Unsightly Mental Blemishes

My Arts Editor directs my attention to the new Corvette:

Corvette’s supercharged small block V8 engine had always been positioned up in the front, giving the 66-year-old classic American sports car its signature “wedge shape.” Even as Corvette engineers tweaked the engine’s acceleration and horsepower, competitors that have offered mid-engine cars for years were setting new performance records and powering ahead of Chevrolet in sales.

“To be truly world class, you have to be mid-engine,” Jonny Lieberman, Motor Trend’s senior features editor, told ABC News. He broke the story in 2014 that a mid-engine Corvette was in production.

Motor Trend editors keep a database of sports car and supercar lap times they record at various race tracks around the world. Over the years, the only cars to beat the 755 horsepower ZR1, the fastest and most powerful Corvette ever built, were its mid-engine rivals. [ABC News]

Which is all more or less fascinating, except that this isn’t really so good for the climate, now is it? Granted, it’s a low production run, but it really seems to me General Motors has missed a bet on becoming a leading car manufacturer by doing something truly innovative with their car engine – making it climate friendly.

And we might have even bit on this idea. A much classier presentation than this new hulk of a car.

Disfluency:

Based on previous research, psycholinguist Hans Rutger Bosker and his team already knew that people sprinkle their speech with so-called disfluencies, the um’s, ah’s, uh’s and pauses that we often unwittingly slip into conversation. They also knew that these disfluencies usually cropped up before someone said a word that wasn’t in their everyday vernacular. [“There’s A Good Reason for Why We ‘Uh’ and ‘Um’ When We Talk,” Lacy Schley, D-brief]

From a NewScientist (26 April 2019, paywall) sidebar:

Bedrock of democracy

The impact of the planet’s geology is even visible in how people vote. Running through the staunchly Republican south-eastern US states, for example, is a distinct crescent of Democrat-voting counties (see graphic, below). This curve closely follows an exposed band of 75-million-year-old rocks laid down during the Cretaceous period. These have produced a very rich, fertile soil, which was found to be perfect for growing cotton. In the mid-1800s, cultivation of this crop led to a boom in slave labour. A high proportion of African-Americans still remain in these areas, where they favour the more liberal policies of the Democratic party, and continue to vote for its presidential candidates.

Fascinating stuff. I wonder if Professor Turchin has ever considered this sort of cultural influence during his demographics research. The geographic movements of a specific group of people, based their source of origin, might or might not perturb the cycles of prosperity/poverty in interesting ways that make them more predictable.

They say, Never miff Mother. Personally, that sounds a trifle obscene to me.

Shadow of Suspicion (1944) has a tension between its plot and its characters. The former is intriguing, while the latter are irritating. A man comes to Chicago, establishes an account and deposits a check at a local bank, to be drawn on a New York bank, giving his name as Adams. Then it’s off to the local branch of Cartell & Co, a diamond broker recently robbed of a magnificent necklace.

He is intent on a $1500 ring (roughly $21,000 today), but the manager of this branch of Cartell notes his local funds are not yet available, and denies the sale. Adams then announces his name is Northrup, and this was a a test. The home office is concerned as there’s another valuable necklace on its way to the branch. The manager, suspicions aroused, suspects a double-cross, and calls the home office to see if there’s really a Northrup there, as he’s never heard of him. But there is a Northrup at the home office.

A yarn-spinning, old dude who comes to the phone, and soon is offering to come to Chicago to help entrap Adams / Northrup, who seems to be up to no good.

The machinations continue, and soon it seems as if only the pretty young secretary, a continual distraction to Adams / Northrup, has nothing to hide. Well, except her irritation with this persistent young man of many names.

The plot, taken on its own, is a lot of fun, if perhaps a trifle superficial. But the characters themselves tend to be an annoyance, in some ways caricatures of who they probably should have been. The plot keeps moving along, and while sometimes I was grinding my teeth, I was just a little too intrigued to not finish watching this admirably short movie (just over an hour).

But perhaps I was just stubborn.

I haven’t been paying much attention to the Keystone XL debacle recently, as it hadn’t been on my radar, but now the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council has forced it back to the forefront:

The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council voted to ban Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) from its Pine Ridge Reservation on Wednesday and sent her a sharply-worded letter on Thursday.

“If you do not honor this directive,” wrote the tribe’s president, Julian Bear Runner, “… we will have no choice but to banish you.” …

Bear Runner pledged that the ban would last until Noem rescinds her support for a pair of laws the state passed in response to promised demonstrations against the Keystone XL pipeline project. The laws, which codify “riot boosting,” are designed to prevent protests that may disrupt pipeline construction.

Critics say the legislation was designed to prevent the sort of large-scale, high-profile protests that unfolded over the Dakota Access pipeline in neighboring North Dakota, which began in 2016 and lasted for months. Demonstrations there led to more than 750 arrests, and the policing effort cost the state $38 million.

Noem announced the bills in the waning days of the year’s legislative session, and the state’s Republican majorities pushed them through the House and Senate in just 72 hours.

“My pipeline bills make clear that we will not let rioters control our economic development,” Noem said in a statement after she signed the bills into law in late March.

I don’t have much more to add, other than to note that it’s inappropriate for a governor of a state to be so blatantly on the side of “economic development,” especially that which could prove disastrous for the state – and then push the poorest members of the state (yeah, it may not be accurate to suggest tribe members are also South Dakotans, but you take my point) to take the biggest risk for the lowest payback. Frankly, her misunderstanding of the state’s role is both dishonorable and goes against the ideological principles most GOP members hold, which is that the state should get out of the way and let the free market do what it will.

Politico notes, in the wake of the Stephen Moore debacle’s termination, how poorly the Trump Administration has done in vetting candidates for important positions:

In total, Trump has withdrawn 62 nominees since taking office, according to data provided to POLITICO by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that tracks federal vacancies. At this point in his presidency, Barack Obama had withdrawn 30 nominees. The figures include only people who were formally nominated, so Moore and others who took themselves out of consideration before their official paperwork was sent to the Senate aren’t counted.

The context is weak, since numbers for Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II are not provided, nor how many such total positions needed to be filled for those Administrations, nor how many positions have not even had a nominee advanced, a Trump specialty. Still, stuff like this is eye-catching.

In the past three months alone, two high-profile candidates for top administration jobs have pulled themselves out of consideration, in addition to Moore. Trump announced last month that he would not nominate Herman Cain, a former pizza executive, to the Fed amid opposition from some Senate Republicans. And in February, Heather Nauert removed herself from consideration to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations after learning that she had employed a nanny without the correct work authorization.

Current and former administration officials insist that they’ve made strides in professionalizing the White House’s internal vetting operation. But they say the president himself sometimes undermines that process by making major staffing decisions on his own, with little consultation and with little notice.

It’s easy enough to laugh at the assertion in the last paragraph, but that may be a mistake. Let’s make a contrarian assumption that this is nothing to laugh at – and not because of the incompetence of an amateur President is showing through, as does Steve Benen.

Instead, we know that President Trump likes to work with “acting” Secretaries and the like, because he’s told us so. Putting forth nominees sure to be rejected is one way to slow down the process, leaving Trump in a position where he thinks he holds more power than he would otherwise. (One has to wonder how much less likely it is that an “acting Secretary” will tell him No than will a confirmed Secretary.)

But we can take this a step further and recall there’s a common assumption that doesn’t often come out in the open concerning, and that’s happens to be the belief that all these positions are necessary and must be filled. Out on the right-wing of the GOP, there is a philosophical disagreement with this ideas, as this conflicts with the ideological position of ‘small government.’

Watchdog groups also remain alarmed by the sheer number of positions for which Trump has neglected to nominate anybody. At the State Department, more than 30 senior positions are vacant. There are more than a dozen senior-level vacancies at the Justice and Defense departments.

Of course, an argument could be made that there really shouldn’t be 30 senior positions at State, because, by golly, the world’s not that big. I can hear Trump professing such sentiments. However, given our position in the world, and the many philosophical positions we take in order to push a better civilization on the rest of the world, State is probably severely understaffed.

So when Trump fails to nominate anyone for a position, or advances ludicrous choices for nominee, he, or more likely his puppet-masters, may be making a strategic choice that advantages their position on the global chessboard. It may not be Trump being an impulsive man-child.

Protean:

(Adjective)

1. : of or resembling Proteus in having a varied nature or ability to assume different forms
2. : displaying great diversity or variety : VERSATILE [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Robert Mueller’s Take Care Clause,” Quinta Jurecic, Lawfare:

The Take Care Clause plays a central role in Mueller’s constitutional argument. Jack Goldsmith and John Manning have studied the “protean” nature of the clause and the many contradictory interpretations that courts have adopted; here, Mueller’s analysis has some resemblance to the understanding set out by Andrew Kent, Ethan Leib and Jed Shugerman, who argue that the Take Care Clause imposes a “duty of fidelity” on the president. Mueller does adhere to well-established readings of the clause as empowering the president to exercise prosecutorial discretion and to remove officers. But he also reads it as constraining presidential action, writing that “the concept of ‘faithful execution’ connotes the use of power in the interest of the public, not in the office-holder’s personal interests.” The duty to “take care” can also be, as Kent, Leib and Shugerman write, a limitation on discretion.

Kevin Drum worries about the very recent action by Facebook removing Louis Farrakhan, InfoWars‘ Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others from their platform:

Do we want a few faceless committees at Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram deciding on these things? If Facebook had been around in the 60s, would Huey Newton have been banned? David Duke in the 80s? Pat Buchanan in the 90s? Ayaan Hirsi Ali today? Should they? Once you start banning people, you’re inviting public pressure to ban even more people, and profit-seeking companies are pretty sensitive to public pressure.

We’ll see how this plays out, but I’m not sure that banning high-profile nutballs is the right way to go here. It invites endless trouble and it’s really not the biggest problem that social media has anyway. It’s the armies of flamers and trolls that really need to be brought under control.

In any case where speech is curtailed, the question to answer is: Who decides? This doesn’t mean that speech is never curtailed. We already do in some ways. But you should always ask: Who decides?

Let’s ask newspaper editors for the last couple of centuries. Previous to the Web, if you wanted mass communications, you had to go through newspaper editors, TV owners, or magazine editors. The First Amendment doesn’t guarantee your views will be made available, only that the government cannot, with some exceptions, repress your personal expression of them. So those who had taken the time to build mass communications exercised the gatekeeper function, and because they had to satisfy their audiences, who generally had conventional, orthodox tastes by definition, the bulgy-eyed set was shut out.

That said, let’s talk about the difficulties of yesterday vs today for your typical bulgy-eyed maniac. Since the invention of the printing press, the guy with an irrepressible urge to spit out alarming opinions has always had the option to buy or build a printing press analog. Fifty years ago, it was the mimeograph, and I recall receiving the mimeographed, or something similar, Richard Geis newsletter on a quarterly basis, until Geis’ health gave out, and that was followed (to fulfill the subscription requirements) by a subscription to something called The Utilitarian, or somesuch, a libertarian rag of dubious intellectual worth.

Today? Hey, all those banned from FB have web sites, they can advertise on friendly sites, people know how to get to them, and quite frankly, while FB and its ilk are a bit of a new beast on the scene^[1], it’s not as if these folks are being shut up, not in the least. The value of social media sites is not in the advertising, it’s in the person-to-person communications. Perhaps we’ll soon see an FB analog in the Conservapedia.

Nothing to see here, move along.

¹ Think of a camel with a fifth leg.

Many letters of this sort have been written over the last couple of years, mostly by disaffected Republicans, but Patti Davis, daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, brings a little more firepower to the pen in this Op-Ed for WaPo:

You [Republicans] have claimed [President Reagan’s] legacy, exalted him as an icon of conservatism and used the quotes of his that serve your purpose at any given moment. Yet at this moment in America’s history when the democracy to which my father pledged himself and the Constitution that he swore to uphold, and did faithfully uphold, are being degraded and chipped away at by a sneering, irreverent man who traffics in bullying and dishonesty, you stay silent.

You stay silent when President Trump speaks of immigrants as if they are trash, rips children from the arms of their parents and puts them in cages. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that my father said America was home “for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness.”

You stayed silent when this president fawned over Kim Jong Un and took Vladimir Putin’s word over America’s security experts. You stood mutely by when one of his spokesmen, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said there is nothing wrong with getting information from Russians. And now you do not act when Trump openly defies legitimate requests from Congress, showing his utter contempt for one of the branches of our government.

It’s worth remembering that, at one time, Reagan, a former Democrat turned Republican, claimed that the Democrats left him, he had not left the Democrats. I think these days, if he were still around and cogent, he’d be an Independent, railing against the moral cowardice of the current crop of GOP members of Congress.

But do you know what I’d really like to see? A reporter hand a copy of Davis’ letter to Senator Graham (R-SC) and ask him for his thoughts, and when Graham responded with the scorn and spittle he’s recently developed since coming in contact with President Trump, ask him why he’s not weeping in shame at his moral depravity.

Yeah, that’s posturing – but it would also be a way to show Senator Graham the road to redemption.

Former Special Counsel Mueller is angry at Attorney Toady General Barr:

New questions hang over the integrity and motives of William Barr after it emerged Tuesday night that Robert Mueller expressed concerns about the attorney general’s initial letter to Congress summarizing his special counsel report.

The bombshell revelations detonated hours before Barr was due to testify Wednesday on Capitol Hill, an appearance that was already likely to be a political cauldron with suspicion intense among Democrats over his framing and interpretation of the Mueller investigation.

In a letter to Barr last month, Mueller expressed concerns that the attorney general’s four page letter to Congress summarizing his principal conclusions did not fully capture their context. He believed his report was more nuanced on the issue of whether President Donald Trump had obstructed justice and he wanted more of his findings to be released, officials told CNN.

Mueller did not believe the summary was inaccurate but was frustrated with media coverage based on Barr’s letter, officials said. The Washington Post first reported on the letter. [CNN]

And you have to love this:

Phil Mudd, a former FBI agent who once worked with Mueller at the bureau and is now a CNN commentator, said Tuesday on “Cuomo Prime Time” that it was “stunning” that someone as dutiful and restrained as his former boss had written to Barr to question his summary of the special counsel’s principal findings.

“This is a baseball bat wake-up call. … You cannot underestimate what he is saying,” Mudd said.

This has the flavor of an event that’ll pop up in history and political textbooks as an important event on the timeline of the Trump Presidency.

It’ll also be used to illustrate the importance of an Attorney General who is independent of the President, and a President who has at least a clue as to how to run the circus. Indeed, it may provide fodder for debates during the upcoming campaign.

I wonder if there’s ever been a movement to make the Attorney General an elective position.

Watching the Republicans stutter over this should be entertaining.

Clickjack:

Clickjacking (classified as a User Interface redress attack, UI redress attack, UI redressing) is a malicious technique of tricking a user into clicking on something different from what the user perceives, thus potentially revealing confidential information or allowing others to take control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous objects, including web pages.^[1][2][3][4]

In web browsers, clickjacking is a browser security issue that is a vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms. Clickjacking can also take place outside of web browsers, including applications.^[5]

A clickjack takes the form of embedded code or a script that can execute without the user’s knowledge, such as clicking on a buttonthat appears to perform another function.^[6]

Clickjacking is an instance of the confused deputy problem, wherein a computer is innocently fooled into misusing its authority. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How hackers use tricks to make money from your clicks,” Donna Lu, NewScientist (20 April 2019, paywall):

So certain websites contain tricks to get people to click. For example, an apparent link to a news story may actually take users to an advertising site earning the owner ad money, invisible objects that cover parts of a page could register as ad clicks when clicked, and hyperlinks that open an ad first before redirecting to the intended website also result in stolen clicks without the clicker realising.

The team scoured the internet’s top 250,000 most popular websites and found 613 sites with so-called clickjacking code. Though this totalled less than 1 per cent of the websites they looked at, it amounted to a total daily traffic of 43 million visits. On these pages, more than 3000 hyperlinks had been secretly inserted.

Just a random thought: Is this going to be like cancer? The Web so thoroughly ruined by the unprincipled that, one day, the whole thing just collapses as people stop using it?

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an archaeological finding reported in American Archaeology associated with climate change, but I was waiting for the article to make it to the Web. It still hasn’t made it there, but now Archaeology has a report on the same finding, so here it is:

One surprising effect of European colonization of the Americas was a cooling of the Earth’s climate, researchers at University College London have determined. The team, led by geographer Alexander Koch, estimates the indigenous population of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century to have been around 60 million. Over the next century, this population declined by some 90 percent, largely due to epidemics introduced by Europeans. As a result, around 215,000 square miles of cultivated land, roughly the area of France, was left fallow and reverted to forest. This sucked up enough carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere—to lead to cooling.

How humanity tends to behave results in the emission of climate change gases, so reducing the numbers causes a reduction in those gases.

Right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt’s latest made interesting reading when he stated why he believes Trump is a shoe-in for re-election in WaPo:

Last week’s message from a booming economy should have rocked the Democratic field. Alas, the party seems collectively intent on poring over the Mueller report yet again in the hope that, somehow, someway, there’s something there. But the probe is over. No collusion. No obstruction. Democrats have to campaign on something else besides a great economy, rising values of savings, low unemployment across every demographic, clarity about allies and enemies abroad, and a rebuilding military. It’s a tough needle to thread, condemning everything about Trump except all that he has accomplished that President Barack Obama couldn’t or wouldn’t. Not just tough — it’s practically impossible.

Bold mine. The interest doesn’t come so much in its content, though, as it is in contrast to other evaluations. So what is to be made of Fox News‘ senior judicial analyst, former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano’s analysis of the redacted Mueller Report? Here’s what he has to say, via the Fox News website:

Mueller laid out at least a half-dozen crimes of obstruction committed by Trump — from asking former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland to write an untruthful letter about the reason for Flynn’s chat with Kislyak, to asking Corey Lewandowski and then-former White House Counse lDon McGahn to fire Mueller and McGahn to lie about it, to firing Comey to impede the FBI’s investigations, to dangling a pardon in front of Michael Cohen to stay silent, to ordering his aides to hide and delete records.

The essence of obstruction is deception or diversion — to prevent the government from finding the truth. To Mueller, the issue was not if Trump committed crimes of obstruction. Rather, it was if Trump could be charged successfully with those crimes.

Mueller knew that Barr would block an indictment of Trump because Barr has a personal view of obstruction at odds with the statute itself. Barr’s view requires that the obstructer has done his obstructing in order to impede the investigation or prosecution of a crime that the obstructer himself has committed. Thus, in this narrow view, because Trump did not commit the crime of conspiracy with the Russians, it was legally impossible for Trump to have obstructed the FBI investigation of that crime.

The nearly universal view of law enforcement, however, is that the obstruction statute prohibits all attempted self-serving interference with government investigations or proceedings.

As an independent voter, to my mind it is significant when a prominent partisan personality does not follow the party line on a major issue; it’s even better when such a personality has relevant experience and expertise, and uses it to produce what appears to be an honest evaluation of a document of paramount importance. These are the writings which catch my attention as possibly highly informative. Napolitano is unequivocal in his conclusions, while off-handedly condemning Attorney General Barr for not even reaching the low standard set by former AG Jeff Sessions.

Hewitt? He appears to be writing merely for his right-wing paycheck, keeping his masters happy with whatever pablum is necessary to push the Party line. It’s exceptionally difficult to take seriously the communications of someone who can seriously misread a report from which many observers, partisan or neutral, have found serious evidence for obstruction of justice. Who knows what else he’s misinterpreting to the satisfaction of his masters?

I must admit I rarely read Hewitt, but the title of his article (“The 2020 election isn’t going to be close”) was too good a hook to ignore. Too bad there was nothing to it to take seriously.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of Christian minister Mike Huckabee and White House Press Secretary, puts her foot in it:

Look, I think that the real shame in all of this is that Democrats are perfectly capable of coming together and agreeing on the fact that they’re comfortable ripping babies straight from a mother’s womb or killing a baby after birth, but they have a hard time condemning the type of comments from Congresswoman Omar. I think that is a great shame.

Bold mine.

Brazen lies. But this is the face of the Christian religious right, and not just because Sanders, daughter of a minister and therefore should be considered as having been “raised right.” It’s because there’s no avalanche of disapproval, no disavowal of these statements, by the religious right leaders.

It used to be that people held the truth to be sacred. Now it’s more important to win the battle, no matter what. It’s discouraging that those who think they’re the most moral of the land are, in reality, the least.

Futurism.com reports on the latest threat to our collective sanity:

A Russian company called StartRocket says it’s going to launch a cluster of cubesats into space that will act as an “orbital billboard,” projecting enormous advertisements into the night sky like artificial constellations. And its first client, it says, will be PepsiCo — which will use the system to promote a “campaign against stereotypes and unjustified prejudices against gamers” on behalf of an energy drink called Adrenaline Rush.

Yeah, the project sounds like an elaborate prank. But Russian PepsiCo spokesperson Olga Mangova confirmed to Futurism that the collaboration is real.

“We believe in StartRocket potential,” she wrote in an email. “Orbital billboards are the revolution on the market of communications. That’s why on behalf of Adrenaline Rush — PepsiCo Russia energy non-alcoholic drink, which is brand innovator, and supports everything new, and non-standard — we agreed on this partnership.”

Now it appears that PepsiCo is merely exploring options. But if this, or a related, project is pushed along, it seems to me that sending the lawyers out on an accusation of despoiling the commons – that is, our shared sky – should be a good strategy going forward.

But I have to say, this is a nihilistic statement:

“We are ruled by brands and events,” project leader Vlad Sitnikov told Futurism at the time. “The Super Bowl, Coca Cola, Brexit, the Olympics, Mercedes, FIFA, Supreme and the Mexican wall. The economy is the blood system of society. Entertainment and advertising are at its heart.”

No, not really. We have free will, and so long as we don’t permit ourselves to be mislead by advertising and entertainment, we can live more satisfying lives than if we follow along in the wake of what marketing execs want us to do.

The drive to consume is what drives them.

Ambit:

the range or limits of the influence of something:
They believe that all the outstanding issues should fall within the ambit of the talks. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “The Long Fight For The Freedom To Blaspheme Has Lessons For Today,” Robyn E. Blumner, Free Inquiry (Vol. 39, Number 3):

Comstock also went after freethinkers: people who were calling religion and its rules for private behavior into question. He thought freethinkers, who often held the view that women should be free to control their sexual reproduction in bold defiance of church doctrine, equally immoral as those producing smut. Freethinkers were prosecuted under obscenity law, but the crime was essentially that of impinging on Comstock’s religious sensibilities. And at that time, the crime of obscenity subsumed blasphemy within its ambit.

I had to laugh, as an old guy with a sense of social media history, at this report from LinkedIn on how Twitter wants to change its usage model:

Jack Dorsey wants to shift Twitter from its model of following specific people to one where users would follow topics, in order to improve the quality of conversations on the platform. “That is a huge fundamental shift to bias the entire network away from an accounts bias to a topic and interest bias,” he told the audience at TED 2019 in Vancouver.

The Twitter CEO admitted the platform incentivizes the wrong kind of behavior, consequences he had not imagined when building the platform thirteen years ago. “In the past, it’s incentivized outrage. It’s incentivized a lot of mob behavior. It’s incentivized a lot of group harassment,” he acknowledged. “If I designed the service again, I wouldn’t emphasize the follow count as much. I wouldn’t emphasize the like count as much. I don’t think I would even create likes.”

Sheesh. Just like the old Internet forums, pre-Web, the name of which I sadly cannot remember. Or, off the Internet completely, a number of different species of BBS software, such as the Citadel software I was involved in^[1].

An optimist would say Twitter is evolving from a backward form of communications to a proven form; a pessimist would ask, Why should I use the Twitter I love after it mutates into something else? My exposure to Twitter has been limited to following links and, sometimes, providing a link to a Tweet. My experience is that the thoughts of Twitter authors, even in “Tweet storms”, are fragmentary and more useful for pointing at more developed sources, than for themselves.

But the popularity of Twitter marks me as simply someone unsuited for the experience; many people no doubt love it. And so, for them, will this change to what I hazard to be the very heart of Twitter be such a turnoff that Twitter will become another failed social media experiment? If they change, will they become an object lesson to everyone else about changing the primary hook of your social media offering?

Could this be the death of Twitter as it loses its uniqueness?

¹ Author: the late Jeff Prothero, aka Cynbe ru Taren.

When you see a headline of a NewScientist (6 April 2019, paywall) article like this:

Is religion good or bad for humanity? Epic analysis delivers an answer

You can get a little interested. But I admit I was a little disappointed right from the get-go, because Professor Harvey Whitehouse of Oxford simply ignores the most profound interpretation of the fact that there is persistent, if not consistent, religion, and, instead, gets caught up in the entire weighing of each bit of evidence:

But first, what do we mean by “good” and “bad”? Should religion be considered good if it has inspired magnificent art but enslaved millions? Would it be judged bad if it ensured equality at the price of free expression? Such assessments risk miring us in moral quicksand. Besides, how could these intangibles be weighed against one another? A more empirical approach might tally lives lost or harmed against those saved or enhanced as a result of religion. But any attempt to estimate these numbers would be hopelessly subjective.

But he ignores the question in his own title, ending up in the brush, rather than looking at the forest, and thus forgets the two most important pieces of evidence, which are

1. We still exist after quite a lot of time;
2. Religion, as inconsistent as it is with each instance of itself, still exists.

From these two indisputable facts, and employing evolutionary theory in a sociological context, the inevitable conclusion is this:

Yes, religion has been good.

It has had survival value, in other words. That’s the answer to the question. But Whitehouse’s summary and analysis is not trivia.

But first, I selected the words in my response carefully. I used the past tense very deliberately, because one of the rules that comes out of observing evolution through the biological record is that today’s feature may be tomorrow’s bug. Your cheetah may be evolutionarily adapted to run down and feast on gazelle’s and similar critters, and the cheetahs may do very well while those gazelle’s are around to eat. But when their normal prey disappears, the adaptations which allowed them to take a gazelle down may actually work against them when they find themselves a water buffalo.

So, for those readers of an agnostic or atheistic bent who are wondering about my answer, please bear in mind that past performance is not a predictor of future performance. We may have ridden the horse of religion to success so far, but that horse is flea-ridden, full of false beliefs, easily manipulable by malign personalities, and never tested in an environment where scale has begun to matter, by which I mean a world already deep into overpopulation, where a pro-natalist, all life is sacred attitude is deeply at odds with the goal of keeping civilization going and not having it collapse into a heap of dust.

That’s where the work of Whitehouse and his colleagues does become important. As presented, it appears to be stripped of the overall context of population, carrying capacity, and the entire population dynamics question. That is the important part that, at least in this article, it missed. Just to reiterate, a pro-natalist policy is important when humanity is in separate groups and resources, in proportion to human population, seems unlimited.

That’s not the situation now, and how that interacts with religion seems to be the paramount question.

Steve Benen sums up a critical decision former VP Joe Biden must make now that he’s a declared candidate for the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2020:

For Biden, Trump’s presidency is effectively a fluke. A historical accident. An “aberrant moment in time” that can be corrected with the election of a Democratic president who won’t necessarily turn back the clock to 2016, but who can at least restore a sense of normalcy and maturity to the White House, bringing an abrupt end to a four-year period of madness.

But for many Democrats, each of whom would welcome Trump’s departure, Biden’s assessment is a misdiagnosis.

For them, Trump isn’t the disease, he’s a symptom of a larger sickness. In this model, there’s a systemic rot in our political system, eating away at Republican politics, which made it possible for a racist television personality to rise to power in the first place.

Replacing Trump is an obvious prerequisite to better political health, the argument goes, but it wouldn’t remove the deterioration of our political foundation, without which Trump’s madness would have been impossible.

Source: Gallup

Trump’s approval rating within the Republican Party is sky-high. I think this invalidates the public Biden position, while confirming the position of those Democrats who disagree with him, as well as those independent observers who’ve been noting symptoms of a terminal pathology in the GOP for years now.

But is it wise, or better, politic, of Biden to switch his position? After all, no one wants to be told their political and intellectual positions are not only balderdash, but actually indications of a systemic mental illness. It just doesn’t go over well. If he wants to lure the bulk of the Republican Party back to, well, normality, the first step is not to spit in their faces.

On the other hand, Gallup polls also indicate that roughly 27% of US citizens answering another poll consider themselves to be Republicans (however, another 16% consider themselves “Republican leaners”). Worse for them, they are an aging demographic that, I think, is not attracting a lot of the younger generations, if this Pew Research research finding continues to hold true. Essentially, the current Republicans are part cult members and part cult leaders, and the younger set recognizes there’s something wrong in this dynamic and are avoiding it. Inevitably, the infection, as it were, will die out from old age, if not outright invalidation (which I suggest will happen to End-Timers such as former Rep Bachmann (R-MN) and half-term Governor Palin (R-AK) as their Biblical predictions once again prove wrong).

If Biden and other Democratic candidates choose to label to the Republican Party as being pathologically and systemically ill, independent voters will come to one of two conclusions. First, they just write it off as inter-party warfare and the Democrats get dinged for being bitchy.

Or, two, the voters decide to examine the evidence. In order for the Democrats to get that to happen, they have to get their messaging up to the task of informing the uninformed without alienating them, while keeping in mind that many voters don’t have time to do the research. It’s going to be harder than it sounds, because it’s going to involve absolutist propaganda from the GOP, as we’ve seen from Trump, that appeals to a lot of people, and they won’t want to reject it, no matter how pathological the entity might be. After all, absolutism is easy, nuance is difficult.

But I think, in the end, that Biden should probably change his position. It’s honest, it’s accurate, and it’s good for the future of the nation to practice honesty.

Someone who’s been relieved of the responsibility of differentiating between right and wrong.

Oh, I know that’s not in the dictionary, but that’s effectively it.

… but I happened to have the camera with me, so here’s a tulip to brighten your day.

Bonus! The first dragonfly, we think, of the spring! It was hard to get him into focus, as he was mostly transparent.

Later today I have to dig a new tree out of the dogwoods. This may be the end for the rickety old shovel I so dearly love.

NBC News is reporting on a Federal attempt to stop the supply of opioids:

In a national first in the fight against the opioid crisis, a major drug distribution company, its former chief executive and another top executive have been criminally charged in New York.

Rochester Drug Co-Operative, one of the top 10 largest drug distributors in the United States, was charged Tuesday with conspiracy to violate narcotics laws, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., and willfully failing to file suspicious order reports.

Laurence Doud III, the company’s former chief executive, and William Pietruszewski, the company’s former chief compliance officer, are individually charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Pietruszewski is also charged with willfully failing to file suspicious order reports with the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA.

Both Doud, 75, and Pietruszewski, 53, face life in prison. Doud will appear in court Tuesday, and Pietruszewski pleaded guilty last Friday, Geoffrey S. Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said.

There are two facets to consider.

First, the accused are facing life in prison, and yet they did violate the law in pursuit of profits. This illustrates the lure of money.

Second, diminishing the supply may artificially diminish the rate of addicts, but it does little to diminish demand, and that’s the real problem. So I have to question whether this sort of prosecution will have any sort of true impact on the opioid crisis, even if it’s followed by more.

It’s a little odd.

From NASA’s JPL:

“InSight’s first readings carry on the science that began with NASA’s Apollo missions,” said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “We’ve been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!”

The new seismic event was too small to provide solid data on the Martian interior, which is one of InSight’s main objectives. The Martian surface is extremely quiet, allowing SEIS, InSight’s specially designed seismometer, to pick up faint rumbles. In contrast, Earth’s surface is quivering constantly from seismic noise created by oceans and weather. An event of this size in Southern California would be lost among dozens of tiny crackles that occur every day.

Fascinating. Mars is a smaller planet than Earth, further from our common star, and thus in a weaker gravitational field. Its moons, Deimos & Phobos, are small, so it seems unlikely that the sound was gravitationally triggered. Would a meteorite strike cause that? I’d expect the wave form to have an abrupt beginning and a tail for an end, and that’s not what we see here.

Just a little settling of the planet?

Just a little windy, maybe, to be polite about it?
Image Source: NASA.

For those of us who’ve been following the refusal of former White House official Carl Kline, former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office who overrode findings against awarding security clearances to various Trump progeny and others, I should think there was some tittering over this remark by his lawyer:

In a separate letter Monday, Kline’s attorney, Robert Driscoll, told the panel that his client would adhere to the White House recommendation.

“With two masters from two equal branches of government, we will follow the instructions of the one that employs him,” Driscoll wrote. [WaPo]

And how often does this happen in other areas of the law? Exactly zero. You don’t get to decide not to testify because your employer told you not to; you testify because the law said that this is an appropriate subject on which to testify, and, outside of Second Amendment considerations, you either do it or you end up in the pokey.

Now, the House Oversight Committee may not have the power to jail the dude, but they should make it very clear that he should be testifying because of the danger in which his decisions has potentially placed the United States, and because that’s the honorable thing to do. So President Trump told him not to. Big fucking deal. If the Administration is fucking things up, he should be hastening to give that testimony – not sitting on his ass with staples through his lips.