Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Last January Backchannel published an article relevant to this thread, concerning the establishment of an AI (Artificial Intelligence) ethics board by Google. One of the leadoff paragraphs contains links to a number of associated organizations:

Earlier this month, the MIT Media Lab joined with the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to anchor a $27 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence initiative. The fund joins a growing array of AI ethics initiatives crisscrossing the corporate world and academia. In July 2016, leading AI researchers discussed the technologies’ social and economic implications at the AI Now symposium in New York City. And in September, a group of academic and industry researchers organized under the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence — an ongoing project hosted by Stanford University — released its first report describing how AI technologies could impact life in a North American city by the year 2030.

And I’ll get back to this. The Backchannel article covers the Google organization:

Perhaps the most significant new project, however, is a Silicon Valley coalition that also launched in September. Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft jointly announced they were forming the Partnership on AI: a nonprofit organization dedicated to matters such as the trustworthiness and reliability of AI technologies. Today, the Partnership announced that Apple is joining the coalition, and that its first official board meeting will be held on February 3, in San Francisco.

Think of this group as a United Nations-like forum for companies developing AI — a place for self-interested parties to seek common ground on issues that could do great good or great harm to all of humanity. …

The real issue — though it doesn’t have the same ring as “killer robots” — is the question of corporate transparency. When the bottom line beckons, who will lobby on behalf of the human good?

That should be the responsibility of the governments in question. After all, corporations are ill-equipped for such concerns; even the good corporations have a preoccupation with corporate survival, not societal survival, which is the explicit concern of government. Of course, given the clownish attributes of the current government, I’m not certain I want them holding those reins.

There’s not a great deal more relevant facts about the Google effort, as it seems to be a secret undertaking (or was in January).

One of the links referenced above is to an effort by venerable MIT to explore the topic.

The Media Lab and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society will leverage a network of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates who will collaborate on unbiased, sustained, evidenced-based, solution-oriented work that cuts across disciplines and sectors. This research will include questions that address society’s ethical expectations of AI, using machine learning to learn ethical and legal norms from data, and using data-driven techniques to quantify the potential impact of AI, for example, on the labor market. …

“Artificial Intelligence provides the potential for deeply personalized learning experiences for people of all ages and stages,” says [Cynthia] Breazeal, who emphasizes the need for AI to reach people in developing nations and underserved populations. But she adds that it is also “a kind of double-edged sword. What should it be learning and adapting to benefit you? And what should it do to protect your privacy and your security?”

It’s an introductory document, not really meant for analysis. However, why let that stop me? There appears to be an assumption that the Artificial Intelligences of the future will be of what I’ll call the non-autonomous variety, by which I mean they will not be making decisions about their own tasks, futures, desires, and fates, but rather be exceptionally advanced hammers in our hands. And it’s a worthy limitation; but it sort of avoids the ultimate suite of questions, doesn’t it? That being, if we’re in the position to give birth to an entirely different sentient species, then do we have responsibilities associated with that event and what comes afterward, or are they more like a brand new batch of … slaves?

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com reports on the latest development in tall wood buildings:

When it is completed, Terrace House will be the tallest wood building in the world, inching out (metering out?) Brock Commons, also in Vancouver, by 18 meters to its pointy top. But according to Matt Robinson in the Vancouver Sun, The developer Tobi Reyes said building a taller wood structure than anyone else had before “wasn’t by design.” And if you believe that….

TerraceHouse via PortLiving

Engineer Hermann Blumer is on the job; he worked with Shigeru Ban on Centre Pompidou-Metz, also a remarkable wood structure. …

The building apparently has development approval and is in for permit, and being wood construction, will probably be up before you know it. Wood construction is faster, quieter and cleaner than concrete, is great in earthquake conditions and wood sequesters CO2 for the life of the building.

So long as they remain safe, they’ll remain attractive as the primary alternative to concrete buildings. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly it does go up, and its occupancy percentage.

Superhero stories can be a tough tale to tell effectively because of the lack of a common thread of humanity. After all, the superhero possesses powers not attainable by the common person; and defeating your everyday thug can only take you so far before the audience becomes bored and wanders off, meaning the story-teller must come up with more extravagant antagonists, and the slender rope the story-crafter is trying to dance upon is becomes thinner and thinner.

There are a couple of approaches to this problem. For example, the superhero may also be burdened with some physical disability, which emboldens the common crook. Marvel’s Daredevil is blind, but in a clever twist, he attributes his superpowers to that blindness, his remaining senses sharpening to cover for his nearly useless eyes. Still, the basic disability remains.

Another approach is that taken by the subject of today’s review, Wonder Woman (2017). This is an interesting melding of the Goddess Diana, from old Greek Mythology, with the years of World War I, aka the War to End All Wars. Marvel Studios has chosen to start her off by putting her up against another God, Ares, the God of War (and where will they go from here?). The key is they’ve chosen to humanize a Goddess by recognizing that the traditional divine beings hardly ever change and grow, as this is often taken by devotees as denials of their God’s divine and all-knowing status, and this static condition is death for a story.

So we get to see Diana grow from a child to a woman. And then we get to see her not only be fallible, but to see her change and mature emotionally and mentally in response to the consequences of her actions. This transforms her from an unknowable divine being to someone very much akin to us.

And this, in turn, permits us to share in her story, to understand her mistakes, and, with her, to learn from those mistakes. As my Arts Editor points out, this is the traditional voyage of discovery, complete with mistakes made, consequences sustained, and lessons made apparent.

This artistic decision is one of the strongest components of this movie, but the story itself is well drawn, balancing horror with humor, laughter with anticipation, a plot twist here, a plot twist there. While the title character herself is a good looking lady, she is not a statue depending on her looks, but a good actor in her own right; more gratifyingly, she’s not completely surrounded by more good lookers, but some folks who just look normal – even Chris Pine, who has played Captain Kirk in several block-busters from the Star Trek franchise, is not a pretty face in this movie. In fact, he improved his standing in my estimation, showing more acting chops here than in any of his Trek movies (I skipped the last one, but not because of Pine).

The special effects met the current bar for success, although sometimes it seemed there might be too many. Still, it’s a movie that wants to cover a lot of ground, so that may have been justified. Characters are well drawn, even the Amazons who ran the risk of being too similar. And, being a product of Disney’s Marvel, it has a certain technical sophistication that you just come to expect.

So, go. Have fun. Recommended, if you enjoy superhero movies. It’s a half-step above most of the superhero films in my experience.

Professor Adrian Vermeule speculates on Lawfare on the results of Trump appointing large numbers of judges, who are approved by a Senate that may no longer take notice of blue slips. His first point:

At the level of large constitutional abstractions, courts will point to the Preamble to the Constitution, observing that it is enacted by and in the name of “the People of the United States,” not anywhere else, and that it aims to promote the “general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” This will be taken to provide background principles that inform the reading of all other constitutional and statutory texts, and that shape and constrain legislative and executive authority in an indefinite range of areas.

In other words, legal provincialism. While it’s easy to build a visceral case for such readings of the law, these ignore a basic fact of today’s existence – even if maps show us as nearly alone on a very large island, it doesn’t matter anymore – we interact on a moment-to-moment basis with other nations, and we inevitably interface our legal systems with others, sometimes on a friendly basis, sometimes on a hostile basis. Even more importantly, our actions are so magnified by our technology that it is wholly appropriate to ask if our actions in, say, Gary, Indiana, are injuring the inhabitants of Bangladesh – and, if so, require compensation as appropriate. It is not, of course, just to injure a foreign national and then not compensate; down that path lies bitter conflict, even wars, if not necessarily declared.

It’s better to admit the reality on the ground and modify the legal system and realities simply as good policy. To that extent, those new judges of Trump’s selection who disagree with this philosophy may be condemning the United States to armed conflicts of various sorts, assuming they achieve a legal ascendancy – and refuse to learn, change, and grow in their new jobs. That capacity to learn, etc, may be our best hope.

BTW, Adrian, I think, is torn between withering sarcasm and startling fear.

I was just wondering if peonies metamorphose into something else at midnight …

Guess not.

Some other views on the NATO Article 5 omission by Trump (my view here.). Charles Krauthammer, a neocon, has a mystified conclusion in The National Review:

Angela Merkel said Sunday (without mentioning his name) that after Trump’s visit it is clear that Europe can no longer rely on others. It’s not that yesterday Europe could fully rely — and today it cannot rely at all. It’s simply that the American deterrent has been weakened. And deterrence weakened is an invitation to instability, miscalculation, provocation and worse.

And for what?

You’re a fellow conservative. Just follow the money. Kevin Drum on Mother Jones:

Holy shit. It’s one thing to lose a battle about what goes into a presidential speech—that happens all the time—but it’s quite another to agree to include something and then remove it without telling your top national security advisors. And then send them out to face the press.

This isn’t a case of Trump listening to the last guy in the room. It sounds more like Trump being unwilling to tell his national security team to their faces that he disagrees with them—and then screwing them behind their backs. How long can you keep working for a guy like that?

Indeed. Andrew Sullivan:

And in a few months, Trump has all but trashed it. NATO’s Article 5 — the rock-solid assurance that an attack on any alliance member will be treated as an attack on all — was always the linchpin, and its credibility, especially with the Russians, was essential. Every single American president has therefore immediately, reflexively, emphatically reaffirmed it. And yet Trump pointedly and pettily refused to last week — even though an explicit assurance was apparently in the original text of his speech, and even though Mattis, McMaster, et al. know perfectly well why it is indispensable. Without this unquestioned trust, a defensive alliance falls apart. Yes, there is a real question of the European commitment to defense spending — and Trump had every right to bring that up. But by threatening to withhold military support without such an increase in spending, Trump turned an alliance into a protection racket. Such rackets depend on fear, not trust. He effectively — in a fit of apparent pique — threw away the work and lives of generations like a child tosses a toy from a bassinet.

Which illustrates the limitations of Trump’s cognitive ability – he can’t get beyond seeing money. There are great, if directly intangible, advantages to being the leader among leaders, and the top of that list may be the ability to set the agenda for the world. Trump’s problem is that he’s always been secure and advantaged – and he doesn’t understand that the sandbox he’s in now could become a flaming nuclear hell if he’s not careful. So he doesn’t understand how useful and important it can be to hold the agenda ledger – until another world power snatches it away.

Current Secretary of Defense and former General Mattis (!) in The New York Times:

“To quote a British observer of us from some years ago, bear with us,” Mr. Mattis said. “Once we have exhausted all possible alternatives, the Americans will do the right thing,” he continued, invoking a famous quote often attributed to Winston Churchill.

“So we will still be there, and we will be there with you,” he added.

At another point, Mr. Mattis implored his audience to understand that just because the United States had backed away from the multilateral Pacific trade agreement “does not mean we are turning our back” on the prospect of negotiating bilateral trade agreements.

Which is to say, we’ll get this kid under control and all growed up any day now. I dunno, sir, he’s already 70 years old and set in his ways.

Zeeshan Aleem on Vox:

European leaders probably found the timing of Trump’s refusal to pledge to uphold Article 5 to be particularly galling. Trump is unveiling a memorial to the victims of 9/11 while in Brussels — the only event that has caused NATO to invoke Article 5. The NATO alliance collectively fought the war in Afghanistan which was launched in the wake of those attacks on the US.

In the meantime, NATO is stepping up its commitment to US-led initiatives. On Thursday, NATO decided to officially join the US-led coalition against ISIS, although it did not pledge the use of combat troops as part of that commitment.

The strength of NATO is particularly relevant these days in light of terrorist violence and a resurgent Russia. The continent is currently enduring a fairly steady wave of terrorist attacks — most recently, a suicide bombing this week at a concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22. And Russia’s belligerence in recent years, with its meddling and territorial expansion into Ukraine and its involvement in the Syrian civil war, has its neighbors on edge about the possibility of more expansionism. Trump’s deliberate decision to keep mum on his stance on Article 5 broadcasts a clear message to the West’s military adversaries: NATO is not stable, the US cannot be relied upon to pull its weight on behalf of its allies.

Galling, hypocritical, there are so many adjectives that apply.

Susan Wright on RedState:

Nobody knows if they should take Trump seriously, or should they listen to his cabinet? Right now, the message isn’t always the same, and Trump has repeatedly undercut his own team, often a day or two after sending them out to deliver a message to the world.

Now people with solid names and reputations are seeing those reputations tarnished, as they’re reduced to muck work, shovel in hand, following behind Trump to scoop up the messes he leaves on the world stage.

I’ve not been paying attention to the folks on RedState, so I don’t know if they generally approve of Trump or not. Susan’s conclusion seems fairly generic and mundane.

Politico’s Susan Glasser has a report on the recent contretemps that arose when President Trump failed to affirm Article 5 of the NATO treaty:

When President Donald Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip little more than a week ago, he surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped—and expected—he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.

That part of the Trump visit is known.

What’s not is that the president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.

Deceiving his own National Security team – this has given rise to a lot of clucking among the punditry, and deservedly so. I have  two thoughts:

1. Long term consequences: This demonstrates that a democratically elected leader of the most powerful country on Earth can make decisions which are highly damaging to both the United States and the balance of the Western Democracies. This, consequently, damages the credibility of democracy as an effective form of government.Think about that. An overwhelming majority of the United States is raised with the idea, an ingrained idea, that they have the right to be part of the government process, at the very least by voting; by the same token, by putting themselves forth for governmental positions and perhaps attaining high positions in the government. That, in essence, is the great promise of democracy, as encapsulated in the revolutionary rallying cry No taxation without representation! Sure, France and Germany have demonstrated the ability to elect respectable leaders. That’s good. But is that good enough? Is this going to be ammunition for autocrat Vladimir Putin to use for persuading other countries to abandon democracies? How about Saudi Arabia?And it’s a valid question for the United States as well. Do we return to the bloody^[1] past of monarchies? How about a stroll down the path of Dominionism?Or is it time to try to draw up another form of government? Who’s up to sing the praises for their Robot Overlords^[2]? If we are set on moving forward, though, I might favor the form put forth in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers – you must earn your privilege to vote by volunteering for government service, wherein the government service inculcates the virtue of putting greater society ahead of your individual desires. Whichever path we choose to tread, it is irrefutable that Trump has done some damage to the entire concept of Democracy as a credible governmental approach – which, incidentally, is the system under which he has made and lost and made and lost his millions^[3]. He’s basically committing a sort of philosophical suicide.And we may find that evolving to some other form of government is an unhappy, fraught process.
2. The source of this action. Glasser’s informed speculation is in accord with my initial thoughts:
   

   The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion.

   This is congruent with my own speculation on Mr. Bannon’s views as an alleged white supremacist – his hatred for the form of government that deprived him of hereditary (one supposes) position as a slaveowner. This simple omission from a speech is reverberating throughout the democracies of the West, shaking an historic alliance to its roots. It’s hard to overstate the importance of NATO in historical context, even if Article 5 has only been invoked once in its history. Perhaps the best way to think about it is using the “fleet in being” concept, where the very existence of a force, even if not deployed, modifies the behavior of the adversary. For example, the Soviet Union, so long as it believed the NATO treaty nations would support all of its articles, could never really dare to indulge in aggression against any of those members because then it would face the military opposition of all the nations. I suppose the Warsaw Pact could be viewed in a similar way.

   And what would have happened if Ukraine had been part of NATO when Russia invaded Crimea a few years ago, a part of Ukraine? This leads to the other possibility, that Putin told Trump to omit this part of the speech, as he conducts a low level war against the United States, the great enemy of Russia. However, there is little inside information to prove this supposition, merely the observation that Russia will benefit most from the demise of NATO.

¹And I’m being quite literal here – neither monarchies nor theocracies have done well in the humane government department. Basically, gouts of government-sanctioned blood cover their books to an upsetting degree.

²Not me. Although I suppose I should have said “Artificial Intelligences” rather than Robot, but Robot Overload has a better ring to it. And the AI overlords are probably two or three hundred years in the future anyways.

³I’m not actually sure of Trump’s current location in that cycle.

The North Carolina Democrats suffered a small setback in their court case regarding gerrymandering, as WRAL.com reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld without comment a lower court’s ruling that North Carolina lawmakers illegally relied too much on the race of voters when they drew 28 state House and state Senate districts in 2011.

But the justices vacated the court’s order to immediately redraw the districts and hold a special election this year, saying other remedies should be considered.

It’s really thin lemonade for the GOP, though, and their statement, to my mind, reflects that:

“We are encouraged the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the lower court’s politically-motivated attempt to force a special legislative election in 2017 and its efforts to ‘suspend provisions of the North Carolina Constitution,’ ignore voters’ constitutional right to elect representatives to two-year terms and effectively nullify their votes from 2016,” Rep. David Lewis , R-Harnett, and Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, said in a joint statement.

SCOTUS agreed that gerrymandering occurred, but thinks the remedy is too severe. An honest GOP may have acknowledged the loss or even the moral failure behind the loss. This reaction sounds more like a victory celebration.

Within the North Carolina GOP the toxic brew is, at best, retaining its efficacy. As it seems likely that a redraw for the 2018 elections will be required, they may find themselves nipped in the bud by an electorate impatient with GOP incompetency.

From Attorney Neal Katyal, who is one of the attorneys who brought the suit against President Trump’s travel ban, commenting on Trump’s Tweets’ effects:

Its kinda odd to have the defendant in Hawaii v. Trump acting as our co-counsel.

This refers to the legal fact that his own Tweets are used against him.

… our dianthus survived the ugly (for perennials) winter and is in bloom!

This makes me wonder if all of America is going to be wandering about, drooling, in a few decades. NewScientist (27 May 2017) has a report on the effects of sleep deprivation on mice, and it’s not pretty:

BURNING the midnight oil may well burn out your brain. The brain cells that destroy and digest worn-out cells and debris go into overdrive in mice that are chronically sleep-deprived.

In the short term, this might be beneficial – clearing potentially harmful debris and rebuilding worn circuitry might protect healthy brain connections. But it may cause harm in the long term, and could explain why a chronic lack of sleep puts people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders, says Michele Bellesi of the Marche Polytechnic University in Italy. …

The team specifically looked at glial cells, which form the brain’s housekeeping system. Earlier research had found that a gene that regulates the activity of these cells is more active after a period of sleep deprivation.

One type of glial cell, called an astrocyte, prunes unnecessary synapses in the brain to remodel its wiring. Another type, called a microglial cell, prowls the brain for damaged cells and debris.

Bellisi’s team found that after an undisturbed sleep, astrocytes appeared to be active in around 6 per cent of the synapses in the brains of the well-rested mice. But astrocytes seemed to be more active in sleep-deprived mice – those that had lost eight hours of sleep showed astrocyte activity in around 8 per cent of their synapses, while the cells were active in 13.5 per cent of the synapses of the chronically sleep-deprived animals.

Another reason not to be a brown-nosing slave to your employer. Me? I’m going out to a drive-in movie tonight and sleeping in tomorrow. I put in a couple of hours at work yesterday to cover.

Alexander Vorontsov on 38 North summarizes the current situation and ponders the future of the United Nations:

Being in contact with a wide circle of international experts professionally studying Korea, I am assured that I am not the only one frustrated by renewed attempts by the UN, presented as the main agent of justice and peace in the world, to impose a de facto economic embargo on the DPRK, a state with a population of 25 million people; in essence, it is an unarmed war.

If the habit to discriminatorily punish “bad guys,” selected by the “stakeholders” in the UN’s elite at their own will persists, the majority of the ordinary members of the UN General Assembly may rebel and start asking rather sticky questions: if such a practice becomes standard, what will become of the UN itself?

How did we get to this point, using the UN in such a provocative way? In my mind, it is very simple: Washington wants to force Pyongyang to start talks from a position of capitulation, while Pyongyang wants to enter talks from a position of equality. Frankly speaking, this is nothing special or new.

While the popular belief these days is that negotiations with North Korea have never worked, it is important to remember the progress made under the US-North Korea Agreed Framework. For the time the agreement was in place, key components of North Korea’s nuclear weapons infrastructure were irreparably shuttered while the two countries worked toward normalization of relations. Had it been kept in place, it might have found a suitable way to deal with issues of cheating. But its abrupt end made subsequent efforts to negotiate difficult to start, with mistrust high on both sides, leading to the complex and dangerous situation we are in today. In order to get back to negotiations now, which most stakeholders seem to want—conditions for talks would need to be seriously discussed.

The US-North Korea Agreed Framework was signed in 1994 by the Clinton Administration, and foundered in 2003 during the Bush Administration. Will GOP aggression work well with the North Koreans, or will it just piss them off? Hard to say.

Aquafaba:

Egg whites aren’t the only option for foamy meringues. It was recently discovered that the liquid from tins of chickpeas, known as aquafaba, whips up just as well. [“Proof in the pudding: Myth-busting 15 common cooking tips,” Sam Wong, NewScientist (27 May 2017, paywall)]

As London recovers from another terror attack, it’s worth asking ourselves what those who are directing these attacks are trying to accomplish^[1]. While these stabs at the vulnerable citizenry have little direct effect, the real question regards the veiled goals of the directors.

In other words, what do these extremist fear the most from the West, and are therefore trying to change?

Religious extremists, seems to me, always have as their putative goal a societal adherence to the most extreme version of their religious tenets, whether or not they can actually be found in their sacred tomes.

And the Western countries, such as Britain? To lesser and greater extents, they have left such societal rules behind. While I could spend all day enumerating such instances as gay marriage, I’d prefer to abstract it to a rational approach to justice. At one time we used the Biblical rules to run our societies and called them just, but that led to chaos and death; now we try to use reason to define our justice, and if that leads to results that dismay some of our citizens, I must say that most adjust admirably. One example is that of gay marriage, and watching much of society adjust to the idea that our gay members should have the option of marrying those they love has been an inspiration and a pleasure.

But for those who believe in a very strong version of God, the extremists, this is repugnant. Thus, they wish the rule of God, as decreed by the clerics; the West is transforming from the rule of God to the rule of Law^[2]. In our particular case, the extremists see their favored ordering of society endangered by the West.

Not through direct attack, necessarily, but through the very existence of those principles of the West.

Why? Because they are attractive. Because they promise peace. They, perhaps even more importantly, demonstrate prosperity.

The Magna Carta, an early attempt at Constitutional Law.
Source: BritRoyals

Speaking abstractly, any principle is a good principle in that it leads, eventually, to a positive outcome for the individual and/or the society in which the individual is embedded; a negative outcome decreases survival and reproductive opportunities, if not directly, then by degrading that society. Sufficient degradation of society by an individual can easily lead to a Pitchforks and Torches ending for the individual pursuing a negative principle (say, I will enrich myself without treating my fellow societal members justly), as his fellows find a way to remove his riches and/or his life.

A set of principles can and should be judged on several metrics. One often ignored is that of robustness, which is to say that as external stressors change, do the principles continue to deliver positive outcomes?

So that was a fairly laborious approach to the question posed earlier in this post, that being (yeah, I almost forgot, too) the goal of those directing these terrorists. I believe they are trying, as with any war, to modify the behaviors of their opponents; in this case, they are trying to subtly modify our very principles. They are repugnant to those directing the fight, and so they make the most logical target of the extremists.

Therefore, while we properly worry about our physical security, we must devote even more concern to our future, as it is formulated, in a sense, by our principles. While I worry about the Brits, as their various Party leaders seem to currently be wanting, that’s their problem. We in the United States have our hands full with an Administration run by an individual from the private sector who has never, and cannot be, troubled to think beyond the private sector. His basic incuriosity, which is much like former President Bush’s, is leading him down the same mistaken path which took Bush (II) into the infamy of authorizing torture. Filling his White House with pretty faces and empty heads, and putting someone reputed to be a white supremacist as well as a follower of Leninist principles – both in opposition to our commonly held set of principles as Americans – the current President has attempted to fulfill campaign promises which contravene American principles.

While I believe his latest attempt to push his Muslim ban order, as the Times of India reports –

US President Donald Trump on Sunday slammed London’s Pakistani-origin mayor Sadiq Khan saying it was not the time to be “politically correct”, and touted his controversial travel ban in view of the London Bridge terror attacks that killed seven people and wounded several others.

“We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse,” Trump said.

is in earnest, the problem for Mr. Trump is that this has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with the principles which have brought us peace and prosperity. I don’t think he, or nearly any member of his Administration, has the capacity to even consider these objections to their proposed set of actions, or why those proposals are ultimately against the law – and anti-American.

The real war is these attacks on our principles, from both religious extremists and the leaders of Russia. They are both in an existential war – because their competing sets of principles, of religious extremism and strong-man rule, respectively, have been doing poorly. It’s our job to show that our principles work better, and in all conditions.

And to better educate ourselves concerning those principles. After all, it is Trump in the White House.

¹Assuming, of course, that these aren’t just religiously motivated individuals acting without direction.

²The rule of Man came before either, and consisted of the strong-man ordering of society; changes at the top came through blood-shed, and could be devastating.

A little chive supper for the bee.

He has a lot more to go.

And there’s some Indigo rushing somewhere.

A HuffPo report on Rep Tim Walberg (R-MI) typifies the rank amateurism that seems to be gripping the GOP these days:

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told a constituent last week that God can solve the problem of climate change if the global phenomenon truly exists.  …

“I believe there’s climate change,” Walberg said, according to a video of the exchange obtained by HuffPost. “I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time. I believe there are cycles. Do I think man has some impact? Yeah, of course. Can man change the entire universe? No.”

Source: Phys.Org

Of the 4 footed, millions of years old variety. On Dead Things, Gemma Tarlach remarks on a find named Zuul crurivastator, a new member of the ankylosaur, or club-tailed herbivores:

The new-to-science dinosaur’s genus name reflects its block-headed, short-snouted resemblance to Ghostbusters’ Terror Dogs. But that vicious tail club inspired its species name, crurivastator, which translates to “destroyer of shins.”

Destroyer of shins. Heh.

Heh, indeed. But this is a specially cool find:

The virtually complete, partially mummified specimen was unearthed in 2014 and is still being prepared. Researchers started at either end (the spectacularly well-preserved skull and tail club) and are working their way toward the middle. In about two years, when the work should be complete, lead author Victoria Arbour of the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto thinks Zuul will measure about six meters, or 20 feet nose to club.

Stegosaurus Ungulates
Source: National Park Service

Nearly complete, details in place (unlike Stegosaurus, wherein the paleontologists first thought those plates would act like a roof), and even the possibility of recovering proteins. Proteins from an estimated 75 millions years ago.

Makes me feel like a kid again.

And, in honor of my late friend Nancy, who loved to eat dinner with a bunch of computer geeks and listen to them geek out (her eyes would cross and she’d start drooling, she claimed), here’s a bit of tech talk from the academic paper, from The Royal Society:

6. Skull

The skull is complete, missing only the tip of the right quadratojugal horn and the ventral edge of the vomers (figures 2, 3 and 5). The skull has undergone plastic deformation, with some dorsoventral compaction and mediolateral skewing evidenced by the bilateral asymmetry of the skull overall, and flattened, oval orbits [33]. The lateral sides of the snout taper gently towards a squared-off premaxillary beak. Laterally, the skull is relatively flat dorsally, unlike the arched profile of some specimens of Euoplocephalus, Anodontosaurus, Scolosaurus and Ziapelta, but this might result from taphonomic compaction of the skull. As in other ankylosaurines, the antorbital fenestra is absent and the supratemporal fenestrae are obscured. In dorsal view, the skull has a trapezoidal outline. Apart from the three known skulls of Ankylosaurus (AMNH 5214, AMNH 5895 and CMN 8880), ROM 75860 is the largest ankylosaurine skull recovered from Laramidia (table 1).

Andrew Sullivan is perplexed by the failure of the reactionaries to overwhelm all of Europe:

A funny thing is happening to Theresa May’s unstoppable march to a massive new majority in Britain’s parliament: It appears to have stopped. I’d like to think this may have something to do with Trump: He is so repellent to almost anyone in the civilized world outside the U.S., he appears to be weakening reactionism’s appeal in Europe. After the Dutch far right stumbled this spring, and Macron beat Le Pen more decisively than expected, we now see Angela Merkel’s polling having perked up since March. But in Britain, the collapse of the Tories in the polls since the campaign started has been nothing short of remarkable. They began the campaign with a lead of close to 20 points; the latest poll — probably an outlier — gives them a mere 3 percent lead over a Labour Party led by someone (Jeremy Corbyn) slightly to the left of Noam Chomsky. In the poll of polls, Labour has gained 12 points in the last few weeks and the Tories have gone nowhere.

And is it impossible for the Europeans to watch the ugly results of the election of Donald Trump … and say “No fucking way?” Why not? After all, he’s been notorious virtually from the beginning of the Presidential campaign; the actual Presidency is simply the (very noxious) cherry on the top. The ugly incidents, the idiocy in Congress and the White House – I have no doubt the professional watchers in Europe have been relaying these dismaying results to their colleagues in the non-reactionary parties, and the word went out: bloody well vote, none of this crap about not liking your own candidate – take a look at the reactionary candidate and tell me you want him or her running this nation. The way Macron defeated Marine was quite reassuring to those in the United States who’ve never been under the Trump spell; we can only hope our fellow Americans will have such vastly bad experiences that they’ll awaken and regret.

I don’t live in Britain, nor correspond with any Brits, so I don’t know if Andrew’s speculation that Prime Minister May is mismanaging the early election she called – but I do know from readings that she and her cohort seem to be scientifically illiterate, and I wonder if that may have something to do with the apparent disaffection with the government.

It’s too bad the other side also appears to be quite radical, in just that way that political-junkies can be. Otherwise, May might be ripe to be rolled off the log.

Professor David Wirth on Lawfare discusses Trump’s intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on Climate, noting there’s a cooling off period which will push the actual notification off right into the heated part of that wonderful season we’re already stepping into – Presidential election season:

In the context of the Paris Agreement, this structure provides a number of useful insights—all of which, as intended, exert a moderating influence on what might appear in retrospect to have been a rash decision in the heat of the political moment. They may also create quite a bit of unintended discomfort for the Trump presidency.

In terms of politics, this means that Trump’s abandonment of the Paris Agreement, not yet having taken effect and still subject to reconsideration, could well be a live issue during the next presidential campaign. It is not difficult to imagine that the timing of the effect of the U.S. withdrawal could well be a gift to aspiring presidential candidates from both parties, entirely contrary to Trump’s own interest in securing a second term.

Having watched this Administration boot the fumble right down the field, it’s not surprising that they didn’t think ahead here, either.

But in the presence of this incredible string of incompetent incidents, it’s also possible to credibly contend that Trump, along with the most of the GOP, truly believes the assertions of fake news. If so, then polls such as this one (left) from Gallup will not impact their thought processes – or perhaps they’re not even aware of them, seeing as Fox News is seen as a credible source in the White House these days.

Therefore, in the bubble of the GOP, as Andrew Sullivan & many others declared them years ago, they only hear themselves and think that’s the world – and everything else is the production of the enemy, even science. So perhaps Trump thinks he’s doing what the United States wants.

And that’s a useful way of thinking about this, because we can compare and contrast with another hypothesis – that being the GOP is simply out to erase the legacy of President Obama. The ACA is under assault, although watching the passing of the AHCA and the reactions of even GOP Senators puts me in mind of the great rubber hammers of the cartoons. President Obama also contributed to the Paris Agreement.

Now, whether this is endemic racism, not unbelievable given the presence of white supremacists in the White House, or GOP fear of Democrats taking full credit for the improving healthcare situation, as has been rumored, or the religious sensibility (a term I use with hesitant humor)  of the GOP finding it unbelievable that their sworn enemies, the Democrats, could do anything good under the Sun, I don’t know.

Returning to Professor Wirth’s commentary, I found this interesting:

The modest requirements of the Paris Agreement have been largely overlooked during the Agreement’s transformation into a political football.  Much of the Agreement is not legally binding, and those provisions that are involve primarily reporting and updating each country’s voluntarily identified “contribution”—purposely not a commitment that is legal enforceable. The Agreement’s generality and flexibility, in response to U.S. demands and experience with Kyoto, is a principal reason the deal was launched so quickly, less than a year after its adoption in December 2015.

Quite simply, the Paris Agreement puts “America First,” with our domestic policy agenda driving U.S. engagement with the Agreement and not the other way around.  During the lengthy public debate leading to the President’s recent announcement, even the principal negotiator for the United States concluded that the existing agreement could accommodate a relaxation of the U.S. contribution of the sort anticipated by Trump’s recent domestic proposals.

Given this modest description, it becomes more and more a question of “why did you bother?“, just like their persecution of the ACA, than anything else – a ripe reason to go looking for skulking motivations.

Scott Chamberlain on Mask of the Flower Prince has his own list of ten pieces of Mother’s Day music – for the imperfect mother in your life:

Barber: Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance.  Medea is the star of Western Civilization’s earliest custody-battle-gone-horribly-awry soap opera.  Furious that her louse of a husband is taking their kids to live with a new trophy wife, Medea decides a little infanticide will even the score.  It’s a story with something for everyone in the family.

Cherubini: Medea. A follow-up to the above entry, because sometimes a 12-minute work about a mother killing her children isn’t enough, and you really need a full-blown opera to do the story justice.

He also includes links to the music. G’wan – you know you want to!

Hit a home run or I’ll scratch your toenails off!

We ran into an unexpected pleasure. There are certain movies which make our teeth itch; we identify them by how predictable they appear to be, and how good for us they appear to be. Such was the apparent case with Rhubarb (1951), a movie about a millionaire leaving his fortune to his cat, Rhubarb, and how the cat becomes a good luck charm for the formerly failing baseball team he had owned.

Sounds painfully predictable, doesn’t it?

But – at least for those of us fortunate enough to be cat owners – it’s a heckuva lot of fun, watching a bedraggled, nasty stray who hoards golf balls turn into a beloved pet who then transforms yet again into the team owner. Along the way there’s a vicious daughter of the deceased, cut out of the will and jealous of it all, and her clever machinations; the quite naturally terrified bookies and their scheme to negate the good luck charm; the soon-to-be married cat guardian and his sweetie, who is allergic to Rhubarb; and a passel of terrified pooches who’d rather not go toe to toe with the big tomcat.

I think one of the keys to this movie’s unexpected success with us was that the very personality of the cat is key thematic material for the movie – gumption, in a word. The millionaire takes delight in the cat, from his golf ball hoarding and dog chasing days to his independence; not seeing that in his daughter induces him to cut her out of the will. It becomes a running undernote of the movie, not insistently played up, but more a wistful minor key melody of persistence and guts in the face of mild problems. The acting is competent, the plot bounces right along, and the millionaire’s home is just as ridiculously ornate as you might expect.

That and the occasional word play. How can I resist a movie with the following dialog?

Lawyer: But that cat may have been powdered or sprayed with some irritant, such as pepper or mustard!

Judge: Point well taken, Mr. Dill.

I shan’t actually recommend it, but if you run across it one rainy afternoon, you could do worse than give this one a ten minute trial.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog contributes some analysis which fairly well backs up my thoughts on how the failure to train our politicians in the basics of societal sectors is leading to disaster:

That’s not a throwaway line. What we have here is the White House’s budget director suggesting it may be time to eliminate the Congressional Budget Office from existence.

Note, Mulvaney may believe that the CBO score on the Republican health care plan is “absurd,” but he’s offered no competing data. Either the far-right budget chief doesn’t have alternative numbers, or he does have competing data that he prefers to hide out of embarrassment.

What’s more, given that Mulvaney just unveiled a budget plan with a jaw-dropping $2-trillion mistake – a colossal screw-up he says was intentional – perhaps the OMB director should avoid questioning the reliability of others’ budget analyses for a while.

But it’s the broader disdain for objective sources of information that really rankles. I’m reminded of a piece from the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman in March:

This is straight out of President Trump’s playbook, one that tries to convince everyone that there’s no such thing as a neutral authority on anything. If the CBO might say your bill will have problematic effects, then the answer is not to rebut its particular critique, but to attack the institution itself as fundamentally illegitimate. If the news media report things that don’t reflect well on you, then they’re “the enemy of the American People.” If polls show you with a low approval rating, then “any negative polls are fake news.” If a court issues a ruling you don’t like, then it’s a “so-called judge” who has no right to constrain you.

The Teapot Dome Scandal:
Crap like this happens when you’re ignorant, again and again.

And I’m sure Mick, Donald, & most of the company really don’t understand why things are structured as they are structured. The reason is that the government is not in place to make a profit, but to govern, and governing has little to do with how corporations run.

In this particular case, the CBO exists to evaluate proposed legislation in terms of at least the costs, and in the case of the AHCA, how well it accomplishes its putative goal, all in a non-partisan manner. This is just one aid in responsible planning and legislating.

In the corporate world there are other ways to do this – mainly by letting companies try things and if they fail & sink, too bad for them.

That doesn’t work in the government world. There’s little competition, and when there is it must be strictly regulated in order to avoid negatively impacting the citizenry.

So when Mick says,

“At some point, you’ve got to ask yourself, has the day of the CBO come and gone?” Mulvaney said…. He said, “The days of relying on some nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to do that work for us has probably come and gone.”

The proper response is, “No, Mick. Your time has come and gone. It was back in the 1800s. And the CBO was originated to stamp out scum like you.”

Back on May 24 Slate reported on some more GOP jiggering in government in the realm of “ringless voicemail,” wherein a couple of companies have devised a method for inserting messages into your voicemail without ringing your phone first. While actually not strictly a new technology, the FCC has been asked if this is legal, and the Republican National Committee has weighed in on the matter:

She’d jump his bones if she could.

Perhaps the worst facet of The Detective (1954) is the overly bland title, which gives little to munch on until the movie is underway and you realize the detective is a certain Father Brown, Catholic priest, which is significant for those who watch the later TV series. This is the introduction, wherein we learn Father Brown is humble yet overly-confident, charming yet exceptionally shy, eccentric and yet a priest.

The attentive audience members will swiftly recognize the genre as being the British comedy-mystery. The details of the plot may mystify and even delight, as when Father Brown slips a man’s cigarette box from a man’s hand into his own (voluminous) sleeve, the victim none the wiser, but it’s clear the end point of this movie will be the recovery of the stolen cross, and, more importantly, the guidance of the soul engaged in high crimes back to the path of … well, whatever it is. It’s difficult to argue with the moral & teaching of the story, but the mouth of wisdom is, to the modern ear, accustomed more to accusations and acknowledgements of various crimes perpetrated by clerics, somewhat untrustworthy; and for those who do trust clerics, there is the urge to advise them to be more circumspect in their selection of authority figure.

The acting is the usual British competent to excellent, the staging is fun, and, overall, it’s an enjoyable movie.

Oh, and I lied. Really, the stage combat was, at best, unconvincing.