Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Autochthonous:

1. (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists.
   1. Geology (of a deposit or formation) formed in its present position.
      Often contrasted with allochthonous

[Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in the Feedback column of NewScientist (28 October 2017):

[A reader] informs us that King Leopold III of Belgium was a fervent naturalist and traveller. “He led several expeditions in Africa, Asia and South America among others,” says Anne, and, unlike his infamous grandfather, “was acclaimed for his defence of nature and of autochthonous populations.”

Martian on right, painfully earnest frat brother on left. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Mars Needs Women (1967) proves only that its script needed a rewrite. This patched together piece of shit has really nothing at all to say, except maybe that the director had the sort of ego which could be soothed with shallow drek.

Blech.

This thread has been quiet, but here’s Michael C. Horowitz and Julia M. Macdonald on Lawfare comparing the campaign to stop autonomous weapons from being used (one of them is known as The Campaign To Stop Killer Robots) to the successful anti-landmine campaign. They worry that we haven’t piled up enough bodies yet:

Second, while there was clear evidence of the human costs of the use of landmines around the world, the lack of casualties from the use of lethal autonomous weapon systems muddies the ability of the movement to build public support. The pictures of ordinary people injured and maimed by mines, combined with the casualty statistics, played a key role in shocking and shaming governments to take action. It also bolstered the legal argument that mines violated the proportionality and distinction principles of international humanitarian law. Persuading the international community to ban a technology preemptively without observing these human costs will be difficult. Moreover, autonomous weapon systems are a much broader category than blinding lasers, the only previous technology to be subject to a preemptive ban.

Not only is the international community less emotionally affected, but there remains uncertainty as to whether these weapons would, in fact, inherently transgress international law. It is also possible that autonomous weapon systems might reduce civilian casualties in some cases if they have high levels of accuracy, lack human emotions (e.g. revenge), and do not suffer from the same physical limitations as humans, such as fatigue.

They may have a point. However, if enough bodies are piled up, it may also suggest the lethality of the system – a desirable trait, no?

Their conclusion:

Therefore, while the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots appears to be following a similar playbook as the ICBL, we should be cautious in drawing too many conclusions about the likelihood of a ban on LAWS [Lethal Autonomous Weapon System]. The differences between the two issue areas—in particular, the lack of consensus around the definition of lethal autonomous weapons, uncertainty as to their military effectiveness, and the current lack of human casualties from the use of these weapons—will make attaining a preemptive prohibition on their use harder to achieve. That being said, continued dialogue and discussion about what LAWS are is essential to determining something very important: agreement on the proper role of humans in decisions about the use of force, and how to best achieve that aim.

I cannot help but notice that there is no address of the issue of using a potentially sentient artificial entity as a military recruit may induce ethical objections as well.

It’s hard to come up with anything insightful to say about yesterday’s tragic mass murder in Texas. There’ll be the cries for this not to happen and here’s how, the drummed up outrage at the idea of politicizing the murder by actually proposing legal changes to prevent it from happening, some conspiracy-theorists will try to lump it in with the Sandy Elementary Shooting as never having happened, etc. It’s all becoming depressingly predictable.

It’s a rut we’re in, and I don’t know how to get out of it. One side thinks the other side is taking advantage of this for political gain, while the other sees an incomprehensibly lax regulation of the means for killing our fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, all us normal folks are just pigeons being shot out of the air.

From my libertarian readings from years ago, I know the gun rights advocates believe that arming the populace is supposed to stop these things from happening. My personal observations so far culminate in the conclusion that this theory is a primitive application of shallow reasoning to a scenario full of potential nuances. It’s becoming apparent that he who gets off the first shot wins – he may still end up dead, but it’s damn well clear that mankind is not a rational species, as anthropologist will tell you. The shooters are not rational people, they’re madmen looking for a personal escort to Hell.

Since I woke up with this on my mind, I suppose I’ll dispense the same political script as everyone else concerned with the NRA’s control of the issue. This is for my benefit, to blow off steam and anger.

For each and every GOP Congressperson up for re-election in 2018 who did nothing in Congress to respond to tragedies of this sort, the same rough script should be employed.

Since the last election there have been N mass shootings. (Populate with appropriate sad images of people mourning.)

Has our Congressman XYZ proposed legislation to prevent madmen from gaining access to guns?

No.

Is this failure irresponsible?

Yes.

When you elect me, ABC, the first thing I will do is begin work on gun-control legislation that will make it difficult for madmen to get their hands on guns. I will submit it for consideration within a month of taking office. And then I will push for it to passed.

Why? Because if one day I hear on the radio that some of my own family have been killed by a madman with a gun, how can I possibly hope to look my family in the eye?

How can I hope to look my constituents in the eye?

This is how responsible governance takes place, and Congressman XYZ doesn’t understand this.

I do. Vote ABC.

And if the GOP screams that this is a coordinated campaign, everyone answers You’re damn well right, you murderous morons. This is a national problem and you’re not addressing it.

I don’t really feel better, but at least I tried.

Ya know, lady, later someone talks about a “vibrator”. Would that be your vibrator, or the gentleman’s?

Proving multi-tasking has never been a skill of mankind, Michael Shayne spends so much time trying to finance his impending wedding and subsequent marriage that he loses the girl in Dressed To Kill (1941), the third installment of the Michael Shayne, Private Detective, series. The strength of this installment may also be seen as the bandages that cover its weakness: some fairly clever dialog obscures the fact that we never really get to know these characters, not even Shayne, a private detective who, from what his beau has to say, has never really cracked a murder case before, despite multiple tries.

But he has empty pockets and a bride-to-be when, responding to screams in the Hotel du Nord, he discovers a maid shrieking at the sight of a body of a woman, sporting a neat hole between the eyes, and a man, the head of a dog on his head, also shot in the head, sitting at an elegantly laid dinner table. These are a former theatrical producer and one of his leading ladies, and Shayne employs sharp patter, a certain jocular attitude towards the dead, evidence he purloins from the murder scene, and some street smarts as he wades through misdirection, lies, more bodies, a fairly clever murder device, and some clumsy cops.

But no real backstory, no insight. This is a straight B-class movie, I think, and it’s purely about the entertainment value. And it does deliver. Shayne is a pleasant and clever character, and yet in the end even he says “Well, color me pink….”

It’s fun. But if you never see it, you won’t have missed any profound insights.

Ossicone:

Ossicones are horn-like (or antler-like) protuberances on the heads of giraffes, male okapis, and their extinct relatives, such as Sivatherium, and the climacoceratids, such as Climacoceras.^[1] The base that a deer’s antlers grow from is very similar to an ossicone.

Ossicones are similar to the horns of antelopes and cattle, save that they are derived from ossified cartilage rather than living bone,^[2] and that the ossicones remain covered in skin and fur, rather than horny keratin. Antlers (such as on deer) are derived from bone tissue: when mature, the skin and fur covering of the antlers, termed “velvet,” is sloughed and scraped off to expose the bone of the antlers. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Giraffe ancestor didn’t have a long neck, but two sets of horns,” Science:

Kevin Williamson meditates on the functions of political parties in the context of the Donna Brazile revelation concerning the Clinton campaign and the DNC on National Review:

There is a contradiction within American progressivism, which seeks to make the political process more democratic while pushing the policymaking process in a less democratic direction. For a century, progressives have championed more open primary elections and open primaries, popular ballot measures, referendum and recall processes, and wider voter participation. At the same time, progressives, particularly those of a Wilsonian bent, have sought to remove the substance of policymaking from democratically accountable elected representatives and entrust it to unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies in the belief that panels of experts immune from ordinary democratic oversight could make hard decisions based on reason and evidence rather than on short-term political necessity and popular passions. They regarded the political parties and their infamous smoke-filled rooms as embodiments of corruption and old-fashioned wheeler-dealer politics at odds with the brave new centrally planned world they imagined themselves to be building.

As it turns out, political parties are — like churches, civic groups, unions, trade groups, lobbyists, pressure groups, and business associations — part of the secret sauce of civil society. In much the same way as our senators — in their original, unelected role — were expected to provide a sober brake on the passions of the members of the more democratic House of Representatives, political parties exercised a soft veto that helped to keep extremism and demagoguery in check. Anybody can run for president — but not just anybody can run as the candidate of the Republican party or the Democratic party. Third parties face an uphill battle, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot prevail: The Republican party was a very successful third party, displacing the moribund Whigs. The difference between a republic and a democracy is that republics put up more roadblocks between fools and their desires.

The denuded political parties provide an important fund-raising and administrative apparatus — along with a tribal identity that is arguably more important — but they do not offer much more than that. Instead, we have relatively little in the way of mediating institutions between candidates and the public at large.

And, if this is an accurate view of the Republicans and the Democrats, it means we’re moving from the Age of Policy to the Age of Personality. That never ends well.

But while I find his remark that a fully functioning party should provide a veto against bad politicians appealing, I do not see how this connects to his previous remarks concerning Wilsonians who want to employ experts in making policy. The idea that a bunch of politicians, sans expertise in most facets of modern life, can hope to cope with the complexities of the modern world makes me shake my head in disbelief. Given my own numerous remarks on the defective efforts of amateurs, I could not dare to make any other statement – nor would I wish to.

The solution cannot be to elect a bunch of amateurs – especially the second-raters put forth by the GOP, who respond to the modern world by rejecting it and all of its necessary complexities – but instead learn how to integrate the elected world of republics and democracies with the meritocracy which is scientific knowledge. We used to know how to do this, but we’ve partially forgotten, I think, through the willful rejection of the distilled opinions of the experts because they clash with the ideology of the elected. I state it this way because no traditional political party with which I’m familiar is immune to such rejections.

But Kevin smoothly and slickly uses the phrase … unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies … as if it were a historical and unassailable truth, and it’s not. Bureaucracies can be held accountable, and they can be replaced. Neither operation is easy, of course, but then effective and fair governing is a non-trivial business.

Ummm, remember, she has a head, too.

The British Stormy Monday (1988) suffers from a common affliction of the British cinema of that era, a quality I’ve referenced before, somewhat mystifyingly, as brittleness. This story follows the tale of Brendan, a down on his luck Brit who decides to take a cleaning job with Finney, a club owner in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he first demonstrates his cleaning skills and is then given an emergency assignment to pick up a group of jazz musicians who’ve arrived early from Poland and without documentation at the airport (or perhaps it was a naval port).

In a separate thread, Mr. Cosmo of New York City contacts Kate, a pleasant young red-head, and requests her to show up and render professional assistance (of what sort is never clarified, which I found very irritating) in his quest to do … something. He’s apparently some sort of businessman who is being brought in by the City government to help resuscitate a moribund neighborhood. Or perhaps the entire city. It may be this lack of attention to detail which imparts a sense of brittleness to the entire movie.

But back to Kate, as she makes her way to assist Mr. Cosmo, she runs into Brendan, quite literally, but no one is hurt. A little later, we discover she has a second job waitressing at a bar, in fact just around the corner from Finney’s club – where Brendan is slaking the pains of the day away and meets her again. On impulse, he asks to meet her for drinks once her shift is over, and she agrees. Later, during the drinks, she disappears for a moment, and Brendan overhears a couple of toughs discussing a contract they’ve received to work over Finney.

Brendan and Kate finish their date, and Brendan notifies his employer of the impending violence to be inflicted on his person. The tables are turned and the toughs turned away, in a very nice scene. We soon discover the toughs were hired by Mr. Cosmo, who apparently wants Finney’s club. Why?

We don’t know, really. It’s merely a knob on the plot, it exists to bring out some conflict without any real motivation.

A little more to-ing and fro-ing, Kate and Brendan get a very tough reputation, a jazz musician goes out in a burst of fame flame, and that more or less wraps things up. We were neither upset nor shocked by the plot, even if we couldn’t spell it out from afar.

This is because we didn’t really care, and that’s a shame. The acting seemed competent enough to me, certain scenes are enacted with a fine eye to detail and psychology, and the moviemakers seemed fairly bold. But there were disconnects, such as the aforementioned mysteries of Kate’s profession and Mr. Cosmo’s desire for Finney’s club – and how he goes about it. It’s as if the story-tellers didn’t really much care about the story they were telling, and that indifference carried throughout what I suspect could have been an interesting, even compelling movie.

But it’s not.

Too bad.

I’ve written about Rep. Lamar Smith’s (R-TX) bad advice about Americans getting all their information from President Trump here. I’m mildly happy to see Science reporting Rep. Smith is retiring:

The controversial chairperson of the science committee in the U.S. House of Representatives announced today that he will not seek re-election to Congress next fall. The pending departure of Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) could give the U.S. scientific community a chance to recalibrate a rocky 5-year relationship with a key congressional committee.

The 69-year-old Smith, who was first elected to Congress in 1986, is in the middle of his third 2-year stint as chairman of the science committee. House rules require members to step down as chairperson after 6 years, so Smith was already a lame duck.

But his departure could be more than simply a changing of the Republican guard. Smith, trained as a lawyer, has fought acrimonious battles with scientists over peer review, climate change, and the role of the federal government in supporting basic research since becoming chairperson in January 2013. He has clashed repeatedly with senior officials at the National Science Foundation, which he has accused of wasting tax dollars on frivolous research, and at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which he believes has hampered economic development through overregulation.

“Chairman Smith’s climate denial and investigations have created consternation in the scientific community and relations have deteriorated while he’s been chair,” one longtime observer says. “But he has not been fundamentally hostile to the scientific or academic enterprise. In an increasingly ideological and polarized Congress, it’s not clear whether his successor will be less controversial.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, which has been one of Smith’s leading critics over the years, says his departure “offers Congress and the science community a chance for a fresh start.” The science committee “became a venue for partisan conflict and political interference in science” during his tenure, says Andrew Rosenberg, who heads the union’s center for science and democracy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In light of his terrible advice concerning President Trump as the fount of all knowledge, this is a bit of an appalling revelation:

Smith’s letter announcing his decision notes that he has “been able to shape policy involving ethics, immigration, crime, intellectual property, space, energy, the environment, the budget, and high tech” as chairperson of the ethics, judiciary, and science committees.” But the 16-term legislator is vague about exactly why he’s retiring, saying only that “for several reasons, this seems like a good time.”

Given his flawed idea of government’s role in society, the idea that he chaired a committee on ethics leaves me feeling mildly ill.

Back in May I mentioned the open House seat in the South Carolina 5th district, vacated by Mick Mulvaney upon his confirmation as Director of OMB, was actually being contested by the Democrats in the form of a guy named Archie Parnell. Archie lost, as I noted here. But he didn’t do badly, as this chart indicates:

Data from Ballotpedia.

Now he’s back and running again. He’s even released an amusing election video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_zj8r_NhpA&feature=youtu.be

Yeah, that’s all. I just liked the video.

On Lawfare, professor Alan Rozenshtein weighs in on the problems of new services offered over the Internet and how they interact with our legal system:

Unfortunately, when it comes to policymaking, the platform-or-publisher question is a prime example of what the early-twentieth-century legal realist Felix Cohen called “transcendental nonsense”: the counterproductive attempt to answer practical questions through conceptual analysis. One of Cohen’s famous examples was the debate over whether a labor union was a “person” and thus could be sued. Instead of torturing ourselves about the essence of labor unions or personhood, Cohen argued, we should instead ask whether we’d rather live in a world in which labor unions could be sued; if yes, then we’ll say that labor union are persons, and if not then we’ll say that they’re not. In this view, the label “person” isn’t driving the analysis but is rather just a shorthand way of describing those entities that the law allows to be sued. And since all definitions are just arbitrary conventions, there’s no purely logical reason to prefer one categorization over another. The real work has to be done by a combination of facts—what is the state of the world and what are the various options for changing it—and values—what sort of world do we want to live in.

In the case of technology companies and their obligations to moderate content—whether of foreign interference in elections, terrorist and extremist speech, or just everyday bullying and harassment—debating over whether companies are platforms or publishers is as backwards a strategy as is arguing over whether labor union are people. Instead of having a theoretical discussion over what kind of entity a technology company is, and then, using that categorization to determine its obligations, we should ask what obligations we want the company to have, and then use whatever label is most convenient to remind ourselves of what we decided. And to answer this latter question, we need to focus on facts—how many users, what kind of content, what sort of algorithms—and values—what tradeoffs are we willing to make between policing bad content and the inevitable infringements on user privacy and free expression that such policing entails. These are hard questions, and definitional debates over whether a technology giant is more like a newspaper or a telephone network won’t help.

In other words, let’s retire the tired debate over whether Facebook or Google or Twitter is a platform or a publisher (or some third, hybrid category). It’s just distracting us from the real issue: not what these companies are, but what they can do.

It’s a little fascinating watching someone dance around the fact that the law is currently inadequate by disputing certain processes whereby we make law, or damn near anything else comprehensible. I think it all keys on this:

And since all definitions are just arbitrary conventions, there’s no purely logical reason to prefer one categorization over another.

Well, no. As any software engineer of the object-oriented variety (and, to a lesser extent, perhaps, the functional-paradigm programmer) knows, we categorize in order to simplify attaining our goals; within the law, categorization means we can avoid enumerating every entity we wish to address within the framework of the law, and, more importantly, extend it to future entities. The definitions are not arbitrary, but are driven by goal-oriented logical processes – and thus we invalidate Cohen’s (Rozenshtein’s citation) remarks.

Without having followed this discussion in any form, I suspect the real solution is going to start with something Rozenshtein should like to discard – the … third, hybrid category. But how to extend the categorization? Elsewhere in his post, he states that

But the companies, led by Google, are increasingly defending their algorithms as First Amendment–protected speech, which suggests a closer affinity to publishers like the New York Times or CNN than to pure communications platforms like AT&T or Verizon.

My understanding is that these algorithms are part of the content delivery system, rather than the content generation system (which, for you categorization buffs, means the users). For Rozenshtein, he uses their existence to suggest a likeness to previous category members, but based on content generation, I think. I could be wrong.

But let’s reconsider, then, the previous generation of publishers and platforms. How did they deliver content?

First, there were the old corkboards in stores and other buildings of both private and public nature, of which you still see a few. People could leave messages of general or specialized interest, which might be answered through public or private means by other interested folks. This might be an example of a platform.

There was, and still is, the public sale of the content. An example is the iconic sale of newspapers by newsboys. While this might function purely to move buyer-generated content to other buyers, it was more usually used by the company providing the content to sell that content, thus making the company a publisher.

The postal service is the last one I shall mention, and I mention it last for a reason. Much like the previous category, public sales, it could be used either way, although more by publishers. LOC (letters of comment) columns provided a minor way for readers (who were not always buyers, although again they overwhelmingly fell into this category) to generate content, but again this was, and is, a publisher-dominated content delivery system. Importantly, this mode of content delivery permitted a limited form of customization, because now the user of the delivery system knew who was receiving the content. In theory, each item could be modified based on knowledge of the reader at the given address. Insofar as I know, there was no regulation of such activity.

This slight diversion down memory lane should serve to awaken a question in the reader: how do the algorithms of Google, et al, fit into this picture of content delivery? The closest categorization is the last one listed, the postal service delivery system, because each recipient can be, and in technical fact has to be, distinguished from the others. Once collection of data extraneous to the technical requirements of delivery commences, the items delivered can be modified based on the extraneous data – and possibly the non-extraneous data as well, to be entirely anal about it. Keeping in mind my long term theme that computers are multipliers, the ability to modify items based on the extraneous data is boosted to the n^th degree, compared to the prior generation postal delivery system. This ability to customize is then applied to items both actively collected by the company, as well as those independent content generation entities who are using the company’s delivery system to send content to readers.

And this, I contend in my legal ignorance, is what will end up generating an entirely new categorization for the noted companies, much to their dismay. This massive ability to customize, and the lack of control of the providing company over that content, will make them unique – and subject to regulation.

I hope the questions used while formulating such regulations will include questions regarding the appropriateness of customizing political content to separate users – if one political message generated by, or for, candidate A contradicts another from the same content generator, but is only viewable by non-intersecting subsets of the receivers of the messages, is this an appropriate and desirable use of the medium? If not, then what do you do about it? Ban the entire service a priori, or attempt to detect and punish a posteriori, after the damage is done?

In the end, categorization is the marvelous tool of the human intellect, but one must always remember that they are often imperfectly defined; new categorizations should always be kept in mind, but will always be driven by the goals of those doing the categorization.

Sedulous:

1. working hard and steadily; diligent
2. constant; persistent: sedulous attention to the task

[YourDictionary.com]

Noted in “The Senate Just Confirmed an Anti-Gay Blogger to the Federal Judiciary,” Mark Joseph Stern, Slate:

Thursday’s confirmation vote provides a reminder of the Trump administration’s vigorously anti-LGBTQ stance. Trump himself may or may not hold animus toward sexual and gender minorities, but his Cabinet, advisers, and allies in Congress are working sedulously to reverse progress on LGBTQ rights. Once Trump stacks the federal courts with reactionary activists, his judges can chip away at landmark rulings protecting marriage equality and the broader rightsof same-sex couples. Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court justice, has already signaled his eagerness to reconsider gay rights. Judges like Bush can help to weaken gay-friendly precedent in the lower courts, making them more vulnerable to reversal.

I must say, my reaction to the sound of this word is quite different from its meaning.

Continuing this story about course disruption by Reedies Against Racism (RAR) at Reed College, The Atlantic’s Chris Bodenner reports on a counter-reaction:

This school year, students are ditching anonymity and standing up to RAR in public—and almost all of them are freshmen of color. The turning point was the derailment of the Hum lecture on August 28, the first day of classes. As the Humanities 110 program chair, Elizabeth Drumm, introduced a panel presentation, three RAR leaders took to the stage and ignored her objections. Drumm canceled the lecture—a first since the boycott. Using a panelist’s microphone, a leader told the freshmen, “[Our] work is just as important as the work of the faculty, so we were going to introduce ourselves as well.”

The pushback from freshmen first came over Facebook. “To interrupt a lecture in a classroom setting is in serious violation of academic freedom and is just unthoughtful and wrong,” wrote a student from China named Sicheng, who distributed a letter of dissent against RAR. Another student, Isabel, ridiculed the group for its “unsolicited emotional theater.”

Two days later, a video circulated showing freshmen in the lecture hall admonishing protesters. When a few professors get into a heated exchange with RAR leaders, an African American freshman in the front row stands up and raises his arms: “This is a classroom! This is not the place! Right now we are trying to learn! We’re the freshman students!” The room erupts with applause.

I caught up with that student, whose name is Pax. “This is a weird year to be a freshman,” he sighed. Pax is very mild-mannered, so I asked what made him snap into action that morning. “It felt like both sides [RAR and faculty] weren’t paying attention to the freshman class, as it being our class,” he replied. “They started yelling over the freshmen. It was very much like we weren’t people to them—that we were just a body to use.”

The result?

Support for RAR seems to be collapsing; only about 100 students were involved in this year’s boycott, a quarter of last year’s crowd. There haven’t been any Hum protests since the upperclassmen who participated in the noise parade were barred from lectures. RAR’s list of demands keeps growing, but its energy is now focused on Wells Fargo [for its financial ties to private prisons]. That could change when reforms to the Hum syllabus are announced this fall, but for now, the lecture hall is free of protesters.

Reed is just one college—and a small one at that. But the freshman revolt against RAR could be a blueprint for other campuses. If the “most liberal student body” in the country can reject divisive racial rhetoric and come together to debate a diversity of views, others could follow.

These are the candidates to be future leaders, and they appear to be reacting properly.

The Arecibo Radio Telescope, currently damaged and inoperative due to Hurricane Maria (NPR).

I don’t know how many folks participate in the public computing projects, but I’ve been doing so for so long that I don’t recall when I started. Today I received an email from the SETI@Home folks, who are analyzing data from various telescopes for any signs of extra-terrestrial civilizations, that they’re overwhelmed with data to analyze and need more participants. If you’re interested in joining the effort, here’s the link.

Hey, I remembered my password to SETI@Home – I probably haven’t logged in to the account in 3+ years! It says I’ve been contributing computing time since 27 Apr 1999. I wonder if I was running the Yggdrasil version of Linux at the time …

Given the tangible and substantial damage President Trump continues to do to the United States, the latest Gallup Presidential Approval poll made me start wondering.

As you can see on the right, the Disapproval line set a new high of 62% and the Approval line set a new low of 33% a few days ago, a plunge I (and I’m sure everyone else) attributes to the indictments of Manafort and Gates, as well as the guilty plea of Papadopolous. The fact that Trump hired and worked closely with those accused of high crimes, and another who actively plead guilty, brings to mind a certain concern that he hasn’t the judgment of character necessary to run an effective Administration.

And then we’ve seen a helluva recovery in his numbers, which I believe to be the result of the terror incident in New York City. It’s a well-known phenomenon that at times of public danger, there’s a rallying effect around the President.

So I’m left wondering if the United States is being deliberately prodded to keep President Trump in power. Every day he does more and more damage to the most powerful country in the world, whether it’s nominating another judge so extreme that even the GOP Senators are disgusted by them, or blundering about in the Mideast, or frantically trying to disassemble the ACA (a blow to the health of the citizens of the nation is a blow to the nation), or attacking the laws and norms which have made this Nation strong, or all of a number of foolish stunts he’s pulled.

I have no doubt that our adversaries and our enemies keep a very close eye on us, and the election of President Trump came as a golden opportunity for them. He’s been quite the productive gold mine for them, and if they have any sanity about them, they’ll try to keep them there. The 30% approval rating is probably the point at which Trump is considered to be in imminent danger of impeachment, and the plunge looked worrisome. So what does it cost them to sacrifice a single soldier in their cause? Pick one out, have him take a shot at causing terror, and, hey, look, Trump is back up to 39%. That’s a safe level, they no doubt muttered among themselves.

Sadly, we’ll probably never actually discover whether this is true, and I doubt it’d have much of a counter-effect. But as terror attacks continue, keep it in mind. We really need to dig out the tick before we all catch Lyme Disease – or something worse.

I fear we were not meticulous in our leaf cleanup, and the survivors are looking awfully darn cold, don’t you think?

Just to make you feel better, here’s a random shot from this past summer.

Janissary:

1. often capitalized :a soldier of an elite corps of Turkish troops organized in the 14th century and abolished in 1826
2. :a member of a group of loyal or subservient troops, officials, or supporters

[Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “‘The Saddest Thing’: President Trump Acknowledges Constraint,” Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare, previously quoted here.

Reading AL Monitor‘s Week In Review, it appears President Trump is being completely outmaneuvered in Iraq by Russian President Putin:

Russian President Vladimir Putin repositioned himself as a key broker of Iraqi energy politics last week, while US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was scolded by the Iraqi government for his comments about Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU).

Given America’s history and assets in Iraq, it seems a reach that Russia could be outflanking the United States in Iraq, as we suggested last week. But while Putin choreographs each move with a wary and calculating eye on Iran and the ever-shifting regional landscape, the United States limits its options by seeing every Iranian move as adversarial and in zero-sum terms, which only serves to frustrate Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who prefers that the United States and Iran not play out their hostility in Iraq.

So in the same week that Tillerson earned a rebuke from Abadi’s office for saying “Iranian militias in Iraq” should “go home” — the prime minister’s statement termed the PMU “Iraqi patriots” — Iraq and Russia signed an expansive energy and economic protocol. The agreement opened discussions of more favorable terms for Russian companies and contractors in Iraq involving electricity and hydropower plants, oil and gas fields, equipment and supplies. The protocol touched on Russian soft loans in support of these projects as long as Russia has the lead in building and running these plants and operations.

Particularly striking is the description of how the United States sees the landscape. While this is not nearly enough information to go on – and I’m not an expert in this sort of thing – it smells like the triumph of false preconception over realism in the State Department. Our preoccupation with Iran can be very injurious if we permit that to limit how we think about the Middle East, and let our inevitable provincialism rule us.

That’s the danger of despising the experts, many of whom have spent their lives learning and evaluating their particular areas of expertise; “down home wisdom,” out of its context, has no application and, in fact, a negative potentiality.

If this bears out as a negative outcome for the United States, we should then consider how Secretary of State’s Tillerson’s management has brought about this result, whether it’s his lack of experience, or his diligent approach to reducing the ranks in the State Department.

I’d rather not hope for this, but this may turn out to be one in a long series of failures for the United States. However, this may be mitigated as most of the energy landscape in Iraq is, of course, oil, and the world is slowly moving away from fossil fuels. If this accelerates, whether through government incentives or a populace that realizes this energy source is not scaling properly, then this failure may not be important as some might assume, except, of course, symbolically.

Snow is not the end of the outdoor picture season, it only seems like it.

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare describes the situation at the DoJ:

But what are these chains? They are not the stolid personality of Jim Comey. Trump managed to get rid of Comey. They are not Attorney General Jeff Sessions or Rosenstein, neither of whom has shrouded himself in glory. Both men have vacillated, rather, between honorable behavior and dishonorable behavior over their times in office. Both men have sometimes acted to protect the integrity of independent law enforcement—Sessions by recusing himself from the Russia matter and Rosenstein by appointing Robert Mueller and stalwartly protecting his investigation. But both men also facilitated the President’s firing of Comey. And they have both covered for Trump’s grotesque interactions with law enforcement even as Trump has humiliated them repeatedly. Rosenstein’s speech vouching for the President’s commitment to the rule of law is only the latest example. Neither of them has shown one tenth the backbone of the now-resigned head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chuck Rosenberg.

So what are the chains then? The chains are the workaday women and men of federal law enforcement, and their expectations that the political echelon at the Justice Department will shield them from becoming the President’s janissaries and enforcers. Trump is menacing the norm of independent law enforcement. He is chomping at the bit to do violence to it. But at least for now, it is holding. It remains strong enough that Trump can fulminate all he wants about how the Justice Department should be investigating Hillary Clinton and he can spit fire about the fact that Sessions hasn’t done more to “protect” him. Yet Mueller grinds on and does his job. The FBI grinds on and does its job. And the Justice Department grinds on and does its job. And the President finds it the “saddest thing” that none of their jobs, as our democratic polity has determined them to be over a long period of time, includes fulfilling his undemocratic aspirations to loose investigators on people he doesn’t like or to have a Justice Department that protects him and his family and his campaign from scrutiny. The saddest thing indeed.

It’s a stunning statement of presidential constraint by the rule of law, if not a statement of belief in it: Trump actually declared this week that while he aspires to corruptly interfere with law enforcement, he just can’t pull it off.

And I suppose I should be reassured that the strong democracy built by Whigs and Republicans and Democrats over more than two centuries is standing up to the depradations of the unprincipled Trump.

But even granite can be worn away by the slow, relentless assault of water, and so I don’t think we can wait for Trump to simply run out his term. I think he should be impeached before he can do more official damage; and it would be good if he went out as the public embarrassment that he is, rather than some sort of martyr to the conservatives. But for that to happen, the right wing media would have to turn on him.

Scurrilous:

adjective

1. grossly or obscenely abusive:
   a scurrilous attack on the mayor.
2. characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive:
   a scurrilous jest.

[Dictionary.com]

Just because I used it earlier today, and I wanted a more precise definition than I had in my head.

Lloyd Alter surprises me with this statement on Treehugger.com as he discusses the world’s largest building constructed with Cross-Laminated Lumber:

Anthony Thistleton, speaking in Toronto at the Wood Solutions Fair, explained that the reasons for using CLT are prosaic: it is a lot lighter, a fifth the weight of a concrete frame, so it doesn’t need deep pile foundations, which would have been problematic with a new Crossrail subway line going underneath. It goes up a lot faster, and in real estate development, time is money. Because the CLT has a bit of insulation value, it needs less additional insulation. Because the CLT buildings have more wall and less column, there is less infill framing. So that overall, the cost often ends up being less than building with concrete.

All those other green benefits, the storing of carbon, the saving of 600 heavy trucks running through London, the renewable resource? Nice to have too, but the real story here is that you can build a better building for cheap.

Thistleton said he wasn’t thrilled about cladding the building in brick, necessary to fit in with the neighbourhood; he thinks it’s inappropriate to put such a heavy cladding on such a light building. I don’t agree; architects have been putting brick facades on wood frame buildings for centuries, and it does fit in with the neighbourhood. I love how they photograph the building from in front of an old brick wall with old mattresses and junk; it is now part of the urban fabric. “The building’s intricate brickwork references both the surrounding Victorian and Edwardian housing and the craftsmanship-like detailing of the local warehouses.”

The brick also gives it a bit of weight; Thistleton notes that a problem with such a light building isn’t holding it up, but holding it down. Wind loads become more important.

It hadn’t occurred to me that generally reasonable winds might cause a building made of lumber to take flight. Naturally, extreme weather such as tornadoes and hurricanes are a different matter, but the implication here is of more reasonable winds.

Into the old email feedbag comes another bit of dubious email. It feeds off some true life scandals, making it easy to lead its readers down scurrilious paths. Due to its nature, I’ll quote it in total and then descend upon it. It was quite colorful, with red dominating the first set of entries, and green the second half.

FALL IS NEARLY UPON US WITH THE GIVING SEASON RIGHT BEHIND – DONATING ITEMS OR MONEY… WHICH GROUP? A TIMELY REMINDER BEFORE YOUR GENEROUS SPIRITS OPEN YOUR WALLETS. Who Would Have Imagined That This Was The Case   The  American Red Cross President and CEO Marsha J. Evans’ salary for the year was $651,957  plus expenses MARCH OF  DIMES It is called the March of Dimes because only a dime for  every 1 dollar is given to the needy. The  United Way President Brian Gallagher receives a $375,000 base salary  along with numerous expense benefits. UNICEF CEO Caryl M. Stern receives $1,200,000 per year (100k per month) plus all expenses including a ROLLS ROYCE. Less than 5  cents of your donated dollar goes to the cause. GOODWILL  CEO and owner Mark Curran profits $2.3 million a year. Goodwill is a very catchy name for his business. You donate to his business and then he sells the items for PROFIT. He pays nothing for his products and pays his workers minimum wage! Nice Guy.  $0.00 goes to help anyone!  Stop giving to this man. Instead, give to any of the following GO “GREEN” AND PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE IT WILL DO SOME GOOD:   The  Salvation Army Commissioner, Todd Bassett receives a small salary of only $13,000 per year(plus housing) for  managing this $2 billion dollar organization. 96 percent of donated dollars go  to the cause. The  American Legion National Commander receives a $0.00 zero  salary.  Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth! The Veterans of Foreign WarsNational Commander receives a $0.00 zero  salary. Your donations go  to help Veterans and their families and youth! The  Disabled American Veterans National Commander receives a $0.00 zero  salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth! The  Military Order of Purple Hearts National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary.  Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth! The Vietnam Veterans Association National Commander receives a $0.00 zero  salary. Your donations go  to help Veterans and their families and youth! Make a Wish: For children’s last wishes. 100% goes to funding trips or  special wishes for a dying child. St. Jude  Research Hospital 100% goes towards funding and  helping Children with Cancer who have no insurance and cannot afford to pay. Ronald  McDonald Houses All monies go to running  the houses for parents who have critically ill Children in the hospital. 100% goes to housing, and feeding  the families. Lions  Club International 100% OF DONATIONS GO TO HELP THE  BLIND, BUY HEARING AIDES, SUPPORT MEDICAL MISSIONS AROUND THE WORLD.THEIR LATEST UNDERTAKING IS MEASLES VACCINATIONS (ONLY $1.00 PER SHOT). Please share this with everyone you can.

So do these accusations fly? Or is this more like that poor cow used in catapult testing? Here’s my analysis:

American Red Cross – Via Charity Navigator, here is the data on the American Red Cross:

Compensation of Leaders     (FYE 06/2015)

Compensation	% of Expenses	Paid to	Title
$517,364	0.01%	Gail J. McGovern	President, CEO

ARC is characterized as being in excess of $1 billion. While the mischaracterization of the CEO’s salary is minor, it’s important to keep in mind the size of the organization, the high rating of the organization – and how little impact the CEO’s salary has on it. So long as the CEO is an effective leader, it’s difficult to fault the salary. Still, it’s a judgment call.

March of Dimes – Via Charity Navigator, I chose to use their Financial Performance Metrics, since the complaint was about how much money makes it to the recipients.

 

Financial Performance Metrics

	Program Expenses (Percent of the charity’s total expenses spent on the programs and services it delivers)	75.6%
	Administrative Expenses	11.0%
	Fundraising Expenses	13.3%
	Fundraising Efficiency	$0.14
	Working Capital Ratio (years)	< 0.01
	Program Expenses Growth	0.6%
	Liabilities to Assets	88.1%

All data for Financial Performance Metrics calculations was provided by March of Dimes on recent 990s filed with the IRS.

Questions concerning the above categories can be answered by following the link, above, and clicking on the category names. In general, it appears to fairly well run, but with room for improvement – Charity Navigator’s score of 75.6% for Program Expenses is near the top of its second-tier in that category, nearly first tier. I’d rate this claim false.

The United Way – Via Charity Navigator –

Compensation of Leaders     (FYE 12/2015)

So the mail is accurate. However, here are The United Way financials:

Financial Performance Metrics

 

	Program Expenses (Percent of the charity’s total expenses spent on the programs and services it delivers)	91.4%
	Administrative Expenses	5.4%
	Fundraising Expenses	3.0%
	Fundraising Efficiency	$0.04
	Working Capital Ratio (years)	0.49
	Program Expenses Growth	0.3%
	Liabilities to Assets	44.5%

All data for Financial Performance Metrics calculations was provided by United Way Worldwide on recent 990s filed with the IRS.

A Program Expenses value of 91.4% is very good, indeed. So here you have to decide if you’re terribly offended at the high salary of a very well run, apparently, charity.

UNICEF – Via Charity Navigator –

Compensation of Leaders      (FYE 06/2016)

Compensation % of Expenses Paid to Title
$537,682 0.09% Caryl M. Stern President, CEO

Or less than 50% of the claim. Still, it’s a hefty amount, isn’t it? Does the CEO deliver?

Financial Performance Metrics

	Program Expenses (Percent of the charity’s total expenses spent on the programs and services it delivers)	89.8%
	Administrative Expenses	2.7%
	Fundraising Expenses	7.4%
	Fundraising Efficiency	$0.07
	Working Capital Ratio (years)	0.22
	Program Expenses Growth	3.1%
	Liabilities to Assets	50.2%

All data for Financial Performance Metrics calculations was provided by UNICEF USA on recent 990s filed with the IRS.

Program Expenses of 89.8% puts it in the top tier for efficiency, and suggests far more than 5 cents of your dollar makes it to recipients.

At this juncture, honestly, the authors of this mail are beginning to look like cold-blooded manipulators who object to these causes on ideological grounds – and will lie and bully to get their way. Still, let’s see on this last one.

Goodwill – In Charity Navigator there are a number of Goodwill entries, confusing me, so I did a search of the Web for Mark Curran and Goodwill. The result, as summarized on Wikipedia (other sites supporting):

A widely circulated email titled “Think Before You Donate” aims to convince readers that “Goodwill CEO and Owner Mark Curran profits $2.3 million a year”, but fact-checking groups have debunked the content of the email: the CEO of Goodwill Industries International is not Mark Curran, nor does he make $2.3 million a year.^[27] The current President and CEO of Goodwill is Jim Gibbons, who in 2014 received a total reported compensation of $689,418.^[28]

So this appears to be out and out deception. For those who believe that all scandals should be revealed, Goodwill has certainly had a few, such as pay out of line for CEOs of  the various branches, and some questions about the use of disabled labor. In the end, this out and out lie was unnecessary, as the facts on the ground may be enough to discourage potential donors.

So how about this manipulator’s favorites?

The Salvation Army – I do not see a Todd Bassett on the Salvation Army’s list of Commissioners. Ah, here we go – PRO bono of Australia covered a similar email, and I’ll just borrow their coverage on The Salvation Army:

Finally, in reference to The Salvation Army Snopes.com said “The information presented above is outdated, as W. Todd Bassett stepped down as National Commander of The Salvation Army in April 2006; the current National Commander of the Salvation Army is William A. Roberts. The Salvation Army is not required to file a Form 990 with the IRS because it is primarily a religious organisation, but according to the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Roberts’ last reported total annual compensation was $126,920, much higher than the $13,000 reported above. Forbes rates this organisation’s efficiency at 82 per cent, a fair bit lower than the 93 per cent figure claimed in the story.”

The American Legion has been difficult to find uptodate figures. Back in 2009 and 2011 stories were published refuting this $0 salary claim, but of course, this may have changed – perhaps current General Rohan is not receiving a salary. However, given the size of the organization, I feel that’s not true, and feel reasonably confident in the suspicion that the author of this mail has, once again, lied through his teeth.

Well, that’s enough of today’s game of Manipulate the Reader – I feel full up to the ears of malignant lies. We’ve seen buttons pushed and money thrown around. Were you a victim? Or did you smell rotten fish and ignored this one? I hope it was the latter.

And I must say there are many sites out there that will discredit mail like this. Rather than accept these malignant lies into your lives, perhaps a little research is in order.

Or just discard the damn things. They rot the mind and the soul.

Lloyd Alter, design guy on Treehugger.com, surveys the terror truck landscape and sees it all about being a design problem:

So a solution to the problem of vehicular terrorism is the same solution that we have been proposing to reduce the number of deaths of pedestrians and cyclists all along: Make SUVs and trucks as safe as cars or get them off the road. It is a vehicle design problem. Or if you are going to still allow a more dangerous design of vehicle, give it a tougher licensing regime. Reduce their availability to those who actually need them and regulate the hell out of them.

I cannot agree, because the first rough patch in the road will be the drivers who will howl in protest on any limitations on their vehicles. First you have to deal with how the perception of absolute freedom is leading to advancing terrorism, both in terms of vehicles and in terms of guns.

And why did the guy in NYC end up waving around a paintgun, rather than some NRA special? I sure hope he – or someone – provides an answer to that one.