Unsightly Mental Blemishes

The Nashville Statement is receiving more attention, this time from Andrew Sullivan in NYMag, who suggests it’s a suicide note:

And so in the Nashville Statement, there is no advice to gay or transgender Christians, except to be heterosexual, dammit. They don’t even air the possibility of chaste spiritual friendship as a way for such people to lead lives not beset with loneliness, or sexual repression of a kind no human is truly capable of without profound psychological distortion. There is no mention of love at all — as if human attraction is not bound up with that deepest Christian imperative. Instead, we are told that gay and transgender people are deceiving themselves or are incapable of loving each other. All this constant rhetoric of loving us is therefore phony. You can’t love people without respecting them. You can’t welcome people you are simultaneously dehumanizing and writing out of creation. …

I believe that for an entire generation, this question is a litmus test for whether Christianity really is about love, and whether the Gospels (which have nothing to say about homosexuality) should even get a hearing. I can date my own niece’s and nephew’s rejection of Christianity to the day the priest urged them to oppose equal rights for their uncle. That’s why Evangelicalism is dying so quickly among the young. The latest PRRI survey shows that only one in ten Evangelicals are now under 30. It is no accident that the generation that has come to know gay and transgender people as people also finds it hard to dehumanize us in the way the Nashville Statement does, and see a church leadership that still treats us in this fashion as inimical to their own, yes, Christian values. And they are right to. This is what the signers of the Nashville Statement do not quite grasp. They just signed one of the longest suicide notes in history. Because what they’re saying is not merely callous. It is manifestly untrue.

When you place your movement’s entire existence on a wobbly pillar, the power that comes from being a strong proponent of that pillar will begin dissolving when that pillar effectively falls. French, and those others who have signed the Nashville Statement, have found it more important to affirm an arbitrary statement from an arbitrary authority than improve their movement, because they’re their entire ideology proceeds from flawed assumptions.

But Andrew merely made an assertion concerning the decline of the Evangelical movement. Kevin Drum has some solid numbers:

The chart below shows their problem. After years of gaining followers, evangelical strength began to decline during the Bush years and then fell off a cliff in the Obama years, dropping from 21 percent of the population to only 17 percent:

This decline is heavily age dependent—and not because of abortion. Young people feel about the same way toward abortion as older people. The real fault line is gay marriage. As the old evangelicals became ever more strident about it, they lost the loyalty of young people who just weren’t willing to buy the anti-gay hatred. Among 18-29 year-olds, only about 8 percent currently identify as evangelicals.

For those folks who consider themselves anti-Evangelicals, this is heaven sent news, obviously – the older the demographic age of a movement, the closer it is to decline and extinction – not that this will ever happen to the Evangelicals. But the Evangelicals need to sit down and really consider what’s going on and correct their thinking on homosexuals. This is not in the least unprecedented, as such subjects as slavery and witches are no longer interpreted as they had been. As the anti-homosexual streak has a weaker Biblical basis than some^[1], as I understand it, the Evangelicals may manage to accomplish this sooner than some might expect.

Or they can go into deep decline until the anti-homosexual champions have passed away and the movement can renew itself. I, personally, don’t care to see such a renewal, as it tends to descend into irrationality, even denial, on a regular basis, a tendency irritated by right-wing radio and the Internet. But the renewal will happen, as many by temperament will eventually flock to the banner-carriers of the movement.

And I’m looking forward to seeing this same chart again in two years. How will Evangelicals, who helped carry Trump over the electoral finish line, react to his abysmal Presidential performance? Will more current Evangelicals lose faith in the movement for selecting such a horrid President, currently on course to be the worst ever? Or will they merely leave the GOP as hopelessly corrupt?

¹Then again, I haven’t read the Bible in 45 years.

Kimberley Paige Barnette has been attracting attention in the last couple of days as she runs in the GOP primary for Mayor of Charlotte. Most people are talking about a Facebook post in which she said, HuffPo reports:

As the mystery of Tabby’s Star ages, the bizarre explanations fade away in favor of something a little more likely. NewScientist (26 August 2017) reports:

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

… Mario Sucerquia and his colleagues at the University of Antioquia in Colombia have proposed another possibility: a ringed planet, similar to Saturn, orbiting close to the star. Such a planet would dim the star’s light in an irregular way during a transit.

First, the rings would block some of the star’s light, followed by the planet, which would dim it further. Then, after the planet passes, the rings would block some light again.

But because the rings would be at a different angle each time, the small dips at the beginning and end of the transits would be larger or smaller. Without seeing many transits, there would be no obvious pattern to this.

To test this idea and measure the irregularity, Sucerquia and his colleagues simulated a light curve from a ringed planet about one-tenth the Earth-sun distance from its star. They found another effect: the star would tug on the rings, making them wobble. This would make the silhouette of the rings as seen by an earthbound observer even more irregular from transit to transit (arxiv.org/abs/1708.04600).

Sounds a bit like my software designs’ evolution – from byzantine to the mundane.

Another hangnail injury leading to death and dismemberment.

It’s the brick’s fault in Terror At London Bridge (1985, aka Bridge Across Time). Specifically, when Jack the Ripper is shot and falls off the bridge, he takes a brick of the bridge with him into the water – and his spirit managed to transfer into the brick at the same time.

But where’s the bridge? It’s now located in Lake Havasu City, AZ, USA (true story), all of it except the missing brick – and now it’s been found and sent over to LHC. Bad things are about to happen in this tourist trap as Jack comes boiling out of that brick. And I do mean that literally – or Jack is highly carbonated. But he’s definitely decaf.

I generally figure a story can have one incredible plot mechanism, and so this qualifies. But now the local police have to figure out what’s happening to the women, and, well, it’s scattershot, between a detective, formerly of the Chicago Police Department, suffering PTSD after having shot a 14 year old boy to death during a burglary in his former life, to the detective’s assistant who has no life, apparently, outside of being an assistant, to the papier-mâché victims, there’s really no character with which to empathize. The Sheriff (or Chief, I forget now) has nothing, the detective might have a former relationship with some lady, but we’re not really sure, the assistant has a bit of gumption at the end, and the possible former girlfriend shows she can run like mad from Jack. There’s a mysterious fellow who wants to blow up the Bridge, but all we find out about him is a generic “mental illness.” He could have been interesting, but instead he’s consigned to the metaphorical loo.

But that’s about all. Oh, wait – I did appreciate the fact that clubbing the detective upside the head actually did result in a severe concussion and left him ineffective – and with a terrific headache – for several hours. It’s a sporadic attempt at enhancing the tension in the film.

And I noticed one attempt at a head feint – always important in detective stories, if not horror stories – but I’d guessed it was coming, so it was ineffective. Otherwise, it’s really just about the screaming and the slashing and the running.

And, as my Arts Editor observed, “This is baaad acting.” And a bad story.

Boring.

Kevin Drum rebuts Press Secretary Sanders:

[Sanders:] “It’s a known fact that there are over 4 million unemployed Americans in the same age group as those that are DACA recipients; that over 950,000 of those are African Americans in the same age group; over 870,000 unemployed Hispanics in the same age group,” Sanders said during Tuesday’s press briefing. “Those are large groups of people that are unemployed that could possibly have those jobs.”

What Sanders leaves out is that those 800,000 DACA recipients also buy lots of stuff, creating jobs for other people. In fact, the amount of stuff they buy is almost exactly equal to the wages of the jobs they take. In other words, if every DACA recipient got deported tomorrow, GDP would decrease by about the equivalent of 800,000 jobs. It would help nobody.

As interesting an observation as that is, there’s a sleight of the hand – transitioning from wages to jobs and implying the same jobs that are lost if the Dreamers are forcibly deported would come out of the pool held by Hispanics and African-Americans.

Still, it’s another page added to the coloring book of the Trump Administration, the one entitled, We Can’t See Beyond The End Of Our Nose.

Holographic will:

A holographic will is a will and testament that has been entirely handwritten and signed by the testator. Traditionally, a will must be signed by witnesses attesting to the validity of the testator’s signature and intent, but in many jurisdictions, holographic wills that have not been witnessed are treated equally to witnessed wills and need only to meet minimal requirements in order to be probated: … [Wikipedia]

Heard on Perry Mason.

Rep Tom Marino (R-PA) has been nominated for the job of Drug Czar. Representing the 10th District of Pennsylvania, here’s the chart since 2010, the last redistricting:

This suggests Marino’s selection is at least partially influenced by the safety of his district. Still, if confirmed, this will  require a special election in order to replace him – giving the Democrats a chance to embarrass the GOP on the national stage. While they have come close, they have yet to flip a national seat; at the local level, however, they are reportedly doing quite well, indicating a great deal of dissatisfaction with the GOP.

It did occur to me to wonder if Marino might not actually be favored by Trump, but marked as disagreeable and to be replaced by a Trump loyalist (see this post for more on this general speculation). However, he has a Trump score (that is, he votes in conformation to Trump’s wishes), as of this writing, of 94.7% according to FiveThirtyEight, so on objective measures he seems loyal enough; however, subjective measures are much more difficult to ascertain.

And will he fit in with the Trump Administration? WaPo has a report:

As a congressman, Marino called for a national program of mandatory inpatient substance abuse treatment for nonviolent drug offenders. “One treatment option I have advocated for years would be placing non-dealer, nonviolent drug abusers in a secured hospital-type setting under the constant care of health professionals,” he said at a hearing last year.

Both I and my Arts Editor took shots of our garlic chives over the last couple of days, because they’ve attracted a strong population of something. To me, they look like Monarch butterflies, but my Arts Editor thinks they’re some variety of moths.

And if you think that last two pictures seemed a little off on the color palette,this last one is truly odd. We’re thinking the camera is starting to degrade.

Source: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

Having recently seen Maudie (2016) at the Edina Cinema, the performance of the two leads, Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, and their chemistry really sticks in my memory. A biography of Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis, Hawkins depicts the various challenges Lewis faced throughout her life, brought about principally by her physical problems, which appeared to be degenerative arthritis and perhaps a touch of autism or OCD.

Or maybe not OCD, but instead simply the compulsion to create experienced by every artist; for her, expressed as a need to paint.

The Lewis House, now located in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

Signing on as a housekeeper for fish peddler Everett Lewis (Hawke, who portrays his character as the very archetype of the infamous Norwegian bachelor farmer), she swiftly marries him and begins selling greeting cards to his customers. To beautify her surroundings, she proceeds to turn their one room shack into a display case of her artistic predilections.

A seasonal visitor from New York happens to get wind of her production and introduces her art to the greater world, and soon the art world flocks to their one room shack in Nova Scotia.

Hawkins and Hawke work well together, she looking for any way to continue her painting, he barely articulate and with his own set of mental challenges to confront, if not conquer. Together, they battle through those challenges to find their happiness, while accidentally becoming famous.

I expect at least one Academy Award nomination for the production, if not two.

Recommended, if you like fine acting performances and general technical excellence. The story is not particularly surprising, but it is competent.

In an informational mail, the Center for Inquiry (CFI), an organization of skeptics who believe strongly in the importance of the separation of church and state, blows the horn about a new Florida law. CNN provides some detail on the law:

A new Florida law would let anyone in the state challenge, and possibly change, what kids are learning in school.

Any Florida resident can raise concerns about teaching material they find unfit for public school classrooms, according to legislation that went into effect Saturday. The bill was introduced in February by Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, and was signed into law last week after passing with bipartisan support.

An “unbiased hearing officer,” not employed by the school district, would determine if a complaint has merit, requiring schools to take any controversial books or material out of the classroom.

CFI‘s worries center around how the curriculum may change. From their mail:

The Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a group lobbying for pet causes of fundamentalist Christians, celebrated, declaring “Touchdown!” on their website. Their Managing Director Keith Flaugh has stated: “Darwin’s theory is a theory, and the biblical view is a theory, and our kids should be taught both in a balanced way.”

Let’s call this what it is: the blatant disregard of church-state separation.

This is a worrisome, expensive mistake by the Florida legislature, but I don’t think CFI can make a credible case for this law being a direct violation of the separation of church and state. I see there being two problems here, and therefore two different reasons for lawyers to get involved, much to the expense of Florida.

First, this law is not for the exclusive use of, say, Christian fundamentalists dismayed at the thought that they are the product of Evolution. Oh, no, anyone can use this, Christians, Hindus, Satanists, Anarchists, Communists, American Indians, Pastafarians, ex-patriate Minnesotans, or, in short, anyone who is capable of taking offense.

And I’m not talking about folks who glory in the denial of reality, as CFI worries. No. Suppose some fundamentalist Christian sect objects to the teaching of evolution and insists that their favored theory gets the lead position. Now what happens? The American Indians come along and insist they’re the offended ones, and now the fundamentalists are the victims of a legally permitted protest. In the end, someone hauls out the lawyers and sends them off to do their thing, and things start getting expensive.

Secondly, of course, the legislature would like to counterpunch this argument with the assertion that an “unbiased hearing officer,” unaffiliated with the school district, will hear complaints and require changes. But I’ll tell you what – no one’s really unbiased. The first time a hearing officer makes a decision against a party with lots of money, the lawyers will come out and dismember that hearing officer in court for not being unbiased.

And how will the victim hapless hearing officer prove he’s unbiased?

Who will defend our “unbiased” hearing officer? Not the school district – there’s expressly no affiliation. That means either he or she has to defend themselves, or the State will have to pay for that defense. So either the State will be rocked by unexpected expenses, or there won’t be any hearing officers.

Rather than bowing to pressure from small grievance groups, the Florida legislature should get back to working on secular, public education as it should be – teaching the tools we use to interact and study reality. Let religious groups teach their alternative theories creation, but since they all lack any factual evidence, they don’t belong in secular schooling, and science should teach what it knows with a reasonable degree of certainty. Textbooks should be selected for their fidelity to facts and / or science, not for ideology, cost, or other factors which will, in the end, negatively impact the education of our children – in particular, their understanding of reality.

If we become a nation based on whim and whimsy of the grievance groups, we’ll become a second-rate nation.

So is this the start of, well, bacterial cell division on a national level? White House spokesman Sanders:

Q    There are many Republicans who believe that getting something on the Republican side is not going to be easy; that the divisions that we see between the center and the right in the Republican Party will become only deeper.  What gives you confidence that this will actually happen?

MS. SANDERS:  With all due respect, I don’t think the American people elected Congress to do things that were easy.  They elected them to make a government that works, to work properly, and to work for American people.  And that’s their job.  And if they can’t do it, then they need to get out of the way and let somebody else who can take on a heavy lift and get things accomplished.

She didn’t target the Democrats, she simply said Congress. And it was a theme of that press conference. I see two possibilities here.

First, she may be setting up the current GOP members of Congress who are not conforming to President Trump’s desires for removal at the next election. This would be an internal revolution, but it could be difficult. This is, obviously, a warning shot across the bow of the non-conformists.

So the second possibility is that we’re seeing the beginning of the shearing off of Trump and Trump’s allies in the GOP into another party. How this will go for a President who continues to be deeply and embarrassingly unpopular is hard to see as successful. However, given Trump’s inability to use his position to engineer his way to what he wants, which is the mark of an incompetent politician, he may see this as an alternative approach.

But it would certainly make his job easier if his closest allies happened to also occupy key positions in Congress. Not to mention it would appeal to his immense ego, and shore up his insecurities.

The Party Of Trump.

Screed:

1. a long discourse or essay, especially a diatribe.
2. an informal letter, account, or other piece of writing. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey,” MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MAGGIE HABERMAN, The New York Times:

Mr. Miller and Mr. Kushner both told the president that weekend that they were in favor of firing Mr. Comey.

Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Miller to draft a letter, and dictated his unfettered thoughts. Several people who saw Mr. Miller’s multi-page draft described it as a “screed.”

Mr. Trump was back in Washington on Monday, May 8, when copies of the letter were handed out in the Oval Office to senior officials, including Mr. McGahn and Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Trump announced that he had decided to fire Mr. Comey, and read aloud from Mr. Miller’s memo.

Some present at the meeting, including Mr. McGahn, were alarmed that the president had decided to fire the F.B.I. director after consulting only Ms. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Miller. Mr. McGahn began an effort to stop the letter or at least pare it back.

Is it sad how politics has even spilled into Word Of The Day? Or is it just more opportunity to learn precise meanings?

Along with Hurricane Irma is Sunspot AR2673, which unleashed a hell of a solar flare, as Spaceweather.com reports:

On Sept. 6th at 1202 UT, sunspot AR2673 unleashed a major X9.3-class solar flare–the strongest solar flare in more than a decade. X-rays and UV radiation from the blast ionized the top of Earth’s atmosphere, causing a strong shortwave radio blackout over Europe, Africa and the Atlantic Ocean. …

Many readers are asking about the historic context of this event. How epic is it? Answer: This is a decade-class flare. A list of the most powerful solar flaresrecorded since 1976 ranks today’s flare at #14, tied with a similar explosion in 1990. However, compared to the iconic Carrington Event of 1859, or even the more recent Halloween storms of 2003, this event is relatively mild. Modern power grids, telecommunications, and other sun sensitive technologies should weather the storm with little difficulty.

[The link to the above may be bad.]

Keep an eye on the sky, especially if you’re the high northern latitudes.

… then it’s time to devolve to name calling. Yes, folks, it’s time to dive into the email bag again, this time on the subject of the Confederate statue removal. This time around I’ll quote the damn thing with a critique interlaced. And in haste, as guests press me for time.

Words of wisdom from someone concerned .

OK, the first rule of handing out words of wisdom is to remember those claiming to be wise usually are NOT. And, yeah, just to be fair, I was a little appalled when Justice Sotomayor, during her nomination hearings, remarked about the importance of a “wise Latina.”

I have BREAKING NEWS for all those that want to erase American history during the day or in the dead of night:

If you take down every statue on the continent, slavery and the American Civil War will still have happened. If you have minimum wage skills now, taking down statues won’t change that. If you’re up to your ass in college loan debt, taking down statues won’t change that. The nation will still be $20,000,000,000,000 in debt. We will still be in a global economy. North Korea will still be run by a lunatic who wants you dead. Radical Islamists will still want you dead. People who hate you now, will still hate you, perhaps even more. Soros, Obama and the Clinton’s will still be sleazy and corrupt and you’ll still be just a puppet for them.

Dude, who said anything about removal of the statuary settling all the problems of the world? This is just a little sleight of hand, distract the reader while the cookie is stolen, now isn’t it?

But statues are all about celebration, aren’t they? Now, why are we celebrating the lives and deaths of traitors? Because that’s what they were. They started the Civil War because slavery was being hemmed in by States and Territories that banned it. And they couldn’t stand the idea that someday their slaves would be taken away.

So why celebrate them? And, on the flip side of this single, why stick the needle into the descendants of those slaves? Why remind them of the guys in the white sheets who illegally lynched and terrorized them?

Let’s just get down and dirty here. There’s never a single solution to any big thing. But there’s lots of small solutions to nail lots of small problems. One of them is our continual problem of race relations, of white supremacists running around with imagined grievances, and of the unprincipled folks who take advantage of that to build wealth and power.

The removal of those statues satisfies the moral imperative that we do not celebrate treachery against the United States. By removing them, we begin to fade out that continual sense of false grievance, of racial tensions.

Source: CNN.
Blech

The rest of that? A mixture of obvious truths and slimy mud slinging, wherein he hopes the former will hide the basic dishonor of the latter. Like I said, when he can’t bring up a belch of bad reasoning, he just slings the mud, hoping these ideas, these little pathogen-laden TICKS, will jump into the readers’ brains and infest them with calumny and libel.

The Department of Education will still not have educated anyone. There will still be only two genders. Hillary will still not have won the 2016 election and Bernie will still be a communist charlatan. There will still be opposing views outside your safe spaces. You’ll still be accountable for your own choices, and the world will still owe you nothing.

Here we get into traditional anti-government provincialism. After all, Education is what destroys this guy’s message, so he’s against it – take any protests with the proverbial salt lick. As we all know, Hillary won the election, but lost in the Electoral College – he might think that’s a very fine point, but the fact of the matter is that the Trump Administration is a minority government – and not getting any better. And Bernie? We’ll probably never know, but since he’s for gun rights, there may be a problem in that argument.

Taking down all the statues will still not change the fact that Communism has been responsible for more slavery and death than the Confederacy ever was and that it was Democrats who fought to keep slavery while Republicans fought to stop it. The removal of statues won’t change the fact that the first slave owner was a black man.

It’s a little hard to even know where to start with this bit of tattered shouting. Shall I just shrug and ask what relevance Communists may have to do with this? It’s a fading, has-been ideology, a dead-end side branch in the evolution of societal systems. So what? No one arguing for the removal of the statues gives a rip about Communism. Hell, most of them are simply for social justice, and a sizable minority are capitalists who recognize the danger slavery presents to capitalism.

And while I’m certain this is a desperate red cape flung into the air to distract me from the essentially empty failure of this presenter’s argument, I still can’t help but notice how he desperately also ignores the importance of context. The easy mistake to recognize is that of disparate population sizes. After all, Russia went Communist in 1918, decades after the Confederacy went down to defeat. Just on that basis alone it’s hard to justify a comparison without a fair amount of math.

But let’s take this one step further, friends, and ask how weaponry compared between the two governmental systems, because, make no mistake about it, slavery is enforced with violence, whether you’re a Communist or a Confederate, with good old-fashioned guns, and that means it’s just possible that the heroic Confederate general that this fellow’s worshiping may have used a whip on some helpless black child.

But he didn’t use machine guns. Or Kalashnikov’s. Not because of his inherent virtue, but because they weren’t available. But if he could have, would our generic Confederate done so?

You bet. You bet. And that’s what this guy wants to defend. Think about it, folks, for a moment. Your blood should run cold, eh?

And I nearly forgot the Democrats / Republicans mumbo-jumbo. Now, I can take this two ways. First, we can just cite context and note that the Democrats of today are not the Democrats of 150 years ago. Past performance is no guarantee of future gains, as the financial advisors will tell you. Second, and what I like better, is this: The Democrats grew up. The Republicans, on the other hand, lost any claim on moral superiority. That’s what happens when you’re sleeping with white nationalists.

Son, you sure you want to make that argument?

And now on to the final deception.

So, if you have a problem with a statue of Robert E. Lee in Virginia, but no issues with a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Seattle, we’ll erect a monument to your cowardice and depict a huddled mass of frightened and drooling idiots who can’t find their asses with both hands and a map.

I had not heard of a statue of Lenin in Seattle, so I did some research. He’s right! There is!

But it’s not proudly on display in celebration of the late founder of a dead empire, as this guy would have you believe. Remember, folks, if it seems ridiculous, it’s worth a bit of research. So here’s Wikipedia:

The Statue of Lenin in Seattle is a 16 ft (5 m) bronze sculpture of Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, by Bulgarian sculptor Emil Venkov. It completed and put on display in Czechoslovakia in 1988. The statue was taken down following the Velvet Revolution of 1989. It was bought by an American in 1993, who moved it to Washington in the US. Since 1995 it has been up for sale and on display in an outdoor retail property in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.

Ah, if I were at liberty to laugh, I’d be wiping tears from my eyes: the symbol of the antithesis of capitalism is for sale! The only celebration is when someone steps up and buys it – and probably melts the thing down for its basic metals value.

Oh, and Donald J. Trump is STILL PRESIDENT!

In the interests of being complete, I include the above pathetic line – since STILL is such an acknowledgment of ongoing failure. I know some of my friends reading this will take it as an insult to liberals, while others will consider it an insult that such a clumsy deceiver would proclaim his allegiance to Trump, for which Trump would surely sue if he could only find this dubious clod. I consider it an insult to America, though, that this person, so incompetent in both argument and deceit, still believes that, somehow, he achieved victory in Trump’s electoral college victory, as if the hamstringing and damage being done to America every day by this Administration is good for the writer of this concentrated effort in deceit. It’s a celebration of divisiveness, which, come to think of it, was a minor note in the song of the Confederacy.

He should be ashamed.

But he won’t be.

But I trust that my friends who’ve persevered to this point will agree that crap like this, circulating through our communities, is unworthy of respect. All it stirs is hate and division.

Umbrage:

to feel upset or annoyed, usually because you feel that someone has been rude or shown no respect to you:

Will she take umbrage if she isn’t invited to the wedding? [Cambridge Dictionary]

Vladimir Putin, rule of Russia, believes that sanctions would be worthless for correcting North Korea’s behavior, according to CNN:

But Putin, speaking in China on Tuesday, cautioned against “military hysteria” and said that the only way to resolve the crisis was through diplomacy.

He warned that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has calculated that the survival of his regime depends on its development of nuclear weapons. Kim had seen how western intervention in Iraq had ended in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein after which the country was ravaged by war, Putin warned, and Kim was determined not to suffer the same fate.

“Saddam Hussein rejected the production of weapons of mass destruction, but even under that pretense, he was destroyed and members of his family were killed,” Putin said.

“The country was demolished and Saddam Hussein was hanged. Everyone knows that and everyone in North Korea knows that.” …

But speaking at the closure of the BRICs summit in Beijing — which hosted the leaders of Brazil, India, China and South Africa — Putin said that while Russia condemned North Korea’s latest actions, imposing any kind of sanctions would be “useless and ineffective.” Kim would rather starve his people than see his regime overthrown, he said.

Yes, it’s Putin, but the last bit rings true, especially concerning Hussein. Thus, while Joseph DeThomas’ post on 38 North is much more respectable, he seems to have forgotten that one aspect. He recommends a combination of stronger enforcement of sanctions as well as a stronger game of diplomacy, and after some specific recommendations he writes:

Orchestrating this diplomacy will be one of the most complex challenges of the past 50 years. It is unclear whether the US State Department—suffering from several levels of missing leadership, low morale and persistent and unhelpful interference from the White House—is up to the task. But a way will have to be found to perform it if there is to be success on this issue.

Probably nicknamed Bush & Cheney.

Joseph doesn’t really go far enough in recognizing the utter inadequacy of the Trump Administration, because, in retrospect, the problems didn’t start there. They started with the Bush II Administration’s decision to trump up (forgive me) a reason to destroy Saddam Hussein, who at this point had been reduced to a two-bit blowhard who had given up his weapons of mass destruction in exchange for guarantees of survival.

But those guarantees were backed by the US government, and were abrogated, to use John Bolton’s term, through lies and deceit.

And – no doubt I repeat myself – the birds of mendacity have come home to roost. Kim Jong-un understands that the US government is not trustworthy, and that, in his mind, it’s prudent to be a porcupine that can inflict a lot of damage on a predator. Promises aren’t enough, but a long, pointy spear may be.

There’s a real moral lesson in all this, but no doubt a historian will do a better – or more objective – job figuring it out than I will. To me, though, this smacks of provincialism, religious egocentrism, and the delusion that God favors you, and thus you can do no wrong.

No. We’re getting an object lesson in how badly these attitudes can go wrong, and the sad thing is that those who voted for Bush probably don’t realize just how much this is their philosophy’s fault. Some of it is the difficulty of drawing lessons from international incidents, since they can be hard to comprehend if you’re not in the Foreign Service. It’s even harder when you practice the hubris of being the center of the Universe. And it’s bloody well impossible when you are not made to see honest analysis, but instead pandering by the right wing media pursuing power and wealth with little regard to the national interest.

And here’s a relevant link. Don’t depend on your Federal government to remind you – they want to bust the ACA. If you’re wondering why, try firing off a letter to your favorite GOP CongressCritter.

My mother-in-law will be in town for the next few days, and so the blogging will be curtailed, although I’ll be trying to catch the news.

With a hurricane like Harvey, it’s not just humans that need help – but some of the wildlife as well. Melissa Breyer of Treehugger.com reports why helping bats is helping the human inhabitants of Houston:

So why the sudden focus on bats? Sure, there are bat lovers for whom this might be of particular interest – compassion is compassion. But there are people and pets in dire need of attention. Yet here’s the thing: The Waugh Bridge colony eats around two and a half tons of insects every night. Without them, Houston’s mosquito population would look very different. Popular Science writes, “A dead bat is a bat that can no longer consume huge meals made of Houston’s mosquitoes – mosquitoes that may lead to a proliferation of diseases after the flood.”

Petrologist:

Petrology (from the Greek πέτρος, pétros, “rock” and λόγος, lógos, “subject matter”, see -logy) is the branch of geology that studies rocks and the conditions under which they form. Petrology has three subdivisions, igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary petrology. Igneous and metamorphic petrology are commonly taught together because they both contain heavy use of chemistry, chemical methods, and phase diagrams. Sedimentary petrology is, on the other hand, commonly taught together with stratigraphy because it deals with the processes that form sedimentary rock. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Why Thousands of Volcanologists are Meeting in Portland,” Erik Klemetti, Rocky Planet:

So, this whole week I’ll be taking part in the IAVCEI meeting in Portland, Oregon. Of course, most people have never heard of IAVCEI, which is an abbreviation of the International Association of Volcanology and the Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior (now you can see why we use the abbreviation.) This meeting is bringing together over 1,200 volcanologists and petrologists (who study magma, not petroleum) from all over world to talk about volcanoes.

Please, sleep with my daughter who can read your filthy test pilot mind!

Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) is an example of the horror-SF genre, but unfortunately a fairly aimless example. Major Bill Allison, USAF, is a test pilot, using a rocket-equipped jet fighter to attempt to make it into orbit. On his last mission, he loses contact with his control team, and when he lands back at base, he finds it abandoned, dilapidated, and weedy. He explores and soon leaves the airbase, looking for anyone, when he loses consciousness.

On coming to, he finds himself a captive. The head of his captors, an elderly man called the Supreme, is wary, while his middle-aged Captain is aggressive and accuses Allison of being a spy. After some verbal fencing, Allison is taken away to a cage where other prisoners are kept – all bald and crawling on the ground. He fights with and questions one, and then is taken out of the cage and returned to the Supreme. He’s questioned some more and accused of being a ‘Scape’. The Supreme’s deaf and mute daughter, who has some telepathic capbility, is proctoring the conversation, and continually indicates Allison is telling the truth.

Eventually, we learn it is 60 years in the future, and now there are only Mutants, who have been damaged by a plague caused by A-Bomb testing, Scapes, who are so named for having escaped the plague, and everyone else, who is considered normal – but, with the exceptions of the Supreme, the Captain, and the Supreme’s daughter, Trirene, they are all sterile as well as mute and deaf^[1].

This, presumably, so the actors could be paid less for no speaking lines, my Arts Editor pointed out.

The Scapes, three in number, consisting of two scientists and a female Russian military officer^[1], have all arrived at this place in much the same way as did Allison, but their craft were destroyed, while Allison’s is intact, so they hatch a plan for Allison to return to his native time to try to stop the plague; meantime, he’s also informed that the daughter has picked him for her mate, since everyone else is sterile. Allison resolves to take her with him, since his plane is a two seater, although he flew alone.

Eventually, the time comes to break out of captivity and make a run for the plane, but the Russian military officer frees the captive Mutants, and in the resultant chaos tries to force Allison to take her instead of Trirene back in time. However, she’s killed by one of the two captive scientists, who has his own designs on the plane, but he, in turn, loses the turf battle to the other scientist, and in the final fight, Allison kills the last scientist, who accidentally shoots Trirene to death during the struggle. Ooops.

Allison then returns and is placed in the hospital, having magically become an elderly man, and is debriefed.

It’s all rather silly. Is there any sort of real theme here? Not that I can discern. And good horror movies do have some sort of interesting theme. Alien (1979), one of the greatest of the genre, gradually reveals that the machinations of a giant corporation in search of profit has infinitely worsened the predicament in which the crew of the Nostromo finds itself, and because this constitutes a betrayal of the crew, it greatly strengthens a horror element in that the iron-clad law that we all stick together in the face of unknown dangers has been broken in the simple search for profit. The horror element embodied in the act of rendering aid resulting in skin-crawling disaster for the rescuers is multiplied.

But there doesn’t seem to be anything like that here. A very straightforward action story, I suppose, but it seems, of all things, timid. The writers didn’t want to pursue hard choices, just tell the story in an expeditious manner.

And it was really boring.

¹I voted that the normals should have a name, too, but my Arts Editor discarded my vote.

²They indulge in some extremely bad and painfully told science to explain Allison’s predicament.

Nothing more than that.. took this pic a while back.

This one, too. Not sure how I forgot to post it, since it’s a bit of a dazzler.

Almost two weeks ago another missive in the ongoing saga of the Motley Fool came across my desk, and I was so appalled at what I read I put it away. Another look didn’t make it any better, though. Purporting to be from co-founder Tom Gardner, it says, among other things, this:

For the past six months, I have been working on a special research project with an ambitious goal:

Isolate the single investing factor that was found in nearly every one of The Motley Fool’s most successful stock recommendations…

As I began to analyze all the recommendations The Motley Fool has ever made, I quickly noticed a clear pattern emerging:

THE SMALLER OUR RECOMMENDATIONS, THE MORE MONEY INVESTORS HAVE MADE.

In other words, the smaller the total capitalization (“cap”) of a company they had recommended, the bigger the profit.

Tom, given how you stated it, the first criticism is that this is just standard math. Forget all the crap about share price, number of shares, etc – when you buy a piece of a company, the percentage at which the company’s total capitalization appreciates over the period that you hold that share of stock is also the percentage at which your holding also appreciates^[1]. Let’s make up a totally artificial example. Suppose someone has guaranteed you that in five years time four companies will each have a $10 billion cap. Suppose further that right at this moment the four companies have caps of $5 billion, $1 billion, $500 million, and $100 million.

Which company should you buy? Ignoring all other variables, and that’s one helluva big “ignore”, you buy the one worth $100 million because the appreciation percentage is the greatest^[2].

But this leads to my second criticism, which are misstatements. There are misstatements in the mail and misstatements in what I just wrote, so I’ll go first – I implied that the risk of each investment is the same. They never are, and that’s the main challenge of any investor, understanding the risks of each investment.

But Tom just glosses over the same point. If Tom had said,

Despite the higher risks implicit in microcap stocks, The Motley Fool’s picks in this area of investing have far outperformed all of our picks outside of microcaps!

then I could have respected what he’d written. That would speak to both the novices and the experienced investors, as the novice may not realize how important risk evaluation is during the investment process, while the experienced investor would realize it was an honest statement that explicitly notes this area of investing is not for beginners.

And then we come to the “herding the buffalo off the cliff” phase of the promotion.

To make sure only committed, long-term investors have the chance to benefit from these recommendations…

Not only will we be accepting just 1,500 additional new members into The Rising Stars Portfolio, but the only way to officially receive YOUR invitation before we reveal the entire portfolio is by filling out our brief “New Member Application.”

With over 500,000 active investors in the Motley Fool community, you can see why we expect those 1,500 seats to sell out fast. Installing this “New Member Application ” ensures our interests align when it comes to investing alongside The Rising Stars Portfolio.

Ah, they’ll sell out fast. Quick action is required. Turn off the brain and get yourself positioned, eh? It’s not a really respectable way to run a sober investing service. Indeed, if you carefully examine the statements, you’ll realize that they really don’t relate to each other very well. Consider the first paragraph vs the second. Or what does it mean to “install” an application?

But I fear rationality is not part of this promotion, despite rationality and refusal to run with the herd being historical parts of the Motley Fool business.

Instead, reading this, the heart starts pounding and you hit that button that says you’re interested before everyone else does, and now they have a shot. It’s not a guarantee for them, of course. Some folks will realize microcaps represent far too much risk for them – Tom’s new service may even give them that warning. But I won’t know that, because I won’t push the button.

As I was thinking about this promotion, it occurred to me to wonder if Tom and David Gardner have actually sold the Motley Fool to some nameless conglomerate, and as part of the sales agreement they agreed that the personas of Tom and David may be used by the new owners to promote the company. The zombie Gardners, if you will.

Now I’m a little frightened of doing the actual research to falsify the hypothesis. What if I’m right?

¹Minus fees and taxes, of course, once you sell. Also, if the company sells new shares of stock in order to raise capital for various purposes, current shareholders are diluted and will then not profit as much. This is common with microcaps, which are usually still developing their initial product. Speak to a licensed financial professional for more detail – don’t depend on me!

²And if this is not immediately obvious, please find a remedial mathematics course which will help you develop your mathematical intuition.

Turns out Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare was once a journalist, skilled in reading between the lines when it comes to anonymous sources. He shares his rules for evaluating such reporting:

Rule No. 3: It Is Ethical and Legal for Defense Lawyers to Dish on Matters About Which Prosecutors Cannot Appropriately Talk

There is no point more important to understanding where any given story comes from than this basic legal fact: investigative secrecy rules bind prosecutors and law enforcement and court officials but generally not defense lawyers or witnesses. Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure bars prosecutors and grand jurors from disclosing matters taking place before a grand jury. Lots of other rules within investigative bodies generally make it improper for prosecutors and FBI officials to talk to the press about what they’ve learned. So when prosecutors and investigators leak, and it does happen, it’s often a serious impropriety—and sometimes a criminal act. (There are limited exceptions to this statement.)

The thing to keep in mind is that none of these rules covers the many defense lawyers who have subjects, targets or witnesses before those same investigators. In fact, defense lawyers are ethically bound to zealously represent their clients’ interests, and many lawyers see conditioning the public discussion of an investigation in a favorable direction for the client as part of their jobs. There are situations—court orders sealing material, confidentiality agreements and the like—where defense lawyers have ethical or legal constraints on their ability to speak as well. But the norm is that they have great freedom to discuss matters prosecutors cannot discuss; the main constraint on them is the duty to act in their clients’ interests.

Dirty little secret: It’s a common tactic for defense lawyers to put material out there in a fashion favorable to their clients and to make sure the sourcing is suggestive of an improper prosecutorial leak—and then complain publicly about prosecutorial leaks. This happens a lot.

My point is not that prosecutors and investigators never leak. They sometimes do. It is, rather, that when it’s lawful and ethical and appropriate for defense lawyers to disclose material and illegal and unethical and potentially actionable for prosecutors to do so, the default assumption should be that the material came from the defense bar when something is sourced in a fashion consistent with coming from either.

Benjamin goes on to analyze a couple of recent stories using his guidelines. Interesting stuff.