Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Tangentially with regards to Obama’s alleged primary failure, former Secretary of Labor for President Clinton Robert Reich recently visited Washington and thinks Trump’s victory is the result of people distrusting an apparently rigged system. What happened when he mentioned that to various denizens of Washington?

Many people asked, bewilderedly, “How did this [Trump] happen?” When I suggest it had a lot to do with the 35-year-long decline of incomes of the bottom 60 percent; the growing sense, ever since the Wall Street bailout, that the game is rigged; and the utter failure of both Republicans and Democrats to reverse these trends — they give me blank stares.

Here’s his Tweet; this Daily Kos posting from Keith Pickering is more legible.

If Trump leaves before four years have elapsed, his successor may have to consider returning Glass-Steagall to law after an appropriate campaign to blame its abolition for the Great Recession. It would certainly be easy enough, since it’s already been written; industry should remember it, if not fondly, but better, perhaps, than Dodd-Frank; and it may even be true that its removal by a business-owned Congress is to blame for the Great Recession.

If we accept and continue the story arc of blame, the GOP‘s plan to replace the ACA with a vastly inferior substitute could be a devastating act of seppuku, perhaps leading to its reincarnation as a reasonable political party once again. However, in the interim, who will take over in the power vacuum?

Palladium:

(secondary) A palladium or palladion is an image or other object of great antiquity on which the safety of a city or nation is said to depend. The word is a generalization from the name of the original Trojan Palladium, a wooden statue (xoanon) of Pallas Athena that Odysseus and Diomedes stole from the citadel of Troy and which was supposedly later taken to the future site of Rome by Aeneas, where it remained until perhaps transferred to Constantinople and lost sight of after the conversion of the Empire to Christianity. [Wikipedia]

Noted in President George Washington’s Farewell Address:

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.

While politicians may be able to get away with deny climate change, but the Pentagon has to be more careful. Military Times reports on the contents of the Quadrennial Defense Review:

Economic competition. Thawing in the Arctic has opened new maritime routes and revealed new energy sources, creating new competition between the U.S. and Russia. The Pentagon’s 2013 Arctic Strategy statement details its plans for safeguarding American interests there and ensuring freedom of navigation. It calls the region a “strategic inflection point,” noting that as the ice caps continue to melt, there will be rush to claim the oil, natural gas and other resources there.

The Pentagon views the Arctic as vital for establishing ballistic missile defenses to safeguard the homeland. But  Russia’s buildup there has greatly exceeded that of the United States. Its military has established a new Arctic command, added four brigades, 14 airfields, 16 ports, and has 40 operational icebreakers and 11 in production. The U.S. has only one working icebreaker, and it was commissioned in the 1970s.

In the South China Sea, warming waters have forced fish stocks to migrate north, increasing the potential for conflict between China and U.S. allies whose economies depend on that trade, says Frank Femia, who heads the Center for Climate and Security. The non-partisan think tank includes several senior retired military officers concerned about climate change and its impact on national security.

A reminder that climate change will be changing the very nature of many conflicts, both military and economic. The refusal of many in the US Congress to acknowledge and begin to deal with climate change and its results may doom the United States ambitions to disappointment.

IT’S HARD TO SAY, as a crisis properly handled could turn things around. But right at the moment, it appears President Trump’s budget and backing for the GOP ACA replacement is not playing well to the crowd, according to Gallup:

This looks to be his low point so far, and tomorrow’s update should be fascinating, although honestly his approval rating (37% in this chart, with a disapproval rating of 58%) will probably move back up as the vagaries of polling and regression to the mean takeover. But I think we’re seeing the results of being an autocratic business owner thrust into a government office which attracts constant attention for its occupants’ behavior – and their attention to liberal democracy ideals. He admits his policies will hurt his own supporters; he wants to inflate the military even more; and while some of his more outré promises continue to have his active support, many others have fallen by the wayside. His New York mannerisms may have played well with those who needed to hear that someone sympathized with their economic plight, and would promise to do something for them, there may now be a dawning recognition that they are little more than a convenient trampoline. As a private business owner, Trump only rarely had to worry about the facts, as they only assumed importance in courts of law who insisted he pay attention to those facts. But in the public sector, an insistent free press makes facts and truth more important, more relevant – if not to him, then to those who are affected by his actions, and can return the favor. I wonder if his support for Speaker Ryan’s ridiculous replacement for the ACA was, in part, a political quid pro quo to not be impeached.

My question remains the same – will he resign, or will he be thrust out forcibly by Congress?

A lush example of the murder mystery genre, Laura (1944) is a leisurely delight. A body, shot in the face with a shotgun, is found in the entryway of a high end apartment by the maid, and the hunt is on for Laura Hunt’s (ahem!) killer. Is it her long-time mentor and (perhaps) lover, the caustically witty and famous columnist, Waldo Lydecker? Is it her alleged fiancee and wastrel, Shelby Carpenter? Is it the woman who also loves Shelby, Diane Redfern?

Is it the woman who also loves Shelby, Ann Treadwell? Was it the maid, Bessy?

Heck, we even speculated it was the cop, the hard-boiled Mark McPherson.

This is a quietly all-around well-made movie, featuring luscious, intriguing sets. But the real treat is the competition between a story that weaves together questions of guilt, love, and passion, and the actors who are performing the story. To the former are the strengths of understanding the difference between information and critical information, as we try to discern who committed this horrific crime – and why? And dialog which clarifies the characters for us – the rapid fire patter of the columnist, Lydecko, the brusque, brooding lines of McPherson, and the languid, vague inspidities of the wastrel, Carpenter. We hear them and they help us zero in on the essence of these characters. But along with that comes a plot featuring move and counter-move, ambiguities and how they pain both he who has to interpret those ambiguities – and she who delivers them. Did she break her word to him – or did she just break his word to himself?

But characters need actors, and these actors deliver. Dana Andrews is a particular standout as the cop, McPherson, clearly communicating that this is a man with some inner demons, leaving us wondering how they drive him – to find guilty murderers, or be one himself? But matching him is Clifton Webb as the ascerbic Lydecko, so often ready with a murderous quip, a prick pried from his shell by the beautiful Laura Hunt. Laura, seen in flashbacks, and fiancee Carpenter, played by an absolutely towering Vincent Price, are forced to the second tier in this movie, despite valiant efforts. But even outside of the main cast, regardless of very limited minutes, both the maid Bessy and Carpenter’s third place lover, Ann Treadwell, are brought to devious life by performances which stir up questions about themselves and human nature which well-nigh demand movies in themselves to answer. Kudos to both story and actors for giving them backgrounds which actually, in one case, made my skin crawl. But, perhaps most to the entire movie’s credit, afterwards my Arts Editor and I talked out several small plot holes – but we didn’t care. The momentum of the movie carried us through those and on to the finale.

This is a movie which can grab your attention and not let go until the final shot is fired and the clock runs out on our murderer.

Strongly Recommended.

Lee Schafer opines in the StarTribune on the inexplicable behavior of Jim Surdyk in breaking the law concerning Sunday liquor sales, and in the process manages to bring President Trump into it:

The rule of law takes a beating in this kind of political environment, too. It’s particularly telling that one in four respondents in a February survey said President Donald Trump should be able to overturn a judge’s decision if he happened to disagree with it.

Our new president isn’t exactly a staunch defender of our traditional sense of the rule of law, of course. He has done things like complaining that our laws forbidding Americans to bribe people when doing business abroad are “horrible” and criticizing a “so-called judge” for taking “law enforcement away from our country.”

Yet this is an issue that seems to have partisans on both sides with blind spots, and critics of the president seem to have a cart-and-horse problem when discussing issues like a perceived threat to our rule of law. It seems far more accurate to call his election as president a result of what’s been happening in our culture, not the cause of it.

Meanwhile, over at The Minnesota Skinny, Frank (I think) also drags President Trump into the Surdyk fray as he defends the opening of the Surdyk’s liquor store.:

It might not have been the right thing, it might not have been the fair thing, but the numbers may one day reveal a risk that produced value despite the penalty. For a similar example, we can look toward the White House.

We still haven’t seen Donald Trump’s tax returns, and you know what? We’re never going to. Never ever ever. No stupid petition you sign on the Internet is going to get those books open. Bernie Sanders might as well shout into a seashell. Trump was supposed to open the books during his campaign, wasn’t he? I’ve no doubt the contents of those returns would have him removed from the White House, but nobody can make him produce them. So, he didn’t. He was lambasted, he’s still being lambasted, but it didn’t stop him from getting elected. Nobody could punish him then, and sure as hell nobody can punish him now.

Frank looks at the law as simply part of the risk equation of life, while Lee is looking at the law as a more sacred part of society, the part that helps us get along with each other. Honestly, while Frank’s view has a certain hipster appeal to it, it’s the sort of approach that only works so long as a small fraction of society is doing it. What happens if everyone decides to drive faster than everyone else? We end up with pileups worth of a Formula 1 race. Robbing banks? We can tolerate that until everyone’s robbing a bank. Frank’s approach is the parasite’s approach, the approach that seems to yield great results – but, to lapse into software engineering patois, it has no scalability.

And, of course, it suffers from the ethical lapse of the end justifies the means.

Getting back to Surdyk and his liquor store for a moment, I’ll just state right now that, for the next couple of years, my wife and I will not be visiting Surdyk’s for any of his products. Sure, this is symbolic – we go through maybe 5 bottles of wine a year, mostly for cooking, and there are wine shops much closer than Surdyk’s. But we have visited there in the past, as they have a better selection than most places, and the smell of the cheese shop is quite heavenly.

But we’re going to take a skip. His lack of respect for society is repugnant.

If you’re an American, President George Washington should require no introduction (and I’ll just point you here if you want one). However, knowing about him and studying his thoughts on the matter of the construction of the United States are two entirely different things. Being the first President of the United States, he faced a special challenge in nearly all he did during the time of his Presidency, and perhaps his Farewell Address was not the least of the challenges.

Once beyond his confessions of humility and doubt, President Washington proceeds to delve into the necessary structures of the United States, and the dangers, within and without, which he saw facing it. I entered into reading it wondering if it would be quaint (and its language is definitely not that of today, being more metaphorical) and perhaps out of date.

Half way through it, I find myself wondering why the study of Washington’s Farewell Address is not a required study subject in high school. Not a specialist subject, as it is addressed to all citizens; and its subjects range from a defense of the construction of the government to the lessons learned by a man of now elder years (presumably written in 1797, he would have been sixty five hard-lived years of military and government service). And some are of spectacular relevance to today. I think it would benefit many students to begin contemplating the issues which resound even in today’s society.

I commend its sober reading and meditation upon to you; meanwhile, I’ll pull out some particularly relevant passages and blog about them over the next few weeks.

In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection. The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on this head; they have seen, in the negotiation by the Executive, and in the unanimous ratification by the Senate, of the treaty with Spain, and in the universal satisfaction at that event, throughout the United States, a decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to their interests in regard to the Mississippi; they have been witnesses to the formation of two treaties, that with Great Britain, and that with Spain, which secure to them everything they could desire, in respect to our foreign relations, towards confirming their prosperity. Will it not be their wisdom to rely for the preservation of these advantages on the Union by which they were procured ? Will they not henceforth be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from their brethren and connect them with aliens?

One of Washington’s primary themes is that of the inadvisability of Party. I suspect this came from both sad experience, as Party tends to magnify ambition and, potentially, ruthlessness, over duty and loyalty, as well as the recent history exhibited by their late Colonial masters, the English and the many Parties indulged in by elite of England. In this paragraph we see a lesson easily applicable to the Iran nuclear deal, a negotiation adamantly opposed by the GOP for reasons readily dismissed by experts. The opposition soon came to be viewed with puzzlement by those not swayed by Party loyalty, and today I credit jealousy and a terror of being rendered irrelevant to the great political drama of the country for the sad behavior of the GOP; the latter might also explain the inexplicable behavior of their behavior in relation to the ACA.

His theme, at its heart, calls for the greater loyalty to be to Country over Party, and this, of course, make sense, for if our loyalties are greater to Party, then the Country is threatened with dissolution as Parties become geographically-affiliated entities; worse yet, this is a potentially recursive operation, until portions of the former Country are partitioned into small entities, and, not unlike the Greek cities of history, at erratic war with each other.

Such is not conducive to prosperity and progress in vital areas, and leaves humanity in a miserable condition. (See the video in this post for an authoritative voice on matter in today’s society.) Thus, by extension I am willing to bet that he suggests the evaluation of each candidate for office of their own terms, rather than their affiliation with Party: on policy stance, administrative competency, and other such matters. Adherence to Party? That’s the mug’s game.

Although President Washington might select a more graceful phraseology for what is my informal interpretation.

This is an old, commercial site that I just ran across – how to make model cars out of beverage cans. Sandy’s CanCars:

Cool stuff. More here.

superprecocial:

In biology, precocial species are those in which the young are relatively mature and mobile from the moment of birth or hatching. …

Extremely precocial species are called “superprecocial”. Examples are the Megapode birds, which have full flight feathers and which, in some species, can fly on the same day they hatch from their eggs. [Wikipedia]

Seen in “Flipping the birds,” Jeff Hecht, NewScientist (4 March 2017, paywall):

Where the eggs hatched is also odd. We know that adult opposite birds mostly lived in forests and had feet made for perching on branches, but fossil nests show they began their lives in eggs partly buried in soil. The ground-dwelling bush turkeys, or megapodes, of Australia are a modern example of this. Their chicks dig their way out of the ground after hatching, a bit like turtles. Megapodes are also the only living birds with superprecocial young, says David Varricchio of Montana State University. “[They] are completely independent of their parents. They hatch and run off on their own.”

When it comes to robots usurping human jobs, most libertarians will point to history to prove that they are no threat to overall human employment. However, in NewScientist (4 March 2017, paywall) Sumit Paul-Choudhury disagrees:

Those who back the robot revolution often point out that previous upheavals have always created new kinds of jobs to replace the ones that have gone extinct. However, one important pressure valve might not work this time. Previously, when automation hit one sector, employees could decamp to other industries. But the sweep of machine learning means that many sectors are automating simultaneously. So maybe it’s not about how many jobs are left after the machines are done taking their pick, but which ones.

The evidence so far suggests they might not be very satisfying. For example, we have seen the rise of the “gig economy”, in which algorithms direct low-skilled human workers. While this is an employer’s dream, it is frequently an insecure, unfulfilling and sometimes exploitative grind for workers.

Sumit goes on to discuss the taxation of robots and the possible use of UBI to cushion the plight of displaced workers; perhaps robot taxation could be used to fund UBI. But his suggestion that the robot onslaught will hit all sectors simultaneously is both interesting and somewhat suspect. Why? Because robots don’t come equipped ready to take over a job. They require specialized training, even more so than the more advanced humans they are replacing, because they have no instincts and no general base of knowledge to fall back on. However, once a training result is established, it’s far more easily replicated than it is among humans; and, of course, they’re cheaper, on average, than humans, and if an accident occurs, there’s little chance of being sued just because a robot is wrecked.

At least not until the robots are artificially intelligent and can value their own existence.

Andrew Sullivan supplements last week’s discussion of intersectionality in this week’s column in New York Magazine:

It’s also a useful insight, it seems to me, to see “intersectionality” as responding to a practical problem on the “social justice” left: how to prevent each oppressed group fighting the others. If everything is connected, and if you can’t separate out one oppressed identity from all the rest, then we have a chance for a truce: Everyone against white straight men! There’s something perfectly perverse about an anti-sexist and anti-racist movement agreeing on an “enemy” that is defined by sex and race. What’s also revealing is where the intolerance is strongest. Brookings’s Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias have crunched the numbers. The answer is: the most expensive colleges. Specifically:

The average enrollee at a college where students have attempted to restrict free speech comes from a family with an annual income $32,000 higher than that of the average student in America.

What you have here is an elite class paying for their kids to avoid ideas that might make them uncomfortable.

So the act of demonization is the result of coming to a conclusion in the arena of justice, no? A problem is identified and a malefactor, or group thereof, is identified. So far, so good. But then both an intellectual and physical violence is visited upon that malefactor, as discussed last week, Is this really an element of justice? Granted, pacifists are rarely winners, and the Hindu counter-example is really that of tactics, not strategy (or, as an unnamed colleague from 30 years ago said, “What if it hadn’t been the British, but the Nazis?”). However, we are not in the arena of governmentally enforced justice, but that of the pinnacles of higher education, implicitly loyal to the free debate of ideas.

Furthermore, if I were a member of one of these social justice groups, I’d have to be wondering about the leaders of the other groups – who are simply sincere, and which are trying to ride their horse to greater power? Justice should be harmonious; groups fighting each other should not require some overriding, new philosophy to meld them together into some faux-fighting force. If they’re at war with each other, either there’s some bad information out there – or some bad philosophy.

Finally, using force can be a counter-productive strategy. Andrew goes on to note an observation by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar that

Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed.

These are groups already, to some extent, distrustful of the Eastern liberal elite colleges; to visit violence upon them is unconscionable and unworthy of those Eastern elites (although I should point out that recent studies also point at well-educated conservatives as being among the strongest proponents of such groups as climate change denial and creationism). And it’s a betrayal of the principles of those colleges.

In essence, it sounds to me like they continue to be too lazy to work out the differences between the groups, to understand how justice must play into their social justice movement. They invent a new philosophy that justifies short-cuts, and employ it.

Let’s not play into the Marshal Tito fallacy, wherein disparate groups are forcibly bonded together, this time using bad philosophy. We’re already seeing the intellectual failures appear. The followers of intersectionality really need to be better than that.

And if they want to be better – each individual should spend a year in a small, dying town. Work in the diner, and SHUT UP. Listen to what these Americans have to say. Figure out where they’re coming from. Develop some empathy for them. If nothing else, learning your opponents intimately is always a good practice. But you might find out – they’re as sincere as you are. They just may hold different assumptions.

1. The advent of the automated car has led the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to adopt a hierarchy of classifications in order to categorize the vehicle you may be driving in the future.  Wikipedia has a quick summary:

• Level 0: Automated system has no vehicle control, but may issue warnings.
• Level 1: Driver must be ready to take control at any time. Automated system may include features such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Parking Assistance with automated steering, and Lane Keeping Assistance (LKA) Type II in any combination.
• Level 2: The driver is obliged to detect objects and events and respond if the automated system fails to respond properly. The automated system executes accelerating, braking, and steering. The automated system can deactivate immediately upon takeover by the driver.
• Level 3: Within known, limited environments (such as freeways), the driver can safely turn their attention away from driving tasks, but must still be prepared to take control when needed.
• Level 4: The automated system can control the vehicle in all but a few environments such as severe weather. The driver must enable the automated system only when it is safe to do so. When enabled, driver attention is not required.
• Level 5: Other than setting the destination and starting the system, no human intervention is required. The automatic system can drive to any location where it is legal to drive and make its own decisions.

TechRepublic presents an overview and analysis:

So why are the levels important? They serve as general guidelines for how technologically advanced a vehicle is. In terms of what consumers need to know, Thilo Koslowski, former analyst for Gartner, thinks that ultimately, there are three stages that will be relevant: “automated, autonomous, and driverless.” It’s important to distinguish between “autonomous” and “driverless,” he said: “driverless is a more advanced stage of autonomous.”

But while drivers themselves may be less concerned with the distinctions, the differences could be significant when it comes to issues like car insurance, which is expected to change radically in the era of self-driving cars.

KPMG, a consulting firm, has issued a report on how the car insurance business will be affected, since the number of accidents are predicted to go down 80% by 2040. The different levels are important because they “change the risk profile of the car,” according to KPMG expert Jerry Albright. “Insurance companies need to understand how these new capabilities affect driving risk.” Joe Schneider, managing director at KPMG, put it this way: “It’s like a baby, going from crawling to walking to running.”

Albright said, “The car becomes safer and safer as it moves towards fully-autonomous driving.”

But Jamais Cascio reports in NewScientist (4 March 2017, paywall) that the assertion may actually be false – some stages actually regress:

Level 3 allows the driver to safely turn attention away on some road types, but to be ready to take over – and it’s what is up next for commercially available autonomous cars. Audi is poised to launch one by 2018, with Nissan, Honda and Kia to follow.

However, Ford has cast doubt on the wisdom of this road map. In tests of level 3 systems, it has found that drivers lose “situational awareness”, sometimes falling asleep. The problem persists even with buzzers, vibrating seats and a second engineer to watch the first.

As a result, Ford technical lead Raj Nair has restated the company’s desire to skip level 3. It aims to make fully autonomous cars by 2021, without pedals or steering wheels, for use within a predefined area: level 4 autonomy. The intent is to create a vehicle for ride-sharing or ride-hailing. Passengers would be free to chat, use phones or nap without worrying about taking control… because they can’t take control.

And, of course, that last sentence may freak some people out. Like me. Even though you also can’t take control of a bus, or a train. But in those cases, they’re an act of faith in your fellow human, someone you can empathize with, even chat with. Not so much the computer running the car, though, especially if you’ve heard that certain Big Data techniques can result in conclusions which, although correct, are not really explainable, even by the algorithm’s coders and creators.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Will there be underground games involving messing with the traffic patterns that’ll evolve from automated cars? On the other hand, will it be harder to sabotage automated vehicles, i.e. the bomb in the boot trick which is seen from time to time?

Here comes the future – hang on tight.

Regarding the importance of the Presidential oath of office, Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare continue their discussion, noting we may be seeing the evolution of an entirely new body of law in which the person, and not just the role, is in play during judicial reviews:

In this scenario, the underlying law is not actually moving much, or moving or at all, but the normal rules of deference and presumption of regularity in presidential conduct—the rules that underlie norms like not looking behind a facially valid purpose for a visa issuance decision—simply don’t apply to Trump. As we’ve argued, these norms are a function of the president’s oath of office and the working assumption that the President is bound by the Take Care Clause. If the judiciary doesn’t trust the sincerity of the president’s oath and doesn’t have any presumption that the president will take care that the laws are faithfully executed, why on earth would it assume that a facially valid purpose of the executive is its actual purpose?

In this scenario, there are really two presidencies for purposes of judicial review: One is the presidency when judges believe the president’s oath—that is, a presidency in which all sorts of norms of deference apply—and the other is a presidency in which judges don’t believe the oath. What we may be watching here is the development of a new body of law for this second type of presidency.

This, we suspect, is the true significance of all of the references in both district court opinions to the many statements made by Trump and his aides about the Muslim ban and the true purpose of the policy effectuated in both orders. These references present, of course, as discussions of whether there is truly a secular purpose to the policy in an Establishment Clause analysis using the Lemon test. But there’s at least a little more going on here than that. The lengthy recitations of large numbers of perfectly objectionable presidential statements about Muslims coexist with a bunch of other textual indicia showing not merely that the judges doubt Trump’s secular purpose but that they doubt the good faith of his purpose at all—indeed, that they suspect that he is simply lying about his own motivations.

Perhaps an unanticipated move by the judiciary, but it does seem logical. The erratic behavior of Trump during the campaign and, more importantly, since his victory in the Electoral College, has been alarming – and it’s not been just a media thing, I suspect, for the judiciary, but a real What The Hell Is This? moment.

So, if Benjamin and Quinta are correct, what does this presage for the future? Will the character and publicized utterances of a President, or other officer of the government, become a regularly pertinent facet in court cases? Will the judiciary come to a collective, informal conclusion concerning the trustability of the President & other officers during judicial reviews of the Executive Branch? And will this lead to a political polarization of the judiciary, or will their loyalties be largely to the judiciary rather than the political party which happened to appoint them? I suspect that as the political parties become cognizant of a new body of law, they will redouble their attempts to control the judiciary – although this would collide with the current urgings to make judges an elective, rather than appointed, position.

So long as we are a tolerant liberal democracy at heart, we can hope for a judiciary that remains loyal to its own ideals. But if we continue down the path of mutual intolerance, where the vendetta against “liberal” continues largely unrebuffed by the conservative community, where the worst tendencies of religious sects are uncurbed and even nurtured by congregants distrustful of education and expertise, and where, on the other side, the loathing and disdain for their political opponents by the progressive community leaves me cold and unsympathetic to their position … where was I going with this? Oh, yeah, I was getting a bit pompous. And, honestly, I grew up in an era where the intolerance of both sides was primarily a fringe phenomenon; I suspect, if you look through American history, you see a lot of this sort of thing, and we’ve mostly survived it – with the ugly volcanic exception of the Civil War.

So now we’re going through another period of religious dominance and political intolerance. Hopefully, the lessons of such soft-minded indulgences are not lost on the new generations, who’ll use them to relearn the lesson of mutual tolerance and trust which makes us a great nation.

It sounds like a silly experiment, but the results are fascinating. NewScientist (4 March 2017) reports that you can train bees:

IT’S a hole-in-one! Bumblebees have learned to push a ball into a hole to get a reward, stretching what small-brained creatures were thought capable of.

Previous studies showed that bees could do smart things to objects directly attached to a food reward, such as pulling a string to get at food. Olli Loukola at Queen Mary University of London and his team decided the next challenge was to get bees to learn to move an object not attached to a reward.

They built a circular platform with a small hole in the centre filled with sugar solution, into which bees had to move a ball to get a reward. A researcher showed them how to do this by using a plastic bee on a stick to push the ball.

The bees did learn, and even minimised the effort needed by choosing the ball closest to the hole (Science, doi.org/bz98).

From the abstact of the academic article in Science:

Bees that observed demonstration of the technique from a live or model demonstrator learned the task more efficiently than did bees observing a “ghost” demonstration (ball moved via magnet) or without demonstration.

I’m not entirely certain if this suggests a limitation of the bee’s cognitive abilities – it has to see a creature just like it in order to recognize its own potentiality – or a demonstration that it can recognize a creature like itself, which seems unremarkable. The first link in the article selection, above, is to a video of the bees demonstrating their string pulling ability, a  previous achievement.

Muppets From Space (1999) focuses on the loneliness and quest of Gonzo for his own kind. The late Henson’s ensemble focuses on contrasting Gonzo’s plight with the Muppet theatrical company of Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fonzie, and the rest of the gang, as well as a family of lab rats, and how such families come together to face down threats to the individuals that make up such families, even as they wrangle and annoy each other.

It’s a sweet, frazzled movie, climaxing with the appearance of Gonzo’s kind from outer space. True to form, they are supportive and happy to find Gonzo, even when he realizes his real family has been there for him all along: Kermit and the gang. Sweetly instructive for children, this movie has less to offer the adult viewer, but is a reminder of the glory of The Muppet Show (1976-1981), which charmed children and adults alike during its run.

Berkefeld filter:

A Berkefeld filter^[1] is a water filter made of diatomaceous earth (Kieselguhr). It was invented in Germany in 1891, and by 1922 was being marketed in the United Kingdom by the Berkefeld Filter Co.^[2] Berkefeld was the name of owner of the mine in Hanover, Germany, where the ceramic material was obtained.

The Berkefeld is a good bacterial water filter used in microbiological laboratories, in homes and out in the field. [Wikipedia]

Seen while trying to track down how to make insulin, mostly in survivalist forums (I’m not a survivalist). Much of it seems to be copied from a single source. As an example:

After passing through the filter the Insulin is retested carefully to determine its potency. There is practically no loss in berkefelding. The tested Insulin is poured into sterile glass vials with aseptic precautions and the sterility of the final product thoroughly tested by approved methods.

I believe this is an outtake from the original publication from the 1920s.

A little more on Arrival:

Was she the leading linguist in the world? Or just the best one the military could get their hands on and who would cooperate? The former is certainly less ordinary. But the leading woman was also not some super model of beauty, and an amazing cook, and an athletic dynamo, and and and …. as all too often not-old female stars are portrayed. She has exactly 2 hair styles. Her make up is subdued. She wears ordinary clothes. She tires. She has bad dreams. She has questions. She’s not super-human. The ordinariness was more my wife’s view, but I mostly agree.

I took her as at least one of the top cadre in the language world – in most fields there’s always room for argument over who’s the best.

In the larger picture, I suppose it depends on how the movie focuses your attention. I thought this was clearly an “intellectual puzzle” movie, so I only paid enough attention to her appearance so I could identify her from scene to scene. I suppose she wasn’t an outstandingly beautiful woman in this movie – but put her in Moulin Rouge! and perhaps she’d have been a knock out. But making her that in Arrival would have detracted from the planned impact of the movie.

While I was writing a response to a conservative friend concerning the ACA, it suddenly occurred to me that the entire debate (it seems like such an inadequate word) over the ACA, should we “replace it” with a GOP alternative, or just repeal the ACA, or whatever, whatever, anyways, it tends to lead a trifling bit more of credence to one of my favorite hobby horses: the sectors of society.

Hey, I write this blog to expiate my demons, not feed yours.

So, let’s throw some facts against the wall. First, the GOP would prefer to let the free enterprise / private sector take care of the health sector, on the basis of their faith that the private sector makes everything more efficient, and on a hidden assumption that everyone’s motivated by money, since that’s the grease of the private sector machine.

So, presumably all those money-motivated medical professionals should be against the ACA, no? After all, in the long run it promises to shrink the revenue to the medical sector. Why? The ACA brings insurance to everyone, one way or another, and part of that insurance is to make it quite cheap to get regular medical checkups; by doing so, many diseases and even injuries are caught earlier, and it’s a common rule of thumb that catching a problem early means fixing it is cheaper.

A lot cheaper. And this will important because, demographically, we’re aging, and medical care costs more as we grow older.

But those medical professionals, are they happy about the proposed demise of the ACA? From WaPo:

Major associations representing physicians, hospitals, insurers and seniors all leveled sharp attacks against the House GOP’s plan to rewrite the Affordable Care Act on Wednesday, as some Republicans publicly questioned whether the measure can clear the House of Representatives.

While industry groups warned that the proposal could leave vulnerable Americans with fewer protections than they now have, GOP leaders pressed ahead, bringing legislation before two key committees that are expected to approve the bills by week’s end. They were also working in concert with the White House to win over conservatives, who have complained that the proposal preserves too much of the current law.

In order for a sector, in the theory I’ve tried to articulate on this blog, to have a purpose, a goal, the members of that particular sector must share that purpose. Not necessarily unanimously, but certainly overwhelmingly. So if the motivator of most medical professionals was money, you’d expect to see them applaud the GOP‘s proposal to repeal the ACA and let the free market deal with the health sector.

But medical professionals won’t have anything to do with it. Their purpose isn’t to make money; oh, sure, it’s fine to do so, but in most cases that’s secondary. Their purpose is to fix people. As an example, I have a family member who’s a medical professional, and she says that when she was in college, she was just looking for some way to help people as her career, and that’s how she ended up as a psychologist. It wasn’t the money, it was the chance to help. To fix people.

So when I say that different sectors have different purposes, the reactions of the various medical groups is one of those little bits of proof. And it doesn’t take an overwhelming amount of intellectual effort to realize that the methods of one sector are optimized to accomplish the purpose of that sector – and may actually be completely inappropriate to another. In fact, I think it takes some sadly magical thinking to believe that privatization of legitimate functions of other sectors is a good idea as a blanket policy. Each scenario needs examination; perhaps folks brighter than I (or at least who are being to think about it 🙂 can work out theories and guidelines for making those judgments.

OK, I’m in the saddle and off to heard the cattle about.

The extent of the budget cuts – and their locations – reflect the origins of Donald Trump in the business world, exclusively in the business world – and with no apparent capacity for thinking non-private sector parts of the world should operate in any other manner than how the private sector operates. Jack Goldsmith does Lawfare‘s preliminary analysis of the State Department’s apparent gutting:

The State Department runs U.S. diplomacy and oversees the operation of U.S. international agreements.  The Trump administration is trying to gut State Department capacity across the board.  This is evident in its proposal to cut sharply the State Department and USAID budgets, in its failure to nominate (much less get confirmed) anyone yet for senior Department posts other than Secretary of State Tillerson, in the general slowdown of State Department operations, in Tillerson’s very low-key tenure thus far, and in its proposal to kill a number of State Department initiatives and funds, including the Global Climate Change, the Green and Strategic Climate Funds, the Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund, and the East-West Center.  It is unclear at this point precisely how a reduction of State Department capacity will impact U.S. international law commitments and U.S. participation and influence in international institutions.  But Tillerson wrote to State Department employees yesterday, the budget cuts are “an unmistakable restatement of the needs the country faces and the priorities we must establish.”

One result will be a lessening of oversight of corporations across the globe – no doubt viewed by folks who think the private sector is the be-all, end-all, and that the libertarian dream that free enterprise is entirely self-correcting, but for those not sharing in the dream – and who’ve had to clean up after the private sector’s excesses – a nightmare.

Fortunately, when the these folks leave office, what I might call “true conservatives” will have a template on how to return to shepherding the private sector along. True conservatives are folks that liberals can get along with – not the current radical right circus show.

But for the moment, Trump will see the restraints of government to be unnecessary – because his God is money, now isn’t it?

I have nothing against retro. In fact, in the right circumstances I like it a lot. But this tidbit from Jonathon Keats in Discover Magazine, well, the retro seems a bit out of context:

The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) [a proposal for a Venus probe – HW] — which recently received a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts grant — is built entirely of hardened metals and guided by a clockwork computer. The rover is still far from a planned mission, but it would be able to collect weeks’ worth of climate and seismic data from Venus’ surface, all recorded on phonograph-style records that periodically would be lifted by balloon to an overhead drone. Then NASA just needs to salvage an old Victrola.

Is it the old phonograph records? The balloon? An alternative they’re considering is to use reflectors to send the data via visible light. Maybe they can just send a one-way Navy volunteer who happens to know the old flag signals.

Many organizations issue voter’s guides, from political orgs to even churches, skirting the rim of the Johnson Amendment. But in 2018 we may see a new variety of candidate in some of those guides – working scientists. BuzzFeed has the word:

On Tuesday, [volcanologist Jess Phoenix] will announce her latest extreme endeavor, running for a spot in Congress. Her campaign joins the efforts of the science advocacy group 314 Action to inject better scientific thinking into government, by pushing actual scientists to ditch their field jackets and lab coats and run for office. Along with one other candidate, Phoenix will run to unseat a member of the group of politicians most notorious among scientists: the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, also known by some as the House “anti-science” committee. Her official paperwork will be filed in early April.

The Representatives they are trying to replace — Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who chairs the committee, and Rep. Steve Knight of California — will both be up for re-election in 2018, and 314 Action wants to make sure they don’t come back. (The group also wants to unseat another committee incumbent, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, but hasn’t yet confirmed a candidate.)

The races are just another symptom of bubbling scientific discontent with US politics, best seen with the hundreds of thousands of supporters for a March for Science in Washington, DC, in April, as well as “rogue” Twitter accounts for national parks and federal science agencies gaining large followings. Trump’s introduction of vaccine opponents and climate deniers onto the political stage has spurred scientists, usually insistent on staying out of political disputes, to speak out.

An interesting activity. Certainly, the mindset of a scientist is not guaranteed to resonate with the mindset of politicians, as one looks for answers, while the other – until the advent of Gingrich – looks for compromise. Since Gingrich, it’s more a search for power and the implementation of ideology, no matter what the consequences (see Kansas for an example of such a disastrous approach). But scientists can certainly learn – they spend tremendous amounts of time doing exactly that – and so the question is whether they have the cast-iron stomach to do that.

314 Action is located here. One of their declarations:

Our mission is to put members of Congress who are anti-science under the scope. By scrutinizing their actions and voting record that go against the facts and data, we will bring attention to practices and policies that are decidedly anti-science. It is no longer the time to sit idly by as partisan motives are promoted in direct opposition to leading scientific consensus on topics such as climate change, clean energy and evolution. 314 Action is committed to holding these members accountable for their actions and their votes.

The BuzzFeed article claims 314 Action will only support Democratic candidates, which may be a theoretical mistake. BuzzFeed did find at least one opposition voice:

But others are skeptical about whether getting scientists to run for office in this way will ultimately be good for politics — or for science.

“There’s no shortage of scientific information in Congress. They’re not using it, and it’s not because they don’t have access to it, it’s because the politics of the situation is not incentivizing them to use it,” said science and society professor Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University, who previously served on the staff of the House science committee.

“The calls for more scientific thinking are naive. They misunderstand how politics works, and I also think they misunderstand what it takes to be effective on behalf of science in Congress.”

By only running Democrats for office, he added, a group like 314 Action also runs the risk of further stoking mistrust of science among Republicans.

“The danger is you have a self-fulfilling prophecy where Republicans start to look at science as nothing more than Democratic politics by another name,” Sarewitz told BuzzFeed News.

I’m a little puzzled by the objection raised by Dr. Sarewitz. After all, politicians are elected to Congress  in order to shape policy based on the knowledge of experts on national issues – not necessarily their own knowledge base. The fact that the GOP politicians scream Conspiracy! when their delivered wisdom is denied by a scientific conclusion is the basis of the objection to having them in Congress at all.

Having scientists occupying elected office is important in that they understand the methods of science, when a hypothesis is trustable and when it’s still debatable – on its own merits. Indeed, in an idle moment I might suggest that scientists, by studying reality, which is the fundamental basis of all science, they become grounded in science.

On his other objection, it’s a good theoretical objection, but I think in reality the GOP has mostly gone anti-science anyways.

Keep an eye open. Maybe your district will have the pleasure of evaluating a scientist for office. We certainly don’t have good representation at the present time – perhaps you can help with that.

A reader remarks on the review of She:

And is that a black tube top pictured, or some strange in-the-film censoring?

I believe it’s a tube top. I refuse to watch it again just to confirm that, though.

I do have standards. I do! I do!

Regarding the review of Arrival, a reader writes:

It was good but I was disappointed in the flaws, many of which could have been easily avoided. There was too much “confuse the audience for the sake of confusing them” for one. There should have been one scene showing at least the father’s back, to show that he had been present for the girl’s childhood. Instead, it made him look like a complete jerk for the entire movie, only to insist you believe otherwise at the very end. My understanding is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is fairly discredited now. It’s novel on first discovering it, and seems to explain many things. But apparently it’s not how humans really work. We liked that the lead was portrayed like a fairly ordinary woman.

There was some deliberately introduced confusion, but attempting to show how the flow of time is running through her mind isn’t an easy task. More importantly, though, the complaint about the portrayal of the father brings into sharp focus my central disturbance concerning the movie: that could have all been avoided just by telling the father that he was going to be disappointed in her because she foresaw her child’s early death and went ahead. This is all stuff that could have been avoided by a little conversation – but if you have that conversation then the future is disturbed, and so you don’t see it, ad infinitum. My credulity ligaments begin to snap.

And the lead was an ordinary woman?! The leading linguist in the world? Whose predecessor was carted off to the insane asylum?

Regarding the President’s changing stance on sources of facts as they benefit or hurt him, a reader writes:

Not to worry – he’ll revert to form and denounce the numbers as soon as they begin climbing again. Trump doesn’t have a relationship with truth.

Heh.