bid to reclaim his old U.S. Senate seat, two sources familiar with Sessions tell NBC News.

It has been made clear to Sessions that President Donald Trump intends to campaign against him in what is currently a crowded Alabama Senate Republican primary field. Sessions must file his papers to run with the Alabama Republican Party by 5:00 p.m. on Friday night, which he has yet to do.

Assuming he does file, this should make for an interesting race. First, he has a primary to survive:

There is a litany of other Republican candidates who have already announced their bids, including former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville and former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who lost to Doug Jones in 2017’s special election.

I suppose Moore and Tuberville should be considered Sessions’ most important opponents. But his strategy, as reported by National Review, is particularly interesting:

Sessions, a Republican, “will come out forcefully in support of [President] Trump’s agenda while denouncing Democrats’ impeachment efforts. And steps have already begun to hire campaign staff,” a person familiar with Sessions’ strategy told The Hill.

I suppose it’s simple enough to consider him to be a Republican, through and through, obedient to the ordained Party liturgy. But his strategy seems a little risky to me.

Suppose, as most political observers expect, that President Trump is impeached. Even without a conviction in a GOP-controlled Senate that has proven itself bound to President Trump, we can expect the airing of many embarrassing, even illegal episodes in Trump’s tenure.

Sessions, like all Trumpists throughout the nation, will find themselves under attack during campaigning by Democrats and even moderate Republicans for associating themselves with Trump. It’s true that there’s a difference between an ideological agenda and the moral character of the Administration attempting to apply it, but it’s also true that an ideological position can foster unethical and immoral activities by its adherents, due to the harsh requirements of that ideology. Sessions may find himself being asked if he agrees with the cruelties inflicted on the illegal immigrants at the southern border, the obstruction documented in the Mueller report, the corruption discussed during the impending impeachment and the trial, and other random bits of corruption of which we already know or suspect. Insightful rivals may even ask if his “agenda” fosters corruption and immorality in its adherents, and then let him splutter his way through a denial; followups could then highlight exactly how several facets of the ideology lead to corruption.

“Senator, do you anticipate being corrupted by your agenda’s requirements should you win the Senatorial race?”

Inflammatory? Sure. But I think it’s a valid concern and worth asking. Naturally, today’s Republican Party will take great offense, but given their recent behaviors both nationally and in some states, such as North Carolina, doth protesteth waaaaay too much.

Then add in Trump’s vow to campaign against him, which is exceedingly odd given Trump’s generally transactional nature, and although it’s certainly true that Sessions did the right thing in recusing himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election, his high profile position in the Trump Administration will work against him with the independents. Meanwhile, Trump’s dislike for him for his “failings” will alienate all the Trump cultists, and it’s hard to say how many will refuse to be disillusioned by the impeachment process of Trump himself.

Yep, that’s a dead whale. I expect the clingers to start letting go as the rot sets in.

I suspect that nearly all the boomers who currently cling to Trump will simply dig in with all their fingers and toes, riding their whale right down into the bottom of the Marianas Trench, rather than give up on their dream of resurrecting a past where their lifestyle, concerns, investments (not financial, but relating to position in the old power structure), and privileges are paramount. Their political ideology and, in many cases, religious theology demand that the world work as it did when they were young and middle-aged, and now that the raw problems of over-population are impinging uncomfortably, they squeeze their eyes and ears shut and cry out No!, and cling to Trump as the guy who’ll return everything to how it was. It’s understandable, if not realistic.

And that could easily doom a Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III who is depending on Party discipline and personal charisma to regain his seat, because I think the Trump cultists will break that Party discipline rather than vote for a former Trump appointee who proved to be such a disappointment to their hallowed Leader. If Sessions even wins the primary – and I expect Moore to win it, with Tuberville the most likely to upset Moore – incumbent Democrat Doug Jones may well win a full term to the Senate, defeating the former seat-holder.

As in, If they all have special problems, maybe it’s not peculiar to any one of them after all.

The apparent defeat of sitting incumbent Republican Governor Bevin (R-KY), despite a campaign visit from President Trump, is being explained away by Trump allies, according to WaPo:

Many allies of President Trump rushed to explain away the poor performance of incumbent Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) as an anomaly, while other GOP veterans expressed alarm about the party’s failure in a state where Trump won by nearly 30 percentage points in 2016 — and where he just campaigned this week. …

Allies of McConnell, the Senate majority leader, argued that Bevin’s loss did not indicate any looming trouble for him, who is up for reelection in 2020 and is working to hold the Senate GOP together amid the impeachment debate.

“Republicans won every office on the ballot except [Bevin’s],” Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, tweeted. “Some unique candidate problems. GOP brand was fine elsewhere.”

But I have to wonder, because it seems every time I look at some Trumpist, they’re someone with unique problems. There are a variety of names which require little effort to dredge up: would-be governor of Kansas Kris Kobach, who thought it was a good idea to campaign with a machine gun in hand; former Minnesota Rep Jason Lewis, a paleo-conservative radio personality who repudiated his own positions on women the moment they became inconvenient during his campaigns; InfoWars host Alex Jones, the bull-roarer who claimed in divorce papers that his paranoia schtick was nothing more than entertainment, and later claimed, when sued over asserting that the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a hoax, that he’d been having a psychotic breakdown. And don’t forget Senator Graham (R-SC), who’s migrated from Never Trump Because He’s An Idiot to Brown-Noser in Chief, aka the Pathetic Kicked Puppy.

The point is, in a party in which team politics and swearing to embrace all the party positions, no matter how putrid or even nonsensical, has become mandatory, it’s becoming apparent that the personalities attracted to power through such a shit storm are going to be unique. They have to be unique, because to embrace what has been mandated by President Trump and the other, less well-known leaders and influencers of the Republican Party requires a personality bordering on cognitive dissonance and dependent on adherence to strict ideologies without reference to reality (think 2nd Amendment absolutism). Even Senator McConnell (R-KY), who I would not classify as a Trumpist, has become such a twisted caricature of a politician, due to Trump’s influence, that he really should be retired for his own good – if not for his legacy, which he’s already managed to destroy.

Jennings should be careful of his own observations. If he thinks the candidates he advises are normal people, he may be living in the epistemological bubble that pundits have been warning of for the last twenty years.

Yesterday I discussed the behavior of the House GOP in the context of the impeachment inquiry, and now Roll Call has added another fact to the matter:

Republicans have for weeks blasted the closed-door impeachment process, but transcripts released this week of private depositions show most GOP lawmakers on the three panels at the center of the probe have simply not shown up.

The low attendance for most committee Republicans paints a very different picture of a party that recently stormed the secure room where the depositions have been conducted, demanding to participate in the process. Republican questioning during these private interviews have been driven by a handful of President Donald Trump’s allies and GOP staff.

Conservative Republicans, many closely tied to Trump from the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, have led the GOP questioning, a preview of the coming tumultuous public impeachment process. What is unclear is what role, if any, other Republicans will play.

An impeachment and trial of a President is an undeniably historic process, and should merit the most serious of attention of the Republicans on those panels. We, the voters, are not seeing that serious attention given, and even when the Republicans do show up, the questioning of the witness is not insightful; it’s merely an attempt to grandstand.

So I will have to add another category:

4. Too lazy to get the work done.

The power-hungry are not always known for their work ethic.

The actions of the House Republicans who have access to the impeachment inquiry depositions seem a bit unfocused:

Republicans have complained for weeks about the secret House impeachment inquiry, accusing Democrats of rigging the process and interviewing witnesses behind closed doors — at one point storming the hearing room and chanting, “Let us in!”

But inside the secure room in the Capitol basement where the proceedings are taking place, Republicans have used their time to complain that testimony has become public, going after their colleagues who were quoted in media reports commenting on witness appearances, and quizzing witnesses themselves on how their statements had been released. …

At one point, GOP lawmakers held up the questioning of McKinley to complain about a fellow lawmaker, Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who had made a public comment about witness testimony the day before.

GOP lawmakers during those two days touched not only on Ukraine’s ties to the Bidens but also on potential connections to Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. One line of questioning appeared to suggest, without any evidence, that Yovanovitch might have improperly dealt in classified information, including a question about whether she ever sought to “unmask” the identity of individuals protected in government reports. The term echoed Republican complaints from three years ago that Trump aides’ identities had been unfairly revealed as part of the FBI’s Russia investigation.

It appears the House Republicans are not taking this opportunity to investigate a President who has a number of alleged offenses to his credit, not to mention offensive behavior patterns. They, in fact, appear to be indulging in ineffective behaviors. But why? Here’s some possibilities, keeping in mind that not all the members of a group has the same motivations.

1. They’re foxes. The House GOP are no one’s fools. They know the President is probably not going to survive an impeachment trial, but they also know the zealous Trump base will forgive no one that participates in the process. So? Do the obvious: make great noises, shake your fists and voice your faux-outrage, denounce and denounce, and make sure Fox News gets hold of it. The hell with leadership and moral integrity, because, as Senator Graham (R-SC) has observed, it’s all about being re-elected.
2. They’re frantic. The House GOP knows the President, his and their shared ideology, and their futures will take a big, and perhaps fatal, hit as an unstoppable impeachment occurs, and the trial in the Senate, where antipathy for the President by his GOP allies is more palpable, has a less certain than outcome than they wish. Being a pack of second and third-raters, they’ve been flailing at the levers of power, hoping to delay and even derail the process, but failing. Being who they are, they’ll keep doing it, hoping to play to hometown constituents who are their ultimate audience.
3. They’re irretrievably partisan. Party over country, even theology over country. We’re already seeing this with the Evangelicals. The House GOP has it in spades, and it doesn’t matter if President Trump were to shoot even one of them in the middle of a busy city street, they’d still defend him as the leader of the Party, even proclaiming him immune to prosecution. Here, let me get on my hobby horse and adjust the stirrups. Yep, this would fit right in with Turchin’s disintegrative phase from Secular Cycles, in which the nation’s political elite engages in internecine warfare, literally murder and warfare in many cases, until a generation or two has passed, and the children of the survivors decree Enough, we don’t care who is responsible, the fighting is finished!

So which is it? I’m not sure, and the group may even be split into substantial groups corresponding to the categories. My guess is that it’s #3, as they just don’t seem to be that bright of bulbs, but they do seem power-hungry and ideologically driven. That may be their doom, all wrapped up, as the constituents who’ll suffer at their hands, should eventually figure out what’s going on and dump them in the gutter of history.

No doubt this is a metaphor. Or a simile. Or maybe a silly. Your view, your call.

It was about time for another semi-serious alien invasion movie, and Annihilation (2018), for lack of a more plausible interpretation, will have to fill the bill. Told in a non-linear fashion, and admirably parsimonious with critical information, Earth is being invaded – for lack of a better word – by something called the Shimmer, at an undescribed part of coastal America where a piece of space rock has impacted a lighthouse. The area has been evacuated, optics are a little screwy, and anyone who goes in does not come out.

Until Sgt Kane, effectively lobotomized, pops up literally out of nowhere at his own house, frightening his wife, Lena.

Soon Lena is at the forward security post of the Shimmer, examining the phenomenon from afar. It’s growing in area, which alarms everyone. She falls in with a psychologist, a physicist, a geomorphologist, and a paramedic, all women, and Lena herself is ex-military and a PhD biologist. They are all members of the group selected for the next expedition into the mystery. Within days they’re off.

Where they immediately lose a couple of days without noticing it. Why?

And are attacked by a giant mutant alligator. Amazed by giant mutant flowers. Bemused by giant mutant lichen –

Oh, sorry. But it’s true.

Soon they discover gruesome evidence of previous military missions into the Shimmer, body parts and memory sticks and, well, less common articles. But things start coming together when the giant mutant bear kills one of the women and begins screaming for help … in her voice.

Soon, the difference between invader and defender is blurring, and whether that person on the medical gurney is a person or not is problematic.

But there are problems with this story. Why send in a woman-only team? Must they all have some burden to bear? I mean, I understand this makes them expendable, but it also may damage their will to survive and reach their goal, no? And where the hell is the military, anyways? They hardly show their faces, and yet national security is their primary responsibility. The presentation doesn’t make sense.

Worse yet, these women are supposedly strong, highly educated and trained women, but that education, with the exception of Lena, is not a big part of the story; indeed, their screaming has a bigger part than their training. Their leader, the psychologist, is more like a pro-forma chaperone at a hormone laden school dance, off with her own agenda concerning the cute science teacher, rather than keeping the teenagers from getting into trouble. Why would the military assign such an uninterested leader?

In the end, while this should feel like an intense exploration of an utterly alien race akin to the exploration in Arrival (2017), of the difficulties of understanding the motivations of a species which lack even a common ancestor, it looked more like someone had come up with a lot of really cool CGI effects, hired Natalie Portman to emote all over the place, put it on film and called it a movie. Many of the visuals border on the fantastic, some of the bones of this story are good, such as letting information out slowly and teasingly, but others are little more than the fragile flowers that litter the sets, and consequently Annihilation tends to tilt at the worst of times.

No camouflage here, no sir:

Photographed through a window screen, in case you wondered.

It looks like the Minnesota GOP is running scared, because they have decided not to acknowledge there might be challengers to the great and hallowed leader:

President Donald Trump will be the only choice on the ballot in Minnesota’s Republican presidential primary, even though he’s not the only candidate.

The state Republican Party has decided voters won’t have any alternatives.

Its chairwoman, Jennifer Carnahan, sent a letter to the Minnesota Secretary of State on Oct. 24 outlining the party’s “determination of candidates” for the March 3 Republican primary ballot. Trump is the only name listed.

Absent are three other Republicans who, while long shots, are prominent political names running active campaigns: former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and former U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois.

“The idea that we’re taking our cues from North Korea or the Soviet Union in terms of voter access and voter participation just seems weird to me,” Sanford said in an interview Thursday. Minnesota voters are the biggest losers in the party decision, he said, adding that he suspects that state party leaders are worried a contested primary would show Trump isn’t as popular as he claims. [StarTribune]

I think Sanford’s comments are particularly stinging. For a party which ostensibly champions personal freedoms and liberty, this eviction of Trump intra-party rivals from the primary ballot as if they don’t exist suggests worry, even panic by local Party leaders that, given a choice, the local base may not be so rabidly pro-Trump as they’d like.

Of course, given how Trump has chosen to treat entities which aren’t rabidly pro-Trump, such as, say, California, they may be justified, particularly if they’re the sort who desperately seek the approval of authority figures. And I’m not just being snarky here: the entire toxic culture of team politics does encourage such a mind-set. If the local higher muckety-mucks are predisposed to such an authoritarian atmosphere, they may – probably did – have jumped as high as possible when a Trump campaign minion squawked at them to clear the primary table for Trump.

It’s a pity they don’t understand the advantages of an open competition, particularly seeing as they’re the party of free enterprise. See, now that’s just snark.

Still …

In 2016, Trump finished third in Minnesota’s Republican presidential caucus, trailing Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. In the general election, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson — a former Republican governor of New Mexico who had Weld as his running mate — got 4% of the vote. Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by less than 2%.

A third place finish again would make Trump look awful, wouldn’t it? And chill the chances of advancement by local officials. Tsk.

But as Minnesota farmers reel not only from the trade wars, but from Ag Secretary Perdue running around advising them that the future is Big Ag, I suspect, if Trump even runs again, the Democratic margin of victory will be closer to 15 points. Minnesotans have seen an amateur at work in the national arena, and by and large I suspect they’ll either vote Democratic or stay home – and lie to pollsters who call about the 2016 election. OK, so I’m optimistic – still, closer to 10 points.

The Hill’s headline says it all:

Trump says Republicans should release their own transcripts in impeachment probe

President Trump suggested Sunday that Republicans should release their own versions of transcripts of interviews in the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry.

In a tweet, Trump claimed House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “will change the words that were said to suit the Dems purposes.” His tweet came as Schiff said Democrats were planning to release transcripts of the interviews held in the probe so far.

I think Steve Benen misses an important point in his analysis, as true as it may be:

It’s unlikely that anyone in the West Wing has reviewed the deposition transcripts, but dozens of House Republicans have participated in the behind-closed-doors process – claims to the contrary notwithstanding – and they’ve had an opportunity to let the president know how the developments have unfolded.

And given the weekend’s presidential tweets, Trump has apparently been told to expect some discouraging news.

There’s also a degree of irony hanging overhead: for weeks, the White House and its GOP allies have condemned the private nature of the impeachment inquiry and demanded more transparency. But now that transcripts are poised to be released, Trump appears to be scrambling to undermine public confidence in the materials – which Republicans used to be eager for us to see.

During the assorted depositions, some House Democrats told reporters that Republicans were actually lucky that that the discussions were unfolding in private. In light of Trump’s stress-tweeting, the president is starting to realize those Dems were right.

But in order for public perceptions of President Trump to change to be in accordance with the transcripts and their interpretations, there must be trust in the transcripts.

But this goes deeper than casting doubt on the transcripts. Over the years, I’ve occasionally taken mass emails from the conservative side of the political spectrum and turned them inside out to show an anti-government thread that runs through them. Whether or not they’re reflective of American authors writing them, or the result of a studied assault on American society by a foreign power, they function as a divisive wedge separating Americans from the government by blinding us to the fact that it’s not THE government, but OUR government, and we can and should participate in it.

By casting doubt on the transcripts, which are supposed to be faithful reproductions of the statements of witnesses, we see the sowing of doubt concerning the trustworthiness of the Republic’s elected lawmakers. Whether this is purely the result of Trump’s morality-free way of life, or if he’s doing so at the direction of foreign masters, I have no idea; all I know is that either hypothesis is consistent with what little we know.

But I do know that if the Republicans endorse this defense mechanism, then they’re directly contributing to the potential dissolution of the United States.

Trevor Paglen is a geographer and artist who works with what is still called artificial intelligence in his latter capacity, and so I found his viewpoint on AI, recently expressed in a review of his recent work in NewScientist (12 October 2019, paywall), to be interesting:

Paglen fears the way the word intelligence implies some kind of superhuman agency and infallibility to what are in essence giant statistical engines. “This is terribly dangerous,” he says, “and also very convenient for people trying to raise money to build all sorts of shoddy, ill-advised applications with it.”

“You’re STAFF,” she used to say.

Long time readers know that I’ve often expressed strong skepticism about the use of the term artificial intelligence in connection with what passes under that rubric. Intelligence is not an easy thing to define, and it’s become more and more clear that there is a wide spectrum of behaviors which may be defined as intelligence, such as recognition of self in a mirror, a capability which extends beyond humans to certain cetaceans and others. Anyone with a dog or cat, or an alpaca, knows there’s some intelligence in the critter.

But it seems to me that the use of the phrase artificial intelligence is, in itself, somewhat specious. Is there really a point to distinguishing the substrate of the intelligence? Does this accomplish anything beyond noting that it’s not biological, and thus possibly inferior? That would certainly be congruent with my sneaking hunch that people and corporations would still prefer to work with enslaved creatures that can hardly fight back, and that AI fills the bill.

I once touched in passing on an observation concerning when something is or is not the advanced form of programming in the context of ranked choice voting in Maine, and I’ll reiterate it:

When a programmer is given a task to solve, typically the steps that we’re encoding for the computer to follow are either well-known at the time of the assignment, or they can be deduced through simple inspection, or they can be collected out in the real world. An example of the last choice comes from the world of medicine, where early attempts at creating a diagnosis AI began with collecting information from doctors on how to map symptomology to disease diagnosis.

These steps may be laborious or tricky to code, either due to their nature or the limitations of the computers they will be run on, but at their heart they’re well-known and describable.

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.

I think that digital historians (and this dude claims he’s working on digital archaeology, so don’t laugh) will eventually classify algorithms based on whether the rules directing the program were concocted and encoded by the programmers or users, or if the program itself must deduce the rules based on behaviors and feedback from humans or entities that can validate the deduced rules. Note that the colloquial definitions of artificial intelligence, which require an approach to self-agency, even if it’s not achieved, are not really even relevant to this definition.

And this is important, as Paglen notes, because true self-agency isn’t just a game-changer, if it ever occurs, it’ll be a positive feedback loop. Engineers know that such loops amplify initially small effects in ways that are often out of control and destructive, while negative feedback loops damp down undesirable behaviors through detection and suppression.

An angry self-aware computer isn’t something we want to face, I suspect. Not only are there strong ethical conundrums to worry about, but, if it has access to weaponry, the concerns become existential.

Back to Paglen for another choice observation:

Asked what concerns him more, intelligent machines or the people who use them, Paglen answers: “I worry about the people who make money from them. Artificial intelligence is not about making computers smart. It’s about extracting value from data, from images, from patterns of life. The point is not seeing. The point is to make money or to amplify power.”

And they’re not concerned about ethics, I suspect, although occasionally a bit of noise about ethics leaks through. There’s gold up in those hills to be collected, and the slow poke gets nothing. Ethics, shmethics.

Just getting back to an old love – stuff in space. Here’s a pic of Mercury:

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Arid and lonely, and so so close to our primary. A certain ennui associates with it.

I was a little startled to read this bit from coverage of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent speech to coal mining interests:

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison railed against environmental protesters in a lunchtime speech on Friday, warning of a “new breed of radical activism” that was “apocalyptic in tone” and pledging to outlaw boycott campaigns that he argued could hurt the country’s mining industry.

The remarks were made to an audience at the Queensland Resources Council, an organization that represents peak mining interests in the northeastern Australian state. …

And appalls my Arts Editor, who comes from a publishing family.

More at Hellvetica.com.

In reference to a Trump anti-Witch Hunt party,

Supporters who showed up to the witch hunt hunt were gifted with orange caps featuring jack-o’-lanterns on the front, and “Keep America Great!” on the back. The crowd listed toward retirement age; instead of candy, there were tables of fruit and crudities, and a cash bar. There were plenty of MAGA hats and Trump T-shirts, but few actual Halloween costumes. [WaPo]

I can’t quite decide if they really meant crudities, or just typoed crudites. They both really work.

I present to you the chance to work on a desktop version of the Cray-1, by Craig Fenton:

As part two (see previous attempt) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking for a Cray emulator and came up dry, so I decided to do something about it. Luckily, the Cray-1 hardware reference manual turned out to be useful enough that implementing most of this was pretty straightforward. The Cray-1 is one of those iconic machines that just makes you say “Now that‘s a super computer!” Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?

Not really, but Wow. There’s software emulation, but this guy’s doing it in hardware using a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). They permit customized computer platform to be built in the field. I briefly looked at FPGAs for implementing some work project, of which I’ve mostly forgotten, but that work environment was too unstable to accomplish anything. A pity about that.

This was from the era when computers had presence. Here’s the old Cray-1A from Computing History:

They note:

In 1975 the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced. Excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was Cray Research’s first official customer in July 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) [or roughly $38 million in 2018 dollars]. The NCAR machine was decommissioned in January 1979.

And here’s Fenton’s Civil War re-enactment piece:

Geek on!

[H/T Kevin M]

Twitter has decided to ban political ads, rather than wade into the quagmire of evaluating the truthfulness of such ads, as noted by NBC News:

Twitter announced Wednesday that it will no longer take political ads, a major step as tech companies work to deal with misinformation ahead of the 2020 election.

The ban will go into place in November.

In a series of tweets, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey laid out the company’s reasoning, focusing on the downside of political advertising when combined with digital advertising.

“While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions,” Dorsey tweeted.

“Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale,” Dorsey added.

I suppose I should be embarrassed that I didn’t even know that Twitter had advertising at all, but I’ll skip the pretense. I do not see much utility to Twitter as a societal entity, and so I don’t care. Rival Facebook’s policy?

Facebook is currently embroiled in a debate over its decision to allow political campaigns to push ads containing misinformation. The company has said it does not think it should be the arbiter of political speech, though it does stop companies and political committees from using false information in ads.

This all reminds me that I treated a topic I’d consider a close cousin of this one back in early 2018 as part of a conversation with a conservative friend of mine. The last post of that thread is here, but I’ll summarize because the posts are long. He argued that there really is no such thing as a free press dedicated to facts, but rather always-biased actors; to suggest that some news sources were worse than others, even those sponsored by national adversaries, was an error, and to suggest an audience cannot discern truth vs manipulation was an insult to the audience. I disagreed. If you want more, follow the above link and find your way to the beginning.

My point here, though, is that Dorsey has acknowledged two things:

1. The difficulties of policing paid political ads. Issues of facts vs partial facts vs lies, presentations, and even timing (think of Comey’s announcement concerning Clinton near the end of the last Presidential campaign) makes the task of policing such ads Herculean.
2. The influence of social media on the national discourse. Some folks may dismiss it, but it’s become apparent that social media can be used to polarize American society.

Social media hosted on the Internet is, unless special preparations are taken, naturally an international phenomenon. This means that, politically, both domestic and foreign powers can access them and use them for their own ends.

A domestic political power, although sometimes malignant, is usually acting in what it sees as the best interests of the nation.

As I noted in my conversation with my friend, no such assumptions can be made about a foreign power. Given that no one can be required to reveal their associations in the arena of social media, and the difficulty both technical and non-technical individuals to track down this obscured yet critical information, all the messages one receives on social media from people you don’t know are suspect. (Contrast this to the services offered, present and past tense, by traditional news media, the best of which considered it a requirement that they track down and report such associations to reader. The loss of such traditional new sources will continue to prove to be one of the most under-reported, yet important losses to American culture as the years pass.)

Now, as I understand it, Twitter’s ban is on paid advertising; non-commercial accounts can still spew as they wish. Non-commercial accounts only communicate with those that have signed up for such communications, and they lack, for the most part, impressive names to attract the unwary; an important exception is someone like President Trump. However, this should still put quite a dent in the reach of malevolent entities. And there’s tentative proof of this, as a certain Matthew Dowd has observed (I know nothing about Mr. Dowd, so I’m merely tentative so far as proof goes, but I assume it’s not hard to track down confirmations for the Twitter pro):

The two main entities attacking Twitter for its banning of political ads are: Brad Parscale/Trump campaign and Russian state television. Hmmm…..

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) October 31, 2019

So Putin’s pissed, eh? Given Special Counsel Mueller’s report on the Internet Research Agency (here’s a nice link sympatico with this post), this comes as no surprise.

It’s all about the butts:

Apparently that’s authentic, and it’s not uncommon to have a cat licking its butt in medieval art. More here at Sad And Useless, and thanks to my Arts Editor.

And it appears the GOP has walked right into the Speaker’s trap: as the resolution affirming the impeachment inquiry passes 232 (232 Democrats, 0 Republicans) to 196 (194 Republicans, 2 Democrats), with 4 not voting (3 Republicans, 1 Democrat).

You’ll hear a lot about polarization from third party analysts and about the allegedly illicit nature of the inquiry from the Republicans.

But here’s what it really comes down to:

The Republicans lack the natural patriotism required to protect the Republic.

Real patriots and leaders would have voted for the inquiry resolution, because that’s all it is. It’s not an impeachment vote. Much like the Merrick Garland debacle, the Republicans don’t even want to deal with the issue, despite the multiple offenses, alleged by the Democrats and the Special Counsel and the White House officials now giving depositions. They don’t want to even have the opportunity to affirm the innocence of their leader, despite all the evidence, just as they didn’t want to have to vote against Judge Garland, who came with recommendations from Republicans.

This absurd, absolutist loyalty to such a damaged and abusive President is the end result of the toxic team politics. This post becomes more applicable than ever to the terrible error of absolute and unending loyalty to the party and all of its apparatchiks.

And, in that sense, I suppose the Republicans never really had a chance with Pelosi holding the whip. She knew what they would do, and set the pitfall accordingly. Now she need only persuade the independent segment of the electorate that this does, indeed, constitute pure anti-patriotism.

In an update on the coal industry in Trump’s America, the number of coal companies to file for bankruptcy YTD is now up to five:

Murray Energy Corp., the private coal giant whose founder pushed the Trump administration for an overhaul of what it called “anti-coal” environmental policy, filed for Chapter 11 protection on Tuesday.

It’s the fifth coal company to land in bankruptcy court this year, in a rapidly shrinking industry that’s being squeezed out of the U.S. power market by cheaper options such as natural gas, solar and wind power.

As noted earlier, the coal industry is reaching the end of its rope, and it’s incumbent on the government to take note and … not save it. I don’t say that because it’s the free market thing to do, because we’re not talking about a free market when various energy sources have notoriously been getting government support for years, but because of the environmental concerns of powering a civilization overpopulating itself. Tomorrow’s generations do not deserve more damage inflicted on the environment upon which they will depend just because that would mean corporate survival for coal mining companies.

But the government should step in:

The legal maneuver also could imperil the solvency of a major pension fund that covers tens of thousands of coal miners and has renewed calls for the federal government to step in and help support the retirement payments.

“We’re talking about 82,000 miners who are going to lose their pensions, and we’re fighting this,” Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), whose state is home to large Murray Energy operations, said in a radio interview on West Virginia MetroNews on Tuesday.

And this is what the country is about – taking care of each other. I’d like to see the government step forward and keep those pensions funded.

On Monday of this week, the House Democrats, led by Speaker Pelosi, announced that there would be a vote for concerning the next phase of the impeachment inquiry. From the letter sent to the members of the House:

This week, we will bring a resolution to the Floor that affirms the ongoing, existing investigation that is currently being conducted by our committees as part of this impeachment inquiry, including all requests for documents, subpoenas for records and testimony, and any other investigative steps previously taken or to be taken as part of this investigation.

This resolution establishes the procedure for hearings that are open to the American people, authorizes the disclosure of deposition transcripts, outlines procedures to transfer evidence to the Judiciary Committee as it considers potential articles of impeachment, and sets forth due process rights for the President and his Counsel.

We are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives.

Nobody is above the law.

Naturally, the Republicans, who’ve been railing about the inquiry’s use of private depositions (as is normal in police investigations and previous impeachments), called for a vote on it (none are necessary, as they well know), and, in some cases, Administration officials who refused to obey the lawful orders and subpoenas issued by the House, are now celebrating a faux-victory, Representatives (there’s so many to pick from), Senators (such as Mark Meadows) and the President alike.

They should all be shaking in their shoes, instead.

Speaker Pelosi, she who, with Senator Schumer, bested Trump easily during the national shutdown, is hunting Republican scalps. She’s already demonstrated her command of tactics, as we saw. Now she and her colleagues in the Democratic House leadership have gathered enough information. Not necessarily to convict the President in the Senate, though, but to put the Republican’s nuts in a nutcracker.

Because now they will be faced with the opportunity to vote on the inquiry, and anyone’s who is interested in, or concerned about, American politics will be paying attention.

If the Republicans vote for the inquiry, the Republican base, still infatuated with President Trump, will take note and try to evict them from their seats.

If they vote against, the independents, the deciding force in many districts, will take note and vote against them.

The only Republicans who won’t be too worried are those that have already announced their retirement. There’s more than a couple of them, especially from Texas.

And then, for the Republican Senators, comes a trial in which they will face a similar, devastating question.

I believe Speaker Pelosi thinks that the conviction trial will fail, but in the 2020 elections the true fruits of the impeachment inquiry will be reaped as more House Republican seats turn Democratic, the Senate Republicans are reduced, possibly to minority status, and quite possibly the Presidency will be in Democratic hands as well, as the trial in the Senate terribly humiliates the President, exposing his chronic corruption and incompetency.

And if she scores a victory in the Senate trial, so much the better.