It seems to me that the Equifax data breach is quite the egregious breach of business ethics. Most of us do not have a business connection with them; they are in the business of collecting information about the consumers of the nation, summarizing it, and then selling that information to various other entities.

You do not contract with them to do this, and you cannot control that activity.

In case you’re not familiar with this scandal, here’s a randomly selected story on it from the AARP:

With credit-reporting firm Equifax revealing that hackers may have stolen financial and consumer data on at least 143 million customers in the U.S., it’s quite possible that your personal information — including birth date, Social Security number, driver’s license and address — could fall into the hands of criminals.

Equifax said that it hasn’t found evidence of unauthorized activity on its core consumer or commercial credit-reporting databases. But criminals could use the treasure trove of personal information acquired in the breach to apply for credit cards and loans in your name, access your bank accounts and establish a phony presence online with email and social media accounts.

Not because you made a mistake, mind  you. But because they made mistakes.

Well, this sort of problem, as a class, is causing disruptions to American society. It is preventable and is the result of criminal neglect.

It’s not an accident. Someone – some entity, singular or plural – balled things up.

And how to fix it? I think someone with a corral full of lawyers should step up to the plate and bring a suit that asks for the dissolution of Equifax as the remedy to the injury to the class of consumers who had their data revealed and are now vulnerable to identity theft and other crimes.

Speaking as a software engineer, the industry has hid for far too long from responsibilities such as these. Industry should have its teeth kicked in over these scandalous, preventable mistakes, because that’s how this works – someone steps in a pothole and breaks their neck in the courthouse, and everyone else finally realizes you can’t dump mercury into the lake any longer. I’ve written about Underwriter’s Software Labs before, a fictional entity that shouldn’t be. How much longer before someone with the resources realizes that software development cowboy style is not resulting in shining examples of software?

Maybe it’s time for the insurance industry to get involved again.

Out of the old email bag comes another shot at dividing the ol’ United States into those who would lead the country, and those who despise them. Here’s an abridged version, since it runs a bit long:

Anthropomorphic Nouns

I thought this might be boring, but stick with it.  You’ll love the ending.

We are all familiar with  a

Herd of cows,

A Flock of chickens,

[omitted]

Now consider a group of Baboons.
Baboons are the loudest, most dangerous, most
obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least
intelligent of all primates.
And what is the proper collective noun for a
group of baboons?
Believe it or not… A Congress!
(Note: I hadn’t heard that before, so I looked it up. It is correct)

A CONGRESS OF BABOONS!

That pretty much explains the things that come out of Washington ! 

You just can’t  make this stuff up.

Ummmm…. except you just did. I went looking to see if a group of Baboons were a Congress and didn’t find anything in Wikipedia. A wider search yielded up the fact that this email has actually been analyzed and debunked. PolitiFact is on the case:

Two places where we did find it were sources in which virtually anybody could insert a definition on a whim: Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary.com. (In the Urban Dictionary, someone added the definition on Sept. 3, 2011, in response to the e-mail.)

And it’s no longer present in Wikipedia.

So we turned to Orin Hargraves, a freelance lexicographer and president of the Dictionary Society of North America.

The names for collections of animals are called “terms of venery,” and Hargraves said the best reference source for them is the 1968 book “An Exaltation of Larks” by James Lipton, host of “Inside the Actors Studio.”

The first part of the book, which examines real terms, has no reference to baboons. Only in the section that includes whimsical terms that Lipton coined or uncovered is there any reference to the primates. “A rumpus of baboons” is listed right next to “a buffoonery of orangutans.” (One of our favorites: “a prickle of porcupines.”)

For those who love useless bits of trivia:

Shirley Strum is at the University of California, San Diego, and director of the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project in Nairobi,Kenya. Larissa Swedell is at Queens College of the City University of New York and studies the primates in Ethiopia and South Africa.

Both said the correct term for a group of baboons is a “troop.”

They also note baboons are actually quite bright.

I suppose the next outstanding question is Why didn’t I just direct my correspondent’s attention to the above article?

Here’s the thing: It’s necessary to scrutinize the activities of our individual delegates to the federal government, to evaluate their performance, and to recognize self-interested and/or disinterested behavior. It’s necessary to perform this duty in a thoughtful and honest manner which will yield praise for exemplary service by such members, for which names such as Lugar and Kerry come to mind, and condemnation for such members as Weiner and those who’ve been convicted of corruption.

This mail is not that scrutiny.

This is mail designed to inculcate a general disdain and contempt for one of the most important legislative bodies on the planet. For those Americans who consider themselves patriotic, this mail is an insult, because the structure of our government is one of our strongest safeguards.

Worse yet, it’s a subtle call to treason. For all that Congress often moves at a snail’s pace, it’s better a snail than a Ferrari that races off a cliff. And if it seems like Congress isn’t promoting your favorite business’ interest, my reader would do well to remember that government defends that which cannot defend itself, such as the poor and the environment, the defrauded consumer and the lake shore inhabitant discovering the lake is about to be polluted by industry. Industry rarely needs defense; it needs restraint.

So when I read an email like this, I’m sensitive to how it brings government into general disdain. I’m aware of how this may discourage a person, who may be competent to an elective or judicial post, from pursuing that post – leaving it vulnerable to the ideologically extreme, the avaricious, the dishonorable.

We’ve been seeing that of late.

Spread the word.

Mr. Meade has, ah, revised his predictions, as FoxNews reports. In fact, he’s fairly opportunistic:

David Meade, who claimed the world is ending Saturday when a mysterious planet collides with Earth, is now backtracking on the calamitous claim.

Meade said the world won’t end on Sept. 23 after all, but instead Saturday will only mark the beginning of a series of catastrophic events to occur over several weeks.

“The world is not ending, but the world as we know it is ending,” he told the Washington Post. “A major part of the world will not be the same the beginning of October.”

Meade said his prediction is based on verses and numerical codes found in the Bible, specifically in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. He said recent events, such as the solar eclipse and Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, are omens of the approaching apocalypse.

And he explains the importance of the number of 33 in Biblical numerology and tries to roll astronomy into the gig, according to the report. For the young and the uninformed, this may seem portentous and magical.

For the rest of us, who’ve dared to read history beyond the standard textbooks, or have simply been around for a while, it’s the same old tired drek, designed to make people feel like they’re part of something divinely important. Take advantage of the disasters of the time, whether they be war, pestilence, weather, or tectonics, and behind it is someone in search of fame, prestige, wealth, and power.

It’s easier to make up stuff about God than it is to study Nature.

Remember the Biblical bit about the father’s sins will be visited on the offspring for umpteen generations?^[1] NewScientist (9 September 2017, paywall) has a modern take on this one – that is, the reason why London ended up enveloped in smog is due, in part, to the masters of fraud, from Mick Hamer:

Source: IanVisits, which also has information on this topic.

IN THE first decade of the 20th century, transport reached a tipping point. Would the future belong to petrol, electricity or even steam? The stage was set for a decisive showdown when the world’s first practical electric buses hit the streets of London in July 1907. They were clean, quiet, reliable and fume-free, unlike their petrol-powered counterparts, which were widely reviled for their deafening din and evil smells.

Electrobuses, as they were called, were an immediate hit with the capital’s commuters, and the prospect of a successful challenge to the internal combustion engine was greeted with delight by press and public alike. “The doom of the petrol-driven omnibus is at hand,” forecast the Daily News. “The electrobus is probably a more formidable rival than the petrol omnibus, not only to the horse omnibus but also to the tramway,” concluded Douglas Fox, the country’s foremost engineer and designer of many of the world’s railways, at the September 1908 meeting of what’s now the British Science Association. …

It was a con from the start. In the spring of 1906, the London Electrobus Company announced plans to put 300 electrobuses on the streets of the capital. It offered the public the chance to buy shares worth £300,000 to finance the project, claiming that it had acquired a patent for the huge sum of £20,000 that gave it a monopoly on the electrobus. This seemingly guaranteed that investors would reap enormous profits, and the public rushed to invest.

Almost immediately, however, inquisitive reporters exposed the scam. One bought a copy of the patent. He discovered that it was for a motor vehicle transmission – about as relevant to the electrobus as a patent for a hair dryer. It was simply a device for conning would-be investors. Another reporter visited the west London works where the electrobuses were to be built. Instead of finding a production line gearing up to churn out hundreds of vehicles, he found a former stables next to a pub. Alerted by articles in the papers, angry shareholders demanded their money back. It all ended up in court and the electrobus company was forced to refund more than 1000 investors.

The story continues, and you can buy Hamer’s book, A Most Deliberate Swindle, if you find this interesting – it’s to be published in just a few days, so I haven’t read it, either.

Thus electric vehicles were crippled with a bad rap and petrol powered vehicles took over, despite complaints concerning pollution, both environmental and auditory. Today we’re digging our way out of the fossil fuel hole, not because electric vehicles were out-competed, but because the primary backers were simply swindlers.

¹Yeah, I don’t remember.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has once again apparently saved the liberal bacon by insisting on the use of traditional processes and procedure when it comes to legislation, as CNN reports:

“I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal,” the Arizona Republican said in a statement. “I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried. Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will (affect) insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it. Without a full CBO score, which won’t be available by the end of the month, we won’t have reliable answers to any of those questions.”

But I have to ask whether these are the salutary efforts of a man who will lead Congress out of the hellhole it had recently dug for itself, or the words of a man who remembers better times and is repeating it to a chorus who will largely disregard him.

I fear the answer is the latter. The Senator may wish to believe that he can shame the GOP into returning to the better forms of government, but I fear that the very character of his Party has changed so much in the last twenty years that it’s difficult to see them as willing to use those forms. As one of the older legislators (elected to the House in 1982 and has served continuously since, moving to the Senate in 1986), he remembers what might be considered better times, when Senate collegiality was more important, and the Senate GOP rejected the attempt to convict and eject President Clinton.

But the rightward shift of the GOP has made the most important of McCain’s goals in this context, the return to proper legislating, nearly unattainable. We’ve seen Speaker Ryan and, to a greater extent, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, engage in lies, mendacity, and legislative activities that would embarrass their mothers, and they do so with no evident reluctance.

I do not see the shaming by a Senator in the twilight of his career as being truly effective.

Now, as some have pointed out, given the activities of some of the most extreme of the GOP Congressional members, the more moderate of the conservatives may appear to conform to McCain’s wishes, but I fear it will only be out of necessity. Bi-partisan efforts may allow the GOP in the two chambers to ignore their most extreme members’ objections to others’ plans, but don’t mistake this for an embrace of the old ways of governing through mutual consent.

The GOP, despite not understanding how to govern, appears to be convinced that it has all the answers and it doesn’t need any help from anyone else. I fear that Senator McCain is having a last hurrah, and his replacement will not understand the importance of good government, and how both sides can have good ideas.

The Party ideology no longer permits such thing blasphemous thinking.

Joan Garcia likes spheres. I think this is the best one.

More spheres here. And I must admit her horse has ‘tude.

More of her marble stuff here.

Kevin Drum engages in what appears to be a meaningless critique of an academic paper’s conclusion. The paper, by Jack Mara, Lewis Davis and Stephen Schmidt, concerns how membership in a fraternity or a sorority during college, or lack thereof, affects grades and post-graduation financial success. Here’s the paper’s results and conclusion:

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student GPA by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional four – point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol-related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. …

Our results indicate that college administrators face an important trade-off when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus: while such policies may significantly raise academic performance, these gains may come at a significant cost in terms of expected future income for their graduates.

Kevin thinks the result is backward:

I’d argue exactly the opposite: this paper puts another nail in the coffin of fraternities and sororities and eating clubs and so forth. Allow me to reframe the authors’ conclusion:

Our results provide empirical evidence that fraternities are just another way for social elites to keep themselves at the top regardless of actual performance. Those rejected by fraternities, even though they have higher GPAs, earn 36 percent less than those accepted by fraternities. This is further evidence, if any were needed, that college administrators face few trade-offs when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus.

And I think the intellectual confusion present in both conclusions is really reigning supreme. First of all, colleges exist to educate citizens, not to increase their financial earnings. A financially successful person does not define the successful citizen in the eyes of society, otherwise we’d all be praising Al Capone^[1].

Second, from an individual’s perspective, using financial earnings as a proxy for success in life is well documented as a red herring.

Third, it’s a mistake to consider using such a trivial metric as financial success as, well, being a business success. There are many examples of senior executives who basically burn down their firms, but they walk away with immense amounts of money. There is no apparent attempt in to correct for the mismatch between financial success and real-world success.

I would entertain arguments that such a mismatch is illusory, but I think that such an argument would stray into solipsism, always an intellectual error of elephantine proportions when attempting to evaluate across a collection of individuals.

And then there’s the constraints of the survey, starting with it being one college. And then:

3,762 alumni responded to the survey, a response rate of 25.8%. The survey asked respondents for information about their demographic characteristics, college activities, academic achievement, and current work status and income. In the analysis below, we limit the sample to men under the age of 65 who are employed full-time and for whom all of the control variables are present, resulting in 1,667 observations.

Men only? Under 65? Why even consider questions of success of any kind before the age of 65? This sort of strikes me as madness.

¹Or is that what we did in the last Presidential election?

How often do you get to reprimand a world-class conductor? Not very often, so Scott Chamberlain takes advantage of the opportunity to school Leonard Slatkin, albeit using pre-reviews of Slatkin’s new book, rather than the actual source material:

“Slatkin criticizes management and musicians about equally in his overview. The former remained quiet for too long about its mounting financial troubles, and the latter failed to pose early questions about funding when times were flush.”

The fact that years later we still have to knock down these casually-made, false equivalencies is, quite honestly, mind-boggling.  For what I hope is the last time, there is no equivalency here.

Let’s dig in. The Orchestra’s previous management didn’t “remain quiet” about mounting financial troubles—they actively engaged in a wide-ranging disinformation campaign directed at the musicians, the community, the City of Minneapolis, Minnesota’s State Legislature, and beyond.  This isn’t me just being mean saying this, this was abundantly documented during the lockout, and clearly documented in the Orchestra’s actual board minutes. For example, when the Orchestra leadership was approaching the State Legislature to secure bonding money to refurbish Orchestra Hall, it shaded the numbers to create the appearance balanced budgets and overall fiscal health. Then, on the eve of contract negotiations with the musicians, management shaded the finances in a different way to report a large deficit and make it seem that financial collapse was imminent.

Along with this, management lied about the size of the reported deficit. This wasn’t an accident… in 2011, the board retained the public-relations firm Padilla Speer Beardsley to determine “what size of deficit to report publicly.” Once it determined the optimum number, leadership manipulated its fundraising, expenditures and draws from the endowment to match this pre-determined number. And that was the origin of the $6 million deficit the management kept toting. …

The musicians—along with everyone else—were actively lied to. Repeatedly. Over many years. Which is why the public, local government, state government, and funders reacted so harshly. The two sides are not equivalent.

And so on. Scott makes clear that the lockout model of arts organization finance is a failure – and Slatkin’s equivocation is incorrect.

trichromats:

Trichromacy or trichromaticism is the possessing of three independent channels for conveying color information, derived from the three different types of cone cells in the eye. Organisms with trichromacy are called trichromats. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the Letters section for NewScientist (9 September 2017) in a letter from Tony Durham:

Perhaps it is something to do with the disabling effect of living with atypical colour vision in a society designed for trichromats. If so, I would expect the effects to be particularly noticeable when looking at TV and computer screens, colour photographs and paintings, all of which assume trichromatic colour vision. Further investigation might yield insights into how we see colour.

It’s been interesting watching the interpretations of the Graham-Cassidy health bill, because they really feed right through the prisms that everyone holds up in front of their eyes while interpreting anything. For example, Kevin Drum of the liberal Mother Jones magazine:

It’s hard to know how to react to the cynicism of the Graham-Cassidy health care bill. For starters, it’s as bad as all the other Republican repeal bills. Tens of millions of the working poor will lose insurance. Pre-existing conditions aren’t protected. Medicaid funding is slashed. Subsidies are slashed.

But apparently that’s not enough. Republican senators (and President Trump, of course) obviously don’t care what’s in the bill. Hell, they’re all but gleeful in their ignorance. Nor is merely repealing Obamacare enough. Graham-Cassidy is very carefully formulated to punish blue states especially harshly. And if even that’s not enough, after 2020 it gives the president the power to arbitrarily punish them even more if he feels like it. I guess this makes it particularly appealing to conservatives. Finally, by handing everything over to the states with virtually no guidance, it would create chaos in the health insurance market. The insurance industry, which was practically the only major player to stay neutral on previous bills (doctors, nurses, hospitals, and everyone else opposed them) has finally had enough. Even if it hurts them with Republicans, Graham-Cassidy is a bridge too far[.]

While pundits are always biased – it’s really all they have to sell in most cases – the fact that even the insurance industry is stepping back in horror is telling. On the other side, Chris Pope of the conservative National Review believes it’s better than just a fix:

This simple solution goes further than BCRA in redressing the great disparity in federal Medicaid assistance between states. Indeed, it does so without concentrating cuts on low-spending expansion states such as Arizona. It also prevents states from evading spending caps by merely inflating the number of healthy, able-bodied individuals enrolled, as they could do under the BCRA.

The ACA spends more than twice as much on expanding Medicaid as it does on premium tax credits for the exchange. By consolidating funding for both entitlements, Graham-Cassidy allows states to pool resources to increase the attractiveness and stability of the individual market. In doing this, it meets a clear need, but it also facilitates more thorough reform by repealing the individual mandate and potentially allowing fairly priced, fully competitive insurance to be offered outside of the exchanges. It also greatly expands the flexibility and potential uses of Health Savings Accounts.

But, as I understand it, Pope disregards the fact that the Republican-controlled states, which mostly chose not to take advantage of the Medicaid expansion, did so of their own free will – and apparently from political pique. It’s a little hard to find self-inflicted harm to be a compelling case for much of anything. Except perhaps to examine the inner workings of the most prominent conservative party.

Steve Benen of the liberal Maddowblog proceeds to rip the GOP Senators up one side and down the other. Here’s reason 1 of 5:

1. Republicans have to keep a promise. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said yesterday, “I could maybe give you 10 reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered. But Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign. That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill.”

That’s absurd. For one thing, it’s ridiculous to think a vague campaign promise is as important, if not more so, than the real-world effects of overhauling the nation’s health care system. For another, if Republicans “have a responsibility to carry out what [they] said in the campaign,” they’d also be extending coverage to everyone, shielding Medicaid beneficiaries from cuts, and guaranteeing protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Instead, GOP officials appear desperate to break those promises without explanation.

But as compelling as I find the hypocrisy assertion, this is probably even more diagnostic of the basic incompetency of the GOP:

GOP officials have had seven years to create a compelling sales pitch on health care. That they’ve failed so spectacularly doesn’t inspire confidence in their regressive plan.

It’s rather like watching a rebellious 13-year old boy, told to take care of a laborious chore, who decides to spend 5 minutes on it, rather than the two hours it requires. The entire sequence is unprofessional and quite discouraging about the half or more of the country who voted for these incompetents.

On The Volokh Conspiracy, Thomas Mulligan has published a comparison of meritocracy vs libertarianism which sparked a thought. Now, I did wonder if his characterization of libertarianism as it is currently is accurate, because I quit reading libertarian materials (mostly REASON Magazine) several years ago, but I guess I’m willing to stipulate it for the moment:

The American Dream is a meritocratic ideal.  Our national ethos is that no one should be guaranteed prosperity, but all citizens should have an equal opportunity to pursue it through their merit.  What a person can become should turn only on his or her intelligence, effort, skill, and the like—and not arbitrary features, like race or parental wealth.  That way, if a social hierarchy emerges, it is a “natural aristocracy”—as Thomas Jefferson put it—filled by “virtue and talents”, not “wealth and birth”.

This description of a just economy appeals to Americans across ideological lines.  And it is, by my lights, correct.

But it is not a libertarian ideal.  If we followed libertarian principles and implemented libertarian policies, we would create a very different economy than the one so many Americans desire.  We would create an economy in which merit was not taken seriously.

Consider the lamentable state of opportunity in the United States today.  Our economic mobility is among the worst in the developed world.  Children who are born rich stay rich.  Others, no matter their merits, cannot escape the trap of poverty.  Note that this is not because genetics determine economic outcomes; they do not.  Instead, birth into wealth provides social advantages, like access to elite education, as well as brute inheritance.  The wealthiest 1% of American households inherited, on average, $3 million.  This is no coincidence.

Unequal opportunity is incompatible with meritocracy.  Whether you are rich or poor ought to turn on your merits—not your parents’ merits, or their parents’ merits.

There’s an ambiguous implication that we’re currently libertarian, which would either outrage the libertarians, or kill them off in gouts of laughter, but that’s not really here nor there – and Thomas elsewhere suggests that we’re not libertarian in any case. For me, though, the insight is the assertion that our economic mobility is very poor, and is tied to inherited wealth.

I hadn’t heard the claim concerning the American economic mobility before; I know that years before the libertarians had claimed we had high economic mobility. Have things changed? Thomas provides a link to what appears to be an academic book entited Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, but dating from 2005 – so I have to wonder if this is still accurate.

But I appreciate his theoretical hand-waving a bit more. After all, libertarians basically want to reject just about all regulation in the belief that the marketplace will self-regulate where necessary. They spend a lot of time making that argument. So connecting the inheritance of wealth with stultification is quite interesting. It’s unfortunate that his source of statistics that he would use to bulwark his position appears to be somewhat suspect – and is vulnerable to arguments that things would be better without all those regulations.

Given all that, if we accept that we should be running a meritocracy rather than libertarianism, then I’m a little puzzled that Thomas doesn’t take this to its logical conclusion:

Outlaw inheritance completely.

Sounds insane, doesn’t it? As someone who’s an independent and probably best classed as a mainstreamer, it sounds a bit insane. I’d never considered that position until just now, although I’ve heard it advocated from time to time, most interestingly from someone whose name I don’t recall, but was an investor on the level of George Soros – but this was 25 years ago or more. At the time, I wrote it off as someone who didn’t want to deal with the politics and logistics of the Last Will, but maybe he had a good point after all.

Of course, then you have to ask where the estates of folks should go after liquidation? A lot of people will pee their pants at the thought of the gooberment getting it, although it might be a way to reduce income taxes. But if we’re going to be a true meritocracy, then we’d better be ready to help out new adults as well – because being born into wealth isn’t the same as inheriting it – you get advantages from that as well. And Thomas addresses this with conventional remedies, to which I have nothing to add.

But it does boggle the mind a bit. Libertarians do like to see themselves as people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps – but those with inheritances maybe didn’t have to pull so hard, did they? Perhaps a more formal approach to meritocracy might have, ah, merit?

Remember the Wisconsin / Foxconn deal? Kevin Drum misdoubts it:

According to estimates from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the money Wisconsin pays to Foxconn will be higher than the combined taxes they get directly from Foxconn and from workers at the Foxconn facility. This annual deficit won’t become positive until 2033. The cumulative deficit won’t become positive until 2042. And this all assumes that Foxconn produces the 13,000 jobs it says it will. If it doesn’t, the deal will look even worse for Wisconsin. …

Until now, Wisconsin’s most famous product has been cheese. In the future, state Republicans hope that Wisconsin will be famous for assembling consumer tech products. In reality, their new most famous product is old-fashioned gullibility. They got taken to the cleaners.

I think the Wisconsin GOP is playing to its base so that in 2018 it can proclaim that it’s the party of the high school diploma only whites, not the Democrats. It’s a strategic maneuver.

And it’ll be interesting to see if it works. I think it’ll be a positive for the GOP class of 2018, but after that it may turn into an anchor around their necks.

The institutions that dominate the lives of humans quite naturally dominate the news. I found this report, concerning how the Internet is having a negative effect on a Mideast institution, an interesting response. From Ahmed Fouad on AL Monitor:

Al-Azhar Fatwa Global Center was established in November 2016 based on a decision from Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb to detect extremist fatwas online and to respond to them. The center serves as a platform for communication for those who want to know about fatwas from Al-Azhar online. Around 300 researchers and clerics work there.

These new measures launched in August revived the Egyptian public’s connection with the center and sparked the interest of internet and social media users. There was not much marketing for the trial website that launched in November 2016, so many internet users were unaware of the center.

Youssef Amer, the general supervisor of the center, indicated in a press statement Aug. 28 that the center will play a key role in fighting extremist thought and the credo of the Islamic State (IS). He said, “The most dangerous issues the center is tackling include Islam and citizenship among terrorist groups, mainly IS. The national and religious identities do not conflict, unless the national identity dictates committing acts forbidden by God.”

Al-Azhar refers to a university and a mosque in Cairo, and I believe this reference is to the University. This is not the only activity at the center.

Although Amer revealed the center’s resolve to tackle thorny extremism issues, most fatwas are focusing on matters not related to detecting extremist fatwas and fighting extremist thought, more than 20 days after the launch. For example, the center issued a fatwa on Sept. 9 allowing the earning of a fee for reading and memorizing the Quran, and another fatwa on Sept. 8 approving a man’s right to marry another woman without the knowledge of the first wife.

Back to extremism, this is just one response taken by the Egyptian government:

Yusri al-Azbawy, a political researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, told Al-Monitor, “The center and electronic website are very important, and their significance is yet to be seen. Radical fatwas have taken one of three paths to reach Egyptian minds. The first path is religious channels funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and by Salafist groups. The state resolved the issue by taking a decision to shut down religious channels July 3, 2013. The second path constitutes some mosques that were controlled by extremist currents. The state tightened its grip on them in the past years by forbidding preachers unlicensed by Al-Azhar and the Awqaf Ministry from speaking out in minarets and pushing them to unify the Friday sermon through the Ministry [of Awqaf].”

He added, “The third path is electronic websites. Radical groups have many fatwa websites that cannot be banned because they are numerous. For that reason, an electronic platform … was necessary to give fatwas to those seeking them so that they don’t fall in the trap of extremist fatwas, especially since most youths don’t visit Al-Azhar or Dar al-Ifta to get fatwas and just resort to the internet.”

Others believe Al-Azhar is dancing around the issue of Al-Azhar’s own extremist origins. This may just be a way to make something new seem normal by assuming a voice of authority. I really can’t say from here.

I kinda like this half-turned tree, blowin’ about in the breeze this afternoon.

A self-portrait.

Ever wonder how we get from the dirty present to the clean future? Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford and his colleagues have been working on just that, as published in new journal Joule:

SUMMARY
We develop roadmaps to transform the all-purpose energy infrastructures (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industry, agriculture/forestry/fishing) of 139 countries to ones powered by wind, water, and sunlight (WWS). The roadmaps envision 80% conversion by 2030 and 100% by 2050. WWS not only replaces business-as-usual (BAU) power, but also reduces it 42.5% because the work: energy ratio of WWS electricity exceeds that of combustion (23.0%), WWS requires no mining, transporting, or processing of fuels (12.6%), and WWS end-use efficiency is assumed to exceed that of BAU (6.9%). Converting may create 24.3 million more permanent, full-time jobs than jobs lost. It may avoid 4.6 million/year premature air-pollution deaths today and 3.5 million/year in 2050; $22.8 trillion/year (12.7 ¢/kWh-BAU-all-energy) in 2050 air-pollution costs; and $28.5 trillion/year (15.8 ¢/kWh-BAU-all-energy) in 2050 climate costs. Transitioning should also stabilize energy prices because fuel costs are zero, reduce power disruption and increase access to energy by decentralizing power, and avoid 1.5C global warming.

I must admit that, due to time considerations, I haven’t gone farther than this summary, but it’s certainly an intriguing and exciting proposal. I wonder which variables they’re holding constant improperly and other such mistakes – not that I mean to criticize, but in a project of this magnitude, those errors are inevitable.

gravamen:

1. a grievance
2. Law the essential part of a complaint or accusation [Your Dictionary]

Noted in “The Bully Podium: Is the First Amendment Defenseless?” Anne Tindall & Ben Berwick, Take Care:

Our sense, however, is that when the White House goes after its critics, the gravamen of the concern is an affront to the First Amendment.  So for this post, we’d like to focus on whether there’s a First Amendment claim against government bullying of the press, and, if so, what that claim looks like.

A friend has been bugging me for months to look into ThugNotes, and I finally viewed a few episodes of Dr. Sparky Sweets holding forth on the plots and analyses of various classic works of literature, from the works of Dr. Seuss to The Epic of Gilgamesh.

In gangster talk.

It’s an interesting way to do things, and according to my friend, the analyses are on the mark. They’re brief, little more than five minutes per episode in my small sampling, and they’re entertaining.

Go on, you know you want to. Here’s Where The Wild Things Are. Not your speed? How about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

I’m trying to find the time to enjoy his analysis of Don Quixote.

A reader comments on the increase in carbohydrates in crops:

This is what I’ve been saying for years. I had a gut feeling based on many suggestive facts. We’re now starting to see outlines of the smoking gun, so to speak. As you allude, we’ve already bred corn and wheat to be far more carbohydrate-full and sweet than it ever was naturally (to say nothing of much larger and easier to harvest causing perhaps both good and bad knock-on effects) — and in the process, almost certainly made them less nutritious. How true is that of other crops? How many plant-based foods have followed the goldenrod’s path since the industrial revolution? And how has that affected the ruminants, grazers and browsers we so love to eat? For that matter, what’s going on in the sea? Mankind is literally killing itself. It’s a race of Elon Musk versus the Great Filter.

It’s not clear to me that cross-breeding or direct genetic engineering caused the greater carbohydrate loading, and I don’t think that what this article is saying. So far as I can see, it’s pointing out a strong correlation between higher CO₂ atmospheric concentrations and higher carbohydrate densities in our food crops.

That said, I agree with the general sentiment. I’ll also say that I doubt this is a unique situation, as cycles of the populations of many critters are well known to be tied to their overuse of local food sources, resulting in occasional mass deaths – or, for that matter, bacteria drowning in their own wastes.

But perhaps we’re the only species with the capacity to realize what’s going on – and still deny it.

Another reader remarks:

This is what gets vitamin companies profits.

And, ironically, they are not well-absorbed, as this ten year old Scientific American article notes:

The best way to get vitamins is through food, not vitamin pills, according to Susan Taylor Mayne, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health’s Division of Chronic Disease Epidemiology. A major problem with supplements is that they deliver vitamins out of context, she says. The vitamins found in fruit, vegetables and other foods come with thousands of other phytochemicals, or plant nutrients that are not essential for life but may protect against cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic ailments. Carotenoids in carrots and tomatoes, isothiocyanates in broccoli and cabbage, and flavonoids in soy, cocoa and red wine are just a few examples.

The Guardian has a report on an academic study regarding the characters in children’s stories:

Forget the morals that millennia of children have learned from the Hare and the Tortoise and the Fox and the Crow: Aesop would have had a greater effect with his fables if he’d put the stories into the mouths of human characters, at least according to new research from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). …

Before they were read the story, the children chose 10 stickers to take home and were told that an anonymous child would not have any stickers to take home. It was suggested to the children that they could share their stickers with the stickerless child by putting them in an envelope when the experimenter was not looking. After they had been read the story, the children were allowed to choose another 10 stickers, and again asked to donate to the stickerless child.

The study, which has just been published in the journal Developmental Science, found that those children who were read the book with human characters became more generous, while “in contrast, there was no difference in generosity between children who read the book with anthropomorphised animal characters and the control book; both groups showed a decrease in sharing behaviour,” they write.

The academics, led by Patricia Ganea, associate professor of early cognitive development at OISE, said that existing studies using the same method showed that before they are six, “children share hardly any stickers with their friends, and even after age six, children keep most of the stickers for themselves”, so the task “offers a lot of room for children to change their sharing behaviour after reading the story”.

But reading a book about sharing “had an immediate effect on children’s pro-social behaviour”, they found. “However, the type of story characters significantly affected whether children became more or less inclined to behave pro-socially. After hearing the story containing real human characters, young children became more generous. In contrast, after hearing the same story but with anthropomorphised animals or a control story, children became more selfish.”

Which is not all that surprising. While the same impetus drives all species, which is for the reproductive members to survive long enough to reproduce successfully, there are a multitude of methods, and associated, if implied, rules (read: moral systems) for succeeding. Within the single species homo sapiens many moral systems are found, which may make homo sapiens unique.

The key to most stories is a character to which you can build a reasonable sympathetic link, and then through that link learn lessons concerning situations which you may encounter. If you look at a character and it appears to be another species, then it’s reasonable, even for children, to wonder about the real-world moral system vs the one presented. After all, if nothing else they look different in fundamental ways. By creating that question mark in the reader’s mind, the strength of the lessons are diluted.

Not everyone agrees with the study’s conclusion:

Chris Haughton, author and illustrator of animal picture books including Oh No, George! and Shh! We Have a Plan, felt that while “a simple instructional moral message might work short term”, the stories that have longer impact are the ones that resonate deeply. “I read Charlotte’s Web as a child and I know that made a big impression on me. I thought about it for a long time after I read the story. I identified with the non-human characters. That, among other things, did actually turn me into a lifelong vegetarian. I think a truly engaging and quality story that resonates with the child will be replayed in their mind and that has the real effect on them and the course of their life,” he said.

I, on the other hand, do not recall non-human characters having that sort of impact, despite being a bookworm throughout childhood. I actually actively have avoided stories such as The Lion King because I anticipated the cognitive dissonance of some predator playing King over herbivores and the like to be quite painful – at least as an adult.

On the other hand, how does this play out with science-fiction characters, specially those of the extra-terrestrial variety? I’m not talking about UFO conspiracies and the Greys, but sophisticated SF stories in which characters from other planets make a substantial contribution to the story. Of course, the best SF would include moral systems reflective of the conditions of the extra-terrestrials, which is a bit of a row to hoe; an example is in the Enterprise episode “Cogenitor,” in which an ET species named the Vissians require three individuals to reproduce, one representative of each of three genders, and one of them is deliberately kept in a state of complete ignorance: members of this gender can hardly communicate. One of the Enterprise crew members discover it is quite intelligent and, through interaction, begins to increase its knowledge level relatively quickly. Eventually, it suicides, ruining the chance of the alien triad to reproduce.

Would such a story have much of an impact on a child?

Katherine Martinko of Treehugger.com obviously has a different opinion on the purpose of stories in our species:

As for this question of morality, though, I can’t help but wonder why imparting a moral lesson is considered so important. To put it bluntly, who cares? Kids should be reading books for the sake of reading, because they are interested and amused, not because there always has to be a life lesson takeaway.

I think Katherine has this precisely backwards, although I’ll grant it’s not obvious. While we’re certainly offering moral lessons through our stories, it’s not that we’re pressing them on poor, unsuspecting children who’d as lief not have them. The reality is we’re offering them to children who are desperately looking for the rules of how life works – as befits any living creature out to help the species survive, either through reproduction or through other services.

So, Katherine asks who cares? The children care.

In the leaks thread, Susan Hennessey, Shannon Togawa Mercer, and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare analyze the recent leaks in The New York Times and CNN in which Paul Manafort is revealed to be under apparent imminent indictment and was wiretapped under FISA, and discuss the nature of these leaks:

The CNN story is a different matter. The story discloses FISA wiretaps against a named U.S. person. Whatever Paul Manafort may have done, he is a citizen of this country, and this is an egregious civil liberties violation. It’s also a significant compromise of national security information. Simply put, FISA information should never leak. When it does, it erodes the systems through which the government protects national security—and it rightly erodes public confidence that the systems designed to protect civil liberties work as intended.

Political leaking of wiretapping information is the stuff of the Hoover era. It has no legitimate place in our politics.

Who is responsible for this particular leak is unclear. …

For what it’s worth, a congressional or political echelon leak here seems to us more likely than either an investigative leak from Mueller’s shop or a leak from the court. The FISA court has been a black box since its creation in 1978. Mueller’s shop has been very quiet since its inception—and these leaks are to a considerable degree at his expense. The world, after all, now knows (assuming the story is true) that he has Manafort tapes during a period in which Trump was talking to Manafort; and Trump now has a great talking point about how his claims of having had his “wires tapped” have been vindicated. In that sense, at least, it’s a bad day for Mueller.

I think they are a little ambiguous in the first paragraph, and I will simply have to guess the civil liberties violation is the leak itself, not the FISA wiretap.

This is an interesting report and response, as reported by The New York Times:

Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.

The draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a central argument made by advocates of deep cuts in refugee totals as President Trump faces an Oct. 1 deadline to decide on an allowable number. The issue has sparked intense debate within his administration as opponents of the program, led by Mr. Trump’s chief policy adviser, Stephen Miller, assert that continuing to welcome refugees is too costly and raises concerns about terrorism.

Advocates of the program inside and outside the administration say refugees are a major benefit to the United States, paying more in taxes than they consume in public benefits, and filling jobs in service industries that others will not. But research documenting their fiscal upside — prepared for a report mandated by Mr. Trump in a March presidential memorandum implementing his travel ban — never made its way to the White House. Some of those proponents believe the report was suppressed.

In my mind’s eye, I see a slightly oily Democratic spokesman intoning, “Is the Trump Administration trying to impoverish the United States for partisan reasons? Isn’t he supposed to be the President for all Americans, not just Republicans? Well, your Representative voted the way President Trump wanted him to vote, against the prosperity of the United States. Why should you vote for this Representative?”

Could be quite the talking point. I’d prefer to see the electorate repulsed by an Administration that picks and chooses the facts that it accepts, but I’d be happy enough with this ad making inroads.

The remains of a tree, Como Park, Ramsey County, Minnesota.

I’m not so attached to these two.

Out of focus? No, it’s she’s going so fast!

A driving beat and a woman running like mad. This is how to take the audience’s mind off the primary question in Run, Lola, Run (1998), which is just why is the lead character jumping back in time? As the primary plot mechanism, this is an important question, but we need some context to understand it.

Manni and Lola are low level criminals looking to move up in the world, and to that end Manni takes on the task of transporting some illegal funds from one group to another. Frightened by the police on the subway, he inadvertently leaves the money behind, and cannot find it at the next subway stop. Now he’s on the phone with Lola in total despair, certain he’ll be summarily executed for losing the money – and contemplating taking the risk of knocking over a supermarket to cover his sizable mistake.

Lola’s task? To gather up $100,000 while running across town in 20 minutes.

Skipping all the details, she’s late and barges in on Manni’s robbery, helps him finish it, and then is shot and fatally injured by the police.

And then she finds herself at the starting line again, as it were. How? We don’t really know. And, truthfully, we don’t care all that much, because this is a frenetic plot with gestural dead-ends designed to activate the imagination that hurries us along from detail to detail behind her flying heels, from her father of dubious morals to a man who just can’t stop having variants of the same car accident over and over to the man who is her partner and her lover – and fairly incompetent in that angry, self-hating way.

Add in the industrial music, some fairly insipid dialog, and a good supporting cast, and I could watch Lola run again. But it doesn’t answer the question of why, not only the concrete why, but the thematic why – why make this movie? Is it a sophisticated exercise in adrenaline rushes? I know I was not inclined to stop the movie to say, Hey … wait. Her drive, her running, throwing herself into the task, is so infectious that we forgive the unexplained. And trying to explain it may lead to weak analogies with the butterfly effect and Gleick’s Chaos.

So sit back and enjoy it. The dialog’s a bit primitive, but the visuals are intriguing and the story is just fine. And don’t make my mistake of trying to figure it all out at the end.

Como Lake, Sunset, Today.

I mean my Arts Editor.