Unsightly Mental Blemishes

If I have to say something nice, I’ll say Marsha Hunt, there on the left, seemed to be enjoying herself in her role as a flirtatious, hungry werewolf.

Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) is an amateur effort that just happens to inexplicably include Christopher Lee in its cast. While the main plot might have been interesting in the hands of real writers, those who masqueraded as writers for this flick (or perhaps the director) have dispensed with believable characters, and that is a fatal flaw that cannot be overcome by the exhibition of Sybil Danning’s breasts. Add a staccato editing style which interleaves snarling werewolf heads with other scenes for no apparent reason, a werewolf community that doesn’t really seem to care if it loses members, wretched special effects, a horrid rock ‘n roll sound track which didn’t enhance the movie in the least, a lead actress with no acting chops and a voice only a gauntlet on a chalkboard could love, a leading man who smirks his way through the report on how his sister died, and an excruciatingly awful title, and this is really a movie which should be on the bucket list of Christopher Lee or Sybil Danning fans ONLY.

And then done with your alcoholic drink of choice in hand. Otherwise you may claw your eyes out.

Leon Sigal on 38 North has some more complaints about journalists trying to cover the history of North Korea and its nuclear weapons program. It’s thorough, but just as I was about to skip on by as repetitive, this popped up:

In October 2002, having balked at talks for nearly two years, President Bush sent James Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to Pyongyang—not to negotiate but to confront it over its clandestine uranium enrichment program. The North Koreans offered to forego uranium enrichment, as well as plutonium production, in return for diplomatic recognition, legal assurances of nonaggression, including nonuse of nuclear weapons, and not impeding its economic development, as Kelly himself acknowledged three weeks later: “They did suggest after this harsh and—personally, to me—surprising admission that there were measures that might be taken that were generally along those lines.” Under strict instructions, Kelly ignored the offer. In her memoir, Condoleezza Rice is more forthcoming. Kelly, she recalls, was bound in a diplomatic straitjacket:

Usually there is enough trust in an experienced negotiator that the guidance is used more as points of reference than as a script. But in this case, given the fissures, the points were to be read verbatim. There were literally stage directions for Kelly. He was not to engage the North Koreans in any side conversation in any way. That left him actually moving to the corner of the table to avoid Pyongyang’s representatives.

Rice’s conclusion is worth underscoring: “Because his instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the program on the table.”

Instead, administration officials claimed that the North Koreans had “admitted” they had an enrichment “program” and said they should be punished. They overcame resistance from South Korea and Japan to suspend shipments of heavy fuel oil, thereby tearing up what little was left of the Agreed Framework. While US forces were tied down preparing to invade Iraq, North Korea retaliated by reprocessing the five or six bombs’ worth of plutonium, which, when weaponized, would allow it to conduct nuclear tests for the first time. It also moved to restart its plutonium reactor, ramped up imports of enrichment equipment, and aided Syria in constructing a reactor of its own. The North’s nuclear effort, largely held in check for a decade through negotiations, was now unleashed.

Look, I have no idea if Sigal is offering a fair view of how the history of negotiations over the North Korean nuclear weapons program proceeded and went awry. And, certainly, when confronted with a regime in which a portion, any portion, of the populace is consigned to hard labor camps that are tantamount to death, there must be a moral element to a country’s relations with that regime, especially given the superior firepower that the United States brings to the game, although that power is considerably attenuated when one takes into account the decay of that moral position at the thought of civilian casualties in either North or South Korea. This is true so long as the United States has the gall to consider itself the epitome of moral leadership. But these are all assertions which can be fact-checked by competent historians.

But when I see “administration officials”, and know that means “Bush administration officials,” I’m afraid the red flags start waving. Given the willingness of Bush, Cheney, & Co. to see what they wanted to see, whether it was WMDs in Iraq or the success of American torture, rather than realities on the ground, I’m more than willing to believe the Bush Administration officials saw what ideology dictated they saw.

Or, not to mince words so much, they lied through their teeth.

I was brought up to believe lies have consequences. It degrades your reputation, and, worse yet, it may lead you down paths which have negative consequences. In the above sequence, the Clinton Administration negotiated with the North Koreans to the point where they were signed up to an agreement in which the North Koreans abandoned nuclear weapons development. Clinton handed it off to Bush, and Bush basically said, We think they’re probably cheating, so we’re abandoning it to. And it’s not at all clear Bush’s minions had anything concrete to justify their position – it was simply ideological. It’s even possible that, as something Clinton started, they felt it had to be destroyed. Remember the affect the word Clinton seems to have on conservatives, after all.

Fifteen years later, what do we have? A nuclear armed North Korea.

But I’d like to take this a step further. The Bush electoral victories were essentially powered by the Evangelical right wing in the belief that the evident religiosity of Bush and his cohorts made him the preferred pick for the White House; indeed, some really felt he was the selection of God.

There’s little need to go into the many scandals and failures of the Bush Administration, as they’ve been documented so far and wide that the GOP is unwilling to really acknowledge him as a Republican President. They were that bad. But it is worth asking, was there a common failing which explained how we ended up in two wars, only one of which was even arguably justified, as well as indulging in the horrific practice of torture, not to mention the rampant mismanagement of Congressional duties, particularly financial, once the Republicans held both Congress and the Executive?

For my money, yeah.

They were fucking overconfident that they knew how things worked.

And, you know, while some people are just overconfident because they don’t understand the depth of the pool they’ve jumped in, there’s also the shared overconfidence that comes from folks who think God has blessed them. They get things backwards, believing they can indulge in any sort of shenanigans because God has touched them. Somehow, they don’t understand that, if God even exists and has chosen them, that bloody well means the bar is a helluva lot higher for them than for anyone else.

Being chosen by God means you have a lot higher to jump, froggy boys, than everyone else.

And if God doesn’t exist, you’d better learn a bit of humility because this job is bigger than anyone. Maybe look back at others’ successful work on these problems, eh?

So, one of Trump’s constituencies was reportedly the Evangelical right, although I seriously doubt Trump would recognize a Bible if Melania whacked him in the back of the head with it. But some of his nominations happen to be highly religious, such as Carson and DeVos. The behavior of both since their confirmations has not inspired confidence, and so I have to wonder if they’re wandering about, destroying the good works of their predecessors while believing that God might, oh, I don’t know, be guiding their feet on the path?

Rather than using good judgment and even Science?

I suspect I’m just not going to sleep well over the next few nights. I certainly didn’t last night.

Aplomb:

imperturbable self-possession, poise, or assurance. [Dictionary.com]

I just thought about it today and realized I hadn’t seen it used in years.

I see former UN Ambassador John Bolton, committed neocon and someone who has failed to impress me over the years, has decided that it’s better to destroy the United States’ reputation, and therefore its future, than to continue the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran, as CNN/Politics reports:

John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN who at one point was a candidate to lead the State Department, claimed in a National Review op-ed published Monday that his plan for the US to exit the Iran nuclear deal had to be presented publicly, because staff changes at the White House have made “presenting it to President Trump impossible.” …

In a memo drawn up after a July directive from Steve Bannon, the recently ousted White House chief strategist, Bolton pushes for selling the idea of leaving the Iran deal to the public in a “white paper” and lays out a strategy for the “campaign” and its “execution.”

Bolton has been frustrated at the rise of more traditional foreign policy thinkers within the White House, such as Mattis and Tillerson, who have favored remaining in the deal. The agreement curbs Iran’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Iran remains under multiple sanctions for terrorism-related activities.

“Trump can and should free America from this execrable deal at the earliest opportunity,” Bolton writes.

Where proponents of the deal, including lawmakers and former Obama administration officials, see the pact as a way to get visibility on Iran’s nuclear activities, and, at least for the time being, stop it’s nuclear program, Bolton sees only danger.

“The JCPOA is a threat to US national-security interests, growing more serious by the day,” Bolton writes, though he doesn’t offer evidence. “If the President decides to abrogate the JCPOA, a comprehensive plan must be developed and executed to build domestic and international support for the new policy.”

Abrogate is just a fancy word for failing to keep your word – i.e., dishonor. Some folks may think there’s no reason to consider there to be honor among nations, but this is a false assumption. The simple fact of the matter is that nations assess other nations for their reliability, for their predictability. If they negotiate a good faith treaty with some other nation, what are the chances that the other nation will keep its word, will honor the treaty, and will follow through on all the consequences of that treaty?

Well, those chances can be assessed in two ways – first, by looking backward at the past performance of the other nation. Has it kept its word before, or does it try to weasel out? What is its general inclination towards honorable behaviors?

But past performance is no guarantee of future performance, so they also must assess current leadership.

And I’ll tell you what, when someone like Bolton irresponsibly starts yacking about some plan to dishonor the United States, and our chief foreign relations guy is this amateur hour, incurious man Trump, that’s really frustrating. Because treaties and other agreements between nations is how we encourage trade, and it’s how we discourage war. Without them, tariffs go up, and we end up fighting multiple, draining wars.

And we’re no longer Reagan’s famous “shining city upon a hill.” We’re no longer the principled nation to which other nations can look for leadership. We’re just the heavily armed bully, running around looking for victims.

And bullies get taken down, eventually.

All that said, if they can catch Iran cheating, fine, great. If they’re cheating according to the standards in the JCPOA, then Iran has abrogated it and we’re no longer bound. Then it’s all legit, and I will sigh and wonder what Iran thinks it’s going to get out of this. But if Bolton and his allies use cheating to get what they want, that just blackens the soul of the United States. And the article indicates no cheating by Iran has been discovered yet, and that Bolton’s assertions about dangers to the United States are without evidence or argument. So far, Bolton’s case appears empty to me.

On a side note, I quoted the CNN article because it provides some basic fact-checking, rather than Bolton’s remarks directly. Context is important. Maybe I’ll get around to reading Bolton’s unvarnished remarks tomorrow. Or maybe a reader will be kind enough to provide a summary for me?

Gotta like this idea for replacing Confederate statues!

There’s a marked difference in maturity levels between President Trump and, well, just about any foreign leader, wouldn’t you say? Mexico’s Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, for example:

The Mexican government expressed its solidarity Sunday with the United States following the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey and offered assistance to Texas.

Mexico offered to help Texas deal with the disaster, “as good neighbors should always do in trying times.”
On Sunday evening, Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott spoke by telephone.

Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, the Mexican consul general in Austin, said he has been in constant communication with the governor’s office to determine how Mexico can best help.

“As we have done in the past, Mexico stands with Texas in this difficult moment,” Gonzalez said.

Mexico is prepared for a Katrina-like assistance package, officials said. [Dallas News]

Meanwhile, what does President Trump do? Also via the same Dallas News article, he Tweets:

The latest offer from Mexico to help Texas comes after President Donald Trump took to Twitter Sunday, insisting it will pay for a border wall.

“With Mexico being one of the highest crime Nations in the world, we must have THE WALL,” Trump tweeted. “Mexico will pay for it through reimbursement/other.”

Along with the vast – and embarrassing – disparity in evident maturity levels, we also see the prioritization Trump is evidencing here. Top priority is his base, he’s assuring his base that he’s going to get that damn wall built, and that Mexico – not his base – will be paying for it. Somehow, Somewhen. To be charitable, he’s making promises to his base that, in all likelihood, he won’t be able to keep.

But foreign relations? That’s one of his top responsibilities as President – but he doesn’t seem to be paying attention to the simple common courtesy which keeps relations, personal and international, going without too much grinding.

He may be thinking he’s working to assure his political future and re-election, but for those who understand that it’s competency and not ideology which assures a future, this is one part of the big anchor which will clatter around behind him on the racetrack, dragging him to an ignominious failure.

Adrian Chen writes an interesting article for The New Yorker which touches on a couple of concerns of mine WRT the Web that long time readers will recognize: issues of accuracy and honesty, along with questions of gatekeeping. He brings in a comparison with the early days of radio, which has its problems since being an author on radio requires access to some fairly expensive technology, even on a pro rata basis, while Web authoring access costs have come down to almost nothing; but the comparison is interesting regardless. This really caught my eye:

The various efforts to fact-check and label and blacklist and sort all the world’s information bring to mind a quote, which appears in David Goodman’s book, from John Grierson, a documentary filmmaker: “Men don’t live by bread alone, nor by fact alone.” In the nineteen-forties, Grierson was on an F.C.C. panel that had been convened to determine how best to encourage a democratic radio, and he was frustrated by a draft report that reflected his fellow-panelists’ obsession with filling the airwaves with rationality and fact. Grierson said, “Much of this entertainment is the folk stuff . . . of our technological time; the patterns of observation, of humor, of fancy, which make a technological society a human society.”

Facts alone are only compelling to those who understand the context; for those who don’t, story is the necessary provision of context in an understandable manner.

False stories serve the desires of malicious, selfish folks, and in an ideal world, gatekeepers keep them out. When television and radio were dominant, the gatekeepers were small in number and effective. However, were they neutral with regards to true narratives with which they disagreed? Chen notes:

In 1961, a watershed moment occurred with the leak of a memo from labor leaders to the Kennedy Administration which suggested using the Fairness Doctrine to suppress right-wing viewpoints. To many conservatives, the memo proved the existence of the vast conspiracy they had long suspected. A fund-raising letter for a prominent conservative radio show railed against the doctrine, calling it “the most dastardly collateral attack on freedom of speech in the history of the country.” Thus was born the character of the persecuted truthteller standing up to a tyrannical government—a trope on which a billion-dollar conservative-media juggernaut has been built.

Thus the sense of grievance on which the conservative movement has been built. Now we have Trump lying like it’s drinking water.

It’s a good article to read.

Winsome:

attractive in a sweet, engaging way; charming [Collins]

Popped into my head last night as a word I knew little about, after I had called my wife a winsome lass.

From a book review by Lucas Kello of Ben Buchanan’s The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations on Lawfare:

Students of international relations are trained to read history—even ancient history—as a prelude to the future. Among the eternal notions that theorists commonly invoke, one enjoys special appeal: the security dilemma. It originates in Thucydides’s famous claim that “increasing Athenian greatness and the resulting fear among the Spartans made [their] going to war inevitable.”  A similar fear had fueled Athens’s grab at empire. Therein lies the dilemma: in the anarchic international system, the growing security of one state ensures the growing insecurity of others. This perverse logic produces occasional outbreaks of war, even when the contenders wish to avoid it, as in 431 B.C.

In The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations, Ben Buchanan argues that this ancient logic explains much of the incessant hostility that mars interstate dealings in cyberspace. The argument has three “pillars.” They can be summed up as follows: the development of offensive weapons requires advance intrusion into other states’ networks; maximizing defense also necessitates intrusion; therefore, states penetrate foreign networks whenever they can—even while interpreting intrusions against them as threatening. The cycle repeats incessantly.

Sounds like a negative feedback loop, and it’s fascinating, but retroactively obvious. Moving to the nuclear arms scenario of last century, the remark about 431 B.C. is fairly frightening; one wonders if any of the operational issues of surviving that period have applicability to the issues of controlling and suppressing cyberwarfare. I only bring this up because all options should be examined; I suspect the answer is No, given the disparate nature of the weapons classes involved.

A couple of more opinions come in concerning the Arpaio pardon. Steve Benen on MaddowBlog:

In case this isn’t obvious, a president isn’t supposed to intervene with the Justice Department about an ongoing criminal prosecution of someone the president likes. What’s more, note that Trump didn’t even bother to consult with his own Justice Department – or pay any attention to the department’s pardon protocols – before rescuing his right-wing pal who acted as if he were above the law.

There’s also the near future to consider. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is moving forward with his investigation into the Trump-Russia affair, and as of Friday night, everyone received a stark reminder that this president is comfortable abusing the powers of his office to keep his allies out of prison.

Indeed, it’s easy to imagine Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn waking up on Saturday morning with a spring in their step. After all, in Donald Trump’s America, loyalty to the law is nice, but loyalty to the president is almost literally a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Trump has told a staggering number of lies since entering politics, but his vow to restore “law and order” may be the most painfully ridiculous of them all. It’s difficult to guess where this story goes next, but let’s not forget that as recently as last month, the president reportedly sought information on his power to issue pardons to White House aides, members of his family, and even himself.

Making “law and order” into a ridiculous proposition in order to pardon a law and order sheriff does have a certain irony to it, but I suspect that’s lost on most Trump supporters. Not that they lack a sense of humor, but they don’t have the knowledge base to realize just what’s going on.

The Editors of National Review also disapprove, but cannot resist irrelevant digs at their favorite voodoo dolls:

We are mindful of the hypocrisy of the Left regarding abuse of the president’s constitutional pardon power. President Clinton put it on sale for the benefit of donors and cronies. President Obama used it to effectively rewrite Congress’s narcotics statutes, for the benefit of drug felons and in circumvention of his duty to execute the laws faithfully. Both commuted the sentences of anti-American terrorists from the FALN and the Weathermen. These were disgraceful acts.

But that past doesn’t make Trump’s pardon any less objectionable. Trump acted for the benefit of a political crony, just like Clinton. He did it — just like Clinton — outside the Justice Department’s pardon process. While presidents have the authority to go around DOJ, the regular process is in place to ensure that presidents make fully informed pardon decisions. To short-circuit the standard procedure is to consciously avoid facts that might show that clemency is unwarranted.

These superfluous shots at opponents tends to dilute their outrage and makes it seem as if all the politicians are equally bad – a deft sleight of hand of which they should be ashamed. I think most serious commentators would agree that Trump is way beyond most elected politicians, and is unique among those with him amount of power, in his failure to responsibly manage his position. To imply otherwise, simply to maintain one’s menacing posture against ideological opponents, is dishonest and actually fairly dangerous.

Who knew that Rip Torn and Sebastian Gorka were one and the same!

In order for a comedy about criminals with few restraints on their behavior to work, the characters really need to be parodies of who you might actually expect to find in these situations, and those in Nadine (1987) simply don’t make the grade. It works best if they exaggerate some character trait which, in reasonable quantities, might predispose them to bend their moral systems for financial gain, but we don’t really see that to any great extent here.

It’s 1954 in Texas, young Nadine is newly pregnant, her marriage to her bar-owning husband, Vernon, is on the ropes as his dreams of running a premium bar keep foundering, and in a moment of weakness, she agreed to a photo shoot with Raymond Escobar when he hints that Hugh Hefner may be interested. Recovering her good sense, she returns to the studio to demand those photos back, but when Escobar is knifed by an unknown assailant virtually in front of her, she grabs her folder of photos and scoots out the back door.

Once at home, though, she discovers the folder contains plans for changes to the local highway. Her husband shows up, looking for her signature on the divorce papers, and she promises to sign if he’ll help her with an ill-defined task. Back at Escobar’s, he helps her break-in, then realizes something’s wrong. While she’s searching for her photos, the local cops, assigned to keep an eye on the place, come in to get a brew and stumble on Vernon, who distracts him until Nadine whacks him in the back of the head.

After a whirlwind cop chase, they end up at her place. While she busies herself for one last fling, Vernon discovers the highway plans and flies out the door, intent on making his most immediate fortune, using his lawyer-cousin for financial leverage.

Meantime, the criminal who paid for the plans is looking for them, and the cousin turns to him for financial help. This helps the criminal get a hold of the plans, leading to a climactic battle in a junkyard.

But where are the plans? Well, you’ll have to watch, and even then you won’t know.

It’s not a half bad plot, but it comes off flat. Perhaps it’s the lack of chemistry between the leads, but I tend to think the real problem is they’re too believable. Sure, they’re financially grasping – but we’ve seen that in The Godfather insofar as the criminal goes, and Nadine and Vernon, well, both are from the wrong side of the tracks – it’s not unexpected that a certain lust for money, ill-gotten or no, will possess them. Playing by the rules, after all, doesn’t seem to be doing them much good.

And so the story glides fairly flatly from one mildly intriguing plot twist to another. We know where it’s going, though, and while we may not know exactly which fork in the path it may take here and there, we know the ending spot. And that makes it a bit boring.

Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong on Lawfare call for impeachment of President Trump and discuss the three areas of concern to national security professionals – and, of course, the rest of us. Then, I fear they start calling for a near miracle as they lay down the guidelines they believe should be followed:

In sum, Trump has embarrassed the presidential office in innumerable ways, and members of the House and Senate are obliged to organize these incidents in their heads and get a handle on their constitutional significance. There is a wrong way and a right way to go about this task. The wrong way is to treat the launch of an impeachment inquiry as a matter of political popularity or opportunism. On this view, the relevant vectors might include polls on Trump’s approval ratings, the results of next year’s midterm elections, and worldwide Google searches for “impeachment” (which soared when Trump fired Director Comey in May and has otherwise ebbed and flowed with the news tide). The right approach is to commit to a clear-eyed and ongoing assessment of Trump’s words and actions against the obligations of the office and to trace out the effects of his misconduct on the security and welfare of the United States.

In 1833, Justice Joseph Story explained that impeachment is not limited to “crimes of a strictly legal character” but also “has a more enlarged operation, and reaches, what are aptly termed political offenses, growing out of personal misconduct or gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests, various in their character, and so indefinable in their actual involutions, that it is almost impossible to provide systematically for them by positive law.” This is a near-perfect description of Trump’s wide-ranging abuses and the challenge that now lies with Congress: the order that the positive law is unable to provide is now its to impose.

The pack of second and third rate power-mongers making up the GOP contingent in Congress are not nearly statesmen or stateswomen; they are political creatures who seem incapable of the view that the security of the United States comes first, and the satisfaction of their craven egos is a far distant second. I say that as an independent who has watched them deny anything – ANYTHING – that might constitute a reality they should not breach, be it climate change, banking regulations proven through 70 years of efficacy, or the belief that guns belong in the hands of the mentally ill.

But if they wish to honestly serve their country and accomplish the miracle I mentioned above, then if impeachment results in the loss of their seats due to the extremism of the current GOP base, so be it – this is the result of the abuse of the conservative element of our populace for the last twenty or thirty years by Fox News and other news sources that have failed to serve them with the full breadth of the news, that coddled them, that responded positively to their prejudices, often in the pursuit of self-enrichment.

So I appreciate their detailed, convincing case – but I doubt Speaker Ryan and his cohorts will be doing anything about it soon.

NewScientist’s David Hambling (19 August 2017) notes the first occurrence of GPS spoofing:

REPORTS of satellite navigation problems in the Black Sea suggest that Russia may be testing a new system for knocking GPS off course. This could be the first hint of an electronic weapon that could be used by anyone, from nation states to petty criminals.

On 22 June, the US Maritime Administration filed a seemingly bland incident report. The master of a ship off the Russian port of Novorossiysk had discovered his GPS put him in the wrong spot – 32 kilometres along the coast, at Gelendzhik airport.

After checking the navigation equipment was working properly, the shipmaster contacted other nearby ships. At least 20 were affected.

While the incident hasn’t been confirmed, navigation experts think this is the first documented use of GPS misdirection – a spoofing attack that has long been warned of but never been seen in the wild.

The remark that petty criminals, whose aims are selfish and provincial, might be able to accomplish this sort of thing is particularly frightening. At least nations can be predictable, and if identified in a particular incident, punished. So what’s to be done?

The spectre of electronic warfare has led to calls for more research into countermeasures. Research on receivers that could authenticate a GPS signal has been under way for over a decade. “Guarding against spoofing is not easy,” says Last.

There is one other option: ditch GPS and return to Loran, the second world war era system of radio navigation beacons. It requires a large, complex antenna and spoofing can be detected and located relatively easily. It was switched off in 2011, but advocates have long rallied around a modern update, eLoran – a low-cost fallback for GPS that might now turn out to be priceless.

Standing willing and ready to re-enter service.

And if it really comes down to it, we can re-staff the lighthouses! No, not really, but certainly low-tech approaches, while perhaps not as effective as high-tech, are also not as vulnerable to malicious actors, either. Using low-tech for the primary requirements and high-tech for detection and retaliation may prove interesting.

And the ornamental grass should like to lodge a complaint with management.

Retraction Watch continues to provide human insights into the citadel of Science. Here’s the latest to catch my attention:

Readers who follow scientific publishing will know the term “citation stacking” — as a profile-boosting technique, we’ve seen journals ask authors to cite them, and individual scientists work together to cite each other, forming “citation cartels.” And now, we’ve seen a university do it.

A university in Malaysia has instructed its engineering faculty to cite at least three papers by their colleagues; the more citations a university accrues, the better its ranking in many international surveys. We obtained the original notice, dated August 3 and released by the University of Malaya …

It’s unsettling. Is it unethical? I’m not really sure, but I do feel that, without such artificial forces as this one, the form of science would be different. As citations are a measure of importance for science papers, a proxy if you like, I might take this as a form of cheating. You’d like to think papers would stand on their own and could be evaluated on some pristine and objective standard, but since these papers are written and evaluated by subjective creatures, it’s rather inevitable that we are insufficient to the task of objective evaluation, inasmuch our ability to evaluate reality in all its startling detail is exceptionally limited and even false, so instead we must use the equivalent of a group evaluation, and the convenient approach is to count up citations. However, one would hope a citation is an honest citation, limited in origination to the realm of science, and excluding the irrelevant realm of human prestige.

So, yeah, I think the action by the University of Malaya is unethical.

In a long and somewhat discouraging article on the roots of terrorism, Peter Byrne in NewScientist (19 August 2017) notes a problem local to my town, that of young immigrants becoming radicalized, and an approach with some success:

The key to combating extremism lies in addressing its social roots, and intervening early, before anyone becomes a “devoted actor” willing to lay down their lives for a cause, says Scott Atran at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflicts (see “Devoted to the cause“). “Until then, there are all sorts of things you can do.” One of the most effective counter measures, he says, is community engagement. High-school football and the scouts movement have been effective responses to antisocial behaviour among the disenfranchised children of US immigrants, for example.

Another promising avenue is to break down stereotypes, says social psychologist Susan Fiske at Princeton University. These are not necessarily religious or racial stereotypes, but generalised stereotypes we all hold about people around us. When we categorise one another, we are particularly concerned with social status and competition, viewing people of low status as incompetent, and competitors as untrustworthy. Throughout history, violent acts and genocides have tended to be perpetrated against high-status individuals with whom we compete for resources, and who therefore elicit our envy, says Fiske.

One problem, of course, is xenophobia in the American community. How much hostility is an immigrant expected to endure before she or he loses hope and begins to search for a new avenue of activity which will lead to, well, success? Not success as we might normally define it, but success in some sense that is satisfactory to that immigrant – gaining training in weapons in order to be accepted as a jihadist, as happened with some young Somalis here in Minnesota. Several were stopped as they were leaving the country, and convicted of various crimes. One made it out and was reported killed in fighting somewhere.

For all that America is made up of immigrants, we hardly have a spotless record of welcoming immigrants, so it’s a little hard to think of communities organizing to find ways to welcome immigrants as a matter of course; the efforts that are made seem more extraordinary than that. The individualism that runs rampant in the United States also militates against such efforts; that same individualism may also be alien to some immigrants. It all makes for a heck of a challenge, and then add in the instant communications of the Internet, and what may have taken weeks or months 100 years ago now takes a few minutes – such as collecting information on what people with similar problems are doing.

This sounds like a long challenge, and little progress will be made while the Trump Administration is in charge. Even the Obama Administration may have made things worse through their decapitation strategy:

[Hriar] Cabayan runs the Pentagon’s Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) programme. His counter-terrorism unit taps the expertise of a volunteer pool of 300 scientists from academia, industry, intelligence agencies and military universities. They convene virtually and physically to answer classified and unclassified questions from combatants, including special operations forces fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The result is a steady stream of white papers largely concluding that the US counter-terrorism strategy – decapitating insurgency leadership, bombing terrorist strongholds – is counter-productive. …

Drone strikes aimed at decapitating terrorist cells are likely to fail too. A 2017 study by Jennifer Varriale Carson at the University of Central Missouri concluded that killing high-profile jihadists is “counter-productive, if its main intention is a decrease in terrorism perpetrated by the global jihadist movement”. In July 2016, The Georgetown Public Policy Review reported a “statistically significant rise in the number of terrorist attacks [in Pakistan] occurring after the US drone program begins targeting a given province“.

This suggests we’ve mistaken the symptoms for the causes. A high profile leader, even a cell itself, may not be a cause of radicalization, but a symptom of a deeper issue, and the “solution” functions more as an irritant, radicalizing more people who see our solution as an injustice visited upon them.

The deeper issues are way beyond my minor skills; heck, what little I’ve written is just some babble by a bemused software engineer. But these issues have the capacity to affect all of us, and therefore deserve a little thought from all of us.

In response to the behavioral changes at the Motley Fool, a reader remarks:

Agree totally. These two tigers have definitely changed their stripes. Pumpers indeed.

I’m not sure they’re technically pumpers, but I dislike the changes and implicit use of irrationality in their marketing.

Poking through my email tonight, something I do on Sundays to catch up on what I’ve deferred over the last week/month/year, I ran across the next item in this little saga of disappointment, as they think I attended their big presentation:

If you attended tonight’s live event, you already heard Tom Gardner’s big news.

For the first time ever, Tom Gardner and The Motley Fool have built a microcap-focused portfolio designed to give investors like you instant exposure to some of the market’s smallest, most explosive, and least-followed stocks.

Apparently underlines and bolding have replaced exclamation points as red flags of warning. So there’s more blah blah blah, and then the hook to trigger your irrationality:

As a thank-you to those of you who RSVP’d to attend tonight’s presentation, Tom is insisting we offer YOU our very best price for this breakthrough service — a full $1,000 LESS than others will be asked to pay for the same package.

But there’s a catch: The $1,000 discount is ONLY available for a few hours. You MUST place your order before midnight TONIGHT.

I wonder how many folks actually asked themselves Why? Why such a ridiculous constraint? It limits the calm, rational consideration that an adult should take for investments of this sort; by imposing a short time limit, it attempts to trigger the urge to impulse buy that, quite honestly, the Gardner brothers sought to inhibit in those who took their advice 20+ years ago.

In fact, it’s in direct contradiction to the entire philosophy of teaching an adult investment strategy. Marketing has metamorphosed from the transmission of information concerning products which a consumer might be interested in buying, to the manipulation of consumers into buying goods and services in which they have no real interest, or which may even work against their welfare.

INTERJECTION: Yes, I know everyone just nodded and said, We know that. But I still felt it had to be said. Back to our regularly scheduled rant …

And that mutation from presentation of information to manipulation in search of surplus profit really grinds against the honesty implicit in their advice when they started the Motley Fool.

Since I’m sitting here feeling crabby about the contamination of this ethical oasis^[1], I’ve also got to say that I was appalled when I spotted one of their latest recommendations in their Stock Advisor service. It was for a for-profit educational institute, name forgotten (and probably best not repeated). Long time readers will realize that the clash between goals and methods make the success of such companies unlikely. Newer readers might want to consult this page, and go from there. For another writer’s view, Syd Sweitzer points out more concrete problems with the concept here and here on Common Sense Under the Big Sky.

Confession: I did NOT read the recommendation. I shook my head sadly and went on with my business. Honestly, Stock Advisor has changed over the years, becoming less and less attractive. I may discontinue it next spring, when it comes up for renewal.

¹They used to advertise that some financial magazine had labeled them an “ethical oasis” in the industry of investment advice. Maybe they still do.

The classic Shrek (2001) is a movie that explores the Other, the world traditionally outside of that circle of entities we call Us, and treats it as a community that, if exotic, is also shaped by the drives that we all feel – the need to belong, to be accepted, to have a role, and to be loved. Shrek explores these forces again and again in much the same way Lord Of The Rings^[1] systematically explores the theme of temptation, if not so deeply.

Shrek the Ogre is easy to interpret as the arch-representative of the Other, ugly and reputed to grind men’s bones to make his bread. His life is one of exclusion and repulsion, and now he actively embraces it as an anti-identity, expecting exclusion, and excluding in turn, and puzzled when any creature fails to follow the script he has written for them.

Failing to follow that script is Donkey, the lens through which the audience is expected to observe Shrek. He is innocent of the world, voluble and without a secret to share, interacting with Shrek without reservation or horror. Relationships, friendly or adversarial, are the heart of ever story, and their relationship serves as the microscope through which we come to know Shrek.

Lord Farquaad, responsible for sending Shrek on his quest for a Princess to marry, is the representative of Us. We know this as he is at the top of the typical Western Dark Ages hierarchy, Lord of the land, human, and in command of a human guard and a human town – and is responsible for the eviction of magical creatures from “his” forest. In this rendition, the xenophobia of the Us versus Other traditional confrontation is brought to the fore early in the story, as he labels the undeniably cute and helpless (yet defiant)  Gingerbread Man “… a monster!” Concomitant with this xenophobia is the self-importance and excessive self-esteem exhibited by a man convinced he is the center of the world, even if his physical stature militates against such a self-interpretation. His self-indulgence and concern only for himself completes a portrait of Us that is less than complimentary; it is an indictment of the nature of the xenophobic culture, in its fearfulness and inward turning.

And Princess Fiona is easily the transitional personage, caught between both worlds, and accepting of both. She struggles with this identity, her “curse” letting her be the bridge between the two.

So much for the lingerie present.

Donkey and Dragon’s interspecies romantic relationship, begun in the midst of the invasion of Dragon’s domain, explores how the perception of external differences can hinder and potentially destroy a valuable and mutually satisfying relationship. Only when Donkey, in the midst of self-pity for his loneliness, discovers the Dragon who came to love him is also mourning her loss of love, does he find it in himself to continue the relationship that offers so much, despite the challenges. While taking the time to explore more deeply this part of their relationship would have broken an important momentum in the story, it’s a pity this was not more deeply portrayed.

When it comes to Shrek and Princess Fiona, the importance of honest communication is explored. Before the catastrophic breakup, both have accepted the apparent hideousness of the other, and are willing to look beyond it. But their communications and knowledge of the other is imperfect, and Shrek’s impulsiveness and past history with humans leads him to improper conclusions; Fiona’s pride is stung, in turn, and she turns to Lord Farquaad as a more appropriate – and necessary – romantic choice.

But her relationship with Farquaad, as short as it is, is even more shallow, and when he discovers she has elements of the Other in her, his rejection of her, combined with his exultation of having obtained his selfish objective through his use and discard of her, results in her rejection of the worst of the Us culture. Importantly, though, the demonstration that two creatures of the Other culture can love each other, an important tradition in Western culture, permits the story to end peacefully, even joyfully.

And is this just a requirement of an animated movie of this sort? No. Underlying the entire story is the belief that, by accepting the Other, we can discover that beneath the skin, warts, wings, and magical capabilities, we are driven by the same needs and desires, and can connect and meld into one peaceful, prosperous community through those shared needs. Too often, xenophobia imparts strange and inscrutable properties to the Other, such as the appetites of the witch who catches and imprisons Hansel and Gretel, intending to eat them. Whatever for? Because their flesh is so tender and sweet? It’s still cannibalism, and impossible to understand in our culture. But love? That’s easy. If they can love, too, maybe they’re not so different.

And, finally, the connection to today is strengthened through one of the comedic devices – the insertion of anachronisms. From contemporary lyrics in the musical accompaniment, the appearance of various minor characters from fairy-tales mouthing lines having little to do with fairy-tales, to the mention of forcible relocations and other modern events, they serve to remind us of the connections between this story and the realities of today – and suggest how we might improve our world, not through fearful exclusion, but by welcoming the Other, and find them often, if not always, to be just like us.

Or if that just sounded like nonsense, I watched it because I enjoyed it and I wrote this review as a justification of spending my free time watching an old favorite.

¹I suggest reading the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, rather than watching the movies, as the latter failed to recognize and explore the theme adequately. Instead, much like a former boss once observed, it was “… seven guys go out and kill as many monsters as they can.”

Have cancer and thinking about trying an alternative cancer treatment? NewScientist (19 August 2017) notes this appears to be a mistake:

Among those with breast cancer, people taking alternative remedies were 5.7 times more likely to die within five years. While 41 per cent of those receiving conventional treatment for lung cancer survived for at least five years, only 20 per cent of those who opted out did. And only 33 per cent of people using alternative medicine for colorectal cancer survived the next five years, compared with 79 per cent of those on conventional treatments (Journal of the National Cancer Institute, doi.org/cbsg).

The surprise in the box?

Those who opted for alternative treatments tended to be wealthier and better educated. In the US, medical insurance doesn’t cover unproven treatments, so only richer people can afford the most expensive alternative treatments, says Johnson.

Who would have thought the predominant group in the informal guinea pig category would have been the wealthy?

Traduce:

A reader asks about trophic eggs:

What about all those chicken eggs we eat?

I should think they’d not qualify as trophic eggs, since I would expect a trophic egg is produced for consumption by another member of the same species. However, I have not yet confirmed that.

Fine examples, I’m sure. Not being a poultry farmer.

Down to the Sea in Ships (1949) is a leisurely movie, giving the story a lot of time to infuse character into the folks who are important: the gruff, elderly master of a whaling ship, his grandson whose parents are gone, and the first mate chosen by the ship’s owners to be the new master.

This is a movie about rules, when rules are made to be broken, and when rules are made to be followed – and why. In this, it’s a classic lesson story, illustrating the pivotal points of behavior for those who are in charge and responsible to the greater whole.

The climax, a run-in with an iceberg and the sacrifices the master and crew must make to survive, is quite well done and, while perhaps predictable, is nevertheless riveting.

But there was some odd element to it that left me uncompelled. I’m not sure what it might be, as it was certainly technically a fine example of the craft, and the acting was convincing. Perhaps the fault lies in the audience, conditioned to expect some extraordinary personality to take charge, while this was more the story of seemingly real people, pursuing their crafts and raising family.

In any case, it’s an enjoyable, if not memorable, movie.

And what’s with this title? Down To The Sea in Go-Karts would have made just as much sense.

A while ago I wrote about white supremacists and allied groups as being the epitome of laziness. This basically covered the motivations and characterizations of people who want group supremacism to be true. But what about the result? Andrew Sullivan covers that for NYMag (third section):

Those marchers [in Charlottesville] were not merely propagating evil, they are also its victims. Believing that human beings are somehow inferior or superior because of their innate characteristics is not only to believe a lie; it is to live in a prison. It is putting you and others into a false category from which none of us can escape. To see nothing in one’s own body and soul but whiteness or blackness dehumanizes the self and others. Those marchers, like the president who excused them, are not just hateful; they are also miserable. Sometimes I think we see transcending racism as a delusion, and perhaps it often is. I share the view held by the civil-rights movement in its heyday that transcending it is only possible through a greater power than ourselves; and that its essential characteristic is liberation. It is a pathway to being fully human.

Bad beliefs become horrible destiny. It is horrifying. But letting loose of your basic belief in your own divinity then frees you from the prison which built it.