The American Secretary of the Interior, David Bernhardt, was confirmed on April 11. Seeing as today is the 16th, that was five days ago. Yesterday? Why, yesterday, he was placed under investigation for ethics violations.

The Interior Department’s internal watchdog has opened an investigation into ethics complaints against the agency’s newly installed secretary, David Bernhardt.

Mr. Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the oil and agribusiness industries, was confirmed by the Senate last week to head the agency, which oversees the nation’s 500 million acres of public land and vast coastal waters. He has played a central role in writing policies designed to advance President Trump’s policy of “energy dominance” and expanding fossil fuel exploration. He has been dogged by allegations of ethics violations since joining the Trump administration as the Interior Department’s deputy secretary in 2017.

Eight senators, all Democrats, and four government ethics watchdog groups have requested that the Interior Department’s inspector general open formal investigations into various aspects of Mr. Bernhardt’s conduct. Among the chief complaints have been allegations, revealed by three separate New York Times investigations, that Mr. Bernhardt used his position to advance a policy pushed by his former lobbying client; that he continued working as a lobbyist after filing legal paperwork declaring that he had ceased lobbying; and that he intervened to block the release of a scientific report showing the harmful effects of a chemical pesticide on certain endangered species. [The New York Times]

The confirmation vote? All the GOP Senators but Perdue of Georgia, who is listed as not voting, voted for confirmation, along with independent Angus King of Maine; no Democrats voted for him.

This is a basic example of the dangers of team politics. An intellectually incompetent and uninformed leader climbs to the top, and the Party discredits itself by following blindly along in his wake, approving his actions without effective regulation of his behavior. Speaking as an independent, bad systemic behaviors such as this is why the GOP is simply becoming harder and harder to take at all seriously. This is no surprise for long time readers.

But it’s worth contemplating. It’s great if a good leader is in place, but when a venal, corrupt guy like Trump gets there, and literally doesn’t understand why nearly every action he takes is wrong, it should – but won’t – discredit the entirely despicable notion of team politics.

Everybody hold hands, this could be a rough ride.

At the end of The Valdemar Legacy (2010) my Arts Editor and I yelled, “What?!?!?!”, but not in a good way. This story – or beginning of a story, more likely – splits its time between the roughly current era, where a real estate evaluator in a South American country is sent to value a house and its contents for tax purposes has disappeared, assumed to have made off with some sort of treasure. A second, sent to do the work of the first, discovers things that viciously go bump in the attic, rescuers who confine her under the excuse of bad weather destroying the roads, and an overall negative vibe, one might say.

The other half of the movie? Well, Aleister Crowley shows up (and is exceedingly well done in this flick), so call it the start of the 20th century. A young couple, who spend their time matching orphans with childless couples when they’re not on their rather nice estate, is itself childless due to an illness in the mother, Leonor. The husband, Lázaro, and his wife made their money conducting fake séances, and that has attracted the attention of Crowley. He believes that the fake séances have weakened the walls between various realities, and Lázaro will make a perfect link between them.

He entices Lázaro with the idea of curing his wife, but when Crowley and his group gather to run a real séance, events go awry as a monster from the other side climbs through and proceeds to lay waste to the countryside.

And that’s just about where it stops. What the hell?

So be warned. It’s not a badly done movie from a technical standpoint, and I was appropriately creeped out by Crowley. But the reasons for, well, a story within a story approach were not well laid out, and makes it a little frustrating to follow, especially given this abrupt ending. A sequel appears to have been released in 2011, but whether it finishes up the story in a satisfying way is not known to us.

I’ve been annoyed all day since President Trump had the temerity to give advice to the emergency personnel fighting the Notre Dame fire, as CNN notes here:

So horrible to watch the massive fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!

One must assume the Parisian fire-fighting corp knows its business.

But then I realized that Trump MUST stick his finger into all pies, no matter what, because that’s what the overconfident amateur does. He thinks he knows better than the experts, and has to show it. Meddling idiot.

I see the Parisian fire department told him it would risk collapsing the entire structure. I’d also have to wonder if that would risk spreading the fire further.

It’s sad to see an old structure go, but everything has its end. I just hope there are no casualties.

The monster of my id is in there!

Perhaps the worst part of Fear In The Night (1947) is the title. I think it should have been named Why Did I Do It? Why?

We meet Vince in his dreams, and this dream is unpleasant: he enters a mirrored room, meets a man and woman, the former crouched on the floor doing something, fights with the man, and kills him, while the woman escapes. When he awakens, in the bed at the hotel where he rents a room, he’s in the sort of wretched shape you might expect, covered in sweat and vastly unsettled.

But as he dresses for work, he becomes even more unsettled. In the pocket of his pants are a key and a button, neither of which he has ever owned, and – he remembers from his dream.

He goes for help to his brother-in-law, a police detective named Cliff. Cliff’s wife, who is Vince’s sister, has just become pregnant for the first time, and he’s understandably distracted and uninterested in Cliff’s problems, but he warns Vince not to bother his sister with these problems at this delicate time.

A day or two later, they meet up for a picnic at the beach, with Vince’s romantic interest along for the ride. Chased from the beach by a violent storm, they drive around and get lost in the hills, until suddenly Vince is giving directions to a house they can stay at.

And he doesn’t know how he’s doing this.

I shan’t spoil how this ends, except that Vince’s attempt to throw himself from a window doesn’t work. This is not a murder mystery so much as a psychological study of good and evil – and how sometimes good must depend on luck to win.

Despite the awful soundtrack, we enjoyed his story a great deal. Not that there aren’t holes in it, and I thought Vince’s love interest was somewhat superfluous, but that’s an arguable point – others in the audience might dispute it. It’s short, to the point, and worth spending the time if you enjoy mysteries of this sort.

And, for you fans of the original Star Trek, Vince is played, in his debut movie performance, by DeForest Kelley, the actor who portrayed Dr. McCoy to great effect. I found this distracting, as sometimes Vince looked like Kelley, and sometimes not. Compounding the problem is that brother-in-law Cliff bears a certain facial resemblance to William H. Macy of Fargo (1996) fame. So be warned.

And here it is.

From WaPo:

Iancu v. Brunetti is a trademark dispute in which Los Angeles artist Erik Brunetti sued the government, saying it violated the First Amendment by refusing to register the trademark for his “subversive” clothing line: FUCT.

And the government’s position?

The government argues that the appeals court got it wrong. Registering a trademark is a benefit, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco wrote in his brief, not a restriction on speech. Brunetti has called his clothing line FUCT since 1990 and may continue to do so.

Brunetti is not being penalized for his viewpoint, Francisco says. The government’s decision is based on content and evidence that the trademark “would be perceived as equivalent to the vulgar word for which it is a homonym.”

I’m sitting here trying to see what compelling government interest dictates that an application for a trademark on a near-homonym be denied. What damage will be done if this trademark is permitted?

If it’s so offensive, the public won’t buy the trademark owner’s products, and the issue will be closed. If the public doesn’t desert the owner’s products, then it’s clear that the public officials attempting to deny the trademark application are clearly not connected to the public sense of proper decorum.

Either way, the law is superfluous, and while it may not be a violation of the First Amendment, it is damn silly.

In case you don’t keep track of TMORA (The Museum of Russian Art) shows, and you value your little moments of madness, you might want to pay a visit to them soon, as they currently have an exhibit of surrealist sculptor Sergei Isupov. The following two figures are my Arts Editor’s favorites.  We must of necessity present several views of each, for reasons that will become apparent. The AE has worked professionally in pottery, and was absolutely in awe of Isupov’s work.

Here, if memory serves, is Burden, in three views:

The best I can make out is that it’s about a dog taking his human for a walk.

Her other favorite, which I also liked, we present in two opposing views. I regret to say I don’t recall the name of this one:

Each of these spaniel-sized sculptures presents a complete, well-modeled 3-D image.  Superimposed onto the outside surface of the sculptures are beautifully-rendered 2-D images that totally change the perspective of the original shape in weird and mind-bending ways.  I suspect that one needs to be able to hold them in both hands and view them from every possible angle to fully appreciate these works of art.

I’d be hard-pressed to explain the psychology behind the images in this show.  The casual observer may detect flashes of MC Escher as well as  an obvious nod to Hieronymus Bosch.  In every case, the sculptures are impeccably modeled, and the slip-drawn applied figures have detail as fine as the best etchings. Suffice it to say that the show is well worth a special trip if you’re in the mood for some modern surrealism.

And, just for fun, some work from Isupov’s Big Head period:

The heads are done in stoneware with an overlay of colored slip.  The rest of the thirty-odd items in the exhibit were built in fine porcelain and overpainted or stained with colored slip, with a few flashes of judiciously-applied clear, high-gloss glaze used as a textural highlight.

Surreal Promenade is on view at The Minneapolis Museum of Russian Art from February 9^th – June 9^th, 2019 in the Lower Gallery.

(Most of this post written by Deb, our Arts Editor.)

Helios in action. Remind me not to meet him in a dark alley.

In the category of stone-cold stubbornness I must place Galaxy Lords (2018), a motley collection of competence, incompetence, and, really, something else for which I have no word but stubbornness. Multiverse savior Helios, now in self-imposed exile, is whacking away at a log with his axe when his old comrade, Wranthelon, pops in to tell him the entire multiverse is in danger of falling under the sway of the evil Prince Adorastius, and the Champions are assembling to repulse him, despite the disapproval of the King. After some agonizing, Helios agrees. He leads a crew of clones and an apprentice multiverse-saver on a ship equipped with a prototype, super-fast star drive to the planet on which Adorastius, surrounded by henchmen and hench-robots, is installing the complete version of the star-drive on his ship, in an attempt to stop him before he can use this tech to take defeat all of his foes. They infiltrate the castle, find the captive scientist (who subsequently explodes).

But they’re too late. Helios’ ship is ordered to escape, but the evil Prince Adorastius super-ship damages it while flitting about. Then the aforementioned Champions show up, and in their attempts to save Helios’ ship, they’re turned into shredded cheese. The evil Prince escapes, thinking he’s destroyed Helios, but Helios’ old pal Wranthelon sacrifices himself for Helios, and we end with Helios vowing vengeance.

Yeow, a sequel?

First, the competent stuff. The CGI spaceships, and the space station (which actually got an “ooooooh!” from my Arts Editor), were well done, both technically and aesthetically. Into the same category we’ll put some, but not all, of the landscapes and skyscapes. The makeup is OK, and the costumes are, ah, inventive, probably in the absence of a budget of any size. Oh, and I thought Helios’ voice was moderately well-done.

But after that things go downhill. But I’ll give them this: it feels like a student project. All the actors appear to be very young. That is, they don’t shave. And yet they carry on through this with a show of persistence that is applaudable.

So: the dialog is terrible, the acting left tooth marks all over the scenery, the scenery was mostly CGI and terrible, and the plot was a mishmash of so many other plots, with a few buzzwords thrown in. Oh, and the battle scenes! No sense of how to really stage a battle, and when someone was offed, well, at least once even the camera was spattered with the blood ‘n gore. We were actually laughing through these.

And, yet, throughout this toothclencher, we, too, persisted. There was a thread to this mess which was somewhat interesting, and I think it was the sense that sometimes the good pay a dear, dear price for doing good. The self-sacrifice of the Champions was poorly implemented, as it were, yet it was there. There was no magical saving of them – they die doing what they think is right.

So, whoever made this mess either just stumbled over a positive element, or actually had their head on straight when it comes to stories like these.

But if you’re going to watch this, make sure beer is involved. A lot of it.

While organizing photos from a smartphone that we just replaced, I discovered these two fencing related photos from 2014.

Given that the lower one is in a frame, this is almost certainly not the outdoor fencing mural we sighted in southern Minnesota a few years back. That remains a mystery.

And neither of these fencers is displaying good form. The attacker is leaning over quite a ways, and it seems his back foot has rolled up. The defender is quite lackadaisical.

Who’s the dude in the background with the narrowed eyes and menacing mien? He’s fascinating!

Perhaps the least of the problems with Sherlock Gnomes (2018) is that my Arts Editor didn’t much care for the artwork. She pronounces it as being too plastic. It didn’t bother me so much, but then we’re talking about garden gnomes that come to life when humans aren’t paying attention to them – and, yet, shatter when they’ve fallen from a great enough height.

In act, an exploration of the meaning of a gnome’s entire lifecycle would have deepened the story. I mean, are these spirits that inhabit things made by humans? Things that mimic human-made things? Why? And what does it mean when one … dies?

But beyond that, the primary problems with this presentation have to do with the characters, primarily those of the eponymous Sherlock and his buddy, Watson. Beyond their obvious origins, we don’t really know much about the pair. They’re the sworn defenders of garden gnomes in London – but that’s just a statement with little oomph behind it.

So when they pop up, trying to discover why entire families of gnomes are disappearing in the blink of an eye, they feel very shallow, even artificial. Nor is there a proper parallel with the Holmes of Doyle, because, to a strong extent, Holmes was in it for the intellectual stimulation. No doubt he had some dedication to his clients, but they were primarily sources of intellectual mystery, not desperate victims of crime – in his view. Dr. Watson, of course, provided the humanity that Holmes lacked.

But in Sherlock Gnomes, the investigator and his assistant have this mysterious compulsion to safeguard garden gnomes, creatures that, truth be told, are quite strong, at least until they shatter. Sherlock also has a traditional, if charmingly ADHD, nemesis, but his mania is not the same as Holmes’ nemesis, Professor Moriarty, a criminal equal to Holmes’ intellect. In Gnomes’ case, his nemesis is Moriarty’s opposite, all emotion and crazed evil. Why? We don’t really know why. Moriarty was driven by greed and a profound urge to prove himself superior to those who would imprison him. This guy? I suppose he was born this way.

And the investigators’ link to the missing gnomes, Gnomeo and Juliet, are not much better. They’re stereotypes, without the baggage that came with Romeo and Juliet (but perhaps they were better in the prior movie, which either I have not seen or I have forgotten). A couple who is fighting over neglect after a move to a new, desultory garden, they find an echo in Gnomes and Watson. When their friends and family disappear while they’re out of the garden, they cling desperately to the investigator and his appendage, who are grimly following clues while delivering backstory that is never quite satisfying.

Amazingly, this movie improves after the first half hour. Never mind the cute use of other toys and cultural satire, but simply the fact that there are not one, but two twists to this movie made it better than I anticipated. Not that I and my Arts Editor ever stopped squirming, but the intensity of our squirming wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

As it was, though, while the conclusion was clever, the lack of self-sacrifice clearly made this a story in a very minor key. There are costs to being and doing good, and it’s the exploration of those costs which often make for the better stories. We don’t get that here. Think of Bogart’s portrayal of PI Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), most importantly Spade’s agony at turning in the woman he’s fallen in love with for murdering his partner. That’s doing good at a price. And that’s a big part of what makes The Maltese Falcon a legendary movie.

Sherlock Gnomes doesn’t approach that depth of what I’d call analysis. But I think it would be fun for the youngsters.

Out of state readers may or may not have heard Minnesota got socked with a sloppy blizzard yesterday. Here’s a few pictures to pick up the local readers:

I think that’s my favorite shade of orange.

It may cheer the xenophobic, but this contempt for the law can easily extend beyond what you favor, all the way to what you don’t favor:

During President Donald Trump’s visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago, where he told border agents to block asylum seekers from entering the US contrary to US law, the President also told the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, that if he were sent to jail as a result of blocking those migrants from entering the US, the President would grant him a pardon, senior administration officials tell CNN.

Two officials briefed on the exchange say the President told McAleenan, since named the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that he “would pardon him if he ever went to jail for denying US entry to migrants,” as one of the officials paraphrased.

It was not clear if the comment was a joke; the official was not given any further context on the exchange. [CNN]

So today he finds a way to make the way clear to go above the law for denying entry to migrants; tomorrow, he tells his favorite general that he’ll be pardoned for breaking the law with respect to beginning wars with foreign powers. This can get ugly for even Trump’s most single-minded supporters very quickly.

Is President Trump so much a spoiled child that he thinks this is a routine and acceptable thing to do?

Or is it just another sign of his increasingly obvious dementia?

It doesn’t really matter. The GOP should be leading the way for dumping Trump’s sorry ass out on the pavement. Their inability to take their jobs seriously will be a blot on their collective and individual legacies.

My Arts Editor came up, willy-nilly, with an idea for a superhero’s nick:

The Phantom Itch.

I think it’s a good one for the universe of The Tick. We happen to catch that from time to time.

From Amber Philips in WaPo comes a headline I’d never though I’d see for any President:

The 6 most potentially damaging congressional investigations for Trump, ranked

It really says something when we can talk about multiple investigations of a sitting President, based on so much objective evidence.

NBC News reports on some Attorney General Barr’s testimony to Congress:

Attorney General William Barr, defending his decision to order a review of the Trump-Russia probe’s origins, told a Senate panel Wednesday that he thinks “spying did occur” by the U.S. government on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“For the same reason we’re worried about foreign influence in elections … I think spying on a political campaign — it’s a big deal, it’s a big deal,” Barr said in response to a question from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee, who had asked why he is looking into the origins of the investigation.

Shaheen then asked, “You’re not suggesting that spying occurred?”

Barr paused for several seconds and replied, “I think spying did occur,” though he didn’t elaborate.

Keeping in mind that it’s a crime to lie to Congress, I think it’s a shame none of the Senators thought to ask Barr a simple but pointed question:

Did President Trump, or any of his subordinates, instruct you to mention spying during this or any other public hearing?

Sure, Barr may have something, and, if so, I’d love to see that evidence. But right now, all signs point to politics. It’d be good to dump a threat right in Barr’s lap – no playing politics, or you could end up doing Federal time.

I’m sure my readers have already read about this latest astronomical achievement, but just because I’ve always loved astronomy’s pretty pictures, here’s the latest from JPL/NASA:

Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Politico has a remark on why non-economist Herman Cain may have been put in the pipeline to be nominated to the Fed Reserve Board by President Trump:

Some GOP senators said that Cain’s difficult path might have eased Stephen Moore’s confirmation to the Fed, despite Moore’s own problems with unpaid taxes and his partisan reputation. After all, Republicans might be hard-pressed to revolt against both of Trump’s nominees.

Fed Reserve Board nominee and non-economist Stephen Moore has also been a startling announced to-be-nominee. Steve Benen provides a summary:

To say it’s difficult to know where to start with Moore’s c.v. is to be quite literal. It matters, obviously, that he’s not an economist and knows very little about what the Federal Reserve does. But it also matters that Moore has been wrong about practically everything for many years. It matters that he appears to be a Trump sycophant. It matters that Moore has had a hand in some spectacular economic failures. It matters that Moore’s economic opinions tend to echo Republican talking points while “flying in the face of economic theory.”

It matters that Moore has a reputation for misstating basic factual details. It matters that his economic views tend to vary based on the party of the president at the time. It matters that the White House has made the finance industry nervous with this nomination. It matters that actual economists have been apoplectic about Trump’s selection of Moore, (One scholar argued, “This is truly an appalling appointment. An ideologue, charlatan, and hack. Frankly so bad the putatively serious economists in Trump administration should resign as matter of honor.”)

And Jon Chait at New York Magazine:

Faced with the prospect of attempting to confirm two absurdly unqualified cranks for esteemed Fed positions, the conservative movement has undertaken a triage operation, focusing its defenses on Moore and leaving Cain to twist in the wind. The decision to save Moore at Cain’s expense makes some sense: Of the two, Cain’s kookery was on more colorful display through his slapstick 2012 presidential campaign. Cain’s treatment of women (numerous sexual-harassment lawsuits) is harder to defend than Moore’s(open adultery followed by failure to pay child support.)

Still, the defenses of Moore have a distinctly weary undertone. The Wall Street Journal endorses its former staffer, gamely notes that “as an individual Fed governor, Mr. Moore wouldn’t likely wield much influence.” Yes, “the alleged rap” on him is that “he has on occasion been wrong about monetary policy,” the editorial allows with considerable understatement.

Damned with exceedingly faint praise by WSJ, I’d say. Someone who subscribes to the WSJ should call them up and tell them to grow a pair, because this is a President who needs to be reprimanded, and hard enough to break fingers.

In the meanwhile, I hope that the Congressional press corps gets together and decides to ask every Senator who says they like Moore in comparison to Cain whether or not they enjoy being gamed by the most incompetent President in the history of the Nation. Which is to say, made to look like fools.

And, finally, what is going on here? Trump’s other nominee to the board is now the chairman, and he’s worked out quite well in my opinion. Has Trump received orders to try to wreck the economy from his handlers? Or does he think he can goose the economy into such a high gear that enough voters who otherwise despise him will vote for him after all? Moore apparently thinks so. But he’s only a single vote.

Perhaps it’s the continuing drain of ‘adults’ from this Administration…

Ali Alkhatib, a PhD student in computers at Stanford, points out that computer engineers are no different from any other part of Western Civ these days – they go where the money tells them to go. For him, that’s a problem:

[Professor James Landay] goes on to write about Engelbart’s “mother of all demos” in 1968, the introduction of something like half a dozen features of modern computing that we use every day: text editing (including the ability to copy/paste), a computer mouse, a graphical user interface, dynamic reorganizations of data, hyperlinks, real-time group editing (think Google Docs), video conferencing, the forerunner to the internet, the list goes on. What he doesn’t write about – what few of us talk about – is the funding the Stanford Research Institute got from the Department of Defense, the role the DoD played in the development of the internet and of Silicon Valley itself, and the uncomfortable readiness with which we collaborate with power. We’re shaping our work toward the interests of organizations – interests that are at best neutral and at worst in opposition toward the interests of the public.

John Gledhill wrote about the work of political anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s in Power and its Disguises, arguing that “the subject matter … seemed relatively easy to define,” outlining that the ultimate motivation of government-sponsored political anthropology like EE Pritchard’s study of the Nuer people was that “… authority was to be mediated through indigenous leaders and the rule of Western law was to legitimate itself through a degree of accommodation to local ‘customs’” (Gledhill 2000). The danger of aligning our work with existing power is the further subjugation and marginalization of the communities we ostensibly seek to understand. …

Today the government isn’t the main director of research agendas and funding so much as private corporations are. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and others offer substantial funding for people who conform to their ethics – one which fundamentally has to account to shareholders but not necessarily to people whose lives are wrapped up in these systems; numerous laws on the regular disclosure of the financial state of publicly traded companies carefully ensure that publicly traded companies are responsibly pursuing the best business decisions, but still in the United States almost no laws concerning the handling of data about us, the ethical commission of research on or about us, or even the negligent handling of private data.

The conflicts of interest are almost innumerable and mostly obvious; that organizations discussing the ethical applications of AI should not be mostly comprised of venture capitalists, AI researchers, and corporate executives whose businesses are built on the unregulated (or least-regulated) deployment of AI should be blindingly obvious. And yet, here we are. Somehow.

Certainly, we need to find some way to talk about the development of AI in a way that takes into account the interests of greater society, because it appears that it’s impact will be tremendous. It’s almost frustratingly tempting to say that government should be part of that discussion. It’s tempting because, ideally speaking, the role of government is to take the overall view of the well-being of society. They are best situated to regulate as necessary.

But it’s frustrating because the track record of government, as its various agencies are ‘captured’ to lesser or greater extents, is poor. Even worse, its embodiment of cultural arrogance makes it, again, a poor candidate for such regulation.

Ali’s written an interesting blog post, with few obvious solutions to what, for many, is not an obvious problem. It’s worth meditating on.

h/t C.J.

Three eyes? Bad acne? Halitosis?
Oh, she’s the one with the halitosis!

Blood And Black Lace (1964) reminded me that different nations have different acting styles. I’ve commented a few times about the Japanese style, and this movie reminds me that the Italians have – or had – their own style as well.

Perhaps I’m biased, or impatient, or something, but I don’t like their style, either. I shan’t go much into it, except the emotions seem exaggerated, as if we must be bottlefed the reactions of the characters.

But beyond that, this is a very early slasher film, or giallo, in which there are many female victims of some mad killer. In this one, the victims work at a fashion salon, putting on shows, until one is beaten to death. We’re not sure why, but her secret diary is found, and that leads to another death. And then another. A few more. The police, who thought they had the killer wrapped up, are forced to admit they’ve been fooled.

Eventually, the mysterious killer is revealed, but now the killer is in some serious straits, as the killer’s lover is not entirely happy. However, a fall from a height would seem to take care of the situation, and now the lover makes plans to enjoy the wealth of the killer.

It’s not quite noir, as most of the victims are more or less innocent of any serious crimes; they merely have unhappy luck. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see a real theme in this, and so my interest is mostly kept in discovering who will be the crazed murderer – and whether or not any of the victims, who try to be combative, will actually inflict real damage on their attacker. I hate it when the bad guy is invulnerable. (I also liked Daredevil (2003) because the hero was quite a mess just from his common-criminal suppression activities.)

Do they succeed? I’ll leave you in suspense.

NewScientist (23 March 2019, paywall) has some estimates to pass on about the siblings of ‘Oumuamua:

Parts of Earth may originally be from another part of the galaxy, having crossed light years to form the ground beneath our feet. That is the conclusion of a study suggesting that the Milky Way should be full of free-floating rocks like ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar asteroid that visited our solar system in October 2017, and they may act as seeds to form planets in nascent planetary systems.

Our traditional picture is that planets form out of discs of gas and fine dust around a star, but some observations seem to show them being born much faster than that model predicts. Interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua may be the solution to this discrepancy.

Researchers have estimated that there should be about 29 trillion ‘Oumuamua-like objects per cubic light year in our galaxy, floating free after having been thrown out of orbit around their home stars. They are likely to be relatively small, dark, and fast-moving, which is why we have only seen one so far.

My question, as you may have guessed, is how are they distributed in that cubic light year? Is ‘Oumuamua just a random traveler, or are we about to see a horde of its siblings descend on the Solar System?

An artist’s concept of interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua) as it passed through the solar system after its discovery in October 2017. Observations of ‘Oumuamua indicate that it must be very elongated because of its dramatic variations in brightness as it tumbled through space. Image credit: European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser

Remember Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), former chair of the DNC, who I suggested should shoulder a large part of the blame if Trump won the Presidency?

It appears that her behavior may have even longer repercussions than I had anticipated, based on this AP report:

Pichone voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016 and said she may vote for a third party again if Sanders doesn’t clinch the nomination.

She’s emblematic of a persistent group of Sanders supporters who won’t let go of the slights — real and perceived — from the last campaign. The frustration is notable now that Sanders is a 2020 front-runner, raking in $18.2 million in the first quarter, downplaying concerns about DNC bias and highlighting his success in bringing the party around on liberal policies it once resisted.

Some establishment-aligned Democrats worry the party could lose in 2020 if lingering concerns about the last primary aren’t put to bed.

“It has the potential to escalate, and it has the potential to help re-elect Donald Trump,” said Mo Elleithee, a former spokesman for Clinton and the DNC.

If the disaffection with the Democrats is so strong that it could cost them two Presidential elections against the weakest GOP nominee in modern history, Donald J.Trump, then it suggests that the Democrats are nearly as rotten at their core as the Republicans. It doesn’t show up in their policies, which do not feature self-enrichment as a career goal, but the apparent manipulation of the nomination process without regard to the importance of fairness is appalling, which is another way to say the voice of the generic Democratic Party member has receded into nothingness in the conduct of Democratic Party business.

Of course, the fact that Sanders is (I-VT) rather than (D-VT) does throw a bit of fishing line into the cookie batter, doesn’t it? You want that nomination, Bernie, you should join the Party.

But Sanders adherents will take little note of that nicety, and honestly I don’t think they should take note of it. The Democrats should have either treated Sanders as even-handedly as Clinton and the others, OR it should have said, right up front, that Sanders didn’t qualify for the nomination. That would have been respectable and understandable.

Understand, I think Sanders is too old for the Presidency, as is Biden. Call me ageist if you will, but the Presidency isn’t just about who’s got the best policies and promises on offer. It’s also about competency. We don’t need another Reagan falling asleep during meetings.

But if Trump beats a non-Sanders Democratic nominee again, the basic operations of the Democratic Party should be carefully examined by the Party, because otherwise it’ll continue to lose winnable elections. How are they looking these days? The latest from Gallup:

Not so good. The independents are gaining ground while the Republicans continue to sink from the rocks in their pants, and the Democrats are merely treading water. If you’re a Democrat, you should be taking alarm right now.

We use analogy as a supplement to reasoning because sometimes the required reasoning is simply too difficult. There may be too many variables, or the causal links from one state to another are too poorly understood to confidently employ. This is when analogy comes into play. We find a system that seems to look and operate like the system upon which we’re trying to settle some predictions, and about which we have some known conclusions, and then we try to map those conclusions back to our system of interest. It’s a crude style of reasoning, but, if nothing else, the other system can offer insights into our system of interest.

In this spirit, let me offer an analogy. It occurred to me while reading about the queasiness some banking experts, as well as ex-officials, are feeling about the banking sector right now:

Actions by federal regulators and Republicans in Congress over the past two years have paved the way for banks and other financial companies to issue more than $1 trillion in risky corporate loans, sparking fears that Washington and Wall Street are repeating the mistakes made before the financial crisis [of a decade ago].

The moves undercut policies put in place by banking regulators six years ago that aimed to prevent high-risk lending from once again damaging the economy.

Now, regulators and even White House officials are struggling to comprehend the scope and potential dangers of the massive pool of credits, known as leveraged loans, they helped create.

Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and other financial companies have originated these loans to hundreds of cash-strapped companies, many of which could be unable to repay if the economy slows or interest rates rise. [WaPo]

These officials are drawing very credible analogies with the banking system’s behavior prior to the Great Recession and how today’s seems similar in many respects. This seems very credible to me, as the arena and many of the particulars seem to correspond. As a member of the economy and working dude, this of course interests me – as it should my reader.

But I’m more interested in an more outré analogy, and that’s to cancer. Cancer is characterized as a corruption of a part of the body which is experiencing an abnormally high mutation rate of the DNA of the cells in question. Cell death is delayed or not permitted, resulting in rapid growth and monopolization of resources to the detriment of the host organism; the termination of the host organism is calamitous both to the host and to the cancer.

My analogy is to how investors relate to the companies in which they invest. A company whose profits and revenues are static is considered to be a company that is in trouble; only those that shoot for the moon, continually increasing profits, or have the potential to generate sudden and immense profits (think Little Pharma, or Apple), are considered to be healthy companies.

This is, from an evolutionary perspective, evolutionary pressure. We know, from biological evolution, that an evolutionary pressure results in one of two things: termination of the species, or the evolution of a survival mechanism to counter that pressure. One thing we do not see is a non-response, a static organism. The probability the organism does not change and survives is zero.

What does this mean in business? The pressure is for more and more profits. Companies respond, first beneficially (if you’re an economist; if you’re some other –ist, such as an environmentalist, then it may be neutral or even disastrously negative), by finding more efficient processes, replacement materials, and the like. But at some point, the gains dry up – they cannot go on forever.

I suspect the banking sector has reached its limits and is now dancing on the line of disaster. My Arts Editor saw this when she was a Wells Fargo employee and they were using an internal program called Eight is Great to encourage more selling of financial products to customers, without regard to the customers’ needs. The company culture, such as it was, was to simply make money. This has resulted in a number of scandals over the last several years.

Sector wide, we saw the termination of the Glass-Steagall legislation in 1999, which removed regulation of banking behavior and permitted ownership of investment services that contained inherent conflict-of-interest. This was motivated by the banking sector, which, like most regulated segments of the private sector, continually seeks to ‘capture’ its regulatory agencies, as well as influence Congress. With the accession of President Trump, much progress has been made by the banking sector on this front, as can be seen by the strongly bally-hooed deregulation, the subsequent Great Recession, and the continued pressure of the banking sector to remove the Glass-Steagall successor, the Dodd-Frank legislation. The banking sector players, which are all run by human beings susceptible to the usual human emotions of fear, pride, and the like, are pressured to continue to increase profits.

Think about that, and add in the time element.

It’s rather akin to the Malthusian conundrum: a population will continually expand until it runs out of resources. There are only so many profits to be made, yet the thirst for them is unquenchable, once that becomes the focus of investors. I say that as an investor myself.

So let me get to my point: in the future, we may have to accept that a company that is merely static in the profits and revenue results may be more desirable than those companies that are driven to continually increase profits. This would be a monstrous sea-change in the attitude of all investors but those in the low-risk category; indeed, I wonder if the entire stock-exchange concept has been entirely healthy for society as a whole, because it focuses on money rather than service. Remember, the oil of the economic machinery, which we call money, was not the original goal of capitalism. The original aim was to escape the evils of the the enforced status quo. If you weren’t born into the dominant banking family, the system would damn well make sure you would never be a significant competitor to it, either, and that applied to all other sectors. In a sense, the private sector hardly existed. The concept of money was a necessary but not sufficient part of making capitalists happier than the downtrodden of the status quo.

Today? Too many worship money. Look at who’s President.

I think it’s worth considering the behavior of economic actors, especially corporations, through the lens of cancer. Cancer’s dynamically changing DNA leads to it becoming immune to treatments which had formerly shut it down (remission). Similarly, for a while the banking sector was kept under control, but through its lobbying, agency capture, and other efforts, it’s gradually becoming immune to efforts to control its behavior.

And, like cancer, there’s little reason to believe its out of control behavior is good for the society within which it exists. The last time the corruption exploded, we had a Great Recession which scared the shit out of us. But now it’s shrugging off its restraints again, and it’s entirely possible that the next explosion will lead to even worse results than before. Don’t forget: the institutions that were Too Big To Fail are now even bigger. The financial craters may turn out to be even larger.

How they made cocktails before World War II. The guy on the right screwed up once and lost his eyebrows.

The Shadow Returns (1946) is part of a long-neglected set of stories^[1], published in magazines and told in radio shows, about private detective Lamont Cranston. He has an alter-ego, The Shadow, who wears a mask and is almost never seen but as a shadow against the wall, with which he uses extra-legal means to extract information from criminals and their associates while solving crimes. In this particular episode, he’s the nephew of the Commissioner of Police^[2], which lets him hang around the investigation of a man who mysteriously commits suicide from the balcony of his mansion after a set of diamonds disappears from his mansion. In the company of his fiancee, Margot, and his minion, Shrevvy, they pursue lead after lead, twice more seeing men mysteriously leap to their deaths.

Soon, they discover the secret of the stones, a formula of immense value, and how a man’s fetish for a particular ranch tool is used to effect the many murders. As the bodies pile up, Lamont and Margot maintain their rather carefree approach to the case, until one of the several suspects, each less memorable than the next, is finally fingered, and the case is closed.

Now the only question is how to bundle The Shadow out of the mansion before the Inspector finally fingers him.

It’s ok. The humorous bits with Shrevvy are mostly off the mark, but Lamont and Margot have an easy chemistry that helps move this story along. This is definitely a pre-Bogart crime movie, as Bogart seems to mark the point where we get deep looks into the characters, whether they are protagonists or antagonists, and that’s why The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca stand head and shoulders above most of their predecessors.

Unfortunately, the print we saw had some damaged audio, but it was nothing we couldn’t tolerate. We mostly stuck around just to see why these guys kept leaping from balconies.

And here is the YT version (we saw the version on Amazon Prime). The YT preview looks terrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLuGtk_f0Kg

¹ Or perhaps not. I just know I’ve never seen any new stories in this series since I became a conscious human being. And I don’t care enough to do the necessary research.

² Perhaps this is always true. I am unfamiliar with this series of stories.

Not all elephants end up poached. Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas has a blog post up concerning the last days of an elderly queen elephant, and they are very impressive. Rather than poaching those photos themselves, I’ll just recommend you visit his blog.

It may be sad that the queen has passed on since those photos were taken, but I’d prefer to think of it as the passing of a successful queen elephant, and as such a thing to be considered, oh, satisfying. There’s not really a word for the emotion in question.

As you view the photos, notice the signs of age, and think of how little we see such signs in wildlife photography. I found it moving.

Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!

Sordid. I think that’s a good adjective for Forbidden World (1982; aka Mutant), an exploration of the horrors of unrestrained scientific research. Troubleshooter Colby, whose usual tool is a laser gun, and his trusty killer robot, Sam, has been assigned to a mysterious problem on Xarbia, an uninhabited planet hosting a research station. An interlude with a pointless space battle occurs, which incidentally utilizes footage from Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), after which Mike reaches the station.

He finds three or four scientists specializing in various fields of genetics, a couple of assistants, and a mutant something-or-other imprisoned in a science lab isolation chamber. With movable panels. And all the other research animals ripped to pieces, and blood all over the walls. But never mind that, because it’s time for dinner!

During their meal of syrup dripped on tofu, Mike discovers the scientists are remarkably close-mouthed about their work, as well as a missing scientist, Annie. In the meantime, one of the assistants, Jeff, who has been assigned to clean up the lab, turns out to be remarkably slow-witted: He sticks his head into the lab isolation chamber, and becomes the horrified host to whatever that damn mutant thing might be.

This is what earning a Ph.D. gets you.

Well, there’s cleaning up the liquifying Jeff (don’t ask), there’s the sleeping with the beautiful lady scientist, there’s another mutant, now looking like a giant spider, who goes gallumphing about out in the inhospitable outer world and manages to trap the science team lead and eat him up (yum!) with some of the most unbrushed teeth I’ve ever seen in a movie, all with Mike and Sam running around shooting their laser guns with little effect. And don’t forget the nudity.

Finally, the crime comes to the fore: the mutant, singular or plural, are actually the result of crossing a human cell with something called “Proto B,” a synthetic DNA that results in … the mutants? But then there’s the liquifaction of the bodies, which the mutants are eating. Maybe it’s something the mutants excrete. Yeah, that’s it. Sure. And missing Annie? She was the host mother for this mess. It didn’t end well for her.

Anyways, the scientist who has cancer (and the fakest coughs in the world) comes up with the solution for killing the mutant: feed his own cancer cells to the mutant. With the rest of the scientists gone in various horrific ways, Mike ends up as the ad hoc surgeon who must cut out the tumor and then feed it to the oncoming mutant, who doesn’t appear to want to ingest it, but a little ingenuity and soon all that is left is Mike and the surviving assistant. And, ah, a foaming monster. With teeth.

So, what’s the point? There’s no real sincerity in the “science is evil” theme, no palpable You shouldn’t do that! Not like Frankenstein’s Monster, anyways. The science team lead is vigorous in attempting to forestall Mike’s mission from successful completion, but exactly his motivations in defending the mutant, which eventually lunches on him, are completely unclear.

No, this is mostly about the visceralities of life: pursued by monsters, getting it on with the beautiful ladies, cleaning up messes, and a lack of sleep. If you’re feeling like you need a bit of a dip into a crass exploration of, ummmm, whatever this is, have at it.