Unsightly Mental Blemishes

… Neil Gorsuch, IJ (Illegitimate Justice).

Poor guy. He’ll be known as asterisk-man, because of the controversy of the process.

I haven’t seen any polls yet, and it’s a bit early anyways, but I think we’ll see Trump’s approval rating improve. Some children died, and everyone’s protective instincts kick in – as they should. So when someone does something about it, there will be a surge of approval.

But it doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do in a world with enough firepower to render it uninhabitable to the human species. Especially when the closest thing to superpower #2 considers Syria to be an ally.

Kevin Drum:

The pretextual argument against this view is that a single airstrike isn’t “war,” and anyway, the War Powers Act gives the president the authority to do this kind of thing. The real argument is simper: presidents have done this stuff forever, and Congress has never worked up the gumption to stop them.

Actually, it’s worse than that: as near as I can tell, Congress actively doesn’t want to exercise its warmaking authority. It’s too politically risky. They’d rather have the president do it unilaterally, and then kibitz from the sideline. This is why I don’t really blame presidents from authorizing attacks like this. Congress could stop it anytime they want via the power of the purse, and they never have.

Kevin points me on to David French:

Assad has been engaged in one long war crime since the onset of the Syrian Civil War, and his gas attacks are hardly his deadliest. There has been a casus belli for war against Syria on a continuous basis since the onset of Assad’s genocide, but the existence of a legal and moral justification for war does not always render war wise or just. Nor does it remove the need for congressional approval. There is no reason to forego congressional debate now, just as there was no reason to forego congressional debate when Obama considered taking the nation to war against Syria in 2013.

Congressional approval is not only constitutional, it serves the public purpose of requiring a president to clearly outline the justifications for war and his goals for the conflict. It also helps secure public support for war, and in this instance it strikes me as reckless that we would not only go to war against a sovereign nation, we’d also court a possible military encounter with a great power like Russia without congressional approval. The nation needs to be ready for (and consider) all the grim possibilities and consequences. If Trump wants to go to war, he should take his case to Congress.

Very reasonable. Fareed Zakaria:

.@FareedZakaria on Syria strikes: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” last night

Steve Benen:

If we’re going to take Trump’s words at face value, and assume that he was so affected by images out of Idlib this week that he changed his mind about U.S. policy towards Syria, fine. But it’s not unreasonable to wonder about the scope of Trump’s change of heart, and ask whether his new assessments may include a fresh perspective on refugees, too.

Matthew Yglesias:

President Trump’s official rationale for initiating the first American airstrikes against the Assad regime in Syria struck humanitarian notes, complete with reference to the “beautiful babies” who “were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.” Mark Landler of the New York Times reports that “Trump’s heart came first” in ordering the attack. On its face, that’s a striking turnaround from a campaign season track record that was not only generally supportive of Bashar al-Assad but much more broadly dismissive of humanitarian considerations in general.

This is the Trump who once mocked the very notion of international concern about poison gas attacks. “Saddam Hussein throws a little gas,” he said at a December 2015 rally, “everyone goes crazy, ‘oh he’s using gas!'” …

Still, the overall pattern is unmistakable and represents critical context with which to understand Trump’s turn against Assad. Embracing the Gulf states’ worldview would dramatically improve Washington’s relationship with some of its closest regional allies. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it risks drawing the United States deeper into a series of conflicts around the region.

Jeff Stein on Vox provides some coverage of Trump’s allies’ reactions, which are mostly negative, and sums it up:

But Republican Party officials are ecstatic with Trump’s intervention. Fox News, which is closely associated with the Republican Party establishment, has not openly turned against the intervention the way personalities like Cernovich and Watson have.

But other Trump supporters, including the alt-right — which has its roots in the deeply anti-interventionist paleoconservative movement — thought Trump was the kind of Republican who opposed military intervention. Not everyone thought this was a correct assumption.

So perhaps Trump is trading public far-far-right support for Congressional far-right support? It may be a fruitful trade in that it might actually delay various investigations. And the rest of the public? Some independents will like it because it’s vengeance for the children, the rest will wait with a sense of foreboding. Put me in the latter camp with a large dose of doubt and wondering which of his statements are lies – or if any at all are truthful.

I would have preferred the possibly apocryphal Israeli approach to these problems – a Mossad agent with a pistol.

Ed Yong talks about eyes and fish evolution on The Atlantic:

Eyes are expensive organs: it takes a lot of energy to maintain them, and even more so if they’re big. If a fish is paying those costs, the eyes must provide some kind of benefit. It seems intuitive that bigger eyes let you see better or further, but MacIver’s team found otherwise. By simulating the kinds of shallow freshwater environments where their fossil species lived—day to night, clear to murky—they showed that bigger eyes make precious little difference underwater. But once those animals started peeking out above the waterline, everything changed. In the air, a bigger eye can see 10 times further than it could underwater, and scan an area that’s 5 million times bigger.

In the air, it’s also easier for a big eye to pay for itself. A predator with short-range vision has to constantly move about to search the zone immediately in front of its face. But bigger-eyes species could spot prey at a distance, and recoup the energy they would otherwise have spent on foraging. “Long-range vision gives you a free lunch,” says MacIver. “You can just look around, instead of moving to inspect somewhere else.”

Eyes are fascinating organs. My Arts Editor and I once wrote a novel which depended, in part, on the the weird eyes of trilobites. Those weird eyes, dozens of images – must have take some brainpower to integrate them.

Or did they? Maybe the integration wasn’t all that good – a sort of vague idea of the food target, open wide and hope to get it.

Sort of like a baleen whale, now that I think about it.

Tendentious:

marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view :  biased [Merriam-Webster]

Sounds like a synonym for partisan to me. Noted on Lawfare:

The political strategy here is laid out candidly in this generally tendentious essay yesterday by Andrew Klavan, entitled “Obama Spied, Media Lied,” which makes clear the ambition to change the subject from Russia’s intervention to one of the political misuse of the intelligence apparatus.

Another community that may see its existence in its current configuration at risk is the intelligence community, as explained by Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes in Lawfare:

The U.S. intelligence community is on the verge of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy it has not experienced since the 1970s. Back then, the crisis was one of the community’s own behavior. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s the intelligence community used its secret powers of surveillance and other forms of government coercion—often but not always at the behest of its political superiors—to spy on and engage in operations against Americans for political ends. At that time, politicians really did use executive branch intelligence tools to seek to monitor and harm political enemies, and exposure of that reality nearly destroyed the intelligence community. The problem was Hoover’s illegal wiretaps, bugs, and break-ins, and his attempts to annihilate Martin Luther King and others; it was NSA’s and CIA’s domestic espionage and propaganda operations; it was Richard Nixon’s many dirty tricks.

The community survived because it entered a “grand bargain” with Congress and the American people in the 1970s. And it is that very grand bargain that today’s crisis now threatens.

Today’s crisis is sparked by allegations, both by President Trump and by some House Republicans, of political misuse of the intelligence community by the Obama administration. Whether the allegations are entirely false or turn out to have elements of truth, they put the intelligence community in the cross-hairs, since some of the institutions that are supposed to be key legitimators are now functioning as delegitimators. After all, entirely appropriate investigations of counterintelligence can easily look like inappropriate political meddling, and if the President and the House Intelligence Committee chairman are not merely not defending the intelligence community but are actively raising questions about its integrity, the bargain itself risks unraveling.

In a sense, we’re seeing the effects of small variable changes on a non-linear system. A couple of politicians shouting that the intelligence system is being used for political purposes doesn’t seem like much, does it? But the power of the intelligence systems – and its past abuses by Hoover and, later, Nixon – is such that it makes folks sensibly nervous.

And that makes sense when solid evidence is presented. And that’s the problem here, isn’t it?

There’s no evidence. More from Ben and Jack:

This basic system survived even the Snowden revelations. Many people found Snowden’s disclosures of vast intelligence collection shocking. But though Snowden disclosed many technical legal problems with this surveillance, as well as some controversial legal judgments signed off on by the executive oversight apparatus, it also showed that the the problem of politically motivated surveillance simply didn’t exist. None of the thousands of pages of NSA revelations pointed to anything like the venal activities of the 1970s and before.

But, as we know, all it takes is a baseless accusation that happens to play to folks’ preconceptions in order to generate doubt, or even certainty; many will not follow up with an objective review of the matter, whether it be through partisanship, lack of time, or lack of tools. This is heaven for the unscrupulous power-seeker – which is the best category for anyone on the Trump team, from Trump on downwards.

Ben & Jack pin their hopes on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and indeed the Founders designated the Senate as the home of the great defense of the Constitution – home to politicians who should take the long, wise view (Senator McConnell doesn’t seem to understand that, but there are more Senators than McConnell, fortunately). They also note that the Senators in charge are Republicans – an important political step. If Republicans find their own President is in cahoots with the Russians, it’s hard to call it a political lynching by the Democrats. The final word from Ben & Jack:

Don’t underestimate what’s at stake here, which is not just the fate of the Trump presidency. What’s at stake is the entire structure of legitimacy we have built for the intelligence community in the post-Watergate era. Because if the President and the House Intelligence Committee Chairman can discredit an investigation of foreign interference in an American election and collusion with that effort by the president’s campaign by alleging improper political misuse of the intelligence authorities by the prior administration, if leaking FISA intercepts is an accepted way to go after a political opponent, and if nobody can credibly say who’s telling the truth and who’s lying, then the grand bargain has truly failed, with consequences that are hard to fathom.

Here’s the thing. Suppose Trump succeeds in his claims that the intelligence systems are politically tainted. Think about it.

The current systems would have to be dismantled.

Now we’re operating blind in a very dangerous world.

Then they’d have to be reassembled. Because we’d need intelligence. But you can bet that the new designers would not be highly principled men, concerned about their country. Because the GOP has already proven that it puts party above country.

Who would be the new Hoover? And who would he persecute?

Hated minorities?

Lesbians?

Your brother?

Yourself?

Hatred is not rational. Don’t sit their nodding in approval at these thoughts, because you might be the one in front of the Select Committee on un-American Activities. It may take a generation or two before the right people come together to remake an intelligence system into a the non-political force it should be – and apparently already is.

Stephen Wolf on The Daily Kos rather gleefully notes another North Carolina gerrymandering case won by the Democrats:

On Monday, a federal district court struck down a map that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled state legislature had imposed on the city of Greensboro, the state’s third-largest city. In a remarkable affront to local rule, Republican lawmakers passed a law in 2015 that replaced the city council districts that the city itself had drawn and replaced them with gerrymandered lines intended to hurt Democratic and black voters.

Democrats quickly brought a challenge to this new map, and the judges hearing the case have now put a stop to this usurpation of power. The court concluded that the legislature’s map was an impermissible racial gerrymander; that it violated the principle of “one person, one vote”; and that it unfairly singled out Greensboro. The city-drawn map had remained in place for the 2015 elections while litigation was ongoing, and it will now stay in effect for elections in fall.

Which is all well and good. But then he seems to engage in a bit of confirmation bias:

In fact, these gerrymanders are so effective that Greensboro, which typically votes for Democratic presidential candidates by a two-to-one ratio, is represented in the House by zero Democrats. And Guilford County, which is home to Greensboro and roughly half a million people, likewise supported Hillary Clinton by a 58-38 margin, but Republicans have maintained a majority on the county commission ever since 2012—when, of course, they got to draw the map for it.

The real problem is that his case is difficult to assert without supporting evidence; that is, we can find other reasonable reasons for the observed behavior. For example, perhaps the Greensboro Democrats are a mendacious, despicable bunch who have repulsed voters so badly that they’d prefer local Republicans – and perhaps those running for county commissioner are not as bad as those running for the legislature. The victory in the gerrymandering case is, of course, a point in his favor; but his brush is too large. I fear that he misleads himself and his audience through this presentation.

And I remember how confident the diarists on The Daily Kos were that Clinton would be victorious, that Senator Johnson of Wisconsin would fall, that there’d be a general Democratic victory in the Senate and possibly even one in the House.

Technically, you can say Clinton won the popular vote and lost in the Electoral College because of a quirk and Russian interference, and that some ground was made up in both chambers of Congress.

But, honestly, it was still a disaster for the Democrats and their Progressive wing, and I put it down to the Progressives having their own little echo chamber. They talk to themselves too much. I think Stephen’s post would benefit from some self-criticism. The victory in the court case is encouraging, I do agree – but precision in observation and argument will lead to better results down the road.

Excurse:

a sally or digression [Merriam-Webster]

Noted on Lawfare, in a book review:

Priemel’s research is prodigious, involving not on the many thousands of pages of the official records of the IMT and NMT, but research in more than three dozen archives in Europe and the United States, as well as the voluminous memoir literature and contemporaneous press accounts of the trials. Across ten substantial chapters, Priemel paints the background to the trials and analyzes the conduct of the IMT and all of the successor trials. For good measure, he offers short excurses on French and British military trials related to the successor trials as well.

On the Simple Justice blog, Judge Richard Kopf comments on the impending results of the GOP use of the ‘nuclear option’ to force the confirmation of Judge Gorsuch to SCOTUS:

The Nuclear Option

But it is not solely the stupid questions and political posturing at Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing that will deal the death blow to the federal judiciary in the minds of the general public. When the Senate goes nuclear, a clear and unmistakable statement will have been made to the American public. The Senators will be declaring once and forever that federal judges are just like them [my bold – HAW]. One’s political party is all and everything that matters, be you a United States Senator or a United States Judge or Justice.

The Funeral Pyre

The partisan treatment of Gorsuch is a disaster for the American people and the federal judiciary. With the use of the nuclear option, baked into the mind of ordinary people will be the notion that judging is based upon personal political predilection. The Gorsuch debacle will have cemented—with steel rebar—that untrue but unshakeable belief.

The politicization of the federal judiciary in the minds of our citizens will be complete when the roll is called and a simple majority of the United States Senate carries the day after staging the worst Kabuki dance drama of modern times. At that point, a mortal blow will have been inflicted on the federal judiciary.[i] I wish I was exaggerating.

Continuing the analysis of China’s ban on coal imports from North Korea, Yun Sun on 38 North notes that the official reason given by China, which was exceeding an United Nations’ quota on North Korean coal imports, seems to be misleading, and then plunges into speculation:

There are two possible explanations for China’s decision to impose such a radical measure on North Korea. First, two events occurred a week before the announcement of the ban that almost certainly aroused Chinese ire with Pyongyang: 1) North Korea’s test of a Pukguksong-2 intermediate-range ballistic missile on Feb 11; and 2) the assassination on February 13 of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother Kim Jong Nam, who had been under Chinese protection. Both events gave Beijing ample reasons to put more pressure on North Korea to rein in its provocative behavior.

Second, the Chinese may have wanted to send a conciliatory signal to Washington, given their concern over US-China relations under President Trump. Beijing has wanted to sweeten the pot with Trump in order to induce a friendlier US policy toward China and solidify a quid-pro-quo, transactional approach on key issues important to both sides. Since the Trump administration has identified North Korea as a key national security threat, it is reasonable to infer that China’s action on North Korean coal imports was aimed at heading off harsher US demands for stronger Chinese sanctions against North Korea. Considering the US-Chinese tensions that will form the backdrop for this week’s summit between Presidents Xi and Trump, Xi’s ability to show that it is punishing Pyongyang severely on coal imports could help to lower tensions with the United States and preempt US demands on North Korea that China cannot accept, such as cutting Chinese energy and food aid. China will not go so far as to trade North Korea with US for a positive China policy by Trump. In fact, it is hard to imagine what US can offer for such a trade. However, taking some heat off the potential demands by the US may well be China’s calculation.

I suppose China would prefer not to have a nuclear power angry next door, even if it’s much larger, so even though North Korea may be angry now, this is the lesser setting. But I’d love to be a bug on the wall in China’s leaders’ offices.

Evidently Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare is feeling a trifle frustrated these days:

I believe there is nothing unusual about Trump’s solicitude for Vladimir Putin. I believe that the whole Russia connection story is “fake news” designed to cover up an embarrassing electoral loss on the part of the Democrats.

I believe there is nothing unusual about Michael Flynn’s dealings with the Russian government. I believe there is nothing unusual about Carter Page’s dealings with the Russian government. I believe there is nothing unusual about Paul Manafort’s dealings with the Russian government. I believe there is nothing unusual about Roger Stone’s dealings with the Russian government. I believe there is nothing unusual about Russia’s setting up a secret line of communication to the Trump administration through Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and brother of a cabinet secretary. I believe there is nothing unusual about Jared Kushner’s meeting with a sanctioned Russian bank while working for his father-in-law’s transition. I believe that kind of thing happens all the time in all transitions.

And it goes on and on and on. In fact, it makes a handy list of all the unbelie- er, common-sense beliefs about our Commander-In-Chief.

Stop staring into the fire, Ben. Sooner or later, a Republican will dare to demonstrate some backbone. (Oh, bad visuals of invertebrates legislating the law. Each wears a mask. I think the one wearing the Ryan mask is missing a limb or two. They all seem to be dancing at the Masque of the Red Death. Now it’s just a pile of masks. Wait, how’d I get here?)

Is there some reason Stephen Colbert puts on these absolutely squirm-worthy segments? In this case, it’s the H&R Block bit where he seems to be brain damaged – both of us wanted to crawl out of our skins and not admit we’d seen it.

On Dead Things Gemma Tarlach comments  on the final days of the woolly mammoth:

Source: BBC

The genome of the Wrangel mammoth, which lived in a population of about 300 animals, had numerous mutations compared with its distant mainland cousin. Accumulating mutations over time is not in itself an issue — it’s the way of evolution, man — but it does create problems when the mutations have a negative impact on gene expression and function. And that’s what happened with the Wrangel animals.

According to the research, published today in PLOS Genetics, the pile-up of deleterious mutations left the Wrangel mammoth without a significant number of olfactory receptors, reducing its ability to pick up scents. The Wrangel woollies also lost a number of urinary proteins. In related species, such as the Indian elephant, these proteins are part of the language of social interaction and mate selection.

It also appears that mutations to genes controlling fur texture led to a satiny coat. Because typically stiff mammoth hairs evolved to offer some protection from the harsh Arctic elements, the satin stylings of the Wrangel herd may have made it harder for the animals to survive.

The accumulation of these and other mutations led to what the researchers describe as a “genomic meltdown.” The new evidence supports what are known as nearly neutral theories of genome evolution, which hold that harmful mutations can accumulate in small populations. Essentially: inbreeding bad. It might sound obvious, but this woolly mammoth study represents a rare chance for researchers to make direct comparisons between genomes from markedly different population sizes within a species.

I know some readers will scoff that this tells us nothing new. But thanks to the study, scientists have a better idea of how genomes change (and deteriorate) in small populations. This is important both for conservationists trying to save species with dwindling numbers and for de-extinction advocates who want to bring back departed flora and fauna — including the woolly mammoth.

And so passed one of the sexiest extinct beasties known to man – destined to be an object lesson.

The final episode of Bones, completing 12 seasons, has been broadcast and viewed. Bones marked a valiant attempt to bring science, and scientists, into the realm of humanity, as Dr. Temperance Brennan, for all of her nearly inhuman competence and confidence at the gurney, also has the insecurities that come with childhood bullying and abandonment, the foster care system, and how to interface her atheistic philosophy with a world which is rarely so rational and scientifically ordered; the other scientists also make similar contributions. Whether or not Bones succeeded in influencing society toward a more appreciative position on science and the contributions it makes to society is a matter to be assessed in the future.

But Bones was, as it had to be, so much more, taking on topics ranging from love, sex, and marriage to the morality and backlash of sniping. It’s really fairly hard to just toss off a piece on such a long-lived show in which stuff happened. It wouldn’t be so hard with a sitcom in which nothing really changes, but in Bones characters grew, suffered setbacks, moved on, died – and then were mourned and sent on their way down the last river, so to speak. In other words, all the previous episodes mattered.

So, in some ways, that’s what this piece covers. Bones was unremittingly excellent, unafraid to explore hard topics, and willing to sacrifice characters when a story demanded it. It was fun but hard-nosed, but willing to question that nose when it was wrong, with the exception of the unexamined fidelity of a polygraph machine in the final episode – an aspect of pseudo-science that could have been fun to explore in another episode, but here only served as a gear in the plot. As it was the final episode and it provided some lovely tension, I’ll just have to excuse it with a regretful shrug.

Thanks for the memories, Bones, and I hope we’ll get a movie or two out of you.

Does this wedding veil make my butt look big?

A female zombie, in wedding veil and filched golden wig, galloping, metaphorically speaking, through the dusky forest with chainsaw in hand, gunning it for all she’s worth, in pursuit of the young man caught in the bear trap.

This classic scene, one that I’m sure haunts all horror afficianados, is the very essence of … The Video Dead (1987).

I must admit, I came to this movie with a bar so low even Stephen Hawking, famed wheelchair-bound victim of ALS, could have bounded over it with ease. And I expected The Video Dead still might trip over that bar.

And I was quite wrong. It outleapt Mr. Hawking.

Before we all become far too excited, I’ll admit there are problematic facets to this movie. The camera work is fairly amateurish, as is some of the acting. The action scenes are a mishmash of adequate and, well, they were at least smart enough to not try some of the more difficult effects. A little audio, maybe some debris, time to move on.

But the zombies themselves are interesting. Good solid makeup. I haven’t kept up with the general sociological development of the zombie community (outside of one superb Minnesota Fringe Festival show exploring the social life of zombies), so perhaps this is not all that new – but these zombies had vanity. The aforementioned stolen wig, hats and glasses, and even a group interested in dancing, all showing they’re more than just murderous creatures from another dimension.

But that they are.

And then there’s the story. On the one hand, the acting dulls some of the more subtle edges, and the characterization is somewhat hit & miss. But when it hit, it did well. Case in point is a character, seen once on a B&W television, named the Garbageman. He delivers a frightening warning to the viewers of the TV show, hitting the timing perfectly to come across as a battle-weary veteran of the zombie wars.

And just what’s going on? A TV is misdelivered to a residence, where it powers itself up and begins spitting out zombies. The lone resident is summarily butchered, but the zombies disappear. Six months later, the house has been sold and a brother and sister, barely adults, are prepping it for their parents. The TV, sitting in the attic, lures the young man upstairs. Zombies jump out and attack, but he escapes in a marijuana haze, not believing what has happened.

Neighbors are not so fortunate, finding various ways to be offed by the invaders, but a man from Texas shows up looking for the TV; before long, he and the annoying young man (his voice inflections were wretched) are on the hunt for wandering invaders, who are really driving down home values. Eventually, the young man is used as bait in a most amusing way, and the slaughter of the invaders begin.

And goes awry. This plot has twists and turns, although they’re not really symbolic of anything, which is a bit disappointing, but are good if you’re indulging in some sort of game during the show.

In general, a movie that disrespects its story really annoys me. Any story has rules – bad stories break them. They’re both spoken and unspoken, but they form the backbone by which people can measure their own responses to exotic situations; by breaking them, they lessen the importance of the viewer’s tentative reactions (see here for more on the survival facets of story telling), and thus dull the story in the eyes of the audience.

And, in this respect, the story really follows through. Several constraints are stated at the outset, and they are scrupulously followed by the movie makers, making for a rather delightful approach to the ultimate elimination of the zombies roaming the forest.

In the end, though, complications ensue, and a predictable ending brings the movie to a close.

I think what we can say about this amateur hour effort is that there are actually some good bones to the story, but it’s hampered by technical problems, and the story could have used a couple of more drafts to hone it. But the humor made me laugh, and I had to admire the fidelity to the precepts of the story.

Good try, guys.

And I particularly enjoyed the David Bowie zombie. Rarely do I see such emotion in a zombie.

Oh, nothing like seeing someone use one of your favorite Word of the Days.

http://www.gocomics.com/bloom-county/2017/04/04

I’d be worried.

Oreos fans sampling the limited-edition Peeps Oreos in February expressed alarm that not only their tongues and saliva turned pink, but also their stools (and leaving a pink ring in the bowl). A gastroenterologist told Live Science it was nothing to worry about. [News of the Weird]

Heh.

Continuing this thread, in NewScientist (25 March 2017) Owen Gaffney may have touched on the real reason Russia interfered in the United States elections – climate denier and new EPA chief Scott Pruitt:

Pruitt’s appointment, part of a grander, darker geopolitical strategy, makes that reshaping less likely. This is not about the science. It is not about economic priority setting nor conflicting values. It is not about a desire for small government, the primacy of individual freedom or myopic belief in capitalism. The only fact that matters is that solving the climate issue means killing the fossil fuel industry – arguably the most influential on the planet. …

Dealing with climate change means summoning the economic “gales of creative destruction” – economist Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase for how innovation kills and replaces old industries to drive economic growth.

The first gales are here. Zero-carbon technology is now cheaper and easier to install. Renewables promise individual freedom through energy self-sufficiency.

The world economy is at a crucial inflection point. The US is well placed to ride the storm and capitalise on the next economic revolution. But vested interests dominate the landscape and US policy could delay the revolution.

In contrast, there are no Russian gales. Its economy is a basket case. Apart from oil and gas, it produces little anyone wants to buy. A clean energy revolution is likely to put its economy in a death spiral.

And, being a strong man country in its essence, Putin cannot afford to look in the least weak. Obama’s war on Russia has put Putin in a precarious position, and the restivity demonstrated by the citizenry recently must have made him nervous, although I suspect he works hard to keep the police corrupt. An honorable citizen is his most frightening enemy.

Russian attempts to influence elements of the United States is a subject we’ve discussed before, but it’s worth noting how Gaffney ties it to Putin through his euphemism – death spiral of the economy. But this may be more desperation than sinister plotting, because the free enterprise system, for all its faults, is tied to freedom of choice and free flow of information, and therein lies the key to proper decision-making. Are some American citizens misinformed? Inevitably. That’s part & parcel of the system. Russian influence may result in more misinformed, misbehaving citizens than normal. But so long as those who believe in truth and the essential goodness of their fellow Americans continue to speak out, disseminate real information, and practice Strong Science, industry will take note and change in order to follow the money. We’ve already seen this with the advent of Tesla, tapping into a surprising demand for electric cars. States where science is strong are moving away from polluting technologies.

Just gotta keep shouting.

It’s a continuing roller coaster for Israel’s government. First, the joy of not having a President Clinton. Now the sudden realization there’s an ambitious new President in the United States – ambitious and contemptuous of norms in a way that may make Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu yearn for the years of President Obama. Ben Caspit opines in AL Monitor:

Netanyahu had explained to the ministers that this was Trump’s request, a request that ought to be fulfilled. According to an Israeli diplomatic source, wind of something Trump had said had reached Israel. When Trump’s associates asked him what he would do if the Israelis and Palestinians failed to reach a peace deal, Trump said, according to the source, “Then I’ll do what I understand should be done.” Netanyahu doesn’t really want to find out the hard way what the president understands should be done. This strange turn of events, in which Israel’s most extreme right-wing government offers to limit West Bank settlement construction, is the tip of a giant iceberg of important events taking place under the radar.

The bottom line is that Netanyahu clearly knows how challenging the coming year will be. It might be even more difficult than the bad old days he spent dueling with President Barack Obama. He knows that Trump is determined to deliver the “ultimate deal.” While Netanyahu officially expressed his support for a two-state solution in his famous 2009 Bar Ilan speech, he has no real faith in the process or any desire to carry out significant concessions to achieve that goal. Netanyahu would be willing to gamble all his pension money on zero chances for achieving an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Therefore, Netanyahu’s game is to orchestrate the events of the coming year in such a way that the blowing up of diplomatic contacts between Israel and the Palestinians, and the sooner-or-later diplomatic dead end, will be the obvious fault of the Palestinians, not Israel. That is the whole story in a nutshell. Netanyahu knows he has no other option, assuming he will still be in power when it happens.

But surely they must be aware of the possibility – even probability – that Trump will be impeached. I’m guessing the Prime Minister will continue to prevaricate and delay until – he hopes – President Pence can take over. Pence is also a fringe radical, but may have far more respect for the Middle East than Trump does.

The Environmental Defense Fund has been releasing maps of methane leaks for various US cities, created with the help of Google Map’s vehicles. Here’s Pittsburgh:

Pittsburgh methane leaks, Source: EDF.

Here’s Indianapolis.

Indianapolis methane leaks. Source: EDF.

Who do you think spends more on fixing methane leaks?

Megan Treacy on Treehugger.com comments:

Why don’t more cities replace the pipes? The upgrades are very expensive. Replacing just a mile of pipeline can cost between $1.5 and $2 million. Utilities typically only replace pipes where major leaks are found while slower leaks are left alone.

The exception is in New Jersey where the state’s largest utility is taking on a major pipe replacement project. The Public Service Electric & Gas (PSEG) worked with the Environmental Defense Fund and Google to map out hundreds of miles of urban pipeline and found that their own estimates were way off. The utility now has a detailed plan to replace 510 miles of pipes and reduce methane emissions by 83 percent by 2018.

At a price of $1.5M / mile, that suggests New Jersey will be spending something like $750M to $1B. Has anyone told GOP Governor Chris Christie about this?

And the importance of methane? Jason Mark of the Sierra Club explains in Earth Island Journal:

Actually, any CH₄ released today is at least 56 times more heat-trapping than a molecule of CO₂ also released today. And because of the way it reacts in the atmosphere, the number is probably even higher, according to research conducted by Drew Shindell, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Center. So why is the 21 times figure the one that gets bandied about? Because methane breaks down much faster than carbon dioxide. While CO₂ remains in the atmosphere for at least a century (and probably much, much longer, according to Stanford’s Ken Caldeira), CH₄ lasts only about a dozen years. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to come up with a way for comparing different greenhouse gases, it decided to use a century baseline to calculate a molecule’s “global warming potential.”

In light of the repeated falsehoods coming from Senator McConnell regarding the confirmation of Supreme Court justices (“we never do that in election years“, his reference to the non-existent Biden Rule, his misleading interpretation of Biden’s proposal, his suggestion there’s no principled stand against Gorsuch, and some minor stuff that can be found here), I think there’s an opportunity next time Mitch comes up for election, an opportunity for Republican or Democrat.

Suggest to voters he’s suffering from dementia.

Sure, someone could lie and poorly rationalize this badly. But it’d be more fun watching him and his supporters become angry at the suggestion that he’s incompetent.

But the alternative, of course, is admitting he’s just lying and therefore betraying sacred Senate traditions.

Sure, he’ll wiggle and scream foul. But reminding voters of his preference for party over country will certainly break a few votes loose. And he just might lose his cool.

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare can share the pain of the Trump transition team, as he too has been incidentally collected. The information was used to warn him that he might be the target of spear-phishing attack:

My point here is that incidental collection in and of itself is not a bad thing. It’s merely an inherent feature of surveillance. To say that the Trump transition was the subject of incidental collection communicates nothing of interest at all. Of course it was.

And guess what? So are members of Senate of the United States and the House of Representatives.

To know whether incidental collection is good or bad or neutral with respect to the civil liberties of its subjects, you have to know not merely that it occurred, but what happened to the information afterwards. In my case, it was a very good thing. And if for any reason there exists some intelligence reporting around the government that the FBI warned “US Person Number 437” about a spear-phishing attack planned against him after a presidential tweet, and if any official is wondering who that “US Person Number 437” may be, let me save you the trouble of asking the bureau to unmask him.

That would be me.

And please guys, feel free to incidentally collect on me like that any time you like.

Realism from a professional.

First heard in conversation yesterday.

Planning to waterski on Mars? Not so fast. Following up on earlier speculation concerning what appears to be water on Mars, NewScientist (25 March 2017) is reporting that what has been thought to be streaks of water may be something else:

“There’s part of your brain that immediately tells you that it should be ice melting,” says Sylvain Piqueux at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. “The problem is, it’s really hard to melt ice on Mars.”

Now, Frédéric Schmidt at the University of Paris-South and his colleagues have an idea that needs no liquids: sand avalanches caused by sunlight and shadow.

When sunlight hits the sand, it heats up the top layer while leaving deeper layers cool. This temperature gradient changes the pressure of tiny gas pockets around the sand particles, shifting the gas upward. This in turn jostles grains of sand and soil, causing them to slip down the Martian slopes.

The effect should be most pronounced in afternoon shadows cast by boulders or outcrops. In this situation, the contrast between the cooling surface and the still-warm layers just below creates a pressure gradient as well, shifting the gas and sand even more (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/b4jr).

Killing is not a context-free activity.

The old morality of a man defending his honor by killing the man his wife is sleeping with comes under fire in Human Desire (1954). We see it unfold from the viewpoint of a man, Jeff, caught in the outer swirl of the vortex of doom which is pulling down the murderer and his wife. Jeff”s a Korean War vet, fresh home from the war, the romantic fixation of a fresh young lady, and a railroad engineer; the murderer, Carl, assistant to the station master, loses his cool with his boss and is fired for his troubles. Knowing his much younger wife has some influence with a railroad customer, he presses her to ask him for a favor.

The job is won back, but it slowly dawns on him that the price she paid for his job was a trifle high. Knowing the customer’s schedule is putting him on the train, he forces his wife to write a note indicating another opportunity to thank him for the job, and on the train he avenges his honor in the ways of old, and appropriates the incriminating letter to boot.

Through lucky happenstance, she finds an ally in Jeff, and she works her charms on him, looking for a way free from the vortex whirling about her. The fresh young lady, too much of a novice to the ways of warfare, fades from the engineer’s mind, as the carnal desires take over. Meanwhile, the murderer himself is not insensitive to his act, and his drinking worsens, the sprite of guilt riding his hefty shoulder.

The moment comes, she strikes for her freedom – will it work? How much more dark death will be dealt?

This is a plot of shifting glances and lifted chins, of dawning thoughts and insecure egos, of men aware of their limitations – and being pushed past them, relying on the old, outdated instincts which evolution installed in us – and forgot to remove when they became inappropriate. Of fighting against instant gratification – and losing.

This is film noir.

And if you like it, this is Recommended.