Unsightly Mental Blemishes

I am most happy to see this comment from Garrett Epps, a Constitutional law professor at the University of Baltimore, in The Atlantic concerning the recent checking of papers of passengers deplaning from a domestic flight by ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents, as I’ve been quietly grinding my teeth ever since I heard about it:

After days of research, I can find no legal authority for ICE or CBP to require passengers to show identification  on an entirely domestic fight. The ICE authorizing statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1357, provides that agents can conduct warrantless searches of “any person seeking admission to the United States”—if, that is, the officer has “reasonable cause to suspect” that the individual searched may be deportable. CBP’s statute, 19 U.S.C. § 1467, grants search authority “whenever a vessel from a foreign port or place or from a port or place in any Territory or possession of the United States arrives at a port or place in the United States.” CBP regulations, set out at 19 C.F.R. § 162.6, allow agents to search “persons, baggage, and merchandise arriving in the Customs territory of the United States from places outside thereof.”

I asked two experts whether I had missed some general exception to the Fourth Amendment for passengers on a domestic flight. After all, passengers on flights entering the U.S. from other countries can expect to be asked for ID, and even searched. Barry Friedman, the Jacob D. Fuchsberg professor of law and affiliated professor of politics at New York University, is the author of Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission, a new book-length study of intrusive police investigation and search practices. “Is this remotely constitutional?” he asked. “I think it isn’t. We all know generally the government can’t come up and demand to see identification.” Officers need to have statutory authority to search and reasonable suspicion that the person to be searched has violated the law, he said. Andre Segura, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me that “I’m not aware of any aviation exception” for domestic passengers.

Definitely an authoritarian’s way. After some talk about consensual conduct, he moves on to his own conclusions:

I am vowing here and now not to show papers in this situation. I know that it will take gumption to follow through if the situation arises. What will be the reaction of ordinary travelers, some with outstanding warrants or other legal worries? Should we expect heroism of people who just want to get off an airplane?

Justice William O. Douglas once wrote that a regime of liberty includes “freedom from bodily restraint or compulsion, freedom to walk, stroll, or loaf.”

A shadow is falling over that freedom, both for aliens and for citizens. Its loss will be devastating.

The shadow will exist only so long as citizens let it. Remembering that law enforcement personnel are also citizens, not an enemy, but may need to be gently reminded to remain within Constitutional limits despite hectoring from political appointees. Calmly insisting what is wrong is wrong is the best path.

A light going over of a restoration … of power.

Found here.

Just how effective would a travel ban on the countries despised by the Trump Administration be? Nora Ellingsen on Lawfare condenses the Department of Homeland Security‘s findings:

First, the report found that country of citizenship, more generally, is not a reliable indicator of terrorist activity. By DHS’s count, foreign-born terrorism subjects in the United States originated from 26 different countries, and no country accounted for more than 13.5 percent of foreign-born suspects. In other words—and these are my words, not those of DHS—the travel ban will not be effective not, or not only, because Trump chose the wrong countries, but because trying to single out any country or countries for a travel ban is inherently a misfire. It is trying to fight terrorism by singling out a factor that doesn’t, in fact, offer a significant correlation with terrorist attacks—and that makes very little sense.In addition, the assessment challenges the administration’s claim that the affected countries have a history of “exporting terrorism” to the United States. In fact, these countries aren’t actually exporting very many people at all. As CNN reported, the seven countries in question were originally removed from the visa waiver program under the Obama administration, making immigrating to the United States a less accessible option for their citizens. As the DHS assessment lays out, individuals from these countries don’t move to the United States in large numbers; each of the seven countries accounts for a small percentage of the US visas granted in their region (the Middle East, North Africa, or Sub-Saharan Africa). Each country accounts for less than three percent of its region’s total U.S. visas granted, with the exception of Iran, which clocks in at seven percent. Notably, the assessment reviewed only publically available data on how many U.S. visas were actually granted to residents of the affected countries prior to the ban, perhaps highlighting the need to actually utilize State Department databases before drafting the next Executive Order.

Finally, the assessment draws an important distinction between the countries on the list that face a significant terrorism threat that is reasonably contained within their borders and those who struggle with terrorist groups that also target the United States. Of those seven countries, the assessment indicates that most aren’t harboring terrorist groups actively targeting the United States. According to the 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the Department of State Country Reports on Terrorism 2015, groups in Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan are regionally focused; only organizations based in Iraq, Syria and Yemen currently pose a threat of attacks in the United States.

Yeah, it does sound like the Trump Administration doesn’t really care about facts. Which really endangers all of us in so many ways, if you think about it.

The Polar Bears International website is all about … well, one of the most frightening animals around, at least to me. Over on Treehugger.com, Melissa Breyer summarizes some of what she found on PBI:

Source: Wikimedia

The Norse poets from medieval Scandinavia said polar bears had the strength of 12 men and the wit of 11. They referred to them with the following names White Sea Deer; The Seal’s Dread; The Rider of Icebergs; The Whale’s Bane; The Sailor of the Floe.

The Sami and Lapp refuse to call them “polar bear” in order to avoid offending them. Instead, they call them God’s Dog or The Old Man in the Fur Cloak

Nanuk is used by the the Inuit, meaning Animal Worthy of Great Respect. Pihoqahiak is also used by the Inuit; it means The Ever-Wandering One.

I just remember a long-ago National Geographic story about a polar bear finding a beached pod of whales … and it killed every single one of them. By chewing around their blowholes, causing them to bleed out.

But while the names are delightful, what really caught my attention was back on the PBI site:

“The only way to save the bears and their sea ice habitats is to control temperature rise through greenhouse gas mitigation.” -Dr. Steven C. Armstrup

And this is really an example of sloppy thinking, a matter of dictating how when we’re talking about what. First, we identify that we want to save them. What sort of habitat do they need? Maybe thousands of kilometers² of ice, with seals and whatever else they eat. That requires … historically normal temperatures.

Now, how we get there should not be set in granite. Sure, I agree greenhouse gas mitigation is the most likely approach – but that’s not set in stone. I mean, I keep thinking about all this heat in the atmosphere … and I recall what it can be converted into.

Energy.

So what if someone came up with a way to suck the excess energy out and store it for later use? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

It’s not to beat on Dr. Armstrup. It’s just as an engineer I’ve seen – and been responsible for – sloppy thinking that leads to sloppy solutions, missed solutions, and expensive mistakes. It may seem harmless to improperly state a problem, but words create furrows in our brains, and not everyone can step out of a long, straight furrow that never crosses the “best solution” furrow.

I was briefly on statins several years ago, for six months. It made me very absent-minded; I never made it to the painful muscles stage. But I had always wondered about the functional of cholesterol in the blood. Michael Brooks finally tells me in NewScientist (11 February 2017):

A fatty biomolecule synthesised primarily in the liver, cholesterol forms cell walls and the myelin sheaths that protect neurons in the brain. It plays a part in biological processes from cell signalling to making vitamin D, and may even help fight infections.

So it has its uses. Michael Le Page, in the same issue of NewScientist, reports on a target for gene editing – basically, get a treatment and go off of statins forever:

In 2005, it was discovered that a few people naturally have very low cholesterol levels, thanks to mutations that prevent their livers from making a protein called PCSK9. “They have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease and no apparent side effects whatsoever,” says Gilles Lambert at the University of Reunion Island, who studies PCSK9.

The PCSK9 protein normally circulates in the blood, where it degrades a protein found on the surface of blood vessels. This second protein removes LDL cholesterol from the blood: the faster it is degraded by PCSK9, the higher a person’s cholesterol levels. But people who lack PCSK9 due to genetic mutations have more of this LDL-removal protein, and therefore less cholesterol in their blood.

Drugs were developed to reduce PCSK9, but they turn out to be expensive and cumbersome to use.

But gene editing provides a radical alternative. Using the CRISPR technique, the team at AstraZeneca have disabled human versions of the PCSK9 gene in mice.

They did this by injecting the CRISPR Cas 9 protein and a guiding RNA sequence into the animals. The RNA guide helps the Cas9 protein bind to a specific site in the gene. It then cuts the gene at that point, and when the break is repaired, errors that disable the gene are likely to be introduced.

There was an even bigger fall in cholesterol levels in the mice given the CRISPR treatment than in those injected with the antibody drugs.

They still see human trials starting in about a decade.

Corrigendum:

An erratum or corrigendum (plurals: errata, corrigenda) (comes from Latin: errata corrige) is a correction of a published text. An erratum is most commonly issued shortly after its original text is published. Patches to security issues in a computer program are also sometimes called errata. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing process) and a corrigendum for an author’s error. [Wikipedia]

Seen in this article on Retraction Watch:

On February 9, ten days after the article came online, corresponding author Garret Stuber at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote a detailed comment on PubMed Commons, explaining that the “research community” had brought four figure-related errors to his attention. After investigating the concerns, Stuber discovered that the problems emerged after the peer-review process, “while revising the manuscript to comply with Nature Neuroscience’s final formatting guidelines.” In his note, he outlined the specific duplication issues that arose, which he says he plans to detail to the journal in a formal corrigendum letter.

I’m experiencing some numbness in my right hand, which my Arts Editor believes is the result of carpal tunnel syndrome. This seems vaguely familiar, and I believe I experienced the same problem about 25-30 years ago. Back then, I recall I reined back my typing and may have tried using a wrist splint. I’ve recently noticed my mousing technique has worsened – I need to work on not being quite so lazy. At work I’ve moved my mouse to my left hand; I should probably explore a similar option at home, although my computer area is really setup for right hand mousing.

So I may be taking a break, or at least lessening, my blogging activities. Just to explain that I’m not walking away, hopefully this will go away as it did way back when. And I need to work on more proper technique.

Ever think about the problem of measuring sea level? Turns out it’s quite the horrendous problem – but that may be changing, according to Laura Spinney in NewScientist (11 February 2017, paywall):

Earth’s geoid from DeepEarthScience (2013)

If Earth were a perfect sphere, we might use GPS measurements: these calculate the user’s distance from the centre of the GPS satellites’ orbits. But Earth looks more like a rugby ball, with a radius 21 kilometres longer at the equator than at the poles. It’s a lumpy rugby ball too, with a depression of about 100 metres to the south of India, for example, and a peak of about 100 metres over Indonesia.

These lumps are in Earth’s geoid, or gravitational surface – a plane that you would move across if you did no work in the vertical dimension, like a marble rolling over a table. They occur because gravity is stronger where mass accumulates, as in a mountain or denser rocks. The geoid largely determines where the surface of the sea lies. If you were to swim from India to Indonesia, you would move 200 metres away from Earth’s centre.

Agreeing on a vertical standard, therefore, boils down to agreeing on a model of the geoid – and with the latest satellite measurements, we’re getting close to doing that. In 2002, NASA and the German Aerospace Center launched the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite, and seven years later, the European Space Agency launched its Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) mission. GOCE orbited until 2013, while GRACE is still in orbit, and the two now have enough data to make a geoid model accurate to within a few centimetres. “The gravity field is smoothed because the satellite is far from the Earth’s masses,” says Rummel, who led the GOCE mission, “But it can be complemented by terrestrial gravity measurements.” Together, the two provide the millimetre accuracy required for, say, building bridges.

I hadn’t thought about this so much. So are there any plans?

The technical capability that underpins a geoid-based global standard of height is there – but is there the political will to agree on it? Perhaps. The US, Canada and Mexico have announced that they will switch to a unified geoid-based height system in 2022, and a meeting in Prague of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in 2015 passed a resolution to support the adoption of a single global reference frame. “We agreed,” says Ihde. “Now we have to put it into practice.”

And …

[Ecuadoran peak] Chimborazo beats Everest by a whopping 2 kilometres.

I sense outrage on the horizon.

I think we’re beginning to see the end result of the formation of the echo chamber of the extreme right. One data point is just a data point, but now a second data point is beginning to form, and I’ll call it a theme. The first data point? GOP shock and bewilderment that constituents like the health care benefits of the ACA and allied programs. Some GOP lawmakers have had the courage to try to weather the storm, such as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas:

Cotton paused the event at that comment to make clear he was not trying to accuse vocal critics at the event of being illegitimate or paid, as Trump and Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz have done.

“I don’t care if anybody here is paid or not. You’re all Arkansans,” Cotton said. “Thank you for everyone coming out.”

As the event continued, dozens of people lined up at microphones to ask questions. Cotton ultimately extended the event by about 30 minutes while questions ranged from accountability for Trump, Obamacare, the refugee program, Trump’s proposed border wall and many other policy areas. [CNN]

Plaudits to Senator Cotton. Working along the spectrum, we find Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who couldn’t withstand the cognitive dissonance of discovering what her handlers have to say vs what her actual constituents have to say:

Fielding questions from her constituents for a whole 45 minutes wore down Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on Tuesday, causing her to flee and the audience to roar.

Ernst was in the tiny town of Maquoketa, population 6,062, for a roundtable with veterans. When she arrived at city hall, slipping through a side door, she found 100 people crammed inside the room, CNN reports, with dozens more filling the hallways and atrium. The microphone being used by constituents repeatedly cut in and out, frustrating people in the room who couldn’t hear what was being said, and Ernst only took one question from a non-veteran, a man who asked her about the Affordable Care Act. When she uttered the words “health savings accounts,” Ernst was met with a chorus of boos.

The meeting came to a jarring end after only 45 minutes, despite a long line of people waiting at the microphone to ask more questions, causing the crowd to boo and jeer. [The Week]

While Senator Ernst appears to have a weak stomach for dissent, or too much appetite for ideology, Representative Gohmert of one of the reddest districts of Texas is a shivering coward on the subject:

Former Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona urged members of Congress to host town hall meetings after Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert citing her shooting as a reason he was not going to schedule one.

“To the politicians who have abandoned their civic obligations, I say this: Have some courage,” Giffords said in a statement. “Face your constituents. Hold town halls.” [Politico]

These and many other GOP lawmakers are facing crowds critical of decisions to repeal and (maybe) replace the ACA. This suggests a behavior with anti-survival characteristics – believing what you want to believe is true, rather than what is true on the ground. So what’s this second data point now forming? Steve Benen points me to it: NRA President (and immortal vampire) Wayne LaPierre’s remarks at CPAC:

“Right now, we face a gathering of forces that are willing to use violence against us,” he said. “The leftist movement in this country right now is enraged. Among them and behind them are the most radical political elements there are: Anarchists, marxists, communists and the left of the—the rest of the left-wing socialist parade. They hate everything America stands for: Democracy, free market capitalism, representative government, individual freedom. They want to tear down our system and replace it with their collectivist top-down global-government-knows-best-utopia.”

LaPierre claimed that billionaire George Soros is paying protesters, that crime is on the rise, that gangs are infiltrating the military and law enforcement and that the media “theorized” Trump would be assassinated before Inauguration Day.

LaPierre wrapped up by attacking the media and insinuating violence against the “violent left” if it brings “terror” to communities. [Talking Points Memo]

LaPierrre has manipulated the membership of the NRA through fear for years, transforming it from a respectable organization in my youth into something a lot of non-shooters just shake their heads at and wonder. I am not a shooter myself, but in my younger days I took Dr. John Lott’s research on the detrimental effects of gun control on public safety quite seriously; I have not kept up with that controversy, and a quick Google search seems to indicate it keeps bubbling on.

But back to my point: LaPierre even had the gall to make this statement last year, as Media Matter notes and fact checks:

The leader of the National Rifle Association insisted he wasn’t “crazy,” “paranoid,” or “nuts” before ranting to NRA members in an “urgent” video message where he made claims at odds with reality, including claiming that his widely ridiculed prediction that President Obama would come for Americans’ guns “came true.”

During a six-minute get out the vote video, NRA executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre described America after eight years of Obama as president in hellish terms unrecognizable to anyone who actually lives here, claiming that the president has “laid waste to the America we remember” causing the country to “completely unravel.”

After describing a calamitous America, LaPierre claimed, “I told you exactly what [Obama] would do. The media said I was nuts. But in the end, America knows I was right.” You decide whether LaPierre was right:

• LaPierre said his prediction that Obama “would come for our guns and do everything in his power to sabotage the Second Amendment” “came true” following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, when Obama “exploited a horrible tragedy to launch a blizzard of gun bans, magazine restrictions, and gun registration schemes against law abiding gun owners all across the country.” (Nothing proposed by Obama would have violated the Second Amendment as understood in the Antonin Scalia-authored Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller. The background check bill that was voted on in the Senate after the massacre specifically prohibited the creation of registries.)

And etc. Quite a list of things that I don’t recall ever happening. So we see in the earlier statement an attempt to keep up the bubble from which he profits; when Trump was elected, he was faced with an unexpected problem – how to retain his power when the Big Bad Federal Government Controlled by Liberals …. isn’t. So we get the beginning of a theme – let’s only talk among ourselves, construct our own reality, and if that benefits me, why, it keeps us all safe, doesn’t it? But you have to wonder how many members are sticking around. Sure, those who only get their news from NRA publications will stick – their information environment is too heavily skewed to expect any other behavior. But what about everyone else? Turns out it’s hard to say, as the NRA numbers are confidential. Here’s The Trace on the subject:

The precise size of NRA’s membership — the core of the group’s perceived political muscle — has long been a mystery. In January 2013, Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre boasted before Congress that he served 4.5 million members. Speaking at an NRA convention a few months later, he upped that figure to 5 million. On January 5, in a statement responding to President Barack Obama’s executive actions on guns, the group described itself as “more than 5 million members strong.”

But the truth of those numbers is a matter of debate — the NRA has never allowed an outside party to authenticate its membership, and independent estimates predict a much smaller number. Circulation audits of American Rifleman and other NRA-published magazines that are sent to every member come in at around 3 million. One former board member told the Washington Post in 1998 that when the NRA counts its size, it includes many deceased lifetime members.

So, talk to yourselves, not to anyone outside the tribe. The GOP is getting some shocks now. Will the NRA? Today’s liberals are well known for their law-abiding ways, so gangs of liberals roaming the countryside just makes me giggle. And what will be the next data point on the theme? Perhaps what I fear is another economic crunch caused by out of control spending on defense. Trump has already sounded that horn with his call for going to the “top of the pack” in terms of nuclear weapons. (For those of you who were wondering, most experts say we’re already there and can go off and do something else instead.) A very expensive and dangerous distraction. Given that I think we’re heavily overspending on defense already, and both parties seem to want to increase spending yet again (another example of fear-based manipulation, I think), we may find out the hard way that overspending on defense is a path to recession. But will we recognize it? Or is that bubble too big?

This unsettling proto-totalitarian tendency, reported by Pat Rynard on Iowa Starting Line, an Iowan political news source, fits right in with the GOP’s desperate need to reshape society into its extremist image:

The party affiliation on your voter registration card could block you from employment at Iowa’s state universities were a newly proposed bill by Senator Mark Chelgren to become law. Senate File 288, proposed by the Ottumwa legislator, could bring about a Soviet-style purge of liberal-leaning college staff in Iowa. Chelgren wants to impose an ideological litmus test in order to create a “partisan balance,” based on how Iowa has voted in past elections.

The legislation proposes that a “person shall not be hired as a professor or instructor member of the faculty at such an institution if the person’s political party affiliation on the date of hire would cause the percentage of faculty belonging to one political party to exceed by ten percent the percentage of faculty belonging to the other political party.”

Source: Gallup

Politics simply should not play a direct a part in education as this. I would have to ask State Senator Chelgren if he’s really so certain that his conservative ideas are that much inferior to those that might be held – but not even taught – by the professors at the State universities of Iowa? After all, we’re talking about the marketplace of ideas – not the gargling funnel of ideological rectitude. Students may evaluate ideas on their merits and choose accordingly.

Of course, the blood of the GOP may be running a bit cold. While the GOP currently holds a slight lead over the Democrats, it’s down from historical highs, and I think, given the GOP’s continuing slide into extremist ideology, more members will leave the party for the Independents ranks. And, of course, the Trump disaster is front and center – driving away the doubtful, even as extremist elements pour in and, in some cases, assume positions of authority. While Mr. Bartlett may have missed the subtle point that losing the popular vote doesn’t mean losing the electoral vote, he may still end up correct that Mr. Trump will be the end of the current incarnation of the GOP in one tremendous thud, and that it will be rebuilt by those much like his moderate, serious self.

The demographics of the two parties also contributes to the temperature of the GOP blood, as these charts from 2016 show. The left chart is interesting in that it shows nearly 60% of GOP voters are age 60+, suggesting the cohort that couldn’t manage a winning Presidential run, popular vote variant, is going to start dying off soon. The Democrats and sympathizers are at roughly 50% in the same category. Meanwhile, down in the critical youngest bracket, the Democrats are doing better than the GOP. Normally, I’d shrug and note that as voters get older, they become more conservative. However, given the extremism of the GOP, I suspect the youngest generation will generally be repulsed by the GOP; it is, in an important sense, a return to a static past, and that just will not do for the youngest generation in general, except for those raised in out of touch, static areas. And you’ll have to be extreme from the get-go to survive, given the herd of RINOs that runs around in that pasture.

And, as noted by many commentators, the diversity of the Democrats is their strength, and that clearly shows in these charts.

So, Senator, are you so afraid of some healthy competition that you’ll try to rig the rules? You do realize, of course, that this has the potential to damage your institutions of higher education, so I have to ask – do you value higher education? Do you want to get the most that you can out of it?

Or is your dedication to ideology going to triumph over your love of State and Nation?

(h/t Scout Finch on The Daily Kos)

Nålebinding:

Nålebinding (Danish: literally “binding with a needle” or “needle-binding”, also naalbinding, nålbinding, nålbindning or naalebinding) is a fabric creation technique predating both knitting and crochet. Also known in English as “knotless netting,” “knotless knitting,” ^[1] or “single needle knitting,” the technique is distinct from crochet in that it involves passing the full length of the working thread through each loop, unlike crochet where the work is formed only of loops, never involving the free end. It also differs from knitting in that lengths must be pieced together during the process of nålebinding, rather than a continuous strand of yarn that can easily be pulled out. Archaeological specimens of fabric made by nålebinding can be difficult to distinguish from knitted fabric. [Wikipedia]

Heard on the latest episode of Bones.

While I was driving home from an unconnected activity it occurred to me that the news that a number of major news organization were shut out of a White House news briefing, while of course the mark of an amateur effort at the White House, might be used against them as well by the victim organizations, which are “… CNN and other news outlets, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Politico and some others …”

How so? Glad you asked. Simple. State the truth, put it right on the front page, and then provide links to certain rivals who do have the material. Say, Breitbart, or white supremacist site Stormfront – perhaps there’s a few more.

And let all those folks who are on the fence see what sort of reprehensible organizations, organizations whose cousins started wars and tried to eliminate whole peoples using the flimsiest of excuses, not only support Trump, but actually have personnel in the White House.

9 out of every 10 will be so sickened they’ll end up disapproving of Trump. Maybe even 95 out of 100. Speaking of, here’s today’s Gallup Poll on the subject:

Looks like his approval is back down to 41% and dropping.

Whimsies:

Glassblowers worked their way up through an apprenticeship system, often starting in boyhood with tasks such as carrying coal and weaving wicker wrappers for large bottles. A master blower, or gaffer, would have developed the skills and dexterity to control and manipulate very thin blown glass. It took plenty of stamina to work in the constant heat of a furnace to produce vases, pitchers, and flasks, but at day’s end workers used their leftover time and materials to make “whimsies”—exquisite, often fragile, personal artistic pieces, or demonstrations of skill to impress factory visitors. The glass colors—aqua, amber, and green, mostly—match those used on the production line, but there was a difference between work, which was done as quickly as possible, and making whimsies, according to White. “These were things they made for each other, for family, for wives, for romanticized notions,” Mills says. Whimsies appear in the surrounding home sites, but also in the manufacturing debris in the Dyottville annealing ovens. [ “Letter from Philadelphia,” Margaret Shakespeare, Archaeology (March/April 2017)]

Bluebeard (1944), set in Paris, has horrid musical accompaniment, a jarring mismatch of delicate French accents mixed with broad American Midwestern accents, and a wretched visual presentation due to the age of the film. Sometimes the audio reels drunkenly as the film wandered a little off-kilter through the projector. And the monologue at the end is, perhaps, more detailed than I strictly needed.

And we enjoyed it.

This is a John Carradine vehicle, and while today we may view him as one of the creepy patriarchs of horror films, he was a Shakespearean trained actor, and it shows in this film, as he takes his time in his role and develops a real, ultimately creepy character; the supporting cast, of whom I’ve never heard, were also nearly as good.

But it is Carradine, so this is a horror movie. Bluebeard is the name applied to a mysterious murderer, killing young women and throwing them in the Seine for the police to find. Carradine plays a puppeteer with a sideline as a painter; presently we learn that he painted a portrait of a woman, mad with fever, under his care, and the painting has won a major prize. But for the moment, he’s looking for a tailor to clothe his newest generation of puppets.

Unlike many of these old horror movies, there are motivations and subplots unexpected. The sûreté find that clues are sparse, but they are merely a paintbrush away from the killer, yet one little stitch could give the game away, both in the story and this review. A dealer is bilking the painter; the painter no longer wishes to paint in any case, but the lure of independence beckons; what can it all mean?

And the opera singing by the marionettes – my Arts Editor muttered, “They’re virtuosos!”

Perhaps not quite Recommended, but definitely worth your time if you’re inclined towards Carradine, horror, or just old films.

Now it’s just getting weird about the GOP. They claimed Obama brought disrepute down on the the United States during his time in office. So what are they going to say about this CNN report? That it’s fake news? That’ll be very weak tea:

Lawfare‘s Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey checked their email bag – and came up with a doozy:

We received this morning an extraordinary message from a group of Foreign Service officers. …

Writing for a small group of three other colleagues, this individual begins by noting Lawfare’s prior “advice for civil servants about the ethics of service under the Trump administration” and goes on to seek out ethical advice about how to best handle certain specific concerns facing Foreign Service officers. Namely, this group is worried that the rollout of the executive order on immigration—both the initial order and the forthcoming substitution—is taking place without consideration of important, available data.

Turns out that the Foreign Service officers are worried that these Executive Orders are being crafted without regard to, ummm, the facts, which are available in a variety of government databases, but are apparently not being consulted. Benjamin and Susan’s observation?

There’s a lot to talk about with regard to the specific questions above, but it is worth pausing to note as an initial matter the mere fact that a group of junior Foreign Service officers is currently put in the position wherein they are even contemplating whether they have an obligation to reinforce the interagency process with respect to the Justice Department. This fact reflects the the [sic] failure so far of the actual interagency process to function—and the failure of the White House to conduct interagency consultation processes with even minimal integrity.

Amateur hour has turned into, what, amateur month?

And not to leave you on tenterhooks, they advised the Foreign Service officers that it’s the responsibility of the Administration to seek out facts. To summarize their lengthy reply, the Foreign Service officers are not obligated to jam the important facts up Bannon’s ass. It’s his responsibility, as an adult, to seek out all relevant facts before writing Executive Orders.

The impression you get is of a group that’s trying to run a government without planning, just by following some ideological principles IF you’re an aide, and if your Trump it’s just the flavor of the day, while trying to keep those campaign promises that are perceived as being important. By contrast, you can be certain that Clinton would have had respectable, capable people ready to go, plans in place for implementing important policies, and we’d continue to be the leader of the world.

Not its stand-up comedian.

Coming in the email is a link to a video of a New Year’s celebration in Pyongyang in 2013. It’s in excess of an hour, and being in Korean I’m more or less lost. However, the patriotic bit at about 31 minutes in was interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtAfd_xJ1XA&app=desktop

A reader writes about flying reptiles:

The vestigial wings are curious. This thing surely can’t fly or even glide.

According to the first post on Azhdarchid Paleobiology from 2008:

Pterosaurs are flying reptiles that lived during the age of the dinosaurs (between about 230 and 65 million years ago). Although often called dinosaurs, they are not part of this group and represent a distinct lineage of reptiles that evolved flight independently of birds and bats. There are around 100 species of pterosaurs currently known, and one group – including about nine species – is particularly controversial. These are the azhdarchids, a group named after the Uzbek word for ‘dragon’ [image above shows a giant azhdarchid in flight].

With massive, elongate heads, very long, stiff necks, long hindlimbs, and often gigantic size, azhdarchids are more than deserving of their ‘dragon’ title. Azhdarchids include the largest of all pterosaurs: some had wingspans exceeding 10 m and, when standing, had shoulder heights of over 2.5 m …

I’m having trouble mapping vestigial to wingspans in excess of 10 meters. Then again, just the thought of something that large, flapping about, scooping up stray people … reminds me of The Giant Claw (1957).

A reader comments on Kevin Drum’s lead theory:

I hadn’t known about the perfect mapping of the British curve differences. And it alludes to similar results in other countries. I think the conclusion is pretty irrefutable at this point: leaded gasoline caused fetal harm to the extent that a more numerous cohort of adults faced difficulties dealing with life and committed more crimes. It’s not the sole cause; society is a complex system and there are never simple or single answers. But it certainly appears to a be a major one.

I ran across this coverage of Justice Alito keynote speech at the Claremont Institute’s 2017 annual dinner in Slate by Mark Joseph Stern, and was appalled by both Alito’s off-the-cuff definition of pollution and the EPA‘s. First, Stern’s report on Alito:

Now, what is a pollutant? A pollutant is a subject that is harmful to human beings or to animals or to plants. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants. It’s actually needed for plant growth. All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now. So, if it’s a pollutant, we’re all polluting. When Congress authorized the regulation of pollutants, what it had in mind were substances like sulfur dioxide, or particulate matter—basically, soot or smoke in the air. Congress was not thinking about carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.

Apparently you have to watch out for the little guys, as Ben Caspit notes in passing in AL Monitor:

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A mysterious aircraft eliminated a terrorist squad that included five Islamic State (IS) fighters just as they prepared to fire rockets from the Sinai Peninsula at Israel’s southernmost city, Eilat, Feb. 19. The Sinai affiliate of IS later issued a statement placing responsibility for the action against the squad squarely on Israel.

While Israel has a long-established policy of ignoring questions about such incidents, in this case Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman announced, “Like always, the special forces of Lichtenstein probably took out a few terrorists from Daesh [IS] in Sinai. … We do not let anything go without a response. I don’t think that the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula poses a serious threat.”

For those of us who don’t keep up with foreign affairs, Liechtenstein‘s population is around 38,000, but there are also a few towns and villages named Lichtenstein.

This perhaps obscure 4th Circuit Appeals court loss for the GOP I found interesting as a reflection of their strategy of straight ticket voting – a strategy which I’ve discussed before and have concluded that it is damaging to the American polity. From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

A federal appeals court has dismissed a challenge to a Virginia law prohibiting partisan labels on ballots in local elections.

In an opinion published Tuesday, the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the case brought by a group of Powhatan County Republicans and found the state has a legitimate interest in minimizing political partisanship in local races.

“While party identifiers do not appear on the official ballot for Virginia’s local candidates, the candidates still have every other avenue by which to inform voters of this information,” Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote in the three-judge panel’s unanimous opinion affirming a lower court’s earlier ruling. “Political parties and their nominees are entirely free to publicize their association with each other.”

The plaintiffs argued the ballot rules serve little real purpose because, in many cases, local races are nonpartisan in name only and nothing in state law prevents political parties from nominating local candidates or making informal endorsements. The lack of party information on the ballot, they argued, only sows confusion.

The plaintiffs, the Powhatan County Republican Committee and four candidates it endorsed in a 2015 Board of Supervisors election, claimed the ballot rule violates constitutional rights to freedom of association and equal protection.

Seeing the above on Facebook (from PBS) reminded me of a story I was listening to on NPR this morning – Big Business is having a grudge match in the Texas Legislature, their opponent being religious conservatives. The issue? The above. Business – especially those in Houston, hosting an upcoming event (NCAA basketball, maybe?) – are concerned that overturning the transgender bathroom law will cost millions of dollars as events and businesses pull out.

Religious conservatives are afraid that men will dress in girly clothes and traipse into the women’s restrooms and rape the 9 year olds they find in there.

I’m sure you’ve all heard that explanation before, but I am compelled to say, I KID YOU NOT.

You boys in Texas, you need to think hard about this: No Rapist Is Held Back By A Lack Of Girly Clothes. In fact, we can assume that restrooms, particularly in busy venues, are simply not good for rape. Tragically, it happens – but permitting the transgender to use the one that makes them comfortable isn’t going to lead to mass rapes.

It seems the problem here is that the conservatives chose to take control of the argument, and no one challenged them where it hurts – in the illogic of their base argument. It’s pathetic that is the best they can do, and that so many people listen to it. No doubt it’s because everyone hears R A P E and stop reading. And thinking.

So everyone, THINK. Transgender bathrooms, involving as few people as they do, are a truly trivial issue. The question for religious conservatives is What makes you afraid of doing the right damn thing? ‘cuz it sure isn’t rape concerns. That’s just damn silly.

Pareidolia:

The ability to see pictures in random forms – as in clouds, tea leaves, and inkblots – is known as pareidolia; the images themselves are called simulacra. Some publicized examples I have made pilgrimages to to [sic] examine include the face of Jesus in the skillet burns of a tortilla; … [“Investigative Files“, Joe Nickell, Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2017, not online)]

You see pareidolia used relatively frequently in SI.