Unsightly Mental Blemishes

In NewScientist (22 December 2018, paywall), Douglas Heaven suggests the machines just about have us beat when it comes to games:

Gamers everywhere were watching as OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab co-founded by Elon Musk, pitted a team of bots against some of the world’s best Dota 2 players at an annual tournament back in June.

Machines had been on a winning streak. In 2016, DeepMind’s AI mastered Go. In 2017, a poker-playing bot called Libratus, developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, won a professional Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em tournament. Dota 2, a popular online battle game, looked to be next in line.

In the end, the bots beat amateur players and lost to pros – but that probably won’t be the case next time. “I think OpenAI’s chances are pretty high,” says Julian Togelius at New York University.

But this caught my eye as a vital clue as to the irrelevancy of the claim:

After playing thousands of years’ worth of the game, Open AI’s bots managed to beat a team of amateurs, largely by dominating skirmBut lishes. The bots have a reaction time of 0.2 seconds – roughly that of humans – but in that instant they can take in the entire state of the game, including details that human players have to click on or switch screens to read.

This makes the bots formidable in battle because they know the exact effect of any action at all times. The bots are also ruthless. Human players often get killed trying to save their buddies. Bots aren’t so stupid.

Or are they?

Let’s divide games into two categories, those that are fundamentally single player, such as chess, fencing^[1], or wrestling, and those that are fundamentally team events, such as football (either variety), rugby, or Data 2. I want to discard the former category from this analysis because it lacks subtlety in the interesting facet to be described, focus on the latter category, and concentrate on that statement: Bots aren’t so stupid.

Let’s consider the differences between the players in Data 2. On one side, you have human players. They have lives before and after the game. These lives may include further interactions with their team members, often in another game. Their activities during this game are not only focused on winning this game, but on being invited to play the next game. Humans are social creatures who value interactions and social membership, and to win those, they must show that they will work for the good of the group as well as winning. Think about the “hot-dogging” team member on a football or basketball squad. He or she may be supremely talented or skilled, and considered the key member of the team – but, because they may not be willing to do the down ‘n dirty stuff that such team competitions often require, and certainly hog the limelight, they will find themselves oustered from the team, despite their value. By being willing to take a risk to rescue a teammate, that team member isn’t just playing to win today, but to be part of tomorrow’s game.

On the other side, you have “bots,” computer programs which run autonomously. Perhaps cleverly programmed, or perhaps trained (as in this case) on thousands of renditions of a game. But bots? Bots are not social creatures. That’s not yet part of any AI I’ve ever heard of. They do not plan for anything beyond the end of the game.

They literally have no future.

So there are two strategies going on here. One side plays the game, with no concept of anything outside of it, while the other side is playing not only for this game, but for games in the future – and social membership.

The subtle differences in tactics appears to tell an important tale.

¹ Yes, there are fencing team events of various formats, such as relay, but in the end each constituent bout is still a one-on-one encounter.

In case you were wondering about the breadth of the impact of the Trump Government Shutdown, here’s a sample, courtesy an AL Monitor mailing, concerning Middle East lobbying of the US Government:

From Leah Crane in NewScientist (22 December 2018) concerning the new Event Horizon Telescope’s (a composite entity, actually) attempts to actually image a black hole:

The EHT collaboration’s images will look not like a sphere of darkness, but rather a banana of light. As the black hole rotates, it actually drags light along with it. This causes a bright crescent to appear on the side rotating towards us, juxtaposed with a dark shadow from the event horizon – the edge of the black hole itself.

Dragging light. That’s just a fascinating thought for this ignorant old software engineer. I would have expected the hold hole to bend light around it.

A reader remarks on my the market may be in a perform perfect storm commentary:

Come on negative Nancy, look at this way we have lived through at least 3 recessions, the sun came up this morning and We are still breathing lol, 😂.
Have a great day 🤗

Yes, hopefully we all are still breathing – but remember, there was a recession where the investors fell from the sky like rain, but without rain’s grace and charm.

For what it’s worth, the market recovered its losses and perhaps more yesterday, with the DJIA up 3.3% – and it was the laggard of the big three. The market supposedly reacted positively to unexpectedly good employment numbers, an unemployment rate which ticked up a tenth of a point, and some remarks from Fed Reserve chairman Jerome Powell which seemed to indicate the Fed won’t be the vampire that swoops in and sucks the nation dry.

Ahem.

I can remember when good employment numbers caused the market to sink, because the expectation would be that wages would go up due to competition for workers in a shrinking availability pool, thus lowering corporate profits, so I’m uncertain how much weight to give to the employment numbers assertion of yesterday. Perhaps no weight should be given to it. Perhaps investors have figured out that, in order to spend, people must first have at least a prospect of higher wages in front of them. But it’s worth reading Kevin Drum’s recent furious rant about the phantom of rising wages:

If you want to look at wage growth, you have to adjust for inflation. Period. There are only a very few specialized instances where you want to look at nominal wages, and those are unlikely to come up in ordinary conversation. So for the last time, here is real wage growth for blue-collar workers over the past five years:

To the extent that official inflation numbers are an effective proxy for however price inflation impacts you – and, remember, there were NO SMARTPHONES (you in the back row, stop twitching!) back in 1966, so how do you integrate them into inflation numbers? – blue collar workers have made no progress.

Outside of possibly owning smartphones, flat screen hi-res TVs, improved vehicles, etc.

Baaaaaack to the topic, so what’s driving the market? I’d put $10 – but no more – into the pool that says this is all about algorithms. Look, it’s hard to write computer algorithms that are working in what may be positive feedback loops, and I’m talking individual feedback loops; I’m not even sure how an individual algorithm would deal with a cumulative feedback loop. Can it be written, or trained, to recognize such a beast and either GET OUT NOW or TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE LESSER ALGORITHMS? ‘cuz that’s what they’re all about, those algorithms. Try to catch the other algorithms unaware.

It’s damn silly and I still haven’t seen a good argument to even permit their use.

Be careful out there on the trading floor. We pruned off a couple of stocks to get us out of the fossil fuel industry, something we should have done years ago, but I’m a slug. Otherwise, we’re planning to hold tight. We thought we had some dry powder, but unexpected medical expenses may shoot the chance to take advantage of a potential Trump Recession. But so long as we don’t panic and sell, we should be ok.

You?

The first special election since the midterms is coming up for a state Senate seat in Virginia, and this information is coming from a, well, I’ll call it a shakedown mailing just because I think it’s a fun phrase. It’s from the DLCC:

We’re down to the final 4 days of a crucial special election campaign for Virginia’s 33rd Senate District, and the news isn’t good:

Top Republicans have poured tens of thousands of dollars into this snap election in recent weeks, hoping to overpower Democrats and deliver a huge victory for Donald Trump in the very first special election of 2019.

Grassroots Democrats have been stepping up across the country to help our nominee, Jennifer Boysko, fight back, but we need a BIG final push to counter the GOP’s late money and make sure Democrats like Jennifer deliver a statement win to start the year off strong.

We’re down to the final 4 days until the very first special election of 2019. Please RUSH a donation to help push great Democrats like Jennifer to victory everywhere >>

And, while the first special election is mildly interesting in its own right, I was actually more interested in the content of this letter – and how it’s trying to inspire fear in its reader. I mean, just consider that second paragraph … “Top Republicans have poured tens of thousands of dollars into this snap election in recent weeks, hoping to overpower Democrats and deliver a huge victory for Donald Trump in the very first special election of 2019.” Playing on loathing for President Trump, the fear of the Big Money that is perceived to fund the conservative causes, and the possibility of a big triumph for Trump, it’s all about the money the DLCC wants.

Not about the analysis.

I read this and wondered if this was a play for a seat held by a Republican, because – despite the emotional manipulation – it would make some sense, even this late in the game, to try to buy enough ad space to wake up previously dormant voters who might vote for the lonely, windswept, fig-leafed Democrat who has only the least of chances to win victory –

Er, sorry about that. My strain of purple prose is struggling to get out. I’ll use a hammer on it. The hammer of reason.

So, let’s talk about Virginia’s 33rd State Senate District. Is this a chance to flip for the Democrats? Ballotpedia says … no. The previous election for this seat:

How about the previous election? That one wasn’t even as close as this one. The one before that? Nope.

This is a long-time Democratic seat, although it was Republican previous to 2010 – which may have been a redistricting year. Is it in danger? I doubt it, but on the other hand, it appears the Republican is quite the moderate, if I’m to believe this article in the Loudoun Times-Mirror, a local news source. No mention of Trump on the front page of his website, which may be a strategic move to appear more moderate after watching many extreme Republicans go down to defeat. Perhaps Trump won’t be entirely pleased if May were to win, because that would signal the Republicans moving away from Trump’s extreme positions. Well, extreme when he’s not being so erratic …

But now I’m off point. My real point is that the Democrats seem to be using fear tactics in order to harvest some dollars. Whether this is really true is only known to those who authorized this campaign, and whether it’s necessary will only be known when the votes are counted. If the Democrat, Boysko, wins by a comfortable margin, then the answer is No. If Republican May wins or makes it a close run, then the answer is Yes.

But I still dislike the DLCC missive. It’s little more than an electoral scare tactic.

NewScientist (22 December 2018, paywall) notes the latest evidence of Alzheimer’s, one of my personal bugaboos, spreading from person to person:

GROWTH hormones given to children decades ago seem to have spread proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

Between 1958 and 1985, approximately 30,000 children around the world received injections of human growth hormone extracted from the pituitary glands of dead people. These were used to treat genetic disorders and growth deficiencies.

Three years ago, while looking at the brains of eight people who had such injections and later died of the rare brain disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), John Collinge at University College London and his colleagues noticed they all had beta-amyloid proteins in their brains.

Beta-amyloid is known to accumulate and form sticky plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. These eight people didn’t have Alzheimer’s, as they all died from CJD at a young age, but Collinge says that had they lived, the presence of beta-amyloid suggests it is possible that they would have gone on to develop the illness.

I can hear the cries of the anti-science types from here. Deliberate poisoning and all that shit. This part’ll be ignored, or not understood:

The team wondered whether growth hormone itself stimulates the accumulation of beta-amyloid proteins or if the hormones were contaminated with this protein. To investigate, Collinge and his team examined samples of the growth hormone given to these eight people, which had been archived in the UK. They found beta-amyloid proteins in those samples. Also present were tau proteins, which are implicated in Alzheimer’s too.

The growth hormone used by the eight people who died of CJD was extracted from cadavers using one particular method. So Collinge and his team also looked at growth hormone prepared from cadavers using three other methods, and found no sign of beta-amyloid or tau proteins.

Of all the sciences, I often think biology is the most difficult; I’ve read somewhere that astronomers claim the innards of a star are nowhere near close to the complexity of the innards of a frog. My point? Medicine is damn hard, and sometimes I tire of people running around with their eyes bugged out over the latest medical faux-pas. Sure, sometimes there’s real, culpable fault to assign when it comes to medical blunders. Human greed can infiltrate the medical community like any other, and the pharma industry has spent decades casting that greed as a virtue rather than the corrupting influence that it is.

But the anti-vaxxers just make me tired and cynical about whether it’s real worth saving humanity.

A reader reacts to my proposal to flood the Internet with deepfakes of everyone having sex with everyone else:

Wiping out the myth will combat it, for sure. Good idea. I wonder what the side effect of not being able to believe anything you see any longer is, however.

At least on video.

But this reminds me of some background for an undeveloped novel of the near future. The pertinent idea was the saturation of society with Virtual Reality (VR). The visual was that a significant portion of society indulged in VR in public. In this fictional background, VR goggles are passé, and the desirable technology appears to be a holographic globe. From the outside, it may be opaque or translucent; the user sees the virtual reality incorporated into the holographic walls of the globe. The VR would be adaptive to local reality in such a way as to keep the user relatively safe, such as projecting a wall to keep the user from straying into a road used by real-world vehicles.

I had not considered the digital security of such a device, however, and if VR ever manages to take off, it’ll become a significant concern for anyone associated with VR. The potential damages seem almost immeasurable, and, to some extent, unpredictable.

And this may already be happening. I’m aware of certain industries, such as elevators, in which VR-like goggles which enhance the vision of technicians are a requirement of the trade. Since these are digital and connect with a home base, this renders them vulnerable to intrusion, especially if security is, as usual, lax.

To circle around to my reader’s comment, if computing and energy resource problems can be solved, an entertainment VR technology much like I visualize doesn’t seem to be out of the question – and it’ll be a tempting target to criminals ranging from simple thieves to sophisticated assassins. The problem of trusting what you see may be compounded.

Market skepticism continues, as the chart for the DJIA as of 1/3/2019 demonstrates:

CNN/Business‘ analysts are blaming the drop on …

Apple warned it will badly miss its quarterly sales forecast because of weakening growth and trade tensions in China. …

Beyond Apple, investors were also rattled by the biggest one-month decline in US factory activity since the Great Recession. The closely-watched ISM manufacturing index tumbled to a two-year low, providing further evidence of slowing growth and pain from the US-China trade war. ISM said manufacturing activity is still growing, but suffered a “sharp decline” last month.

“Awful, and worse to come,” Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote to clients on Thursday. “Trade wars are not easy to win.”

WaPo has a deeper analysis of the Chinese economy, suggesting the world’s second largest economy may not only be slowing down, but – a problem common to autocratic nations – may not be putting out trustworthy numbers:

While a number of factors may have played into Apple’s travails, including political tensions and a trade war with the United States, the news from the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters seems to affirm a warning that Chinese economic observers have been sounding for years, particularly in the last few months: The slowdown in China’s economy might be worse than many appreciate — and so, too, are the spillover effects.

“China’s economy is definitely slowing quite a bit across a bunch of sectors, and this slowing momentum is likely to continue for another couple of months at least,” said Arthur Kroeber, founder of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm in Beijing. “And consumer confidence is definitely down, which is probably part of what’s behind the Apple numbers.” …

Although Chinese officials report that GDP has been growing at more than 6 percent a year for a few years, “it looks truly like some sixth grader got out their ruler and drew a straight line with a slight downward slant,” said Christopher Balding, an expert on the Chinese economy at Fulbright University in Vietnam. “It’s totally unrealistic.”

And it’s unrealistic to think that an economy that large could continue to grow at 6%. After all, that implies that the inputs must also grow at roughly the same rate, and when it comes to tangible inputs such as metals, lumber, even sand for concrete, well, it can be quite difficult to expand an input by 6% when the base number is already quite large.

And then deal with the accompanying environmental damage.

So, assuming the Chinese are found to be cheating, what will that mean for the global markets? Beats the hell out of me, but I don’t think I’ll be off in left field if I state it’s going to be a bad thing. Add in the GOP’s destructive tax “reform” of 2017, Trump’s unsurprising lie that Trade wars are easy to win!, Trump’s Shutdown, and what we may be looking at is that tired old saying, A perfect storm.

Hang on tight and keep some powder dry, as they say. Try not to fire prematurely; the ejection of Trump from the Oval Office may be a salient signal of light at the end of the tunnel, although Pence is a relatively unknown quantity, and his time as Indiana’s governor was discouraging.

Much like the attack on Rank Choice Voting (RCV) in Maine, the The New York Times‘ Linda Greenhouse reports on a favored phrase of Republican-appointed judges and justices, and so I see memes are an important part of the Republican arsenal of weapons:

Why is this happening, and why now? To understand why the “second-class right” meme is suddenly penetrating the judicial conversation, we have to begin with Justice Clarence Thomas. He is not the first member of the current Supreme Court to use the phrase; Justice Samuel Alito Jr. used it in his 2010 opinion that extended the analysis of the Heller decision, which had applied only to Washington, D.C., as a federal enclave, to the states. The court was being asked, Justice Alito wrote in McDonald v. City of Chicago, “to treat the right recognized in Heller as a second-class right,” which he said the court would not do.

But it is Justice Thomas who has taken up the phrase as a weapon, using it in a series of opinions over the past four years to accuse his colleagues of failing in their duty to keep pushing back against limitations on gun ownership and use. The opinions were all dissents from the court’s decisions not to hear particular gun-rights appeals.

Followed by echoes in the inferior Federal courts by conservative judges. (For forgetful types, like myself, the 2nd Amendment to the American Constitution is “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.“)

This approach of corrupting honest debate by linking arguments temporally and geographically distributed arguments using emotional phrasing (which is something I deliberately do every time I suggest the GOP is a bunch of second-raters – and I do believe that) is the mark of a sophisticated social messaging campaign. It may not be targeted at the general public, but the community of lawyers is big enough to make it worthwhile. And what entity has made a name for itself in this area?

In light of this previous posting on the possibilities of malicious, anonymous Russian interference in American culture, which I still freely admit is brightly, even enjoyably paranoid, one is left to wonder if the far-right members of the judiciary are being manipulated, to their knowledge or not, by the Russians. After all, it makes little sense to arm teachers, to arm the mentally ill, to make high powered firearms available to those with undetected mental illness – or of a murderous temperament, if that does not fit into the category of mental illness. People are habitually careless and sometimes malicious. We need to understand this. These surprising statements about the 2nd Amendment from Justices Thomas and Alito, an Amendment over which appropriate readings remain highly controversial – and decidedly so, given its ambiguous form – is hardly an acceptable approach to the issue. It ignores the Amendment’s ambiguities and attempts to extend the possibly absurd interpretations as if they’re a settled societal matter – an assertion that is pointedly false.

And that extension of which I spoke leads to my last point. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, we are a country of limited rights, not unlimited rights. For example, yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater may be an example of speech, but if there’s no fire, then your free speech rights do not protect you from arrest, conviction, and punishment.

Therefore, there is nothing wrong with suggesting the right to arms is limited, for if we don’t, then every nitwit with a grudge and a few bucks could go out and buy a full-fledged machine gun. Every attempt to make it illegal would fall under the Alito / Thomas reasoning. And the toll in Las Vegas would have been far higher than the “mere” 50+ we so sadly suffered on that cursed night.

The second-rate meme is a feint, a magician’s trick to distract attention from the real issue of limited rights by slyly invoking emotional thinking in a context that cries out for rational analysis. I use that meme as a descriptive insult of the GOP, supported by the evidence of the last 8 years; these conservative judges are using it as a distraction from the real issues of mass killings of children and adults, a situation which sows chaos in our society – and division in our shared heart.

The long-range strategy to invalidate ranked choice voting (RCV), begun in Maine, continues:

I’ve signed off on the CD2 election result as it’s no longer in federal court. Ranked Choice Voting didn’t result in a true majority as promised-simply a plurality measured differently. It didn’t keep big money out of politics & didn’t result in a more civil election #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/0fEhD1dvAb

— Paul R. LePage (@Governor_LePage) December 28, 2018

Note Stolen Election is scrawled next to LePage’s initials. The goal is to spread the meme that RCV is not a valid voting system. How well this strategy will work is a little questionable in this case, as I doubt a sizable portion of the populace ever views such documents, and while Twitter is popular, I’m not sure this will attract a lot of attention, since soon-to-be-former Governor LePage (R-ME) has been considered a poor governor:

The two most unpopular governors in the country, Republican Mary Fallin in Oklahoma and Democrat Dan Malloy in Connecticut, are both leaving office in January with similarly anemic approval ratings — 17 percent for Fallin and 20 percent for Malloy. Opposing partisans in both states are hoping the sour taste left in voters’ mouths from their tenures will bring electoral dividends next month following two terms out of power.

It’s a similar story with Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Rick Snyder of Michigan and Paul LePage of Maine, three term-limited Republicans who will leave office in January. Fifty-four percent of New Mexicans, 54 percent of Mainers and 50 percent of Michiganders respectively disapproved of Martinez, LePage and Snyder during the third quarter. [Morning Consult]

But spreading the meme does remain part of their strategy.

In concert with this thread concerning the South Carolina GOP’s deepening allegiance to President Trump and Senator-elect Romney’s (R-UT) sharply critical op-ed in WaPo, now the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself is considering protecting President Trump from challengers, according to the Washington Examiner:

Mitt Romney’s scorching critique of President Trump in a New Year’s Day op-ed has sparked a call from within the Republican National Committee to change party rules to protect Trump from any long-shot primary challenge in 2020.

The RNC committeeman representing the Virgin Islands late Tuesday emailed fellow elected members of the national party urging them to change the rules when they convene in New Mexico for their annual winter meeting later this month. Republicans are confident that Trump would hold off any primary challenger, but worry the campaign would derail his re-election.

“Look, the political history is clear. No Republican president opposed for re-nomination has ever won re-election,” RNC committeeman Jevon O.A. Williams said in a email obtained by the Washington Examiner. “Unfortunately, loopholes in the rules governing the 2020 re-nomination campaign are enabling these so-called Republicans to flirt with the possibility of contested primaries and caucuses.”

Note the phrase so-called Republicans. Clearly, the RINO meme is still strong and active among the Republicans, compressing everyone into an automatic bow to President Trump – or a hip-check right out of the GOP.

And will the RNC bow to this inevitable logic and never consider the possibility – nay, certainty – that a weak President Trump running for re-election is inferior to a primary challenger who just might beat him? That’ll measure just how far this profound rot has set in to the Republicans. It’s implicit in Williams’ email, an almost holy belief that Trump is their leader who cannot be betrayed, dumped, or even questioned. He must be protected.

Probably because he’s just not tough enough.

Now perhaps Williams and those who end up agreeing with him view this as an investment on their part. They’ve pledged allegiance to Trump, which takes more than a little political coin, and if they lose him then their political careers are down the drain.

But I think there is an equal part a firm belief in Trump’s charisma and success, persistent despite the failures of the last two years. While willingness to put in one’s lot with a leader is not a measure of a person’s worth, moral or otherwise, the willingness to stick with a third-rater like Trump indicates an inability to evaluate the evidence, an intellectual laziness which does, in fact, signal a second-rate or third-rate intellect.

So will the RNC go along with the proposal? I suspect that as soon as Trump realizes how this proposal will safeguard him from a challenge, he’ll demand it be implemented, long-term consequences be damned.

And the nation will be poorer for it.

One of the salient Special Counsel Mueller mysteries is detailed in this Politico piece:

This month’s three-page summary D.C. Circuit decision revealed a fairly dry set of legal issues that just might conceal a juicy core. The dry issues involved matters of jurisdiction and statutory interpretation fathomed only by elite appellate lawyers, but the potentially juicier underlying issues hinted of fascination: Somewhere, a corporation (a bank? a communications firm? an energy company?) owned by a foreign state (Russia? Turkey? Ukraine? United Arab Emirates? Saudi Arabia?) had engaged in transactions that had an impact in the United States and on matters involved in the special counsel’s investigation. …

And then came Roberts’ surprise Sunday decision. He is the “circuit justice” for the D.C. Circuit, meaning he is the justice assigned to receive emergency and other petitions arising from that circuit. Under Supreme Court rules, the circuit justice may act without consulting his or her colleagues to dispose of routine rulings. So, we should not read too much into the fact that it is the chief justice in particular who acted here.

But we can read a good deal into his decision to intervene at all. Although every judge below agreed there was ultimately no merit to the Corporation’s legal claims, Roberts evidently harbors some doubt. Something in the Corporation’s papers caught his attention. So rather than consigning this appeal to the discard pile with thousands of others, he has blocked the lower courts’ decisions until he can receive the government’s briefs defending those decisions. Those papers must be filed no later than New Year’s Eve. Once he receives the full briefing, he can reject the Corporation’s appeal or he can advance the matter to the full court for consideration.

I have no idea what may be going on, but, on its face, it’s very interesting. Will the information go public if SCOTUS actually hears these arguments, or will this be a closed hearing? Probably the latter.

And, behind the scenes, this means that at least Chief Justice Roberts may have non-public information concerning the Mueller investigation. While I hope Roberts is capable of rulings on various matters without regards to secret information, it’s possible that this information may influence his behavior, both officially and unofficially. For example, he may give Trump only minimal respect, like much of the Federal judiciary has done so, because he doesn’t want to hitch his boat to a sinking ocean liner.

He’s already reprimanded President Trump once for behavior unbecoming a President, but I doubt Trump understood that. Roberts’ future behavior could become very interesting.

Postiche:

1. Something false; a sham.
2. A small hairpiece; a toupee. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in Agatha Christie’s Partners In Crime.

I see Mitt Romney (R-UT), Senator-elect of Utah, former governor of Massachusetts, and failed Presidential contender, has decided to be the first to the mat to wrestle control of the Republican Party from President Trump, if his op-ed in WaPo is any clue. Here’s where he reached out to the disaffected:

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

These are mostly long-time tenets of the Republican Party, with the exception of reforming criminal justice. He also makes a probably debatable call for fiscal responsibility. Why is it misguided? For the Republicans, it’s a talking point, useful in debates, but nothing they’ve taken seriously.

So can Romney wrest control from Trump? I doubt it. Many of the disaffected have actually left the Party, and the rest have fallen into the unfortunate mode of supporting the President regardless of whether or not his positions make sense.

But it is possible Romney is looking to start a new political party, built from those disaffected conservatives as well as conservative-leaning independents. This is a carefully crafted call to rejecting Trump on the basis of how he’s fallen from conservative ideals as well as simple competency.

Will it work? I doubt it. He does not project any recognition of some of the core problems with the conservative movement of the last forty years, and without a good dig at those cancers with the appropriate scalpel, it’s hard to see how he’ll replace Trump with himself.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, New Horizons has reached and passed by the Kuiper Belt rock dubbed Ultima Thule sometime in the last 24 hours, and is now in the process of transmitting the data it’s collected. Here’s the latest pic from the latest story on the Johns Hopkins APL web site:

At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons’ high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule’s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist’s impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima’s spin axis is indicated by the arrows. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

An exciting time for us space exploration junkies. I’m mostly in it for the drama, of course.

Gary Sargent posts on The Plum Line about how Democrats should negotiate the shutdown with President Trump, and one of his points is inadequately developed:

[Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin] McAleenan also said something else on ABC that hints at how Democrats should proceed. He repeatedly stressed that increased economic development aid to the Northern Triangle countries, something the State Department is advocating, would help mitigate the migrant crisis, since many asylum seekers are motivated by desperate poverty at home.

This puts him at odds with Trump’s threats to cut off aid to those countries — and more deeply, is premised on a completely different narrative of the crisis than the falsehood-riddled cartoon version that Trump has adopted as part of his wall push. Getting officials on the record in more detail on these deeper differences would also be useful.

I’ve posted about the short-sightedness of putting up a wall vs investigating why people are abandoning their countries in droves^[1], and it’s good to see that some government agencies have looked into this angle, even if it’s only to send aid.

But it seems to me that Sargent misses a bet here, because he doesn’t suggest that Democrats should incorporate these findings directly into negotiations. That is, I think the next proposal from the Democrats should simply be this:

You get no money for your wall. However, we’ll add $10 billion in aid to the countries from which the immigrants are coming.

And their messaging should emphasize how this will theoretically slow the flow of emigrants.

This will put Trump in a bind, because it’s an eminently sensible, if possibly fruitless, idea that’ll appeal to the left and independents, but the lack of money for the wall will appall President Trump’s handlers at Fox News, as well as his base. If Trump has any ambition for the next two years, not to mention for re-election, he has to appeal to voters beyond his base.

But if he does, his base will hate him.

¹ I cannot think of how to search for those posts at the moment, unfortunately. Bad blogger! The primary point of those posts is that the economic / political activities of the United States, such as subsidizing the export of foodstuffs to those countries, may be ultimately responsible for the movement of these people towards our borders.

The concerns about deepfakes continue, as reported in WaPo:

Airbrushing and Photoshop long ago opened photos to easy manipulation. Now, videos are becoming just as vulnerable to fakes that look deceptively real. Supercharged by powerful and widely available artificial-intelligence software developed by Google, these lifelike “deepfake” videos have quickly multiplied across the Internet, blurring the line between truth and lie.

But the videos have also been weaponized disproportionately against women, representing a new and degrading means of humiliation, harassment and abuse. The fakes are explicitly detailed, posted on popular porn sites and increasingly challenging to detect. And although their legality hasn’t been tested in court, experts say they may be protected by the First Amendment — even though they might also qualify as defamation, identity theft or fraud.

Being a movie star just makes you a bigger target, as one of the biggest stars, Scarlett Johansson, reports:

“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” she said. “The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause. . . . The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”

And, so far, there doesn’t seem to be any plausible approaches to this problem. I’m not saying that there won’t be any, but that, so far, none have come forward to thrust away the encroaching darkness.

So I’ve been musing on a contrarian approach, based on the old parents’ approach to the kid smoking cigarettes:

Here, kid, have thirty more, and finish them in an hour.

And then watch the kid puke all over the place and never smoke again.

That is, I’ve been considering the idea that our country’s elites should commission deepfakes using their own visages. Consider, perhaps, the head of Senator Mitch McConnell doing it with the head of Senator Harris, or perhaps (better yet) with soon-to-be-ex-Speaker Paul Ryan, said heads mounted on suitably young and lascivious bodies. Multiply that by thousands. Involve movie stars, sports stars, broadcasters, governors, zookeepers, your neighbors.

And then flood 8chan and all the other sites currently used by the creators of deepfakes with these videos. Absolutely bomb them. An overwhelming torrent of fake porn involving people who are being abused, or potentially could be abused, but now under their own control. Set up a site named MyDeepFakes.org just to display them.

One of the salient factors motivating the outrage and mortification caused by deepfakes is the old, and now out of date assumption, that video doesn’t lie. People can lie, forget, misremember, and confabulate, but the film, the cold and objective eye of technology, does not lie. That is one of the underlying bulwarks of humanity’s romance with technology.

And now that bulwark is being corrupted. It’s becoming a myth.

So, if we can’t stop the corruption, let’s wipe out that myth. If deepfakes of an obviously ludicrous nature become easily available to everyone, we can begin the process of removing concerns that someone may actually believe a fallacious deepfake. This could be a game changer. Consider this remark by media critic and deepfake victim Anita Sarkeesian, from the same WaPo article:

Sarkeesian said the deepfakes were more proof of “how terrible and awful it is to be a woman on the Internet, where there are all these men who feel entitled to women’s bodies.”

“For folks who don’t have a high profile, or don’t have any profile at all, this can hurt your job prospects, your interpersonal relationships, your reputation, your mental health,” Sarkeesian said. “It’s used as a weapon to silence women, degrade women, show power over women, reducing us to sex objects. This isn’t just a fun-and-games thing. This can destroy lives.”

But she is right for only so long as videos are taken as serious evidence of reality. Destroy that myth, and most of the damage can no longer be inflicted by these despicable moral children, because that damage depends on the credibility of the medium, and this proposal tries to destroy that medium.

I actually do hesitate to put this thought forth. After all, objectivity is an important facet of the scientific method, and invalidating technology that has provided objectivity is somewhat dismaying. But if no other solution can be found, this counter-attack may be the only way to keep our society sane. I can see block clubs where everyone agrees to contribute photographs of their heads, from a number of angles, and a fee, and a few weeks later there are a thousand videos of everyone on the block having sex with everyone else on the block.

Or, gratifyingly, imagine receiving a blackmail email from some dud threatening to send a video of you having sex with someone other than your spouse, to your spouse, and your reply is “Hey, see this link where I’m doing it with President Trump, it’s up on FB where my spouse has already seen it, isn’t it cool you dud?”

It’s enough to make a Bishop’s head spin.

The Wheel of Fortune, Hortus Deliciarum, copy of miniature from Manuscript by Herrad of Landsburg (1130-1195), Hohenburg Abbey, Alsace.

This semi-academic book, published by Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov in 2009, is on the topic of how societal structures and population interact. The title SECULAR CYCLES refers to demographic cycles lasting a minimum of a century.

CHAPTER 1, the introduction and most interesting chapter, briefly fills in the background of the subject, covering earlier theories ranging from the simple Malthusian conjecture concerning population and resources, through Monetarist theories, to Marxist thought on the matter; each receives criticism, mostly in the realm of their failures to explain the data as it is understood. It establishes some of the key concepts and terminology used by academics, problems with data collection and the importance of distinguishing raw data from trends. Careful consideration of this area will prove key to novice readers such as myself.

Structural-demographic theory is then defined:

In this book we examine the hypothesis that secular cycles – demographic-social-political oscillations of very long period (centuries long) – are the rule rather than the exception in large agrarian states and empires.

The demographic portion of the theory draws heavily on Malthusian theory, introducing important concepts such as carrying capacity, resources, etc. The social portion defines elites (the owner of rents) vs commoners (payers of rents), and how the former extract resources from the latter. The political portion of the theory concerns the actions of the State, which appears to be the important contribution of the authors. The State provides, or fails to provide depending on its health, law & order as well as other services, such as public health and (unmentioned, I think) currency support, an important part of a healthy economy.

From here we progress to the two phases of the cycles.

In the integrative phase, particularly the first segment or subphase, the commoner (peasants, serfs, or whatever the local term might be) population is growing, the elite population is relatively small and unified, and the State is more in less in agreement with the elites, strong, and effective in its putative tasks of maintaining order. External, successful wars are not inconsistent with this phase, especially if they add territory into which the expanding population may move, thus relieving pressures which will lead to the second phase, below. The economy is perking along, often resulting in a period characterized as a Golden Age in retrospect. But as the integrative phase grows long in the tooth, overpopulation, defined in the context of carrying capacity of the land, forces the per capita (or per household) income of the commoners downward, while prices increase. During this stagflation subphase, the elites enjoy their Golden Age and, crucially, their numbers increase beyond reason.

The disintegrative phase’s beginning is marked by one or more crises of either exogenous or endogenous source. Commoner populations decline precipitously from either migration or mortality, and the elites enter crisis as their true basis of wealth, the commoners, suddenly decrease in number. The elite crisis results in the depression subphase, marked by often extended, vicious civil wars. The violence discourages the commoners from basic economic activity, thus depressing replacement rates of commoners, while elites are busy exterminating themselves. The State is often broke and unstable, and sometimes in danger of being captured by the elites. The depression subphase often lasts several generations, until the elites become tired of the warring and dying, and have been reduced to a more reasonable number. The peace permits the commoners to venture forth from their sanctuaries, grow food, and raise their replacement rate, marking the beginning of the integrative phase of the next secular cycle.

To say Chapter 1 is the most interesting is not to denigrate the following chapters. I had envisioned these sections, which are case studies of how well structural-demographic theory fits the data available, to be dry and boring. To the extent possible, however, Turchin and Nefedov’s presentation is interesting, using proxies where raw data is not available, such as the temporal distribution of coin hoards or indictments for infanticide, and referring to lurid episodes (assassinations, massacres) from time to time. Both spark the imagination!

King Edward II of England, hapless victim of demographics?

The case studies are of the Plantagenet and Tudor-Stuart periods of England, the Capetian and Valois periods of France, the Republican and Principate periods of Rome, and the Muscovy and Romanov periods of Russian history. Since I’m neither a historian nor an avid reader of any of these particular historical subjects, these were relatively new to me, and thus interesting.

My Takeaways

As a reminder, this book’s conclusions are confined to agrarian societies, defined as societies where at least 50% of the population is working the land, and often it’s a far higher percentage. Attempting to apply their conclusions to today’s societies is undoubtedly an error, but quite tempting.

Perhaps most salient for me is that the three population groups, commoners, elites, and State, have the same motivations – namely, to survive and prosper – but define survival in starkly different terms.

The commoner faces the existential problem, as they work the land, pay the taxes, face stark death if the crop fails, and a brooding future as their numbers increase.

The elite’s definition of survival is to continue within their social stratum, not just as individuals but as families or clans. To sink back to the commoner level is to fail, and many or even most were willing to risk their lives in military service or civil wars to retain their positions.

Those of the State, usually of a monarchical position, look to maintain their positions at the center of power. While certain of these are willing to accept a degradation of status in exchange for continued life, most persist until they are ended violently in the disintegrative phase.

This polymorphic definition but constant framework suggests the basic psychology, perhaps evolutionary psychology, which drives the secular demographic cycle in concert with the implacable realities of limited food sources, land arability, and organisms dependent on ingesting the former for continued existence while reproducing without concern for the future – for most organisms, a simple, untranscendable reality – has to do with the relative definition of survival. It would be interesting to examine how and if a nominally celibate religious option, such as joining the Catholic orders or certain Protestant religious groups, acts as a safety valve for population pressure.

Another thought that occurred to me has to do with proxies. While I enjoyed how they used proxy metrics to at least measure the dynamics of the important metrics, if not the raw values themselves, I was a little disappointed that they didn’t mention the potential logical fallacies involved. Perhaps they expect that the trained reader is well aware of them, but for my own edification I had to realize that a proxy may suffer from the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. That is, a proxy is implicitly a statement that

if dv changes then pv changes in some predictable manner

where dv is the desired value of the target metric, pv is the proxy value in a related metric, and predictable manner means some function f can be applied to dv such that

f(dv) = pv

and f is a reversible function. That is, it’s not a trapdoor function in the sense that it’s not easily calculated in reverse – a simple example is the exponential function, f(x) = a^x, where calculating the xth root of some value is not nearly as simple as calculating the exponential value. The usefulness of a proxy value correlates directly to how easily the transformation function f(dv) can be reversed into a function g such that

g(pv) = dv

I’m a little off point here, so the fallacy which worries me is that it’s difficult to prove that the relation between a desired value and/or its dynamics and a proxy value and/or its dynamics for a desired measurement is an if and only if statement, and if it’s not, then it’s possible some independent, and uninteresting value, may be moving that proxy value. For example, at one point Turchin and Nefedov use the recorded heights of military recruits as a proxy for measurement of the available food rations. But what if a new religious cult has come into vogue that forbids consumption of certain foodstuffs containing the nutrients which boost people’s heights? Using this simple proxy may seem to show oncoming famine, when in reality it was simply a cult becoming popular.

That’s just something to keep in mind, especially for the untrained reader, like myself.

Conclusions

I dove into this book in the belief that demographics are, as ever, humanity’s future, and I came out of it with that belief only bolstered. The details of how the demographics change, even if confined to agrarian societies, was fascinating and instructive in suggesting that the evolutionary survival strategy of boundless reproduction appears to lead inevitably to the human tragedies of war, famine, and disease.

War is the fierce battle over resources as they become scarce relative to the number of people demanding them, whether they be for survival or for maintenance of societal position.

Famine comes when that battle over resources actually blots out those very resources over which the battle began, or when exogenuous factors, such as climate change (think of a super-volcano explosion cooling the world’s atmosphere into a mini-Ice Age).

And disease often ravages us when our numbers grow to the point where we’re too crowded and our medical knowledge cannot compensate.

If this is a subject of interest to you, it’s worth a read.

Recommended.

During our recent trip to Traverse City, MI, to visit my Arts Editor Mom, she took us to see a locally famous Christmas display, and I thought it was nice enough to take pictures. Unfortunately, the smartphone is a sub-optimal choice when it comes to night-time pics, but here’s the best of what we did take.

These two illustrate the general effect, if not the size.

Here we have some lovely animals which we suspect are hand crafted.

And here’s a few more random decorations.

It was far more impressive than these poor pictures may indicate.

The essence of goodness is being short, the essence of evil is height and long noses. Every child should know this.

The silence and paucity of dialog cards in Cinderella (1914 – yes, a silent movie) forced me to pay more than normal attention to the gestural content of this movie, and the sometimes ambiguous content of these old scenes illustrating this old folk tale, whatever might be said about their competence at telling that familiar story, brought into a vivid relief the alternate view of this story.

Classically interpreted as a karma story, the problems for the tale begin with the observation that the Prince’s motivations in searching for a wife do not end with the normal urge to have a wife and a family, but with the additional and unusual duty to continue the royal line. This leads to the question of how Cinderella’s future will turn out, since she’s potentially reduced to the role of breeding stock for the royal family, and no matter how nice the royal family might be, a monarchy is difficult to justify, a priori, as a governmental system. History has indelibly taught us that no family has consistent access to the sort of wisdom required to run a country, even a small country. In fact, the most difficult task a country faces is discovering how to reliably find policy-makers who will wisely lead the country forward.

With this in mind, Cinderella then moves from her initial role as the oppressed daughter, barely a member of the family as her step-sisters have pride of place, into a role where she’ll enable a ruling family to continue their reign, which may end up wrecking the country.

And what of her qualifications? While it’s inarguable that the fairy-godmother selects her for, shall we say, promotion based on her kindness, this is accentuated through contrast with her wicked step-sisters, who mistreat her and others. Why is Cinderella the victim? Once again, the motivation is based on blood lines, as Cinderella is a virtual Outsider in her own family (in this version, where is dear old Dad anyways?), now headed by the equally wicked stepmother. This innate reliance on blood relations in both principal families of the story speaks to the evolutionary drive to propagate the genes which have so far resulted in successful progeny, with little regard for the more abstract concepts of justice which better society.

But back to her qualifications, and, at least in this portrayal of the story, it appears to consist of her beauty and her apparent financial endowment, which is the illusion provided by the fairy godmother. There’s no apparent appreciation of the intellect or wisdom she might bring to the problem of ruling a country.

In other words, taking this story to heart is to revert to an older, unenlightened time. Don’t do it.

It’s a fun production to watch, and I counted at least four nose prostheses during the movie; the still, above, suggests a fifth I missed during the performance. If it were only the wicked stepmother and her daughters bearing the devices, then we could take them to suggest how to identify the bad guys, but the King & Queen also have them, so either this hypothesis is falsified, or there’s a lot more going on behind this story than is present in most renditions of this story. Special effects are charmingly effective, and if I thought Prince Charming looked a bit like a doofus, no doubt he was quite the hot pistol when the movie is made, as the actor, Owen Moore, was married to lead Mary Pickford at the time.

But the real treat of the movie was the live musical accompaniment. We saw this at the Music House Museum in Traverse City, MI, in an informal cinema setting, and the music was provided by Dave Calendine, an accomplished organist who basically played what he felt was appropriate for each scene. He later explained to my Arts Editor that this was how the movie was originally presented 104 years ago (precisely!), and that he considers it an art form worthy of resurrection.

I wouldn’t quite recommend it, but we had a lot of fun. If you can see it at the Music House Museum, do so, and if they invite you upstairs to inspect how one of their music machines work, take it. We were fascinated at the elderly machines, still slogging along.

Paul Waldman in The Plum Line argues that there’s only one way to end the government shutdown, and that’s for the Democrats and the Republicans to do the impossible – ignore the Executive:

So the only answer may be for everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike, to ignore President Trump. Act as though he doesn’t exist and this has nothing to do with him.

By which I mean that members of Congress should shut their ears to Trump’s tweets and threats and fulminations, pass something that House Democrats and Senate Republicans can live with, and then dare Trump to veto it. Because I doubt he has the guts.

There’s two problems with Waldman’s proposal.

First, the Republicans already had that opportunity. The House and Senate had already substantially agreed on a bill to end the shutdown, but the Republicans in the House retreated when faced with an enraged Trump. The flip side of being a member of The Party of Trump is that you have to be his lap dog, or you won’t stand a chance of winning an election for dog-catcher, much less a substantive elective position, in any district controlled by the Trumpists – and, so far as the Republicans go, that’s most of them. The President is a vindictive, petty man, unleavened with wisdom or even cunning, and what that means for the hopefuls in the Republicans Party is that they can no longer exercise good judgment on certain topics popular with the Trump base, such as immigration reform. It is true they can defy him on more obscure topics, such as most areas of foreign relations – but most members lack relevant expertise.

Second, it doesn’t matter if Trump has the guts to veto the legislation, because he’s not the one making such decisions. It’s Fox News making those decisions. All they have to do is appeal to Trump’s inherent sense of victimization and remind him that he’s betraying his base, and he’ll veto the bill, and then he’ll storm and threaten and pound his fist.

And the Republicans will melt, because they don’t dare exercise good judgment.

When I heard Fox News was manipulating the President into rejecting the shutdown bill, I had some hopes the Republicans would show themselves to be mature adults, finally, now that many of them are leaving Congress, but this was a fool’s hope, thankyouverymuch. I don’t know if Trump is going to blink or if the Dems will cave, but the best Dem strategy may be to sit tight, investigate Trump when they come into control of the House, and let Trump stew and take responsibility for his shutdown.

And perhaps the Democrats can take advantage of the situation by labeling this adventure as the #TrumpShutdown. And the wall? Resurrecting an old but deadly Republican curse, label it the #TrumpBoondoggle.

Because that’s what it is.

Murder, My Sweet (1944) is a bit of a mixed bag. An adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, a noir crime novel by Raymond Chandler, which I’ve read in the last year, its fidelity to the novel is somewhat mixed, and of course that weighs on the audience familiar with the novel.

Taken on its own, it’s a fairly tight story of Phillip Marlowe, Private Investigator, who is hired to find a woman named Velma by a huge man, Moose Malloy.  In a bit of a jarring interjection, Marlowe is also hired by another man, Marriott, to assist in the ransoming of a woman’s jade jewels from some thieves. At the exchange point, however, Marriott is sapped to death, and Marlowe is attacked and loses consciousness. He awakens, finds his dead client, and ends up chatting with the police, who are a suspicious lot.

Back at his office, a woman reporter braces him for information, but he brushes her off until she reveals she knows more than she should. Soon enough, he discovers her last name is Grayle, which matches a name he already knows – Helen Grayle, owner of the stolen jewels.

Marlowe and the young Grayle repair to the Grayle estate, where Marlowe discovers Helen Grayle is young, shapely, and married to the elderly Mr. Grayle, himself the father of the faux-reporter. He’s soon hired to continue to hunt for the jade – and nearly seduced by Helen. She knows a name the police have mentioned, Anthor, a man working a blackmail con on troubled, rich women.

Marlowe plans on talking to Anthor, but Malloy shows up and drags him to Anthor. Malloy wants his woman, Anthor the jewels – and Marlowe a little relief from being pushed around. Not giving up information, he’s slugged and drugged, but escapes.

After a few more plot twists, we discover Helen at the Grayle beach house. She’s at work on manipulating Marlowe into doing some dirty work for her, and Marlowe gives her reason to believe he’s bought. But when he returns the next night to report on his progress, Malloy is with him. While Malloy waits outside for his woman, Marlowe finds himself in a double cross with Helen, and then things get tricky as Mr. Grayle and his daughter also show up. Eventually, Helen is revealed to be Malloy’s Velma, and both end up dead, along with Mr. Grayle, and Marlowe is blinded.

In a final scene, Marlowe gets the girl.

And, in a supposedly noir film, that’s right out.

While noir is often about just desserts, it’s rarely about happiness or rewards for the good guys. It’s a chronicle of people pursuing their base urges with abandon, and the unhappy results which attend not only them, but those around them.

And for a noir film, it’s hard to see those motivations. That there are attempts to convey such characterizations is definitely true, but they feel ineffective. Perhaps they ended up on the TV channel’s cutting room floor (TCM was the purveyor), but I doubt it. It just didn’t quite feel real.

Part of the problem might have been the coincidence of Malloy looking for his woman, and her being in another of Marlowe’s cases – assuming that was a coincidence. Perhaps Anthor had told Malloy, but Malloy, given how he’s depicted, would have simply charged into the Grayle estate; hiring Marlowe was far too subtle for Malloy. In the book, Malloy is in fact not connected with Anthor, as I recall.

And that connection to the book may be part of the problem. The book is more vivid, more clever, and more expansive than the movie, as well as being more racist. I cannot help but see the movie through the lens of the book. I appreciated how the movie managed to get at least a few of Chandler’s colorful similes into the movie through Marlowe’s inner narrative, but it’s not really enough.

And the happy ending really ruined it. For me, anyways.

But don’t let me discourage the interested audience member from seeing it. It’s not poorly acted, nor poorly constructed, although sometimes the audio is a bit muffled. There are worse ways to spend a snowy night.

Yesterday’s market jump was among the biggest ever, much less this year. But between yesterday’s absurd jump in market indice values (the Naz over 5%), and today’s drop in indice value, at least as of this typing, there’s been a lot of sophisticated hand-waving as to the reasons, but no one has mentioned the obvious.

Yesterday, the President was out of the country, finally visiting a war zone, and taking advantage of this opportunity to lie to them. Today, he’s back.

I think investors thought he might take advantage of being out of the country to not return. That is, given his unprecedented legal troubles (“No President has ever had legal troubles like I’ve had!”), I would be unsurprised if he sought a haven in a country lacking an extradition treaty with the United States, and tried to run the Executive from abroad.

And then, of course, today’s drop reflects the disappointment upon his return.

It makes the most sense, after all.

Over the 30-odd years of consciousness I’ve had (which is to say, once I made it past the age of 25), some aspects of the United States have been encouraging, and some have been quite bewildering. In the latter category I can thrust many organizations and beliefs that, honestly, have seemed anti-rational. Some of these are a-political, such as quack medicines (homeopathy, apitherapy, acupuncture, anti-vaxxers), which can be understood, if not excused, on the theory that medicine and healing are hard subjects.

But others have found political alignments. I can think of gun rights, creation science, religious sects, movements for special religious rights, the “stewardship” just means environmental rape movement, End of Days folks, and perhaps a few which escape me at the moment, all of which have a general conservative alignment. Hell, let’s throw in the Newt Gingrich-inspired politics of No Compromise With The Liberals, because, while I can see the impetuous embracing it, I do not expect to see an entire political party being so foolish as to follow it.

Being an independent, I should, of course, have a list for the liberals, but oddly enough I don’t. I daresay some of the more daring theorists on the left do get things wrong – which I don’t fault if they’re willing to admit to it. The Antifa movement probably belongs on the liberal list of the anti-rational, although I haven’t dug into that particular movement deeply. Andrew Sullivan’s remarks concerning their University, anti-liberal declarations and actions do suggest they are anti-rational.

To return to my point, as a young person, you ambitiously think you should be able to understand these sorts of things, even if you don’t agree, but as you grow older you come around to the perspective that perhaps you’re just not bright enough to comprehend their conclusions, and you just have to accept that.

This conclusion may turn out to be wrong, though.

(What follows is premised on one data point, about which much is merely guessed at, and a huge amount of speculation. Take it with an open mind and perhaps a bit of liquor.)

There’s an implicit assumption in that position that these fellow Americans, however much I might find their position(s) to be incomprehensible, have at least reached them using honest processes and facts. But as we’ve learned during the Trump Administration, at least one of the sources of this inexplicable behavior, the NRA, has come under investigation by the FBI for possibly improper financial ties to Russia.

That’s my data point. Merely an investigation.

So let’s expand on it a trifle. Let’s stipulate, not at all unreasonably, that the Russians used their financial ties to influence the top leadership of the NRA, a group long extremist and long entrenched in that position. For example, Wayne LaPierre has been part of the NRA leadership since 1991, damn near 30 years now. And their agenda of unrestricted gun rights, the rise and fall of Dr. Lott, the use of simplistic logic concerning the arming of everyone in America, the misreading of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and the dangers of liberals to “authentic America” has been an undoubtedly divisive approach to communicating with American society.

And who would benefit most from a divided, at each other’s throats America? Why, its greatest adversary: Russia.

It is a daunting thought to wonder just how much your fellow Americans have been influenced by a subtle, malignant national adversary, but it’s not hard to imagine. America is often a provincial place that barely believes there’s anywhere outside of its national borders, and the very thought that the whispers in our fellow Americans’ ears might be of some entity inimical to all they hold dear would and will strike them as nothing more than paranoia.

My evidence is circumstantial, without a doubt. I plead guilty to that. But I have to note that if we add in the idea of a national adversary, such as Russia, working to damage us subtly through division, then that explains many of the otherwise incredible conclusions my fellow Americans reach. For example, we clutch the results of science and technology to our very breasts, in so very many fields, and yet a substantial portion of the American citizenry is mortally offended at the very idea of biological evolutionary theory – despite the fact that both biology and medicine are premised on its very existence, and that many examples of evolution may be found in the paleontological record. Is it so hard to visualize a malignant Russia supplying financial and ideological aid to the Discover Institute, the prime supplier of the utterly ludicrous creation science position of Intelligent Design? No, it’s not. I’m not suggesting that they needed to create it, since opposition to evolutionary theory has existed for just as long as evolutionary theory has existed – but simply boosting what would otherwise be an obscure position populated by loonies is an easy enough thing to do, if you have national resources with which to do it.

One more example: the obduracy of the Republicans over the last twenty years. It is an aphorism that elections have consequences, and a tradition that the parties will cooperate in governing the nation. Furthermore, it’s compromise is good policy, as it permits us to link arms and dip our toes into what may be quicksand, rather than abhor the “enemy” and tumble headfirst into treacherous currents. The Republicans have demonstrated the foolishness of obduracy time over time since the 90s, between farming legislation that left egg on their faces, the passing of the ACA without any Republican support in the face of soaring health insurance rates which left even software engineers financially gasping, and a Republican hypocrisy towards Federal financial matters of a magnitude which left the serious observer breathless at its brazen dishonesty; and, no doubt, other examples.

Many, many attempts were made to explain these frankly crass and dishonorable Republican behaviors, but one that was hardly ever mentioned was the possibility that their behaviors were neither the result of inborn character defects nor simple corporate corruption, but the subtle influence, financial and cultural, of a national adversary who found the Republicans a good subject for manipulation. Not that the left has not been the subject of manipulation during the Cold War, for this has been well-documented.

But now it may be the Republicans’ turn.

OK, enough with the wide-eyed speculation, because, beyond the nugget of investigation of the NRA, there’s nothing definite, nothing to wrap around our hands around. But, if you stipulate it, then you have ask:

How do we fix it? How do you overcome conservative denial that their culture has been controlled by an enemy? By what icons do you draw their eyes from the prisms through which they view anything and demonstrate that they’ve been misled?

In some fields, it’s a simple case of logic. In others … the present generation, and perhaps the next, will simply have to die out. Some problems cannot be fixed.

But it’s something worth contemplating.