Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Along comes another one of those emails which sets off my red flag alert system, this time in the form of a poem. I’ll reproduce it here, interspersed with my commentary, which will trace the emotional journey the author wants the reader to traverse, while slipping in subversive currents which will take the reader down the author’s preferred creek.

Dear All

This came from a friend of ours’ who was a veteran.  On this 4th of July, it seems appropriate to read a poem such as that in the midst of all the political rhetoric that is so common on a day such as this.  May you all have a good Independence Day as we all remember that for which our country stands and those who have put their lives on the line.

Peace!

Do we have names to check and verify? No. Note the claim of the author being a veteran, i.e., an American who has served in the military and automatically should receive a certain amount of respect, and then the contrast with the political class.

He was getting old and paunchy

And his hair was falling fast,
And he sat around the Legion,
Telling stories of the past.

Of a war that he once fought in
And the deeds that he had done,
In his exploits with his buddies;
They were heroes, every one.

And ‘tho sometimes to his neighbors
His tales became a joke,
All his buddies listened quietly
For they knew where of he spoke.

Here our veteran earns more authority through some supposed war-time experience. This is accomplished not only by the respect accorded to the protagonist of the poem by his peers, but also because he’s not taken seriously by those who didn’t serve. This is a delicate tapping of a minor wedge between those who were able to tolerate the service’s peculiar needs, and those who did not wish to – or couldn’t.

But there’s a second purpose going on here. It’s meant to make us more emotionally receptive to any message this author might want to insert in this missive – overt or covert.

But we’ll hear his tales no longer,
For ol’ Joe has passed away,
And the world’s a little poorer
For a Veteran died today.

He won’t be mourned by many,
Just his children and his wife.
For he lived an ordinary,
Very quiet sort of life.

He held a job and raised a family,
Going quietly on his way;
And the world won’t note his passing,
‘Tho a Veteran died today.

And one could write the same stanzas about steelworkers, policemen, and many other professions. Also note how the sense of humbleness, always an admirable quality, is increased by limiting the mourners to wife and children. What of his extended family, his friends, his colleagues, his neighbors? When my father passed away, long retired from the Air Force, he had mourners from all those categories.

This is a signal of emotional manipulation. True, any poem can be expected to indulge, but this appears to be excessive, particularly as we assess the slant of this production.

When politicians leave this earth,
Their bodies lie in state,
While thousands note their passing,
And proclaim that they were great.

For the skeptical reader, this is when the alarm bells should be ringing. Why? Because, for the common elected official, this is false. Do you think your common council person, mayor, state legislator, even member of Congress gets this treatment?

No, of course not. For example, unless my Representative, Betty McCollum (D-MN), does something truly extraordinary, there’ll be no state funeral, laying in state, and all that. She may get a nice writeup in the local newspaper for her long period of service (since 2001 and counting), but after that will be an obituary, and then a funeral – attended by family, friends, and colleagues. Imagine that.

Think about when it does happen. Name some names: Reagan, Bush, McCain, Ford. These were not ordinary politicians. Not only did they achieve one of the highest offices of their profession, they also used those offices to greatly influence the course this nation followed. High achievers often gain these posthumous honors, regardless of their profession. For example, top academics will often have faculty positions named after them, or a scholarship in their name funded by their university. High achievers are often recognized as an encouragement to up and comers, and to indicate the model of just what those up and comers should be aiming for.

And, back to the arena of politicians – BITE YOUR TONGUE – often these high achieving politicians are also veterans. Let that sink in for a moment.

The point of this stanza is to magnify an imagined (i.e., false) self-importance imputed to the political class, an attribute that is always considered a negative. That there are self-important people in politics is a given, since they exist in all human professions, from priests to farmers to even food-service. But the fallaciousness of the stanza keys the careful reader into skeptically reading the balance of the missive.

Papers tell of their life stories
From the time that they were young,
But the passing of a Veteran
Goes unnoticed, and unsung.

Does it? Is this not the point of the obituary, the announcement of death that most people receive?

But let’s name some more names. Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Murphy, Nimitz, the Sullivan Brothers, and so many other vets have been memorialized by state funerals, the naming of various machines of war for them, and even Hollywood fame (Murphy), and their deaths brought about public mourning and praising for their exploits and accomplishments.

But the author of this missive would rather you not remember them. Maybe the protagonist of this missive is little more than a PFC in the Army – a position held by thousands. Should we memorialize all of them with more than the usual 21 gun salute? This gets mighty expensive mighty fast.

Is the greatest contribution
To the welfare of our land,
Some jerk who breaks his promise
And cons his fellow man?

And here our author makes an egregious blunder, because he reveals, far too directly, how he wants us to feel about the political class of the United States: Jerks who break their promises. This is the tapping of the wedge that is far too loud, the wedge that is meant to separate the common citizen from the American government under which s/he lives and benefits.

Yes, benefits.

Do promises get broken? Sure, sometimes. When it comes to a government based on compromise, the citizenry had better understand that can happen and doesn’t mean the poor sap who over-promised is a moral-free individual. Sometimes you don’t get what you want immediately. And sometimes, what you want is not what you should get.

But by denigrating the political class as a class, the author strives to inject loathing and contempt into the citizen for those who try to lead this country. This accomplishes the twin ends of dividing the country against itself, and to insulate the political class from the entry of more citizens into the political realm, which is their right. From the entry of persons who may, with experience, offer performance superior to those currently in office or instrumental in political party operations^[1].

In other words, leave us with second- and third-raters in charge. If you’ve ever wondered at the incompetency that appears to be present in either party, this is a contributing factor. As this mail was received from a conservative source, it seems reasonable to speculate this contributes to the incompetency apparent, at least to myself, in Republican circles since the days of Speaker Gingrich.

Or the ordinary fellow
Who in times of war and strife,
Goes off to serve his country
And offers up his life?

While the Romans were often led into war by their political leaders, at least in their early years^[2], there’s was a different way of life that today’s folks wouldn’t much like^[3]. Truth be told, the physical requirements of serving in the military is incompatible with the physical realities of political leaders who’ve reached the point in their career at which they’re making life and death decisions concerning the deployment of the military.

The politician’s stipend
And the style in which he lives,
Are often disproportionate,
To the service that he gives.

Is it, now? Most politicians live on dreams, performing dreary jobs that most probably don’t enjoy, but work in because they know, or at least hope, that the citizen benefits from that work, from the Crime Lab doing painstaking scientific work, to the AG trying to decide which case to pursue and which to discard.

And while it’s true that a few politicians parley their experience into vast sums of money, the same may be said of certain veterans, usually of general officer rank (but remember Murphy!). The two professions are more alike than the author might care to admit.

It’s also worth removing the gloss from the point that not everyone desires the same things. The author implies that we all want to live in 30,000 square foot estates, and this is almost violently untrue, isn’t it? Many desire little more than to raise a family and perform competently at whatever job they do, to have a good roof over their heads. Not everyone wants to be a Bill Gates, or a General Patton, or a President Bush. This point really takes of the wind out of the sails of this stanza.

While the ordinary Veteran,
Who offered up his all,
Is paid off with a medal
And perhaps a pension, small.

I cannot resist noting this is the missive author stabbing himself in the back. Through contributing to the common defense, the veteran benefits by having a safe family, not to mention learning skills such as discipline, and perhaps even a trade, as a veteran friend of mine did in the Navy. Any veteran knows this, so this stanza is a very weak contribution.

It is not the politicians
With their compromise and ploys,
Who won for us the freedom
That our country now enjoys.

Should you find yourself in danger,
With your enemies at hand,
Would you really want some cop-out,
With his ever-waffling stand?

Or would you want a Veteran
His home, his country, his kin,
Just a common Veteran,
Who would fight until the end.

At this juncture, it’s important to consider the oft-overlooked point that the military, whether the Continental Army or the U.S. Army, doesn’t win freedom – it wins wars. When the Continental Army finally banished the lobsterbacks^[4] from most of North America, our current political system, based on freedoms and representative & participative government, didn’t just *poof* into existence as Cornwallis left Yorktown.

It was brought into existence by a collection of politicians. Yeah, that’s right, with names like Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Rutledge, Madison, and many others, who debated the form into existence, and then persuaded the States and populace (then tired of the Confederation of 1781-1788) to embrace it.

That’s part, an extraordinary part, of a politicians job, which is, in the final analysis, making wise choices in governance. That is not part of the military’s job. They go out and kick ass. That doesn’t ensure freedom, but it does let the politicians get on with their job.

Confusing the two just leads to military dictatorships. The author of this missive might assent to Viva Pinochet!^[5], but I shall not.

He was just a common Veteran,
And his ranks are growing thin,
But his presence should remind us
We may need his likes again.

For when countries are in conflict,
We find the Veteran’s part,
Is to clean up all the troubles
That the politicians start.

It’s worth noting that quite often the political country class of one class country or another is responsible for war. In fact, it happens all the time. Especially in those countries where the political class has been absorbed by the military class.

But, circling back to my earlier point, avoiding “political messes” requires the members of the political class be constituted of superior persons – a requirement which will not be fulfilled if mail of this ilk succeeds in attaining the goal we ascertained earlier.

This tactic is a way for the author to cover his missive in glory, rather than the tar & feathers it surely deserves. The political class is denigrated with an insult it does often deserve – while quietly denying the political class the caliber of people it requires. In this way, we see the author of this missive is no friend of the United States.

If we cannot do him honor
While he’s here to hear the praise,
Then at least let’s give him homage
At the ending of his days.

It is actually quite common to hear folks thanking current and former members of the military for their service. This stanza is designed to make the iconic veteran some unappreciated victim of civil society failure, which is palpably untrue.

Perhaps just a simple headline
In the paper that might say:
“OUR COUNTRY IS IN MOURNING,
A VETERAN DIED TODAY.”

At this juncture, I think I need an insulin shot.

PLEASE,

If you are proud of our Vets, then pass this on

And the ending, which calls for this unworthy missive to be passed on as if it’s a sacred duty. Viruses persuade animal cells to replicate the virus, thus causing illness, but it’s not sacred in the same way as this missive is not sacred.

There should be no need to summarize, but I shall anyways: This composition falls into that class of messages which quietly attempt to alienate the people from their government. We’re expected to forget that our government is, well, OUR GOVERNMENT. You don’t like how it’s functioning? Then join the political class.

Just remember, that’s much against the aims of this author.

¹ Especially when many appear to be knuckledraggers.

² This can be verified from many sources. I’ll cite War And Peace And War, Professor Peter Turchin, Plume edition, p 158, the paragraph beginning:

Perhaps the ultimate expression of this sacrificial spirit was the Roman ritual of “devotion” …

And goes on to describe how the leaders of Roman armies, finding themselves in desperate straits, would sacrifice themselves and their armies using a religious ritual. Keep in mind the armies were often led by the Roman Consul, the highest political position during the years of the Republic.

³ Again, I’ll cite Turchin, p. 155-156, in which he asserts that individualism was frowned upon. I doubt many Americans would abide by this Roman Republic societal requirement.

⁴ A term I use purely for the delectation of the older reader, who will recall that it refers to the British Army personnel of 1776, who wore bright-red uniforms.

⁵ General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, military dictator (1973-1990), perpetrator of many crimes according to the opposition.

The NASA mission to asteroid Bennu is called OSIRIS-REx, and a recent pic of Bennu is quite fun.

Image: NASA.

I wonder how long it’ll be before someone tries to drag one of these home.

Illuminati:

The Illuminati (plural of Latin illuminatus, “enlightened”) is a name given to several groups, both real and fictitious. Historically, the name usually refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret societyfounded on 1 May 1776. The society’s goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power. “The order of the day,” they wrote in their general statutes, “is to put an end to the machinations of the purveyors of injustice, to control them without dominating them.” The Illuminati—along with Freemasonry and other secret societies—were outlawed through edict by the Bavarian ruler Charles Theodore with the encouragement of the Catholic Church, in 1784, 1785, 1787, and 1790. In the following several years, the group was vilified by conservative and religious critics who claimed that they continued underground and were responsible for the French Revolution. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Saving Thomas Jefferson’s soul,” Gregory S. Schneider, WaPo:

“I had often heard you [former President Thomas Jefferson] indignantly called, deist, infidel, illuminati &c &c,” King wrote. Surely, Jefferson did not want to be lumped in with “horrid” figures such as Voltaire and other free thinkers who questioned the value of central religion? Their writings had “poisoned the minds & proved fatally ruinous to many.”

Yesterday we returned from a vacation trip to Traverse City, MI, during which we visited Sleeping Bear Dunes National Shoreline and snapped a few pictures. Here’s a few of some dead trees. The first two were up a devious brick footpath that nearly sent me falling on my head.

These are of a grouping of three which made for some nice composition. They are located right on the beach.

Intercalary:

1. interpolated; interposed.
2. inserted or interpolated in the calendar, as an extra day or month.
3. having such an inserted day, month, etc., as a particular year. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Yazılıkaya: A 3000-year-old Hittite mystery may finally be solved,” Colin Barras, NewScientist (22 June 2019, paywall):

But performing these two operations alone isn’t enough to make an accurate calendar, because 12 lunar months add up to only about 354.36 days. The calendar can be brought roughly back in line with the solar year – about 365.24 days – by adding a 13th “intercalary” month every third year, meaning a total of six additional months are added over an 18-year period. Even then, however, the calendar still drifts.

This drift can be largely removed by adding an additional intercalary month every 19th year – making the timepiece run on what is known as the Metonic cycle. Zangger and Gautschy suggest that the Hittites used the procession of 19 deities on the eastern wall to keep track of this. They think a stone marker was moved along this procession once a year to help the Hittites work out when to add extra months over a 19-year cycle (Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, DOI: 10.1558/jsa.37641).

Oiling the gears of detective work in the immemorial manner.

The female lead is simply too annoying in Cloak Without Dagger (1956), the story of a former World War II counter-intelligence agent, now a floor-waiter in a snazzy hotel, and the woman he had loved during the war who stumbles onto him while covering a fashion show. She was snoopy then, and a decade later she’s snoopy now, suggesting that one of the fashion designers staying at his hotel is actually the spy he was chasing back during the war – the investigation she messed up.

Between budding re-romance and an inquisitiveness that just won’t quit, even when breaking into a military installation where they test nuclear powered tanks, she carries the bulk of the story, and thus has many opportunities to be irritating – and doesn’t waste many of them. By the end, even her former boyfriend has used chloroform on her when she stumbles into a tight situation, and I, at least, considered applauding.

You may have guessed the ending, but it’s still a satisfactory, if stereotypical, conclusion to a mystery which was a trifle puzzling, although nothing like The Vicious Circle (1957). The theme no doubt has to do with persistence, whether it’s his or hers, or even the spy’s, although in that case it would be a negative comment on one’s persistent pursuit of wealth, regardless of its source or consequences.

But compelling? No, not really. A bit too fluffy.

lowbrows: an arthaus comedy (2017) defies deep description. Running on the conceit that a Brit woman, Justine, has inherited half an interest in the bar Lowbrows, in Pilot Point, TX, and travels there to investigate the bar and its customers, it becomes a near stream-of-consciousness exercise in meeting her new partner, his restoration work, the local old ladies exercise club, and the various animals.

It’s not a story, and it’s a comedy in the sense of vague ridicule that hangs over every single scene. The acting is often crude and even startlingly bad, but it has a certain charm to it, if only to wonder what will come next. We had to imbibe of it in small portions, as perhaps we’re not as whimsical as the target audience might be, but it might be more up your alley than ours.

Enjoy. Or not.

But who has the better hairstyle?

When considering how to review Dune (1984), it’s hard to know which element to denigrate first.

Consider the visuals: Much of the special effects are sloppily done, although, given the context of a large, space-going empire, the baroque architecture and even spaceships are a nice touch. It’s clear that the director, David Lynch, had a vision for this movie, but it appears his visuals crew just couldn’t deliver those goals for him.

The acting is not exemplary, despite the presence of many star performers, although it’s also not a disaster. With the exception of Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan), they come off as professionals struggling with oddball material; the good Baron may be the only memorable character.

And why are the actors struggling? Because of the story. I know I read Dune, the novel, back in high school, but I don’t recall a word of it, so I must take the movie version on its own terms, and those are dreadful.

First, there’s little attempt to make the characters sympathetic. They are operating in what appears to be a semi-despotic society, but they aren’t struggling for freedom or values, but rather for control of the spice of the planet Arrakis, an immortality drug. Why should we care? The Harkonnens are ceding control to the House of Atreides at the direction of the Emperor, but plan to return in force and kill the Atreides, including the head of the household, the Duke. After the battle and the Duke has gone to his doom, we find the son, Paul, has escaped and found his way to a mystical resistance movement, who might revere the sandworms of Arrakis, monsters who’d dwarf a brontosaurus.

All the while, inner thoughts – vapid as they are – are voiced in whispers, a signal of a failure to find other ways to communicate the inner states of the characters. There are hints of power politics in the Empire that are never sufficiently explained, even if they are somewhat fascinating in an otherwise dull story, of other ways of life both prestigious and constraining.

In the end, I have no idea of the real point of the story. Is Paul a chosen one? A new God? Or just a guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time? The mysticism serves to enable superpowers without significantly limiting them or associating costs with them, and that’s a mistake, because it legitimizes any sort of deus ex machina – meaning the value of cleverness plummets to zero.

In the end, while some of the visuals are slightly fun, this is really just a waste of time. It took me two or three months to watch it. Don’t follow my example.

And it doesn’t need embellishment, or so says Mikhaila Fogel of Lawfare, with regard to the upcoming grilling of Robert Mueller by the House Judiciary and Intel Committees. After reviewing a production put on by Hollywood, she has some words of advice to the notably attention-hungry House members sitting on these committees:

Long time readers know I’ve explored the topic of electric airplanes, but not in a while, so this note in Quartz from the Paris Air Show caught my eye:

The world’s largest aerospace event, the Paris Air Show, was held this week. By the numbers, the electric airplanes on display were a sideshow. More than 400 fossil fuel-powered aircraft worth $15 billion were sold as airlines stocked up to serve the world’s burgeoning demand for air travel.

But it was Cape Air’s order of the first commercial electric airplanes that drew particular attention. The Israeli startup Eviation Aircraft took a “double-digit” number of orders for a $4 million electric plane dubbed Alice. The aircraft can fly 650 miles (1,046 km) at around 500 miles per hour (805 km/h) with three electric motors on the tail and one on each wingtip. The prototype carries a 900 kWh lithium-ion battery (about nine times bigger than Tesla’s largest automotive battery).

Note this line drawing of the airplane:

Not only is it a pusher propeller configuration, but there’s pushers out on the wing tips. Now isn’t that odd?

Maybe it’s common, I don’t know. I wonder what that does for flight stability?

Representative Amash, the lone Republican to endorse impeachment of President Trump, has taken the next step along the street of honor – his (R-MI) is now (I-MI), which is to say he’s now an Independent member of Congress. He’s disgusted with both parties, as he discusses in WaPo:

With little genuine debate on policy happening in Congress, party leaders distract and divide the public by exploiting wedge issues and waging pointless messaging wars. These strategies fuel mistrust and anger, leading millions of people to take to social media to express contempt for their political opponents, with the media magnifying the most extreme voices. This all combines to reinforce the us-vs.-them, party-first mind-set of government officials.

He’s not joining the Democrats, though:

Today, I am declaring my independence and leaving the Republican Party. No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us. I’m asking you to believe that we can do better than this two-party system — and to work toward it. If we continue to take America for granted, we will lose it.

His remark about partisan loyalties I’ll take to be congruent with my extended remarks, tiresome as they are to long-time readers, concerning the toxicity of team politics. Out of curiosity, I looked up his current TrumpScore from FiveThirtyEight, and I see in the previous Congress it was 54.2%, while in the current and incomplete term it’s 93.3%, for a total of 63.5%, a seemingly appropriate score for a disconcerted Republican.

His leave-taking of the Republican Party certainly infuriated President Trump:

Great news for the Republican Party as one of the dumbest & most disloyal men in Congress is “quitting” the Party. No Collusion, No Obstruction! Knew he couldn’t get the nomination to run again in the Great State of Michigan. Already being challenged for his seat. A total loser!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2019

Its childishness betrays Trump’s fear of abandonment, his knowledge, conscious or not, that his radical approach to government, his utter lack of leadership, may result in his being labeled the worst President ever – not the best.

And that abandonment is an implicit challenge to all of the GOP members of Congress, because Amash didn’t cite issues peculiar to his situation, but rather the behavior of the entire Party. His citation of the patron Saint of the Republic, President Washington, as to the behavior of autocrats within political parties:

Washington said of partisanship, in one of America’s most prescient addresses: “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty. …

“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

This leaves the GOP member in a tough strait, as it describes Trump and the Party, and condemns the arrangement.

But, in the end, the objection will be ineffective. Most of the GOPers who are relatively new to the game are knuckledraggers are simply thrilled to have influence and power, and more than happy to pay the price of obeisance to their Party leader for their position. The balance have a bevy of reasons not to put their positions at risk, having to do with financial, ego, and ideology. To use Amash’s observation, they hate the other side too much to actually pay attention to the health of the nation. To amalgamate a couple of gerrymander authors, they believe their party is better for the state or nation than the other, and therefore they’ll steal the legitimacy of the vote from the voters; and so that sentiment adheres to the ideological zealot. In sum, I doubt we’ll see another defection, the honey of D.C. is simply too strong a lure for most of the GOP members, and the sentiment of President Washington too abstract.

So what’s ahead for Amash and Trump? As the election approaches, Trump’s under-performance in the previous elections (yes, including his disaster of a strategy in the mid-terms) is haunting him, not to mention his incompetency as a leader. Amash? Haley Byrd of CNN speculates:

Amash’s break with his party adds fuel to growing speculation that he will seek the Libertarian Party nomination and launch a long-shot bid for president in 2020. The op-ed comes as Trump is embarking on his 2020 reelection campaign and it solidifies Amash’s role as a leading anti-Trump conservative, representing a group that in 2016 coalesced under a loose “Never Trump” banner.

Over the past several months, Amash has repeatedly refused to rule out a potential presidential bid. Such a campaign would reshape the presidential election: Amash has a national following among Libertarians, and he could draw support from younger, conservative voters who are uncomfortable with Trump.

He told CNN in March that he never stops thinking about such possibilities “because there is a big problem with the current two-party system we have, and someone has to shake it up.”

The Libertarian Party decamping en masse from the Republicans is the last thing President Trump can tolerate, and so he’s attempting to smear Amash. Don’t be surprised if Amash’s Palestinian heritage comes under fire. Maybe there’ll be whispers of him being a Muslim, as if it matters.

But will Amash give it a try? I suppose it depends on whether or not he can get the funding. Perhaps some wealthy Democratic donors will divert some funds to him. I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t expect to see other defectors, but I do expect to see Amash running for President.

And more childish trash talking from Trump. It is, after all, part and parcel with his entire mindset of autocracy, profiting from his position, and corruption. He cannot NOT say it. His base will love it. All the other voters who think for themselves?

Not so much.

It’ll be checkmate in three moves, unless you whack me with that candlestick.

If you’re looking to be mystified for most of a story, The Vicious Circle (1957) might fill the niche. A surgeon picks up a woman from London Airport as a favor to a friend, only to discover her body in his flat the next day, the reporter who gave him a ride to the airport doesn’t exist, the police seem to know more than they should, yet keep letting him slip through their fingers, and his friend didn’t make the call.

Laboring to keep his fiancee happy while he evades the police and tries to resolve the mystery, he keeps digging up more and more mysteries: why does his colleague, Kimber, seem to know his fiancee, yet they both vigorously deny it? What about his patient who lies about her visit with him? Who’s the guy who’s willing to trade a photo that proves the reporter exists for a very particular box of matches?

You won’t guess what’s going on, but the reveal is snappily done. Plans don’t go according to plan,which is quite pleasant, and the acting is more than competent in the British mode. In the end, it’s one of those movies you won’t remember, but you won’t regret watching.

Gotta love the helmets these guys wear. I’d say it’s for holding their brains in, but there’s no brains to hold in.

Some stories are very culturally dependent, stories that, viewed by an audience embedded in the milieu of the story, have great significance. The rest of us? Not so much^[1].

So it may be with Cute Little Buggers (2017). It’s Brit, not American, and is the story of the alien invasion of Earth, starting with a strangely dysfunctional British village. They want our women for the usual thing, and the invaders, ably represented by Ernest and Brian, are nearing extinction – thus their motivation for making it with the loathesomely ugly humans. In some ways, they get the best lines in the show, even if they do look like fish with arms, stuck up in their ship in orbit.

Their proxies for their war for survival are robots who disguise themselves as bunnies!

I’ll not spoil the plot – as much as there might be one – as to advise you that, at least to American sensibilities, this was unappealing. Bad acting, unsympathetic characters, shockingly bad bunnies, and a lot of unnecessary nudity. Oh, and the word FUCK seems to be a big part of the dialog. Maybe the Brits liked it.

While I have to say it reminded me of Shaun of the Dead (2004) in that neither I nor my Arts Editor appreciated it, at least Shaun of the Dead had good acting and pointed commentary; we just didn’t really think a self-absorbed Londoner weathering a zombie attack was funny or profound. Cute Little Buggers doesn’t have the commentary nor the acting. The pacing is by turns sluggishly boring, then ridiculously filled with dangerous bunnies. Their sudden attacks are fairly repetitive, and if the defenses the beset villagers devise are silly, at least they’re creative.

And, just to interject a note of sunshine, I was pleased to see that one of the more despicable characters, who I had pegged for an early out in this cosmic version of Bombardament, actually does quite well for himself. I admired his skill with the cricket bat.

But this really struck me as more an indulgent fantasy than a rigorous exercise in story-telling, an amateur effort that will require large amounts of alcohol and pizza to bribe most viewers to actually finish. We made it to the end, but only by digging our fingernails into the palms of our hands.

And they really blew the first Easter egg. We’re guessing the second was just an outtake. Maybe the only outtake. Brrrrr, I’ve seen worse, but not much worse.

¹ In fact, that reminds me of the time an Iranian I knew for a short period watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) with a group of colleagues. She left at the Black Knight scene with her hand over her mouth. I suspect American tolerance for violence is greater than most of the world’s.

There’s an obvious lesson to learn concerning the consequences of the single-minded pursuit of profit in this appalling article from NewScientist (25 May 2019, paywall):

THE Medak district, to the north-west of Hyderabad in southern India, was once a pristine landscape. People came to bathe in the cool, refreshing lakes and streams. These days the air is foul. With every breath, chemicals irritate your lungs and, after a while, you feel nauseous. The colour of the water doesn’t help: it ranges from bright orange to deep brown, and is often covered in a thick layer of white foam.

The reason for this blight is not well hidden. Behind high walls and barbed wire fences, factories churn out cheap drugs for the global market. Tall chimneys belch black smoke and tankers trundle along dirt tracks under cover of darkness to dump toxic chemical waste. “It’s like a slow poison,” says Batte Shankar, the head of one village we visited. “When you Europeans are taking these antibiotics to heal, it is good for you. But we are suffering.” …

The foetid lakes and streams contain extraordinarily high concentrations of antibiotics, creating reservoirs of the drug-resistant pathogens that kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. Some suspect these places might even be incubating new superbugs that could rapidly spread around the world.

It’s a little horrifying that our pursuit of good health is pushing another country’s environment and health to the brink. You’d think the local authorities would be cognizant of the problem, wouldn’t you?

But Hyderabad’s hinterlands aren’t going to stop churning out antibiotics any time soon. In March 2018, local officials announced the construction of Pharma City, a new pharmaceutical park at Mucherla, south of the city, that will host between 900 and 1000 companies. Indeed, local authorities promote this latest venture with the slogan, “minimum inspection, maximum facilitation”.

Greed? Or desperation? Finding ways to transfer wealth from the wealthy West to the needy East is a great motivation, especially as India emerges from its former socialist form. While capitalism has a lot going for it, I think here we’re seeing a terrible excess which, if things go seriously wrong, a substantial part of human civilization, West or East, could end up paying for.

Gotta love a good orange lily.

I just happened to stumble on an update to this story concerning the destruction of some oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico by a storm. Owned by Taylor Energy, they had done some recovery work, but some 14 years later one (or more?) of the wells is still leaking, and apparently far more than Taylor thinks.

For Couvillion, who was belittled by Taylor Energy as too inexperienced for such a complicated job, told that a containment effort was all but impossible and sued by the company when he dared to press on, success is a vindication.

His business, the Couvillion Group, conceived and designed a containment system weighing more than 200 tons, built it in shops all over southern Louisiana and pieced it together deep underwater. The system has recovered about 63,000 gallons since March, according to Couvillion — virtually eliminating a rainbow-colored slick that has stretched as far as 21 miles.

“I’m in awe of what they did,” said Coast Guard Capt. Kristi Luttrell, who chose the Couvillion Group from among six finalists that bid for the job. “We gave them a task and they did it, and they should be very proud of what they’ve done.” [WaPo]

Is Taylor Energy grateful? No, they’re going to sue. To do anything else is to admit fault, I suppose, and we can’t be doing that.

Even Taylor Energy has acknowledged the Couvillion Group’s success. However, the company has sued Luttrell for ordering the cleanup, threatening to fine it $40,000 per day, hiring Couvillion and cutting it out of a $7 million project Taylor Energy must ultimately pay for.

“While the initial report from the Coast Guard is encouraging, the government refuses to share with Taylor Energy any verifiable scientific information or data despite the company’s multiple requests,” Taylor said in a statement. “Taylor Energy remains committed to its role as the Responsible Party and continues to advocate for a response that is grounded in science and prioritizes the well-being of the environment.”

In the suit against Couvillion, the company argued that he “was not professionally qualified” to perform the work and was “reckless and grossly negligent” for attempting it. The lawsuits were combined by a federal judge in New Orleans and are now pending.

And yet he succeeded. There’s certainly far more to this story than a WaPo reporter is going to cover, but for me the fact that some little firm went out and fixed this, over the objection of the bigger firm at fault, suggests a lot of foot-dragging on the part of the latter – perhaps criminally so.

Just in case my reader missed this bit of news, Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been replaced by the First Lady’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, and she managed to crawl right past Sanders in the Incompetency Department:

A source at the scene said Grisham got in “an all out brawl” with North Korean officials as American and North Korean reporters were hustled in to view the summit. Grisham was bruised a bit in the scuffle, the source added. [CNN]

I mean, come on. I can’t even imagine anything more other than parochial, unprofessional shock at how the reporters get hustled around by NK security forces.

Sheesh. A new low on her third day in the new job.

Or is it just good that I live in fly-over land? I hadn’t heard of this before, but apparently those who transgress against the moral strictures of the woke community can be canceled, which I think means that no one in the woke community will pay attention to you, admit to your existence, help you in your hour of need, nor ever forgive you for any old clumsy mistake that offended the woke community. It sounds quite, ah, brutal.

Sarah Lazarus has decided to make fun of it, and quite effectively, at McSweeney’s:

Bernard Dubois, a retired physics teacher and WWII veteran, was canceled peacefully in his sleep at the age of 96 while mumbling aloud during a very racist dream. He joins his canceled wife Esther Marie Dubois, 95, who last Thanksgiving expressed a strong opinion about vegans.

But it gets better:

On Wednesday, three-day-old Lily Hobbes became the youngest person ever to be canceled, when her father read to her from Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming and she immediately started crying.

But I appreciated the irony of the canceling of an ACLU attorney; the whole thing is worth a read. Andrew Sullivan wonders, in the third part of his weekly tri-partite diary:

I really wonder if we are on the verge of a new orthodoxy in which cancellation will forever be a brutal weapon to enforce woke behavior and discourse. Or whether, in a few years from now, we will look upon this era of woke leftism as one of those moral-panic outbreaks that temporarily make people completely mad.

It will be a temporary moral panic, although proponents of canceling will be around for a couple of decades. The leaders will be too addicted to their position and self-importance to easily give up this implement of coercion.

But as the woke community becomes fractured by the cancellation of followers for obscure and ridiculous offenses, it’ll begin shrinking. People will look at what they’ve built and ask if it satisfies the requirements of common-sense. So long as the outside world looks worse than the woke community, they’ll stick with it, but once the teeter-totter tilts the other way, off they’ll go, looking for a better way.

Speaking as an agnostic, I really appreciated Sullivan’s point concerning redemption in the various Christian sects. Given that we’re not perfect beings, the ability to recognize our own errors and correct them is a critical part of any community. While Sullivan admits the woke community supports redemption, it sounds quite severe and, almost as importantly, very subjective. At least with most of the Christians, you ask for forgiveness from God, and you – and most everyone else – assume you get it.

Funny, I thought I hid her on the right side, not the left.

I learned something tonight (or last night, depending on when this is published): that it’s not impossible to enjoy the romantic farces made in the 1940s and 50s.

I thought I’d hate Tell It To The Judge (1949) as soon as I saw the first gag, but they were smoothly done and organic to the plot. Oh, the plot? The former Mrs. Peter Webb, now Miss Meredith, is up for a seat on the Federal judiciary – in fact, the first woman to be nominated. Her problem? Her recent divorce from her philandering husband has placed her nomination at risk of rejection by the stodgy, conservative, and patronizing members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And she’s furious.

Mr. Peter Webb’s problem? He’s not a philanderer. The pretty blonde he was seen with, a material witness in an important case, keeps following him about, begging for protection against mobsters. Which is sort of like how he follows his former wife about, begging for her affections again. Throw in an opposed grandfather, a lighthouse keeper, and a grifter, not to mention the most adorable St. Bernard ever, balanced by some annoying high society types, and he’s in for a rough time.

The details are not important, except as to whether they seem organic or imposed, and, for the most part, they are organic. Are they funny? My Arts Editor burst out laughing at points where I thought we’d be squirming, so this observation suggests that, yes, they are funny. She can be a harsh audience.

Will this make you think for the next few days? I don’t think so. It’s light and fluffy and disappears like smoke. But it was fun while it lasted.

Seems like you can’t have a restaurant without a TV as a distraction.

This one, incidentally, is located within Zait & Za’atar, near the western corner of Snelling and Selby in St. Paul, MN. We’ve eaten here a couple of times now and note they seem unafraid of smoke and garlic, resulting in strongly flavored dishes. If you value ambiance and decor over food, then perhaps this won’t be your gig as it’s rather primitive in those respects, but otherwise we’ve enjoyed the food and relative quiet. If Lebanese food appeals to you, give it a visit!

The pink peony seems to have suffered a let down.

Recently, SCOTUS brought forth their view on the judiciary and political gerrymandering cases through their ruling on Rucho v. Common Cause, the North Carolina case, and Lamone v. Benisek, the Maryland case. This 5-4 decision, decided along ideological lines within the court, left the liberal wing with another loss – and a sense of outrage. Here’s Justice Kagan’s dissent:

For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.

And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to  advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.

And checking them is not beyond the courts. The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country, including those below, have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims. Those standards satisfy the majority’s own benchmarks. They do not require—indeed, they do not permit—courts to rely on their own ideas of electoral fairness, whether proportional representation or any other. And they limit courts to correcting only egregious gerrymanders, so judges do not become omnipresent players in the political process. But yes, the standards used here do allow—as well they should—judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms. In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong.

Justice Kagan’s dissent is heartfelt, powerfully written – and symptomatic of her, and my, generation’s sins.

First of all, it’s characteristic of the Instant Gratification Generation. Fix this problem now, she cries! This failure to consider how the future may render this problem moot, how the festering of this manifest injustice may be more advantageous, in the long run, than its immediate cauterization, is characteristic of those I’ve grown up with in my generation.

But that leads to the second: is there a judicial solution? Hey, I’ve hardly paid attention, while Justice Kagan is one of the top professionals in her field. Who am I to comment? Maybe I’m just someone with too many opinions.

But I can’t help but notice that all the suggested approaches to the political gerrymandering problem are inevitably encumbered with one problem that they haven’t addressed, and that renders any analogies with race-based gerrymandering solutions invalid: voters can change their political spots. A voter cannot change their ethnic heritage, but when it comes to politics, they can change their vote.

This means that today’s solution is potentially tomorrow’s problem. Sure, voters of important ethnicities can change their geographical location, thus invalidating redrawn political maps to the befuddlement of the judiciary line-drawers, but it’s more likely that voters will change their electoral choice than move to a new home. I say this not just because it’s convenient to my argument, but because there’s a real difference between the two activities. It’s quite rare that a group, en masse, chooses to move. Sure, a river changing its course, or a shattering earthquake can cause a group to move, but those motivations are are exceedingly rare. The key realization is that, generally, people move for reasons particular to them. Sure, statistically, you can group them and study them – but look at a city of people selling their homes and moving and you’ll find a multitude of reasons, and most of them are non-political.

But politics and voting doesn’t require changing residence or even party registration. All you have to do is register to vote, and then do it – with a secret ballot, no less. Today’s Republican town could become tomorrow’s Democratic town – especially since the wildcard, the independents, change their spots quite easily.

But my reader may complain that most seats are safe, despite the swings we’ve seen in voter preferences in recently years. I would point at those recent oscillations, though, and notice that the key realization here is that the political activities of those in charge will impact those who live in that area, and while the impacts will be disparate in magnitude and in whether they are positive or negative, that is only two variables, unlike those who are changing residence. The probability that a mass of voters might change their votes due to the activities of those in political power is far higher than for those of a given ethnicity moving en masse.

Given a political organization of sufficient repugnance, whether it be from incompetence, abuse, or ideological zealotry, those living in that area can, as a group, uncoordinated or not, change their vote at the next election from favoring to disfavoring that political organization.

This brings me to my final point. Many people, if they have any concerns, interests, or agendas in which government can be involved, keep an eye on the political leaders. Even those considered reliable members of a party’s base keep an eye out, usually for ideological blasphemy by their leaders. These signals may be interpreted as indicative of a particular person, but, of course, they can also be taken as a whole to act as intelligence about the entire organization. This is simply how we’re put together; it’s a social survival mechanism, akin to Is that lion too full to chase me, or had I better take off running now?

But what if SCOTUS had instead found for the plaintiffs?

Here’s what happens: this signal, a signal of arrogance, pride, disdain for the voter, and perhaps worse, is lost to that key audience, the voter. Sure, it’s damaging the polity that their activities continue unabated, but those activities are also a signal of the attitudes of that organization towards the voter: that of treating them as cattle, their votes as commodities, as a group to be led about by their noses or excluded. But at least we know and can do something about it sooner rather than later. Even for a relatively high-profile cause such as gerrymandering, SCOTUS decisions are often obscure and unknown; if they had found for the plaintiffs, the lines would have been redrawn, and even with great fanfare, the resultant public consciousness of it would have dissipated within a week.

But finding for the defendants means this signal continues to impact the voters, and it also encourages that political organization to continue activities which are reprehensible. That makes their unworthiness even more obvious.

We may find that this decision by the conservative wing of the Court will actually damage the Republicans, in the end, as the independents and moderate Republicans vote out the hard-line Republicans who’ll do anything to win. They’ll be voted out because doing anything to win is not the American thing to do.

So don’t entirely despair at this decision. If they had found for the plaintiffs, they may have embraced a deeply flawed solution with little input from the public, and little chance for improvement. Now the problem returns, not to the political sphere, but to the public sphere, either formally, or motivated by the misdeeds of the miscreants, regardless of their political stripe.

When I heard that the city elections for Istanbul, Turkey, had resulted in a narrow victory for the opposition’s candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, but then the national government had nullified the elections on some obscure grounds or another, I got that bad feeling in my gut. Surely Erdogan’s national government wouldn’t let the rascally opposition gain a lick of power, much less the position of mayor of the largest city, would they?

Sometimes the gut is wrong:

The opposition’s stunning landslide victory in yesterday’s controversial redo of the Istanbul municipal polls has reignited hopes that Turkey’s democracy, which seemed to be in its death throes, has some fight in it still.

Ekrem Imamoglu, the once obscure former Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor of Beylikduzu, an ugly urban sprawl on the edge of Istanbul, defeated his governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) rival Binali Yildirim by a whopping 800,000 votes compared with the measly 13,000 ballots in the first run. The result is widely seen as the biggest setback faced by the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who pressured electoral authorities to invalidate the March 31 results in Istanbul in the hope of winning this time.

Western diplomats cynically intoned that Erdogan would do so, cheating his way to victory if need be. But few counted on the apocalypse that was in store. Cheating was apparently not an option: AKP strongholds like Fatih and Uskudar, where Erdogan maintains his private residence, fell to the opposition, a resounding signal that his oversize sense of entitlement coupled with a poorly managed and polarizing campaign had backfired spectacularly.  Rising inflation and joblessness are however among the AKP’s biggest woes. [AL-Monitor]

Overconfidence and the belief that they deserved it appears to have been the undoing of the ruling party. That the AKP is basically a religious party – of the Muslims, but it doesn’t really matter – suggests they probably felt they had the imprimatur of their deity and thus they couldn’t lose.

It’s a common failing. We’ve seen that with the Republicans.

I don’t have much more to add, except don’t despair, there’s always a chance your opponents will become overconfident when they are ascendant – and then they become descendant.

Formal Methods in computer science are well summarized in Wikipedia:

In computer science, specifically software engineering and hardware engineering, formal methods are a particular kind of mathematically based technique for the specification, development and verification of software and hardware systems.^[1] The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design.

I’ve commented on a number of occasions, usually to colleagues, that some day the profession has to find a way to apply Formal Methods in order to produce better products, even if I haven’t the faintest idea of how to do it myself^[1]. It’s good to see that some folks have been pursuing this objective, as noted in this pop-sci report on TLA+, which appears to be based on that notion:

TLA+, which stands for “Temporal Logic of Actions,” is similar in spirit to model-based design: It’s a language for writing down the requirements—TLA+ calls them “specifications”—of computer programs. These specifications can then be completely verified by a computer. That is, before you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy (say, if you were programming an ATM, a constraint might be that you can never withdraw the same money twice from your checking account). TLA+ then exhaustively checks that your logic does, in fact, satisfy those constraints. If not, it will show you exactly how they could be violated. [Pocket / The Atlantic]

The title reminds me of a chapter in FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING: Theory and Practice (MacLennan), in which the passage of time had to be accounted for by the functional programmer. Apparently functional theory didn’t account for the passage of time, and the author found this to be a problem that had to be treated. I fear I missed the point of that chapter.

I must say, though, that one of the arguments the driving force behind TLA+, Leslie Lamport of Microsoft, employs falls with a thud to the ground:

For Lamport, a major reason today’s software is so full of bugs is that programmers jump straight into writing code. “Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered,” he wrote in an article. “But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.” Programmers are drawn to the nitty-gritty of coding because code is what makes programs go; spending time on anything else can seem like a distraction. And there is a patient joy, a meditative kind of satisfaction, to be had from puzzling out the micro-mechanics of code.

The problem is that it’s a rare person who has the resources to build a skyscraper on a whim. Programming, though, all you need is the compiler for the language of choice, and a computer. Anyone with a little intellectual gumption – or gall – can sail right into writing a program. And once someone gets the taste of success in their mouth, it can take years to wash it out. The analogy is broken.

The ease of writing code tends to obliterate the importance of the entire enterprise, truth be told. I recall way back when I was just starting to write code, I ran across a guy – I can’t remember his name – who didn’t consider it science, nor engineering. For him, it was an art form. This is not to say that all software engineers go to that extreme, but given how easy it is to indulge in writing software – programs, apps, code – compared to building even a shack, it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of undisciplined writing of code out there, me included.

But code is written everyday for critical, life-involved applications. Forget “mission-critical,” I’m talking embedded software in medical devices, the software that controls various energy sources, all things that can cause death if they fail. The use of tools such as TLA+ should continue and grow, otherwise the promise of computers will be blighted.

But it’ll probably be after my time.

¹ I know I’ve mentioned related topics on this blog, specifically having to do with software dis-warranties and the general use of the customer as a beta-release mechanism.