Unsightly Mental Blemishes

I admit I was captivated.

No! There’s not room for you here!
Uh, oh, here comes my daughter, she always contradicts me.

Watching In the Year 2889 (1967), we agreed that this movie must certainly be considered a candidate for Mystery Science Theater 3000: awful story, poor acting, uninspired makeup, ridiculous premise, obtuse title. And, for MST3K, a target rich environment.

General premise: the atomic bomb have come raining down on mankind.

Specific  premise: a man has built his home so he and his daughter can survive this. Wait, what? Why? Why would you want to survive?

Plot: As the survivors puzzle over a couple of survivors who should be dead, the squabbling begins and survivors (and one unsuspecting rabbit) start getting picked off.

Acting: not wooden, but restrained without that sudden release that restrained acting can enable. Even the would-be rapist only inspires some faint inclination to shun him, without the actual need to strangle him.

And, despite the title, they seem to be discussing World War II!

But perhaps best is the father, in his sixties, a retired Navy Captain, who keeps meeting refugees at his front door with a gun and a barked “Get out! There’s no room for you here!”, only to have his twenty-ish daughter reprimand him and take the refugees to yet another bedroom in their spacious abode, while the father walks grumbling off. Juxtaposing that with a yet later “I’m in charge” speech was priceless.

But, really, I would only recommend seeing this under the guidance of Joel Hodgson. Or with beer, and lots of it.

Here’s the header of the Raw Image Gallery of Cassini. Totally gorgeous color palette.

Source: NASA/JPL/California Institute of Technology/Space Science Institute

Since we’re in the raw image gallery, here’s a fairly striking, uncalibrated picture of the moon Mimas from just a few days ago:

Credit: NASA/JPL/California Institute of Technology/Space Science Institute

Makes me wish I had pressed on with my own image processing. I had to figure out some math and ran out of energy for it. Maybe the Cassini math isn’t as bad as the Viking math.

38 North invited former Secretary of Defense William Perry to their monthly breakfast, and he accepted, giving a short presentation and taking questions from the press. While he doesn’t claim to be an expert, he certainly has a lot of experience with the North Koreans, and I appreciated this insight into North Korean motivations:

Anybody that’s ever done any negotiations understands you cannot succeed unless you know where the other side of the table is coming from, what they’re trying to achieve. And I think a big failure of our negotiations in the so-called “Six Party Talks” is we have not done that and not understood where North Korea is coming from.

I presume to tell you what I think they are. My knowledge is based on two things. Partly on having had numerous discussions with North Korean senior officials on this subject. But, I think more importantly, by observing what they do. What they do makes clear what they are thinking. So, let’s get to that for a moment.

I believe – I believe without any, really, uncertainty – goal number one of North Korea is to sustain the Kim dynasty. You could describe that as survival of the regime. But I put it more specifically: sustaining the Kim dynasty.

The second goal is an important goal for them. It is achieving international recognition.

A third goal is improving their economy. But I want to emphasize that third goal is subservient to the first two goals, and they have demonstrated that over, and over, again. They’re willing to sacrifice their economy if it’s necessary, to achieve those first two goals.

So, sustaining the dynasty, achieving international recognition, and a poor third is improving their economy.

The idea of a unified Korea that they talk about I think that’s way behind the other goals. They don’t see that as something that’s going to be operational for many, many – a long, long time.

It’s true that sometimes leadership and legislative wisdom can clash with the popular will – after all, we don’t hire representatives to convey our express will into the legislature, we hire them to figure out what’s best and then do it. But it’s a ticklish high wire we cross when this comes up – when is it leadership, and when is it base corruption? Several factors need to be observed, including the reasonability of the claim – does it pass the sniff test?

So the activities of the South Dakota legislature need this examination, because they seem to contravening the will of the voters who approved a referendum, as Salon reports:

Republican lawmakers in South Dakota have refused to enact a ballot measure instituting campaign finance, lobbying reforms, public financing for campaigns and creating the first independent ethics commission in the state’s history. The bill passed with 52 percent the vote.

The South Dakota Government Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act makes it illegal for lawmakers to receive more than a total of $100 annually from lobbyists in the form of “any compensation, reward, employment, gift, honorarium, beverage, meal, food, or other thing of value made or given directly or indirectly.” Under the new law, an independent ethics commission would investigate ethics and campaign finance complaints lodged against legislative and executive branch officials.

The opposition was primarily the Koch brothers, and after the measure passed,

Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard has argued that voters were “hoodwinked by scam artists who grossly misrepresented these proposed measures.” Republican House Majority Leader Lee Qualm said, “We need to get rid of this as quickly as possible.”

Surely you’d think they’d understand how bad this behavior looks to the average voter, at least those who paid attention and gave the bill serious thought. Now, perhaps they have a point, and if so, if they have average communications skills they’ll be OK. But without seeing those arguments, I have to fall back on general observations of the GOP for the current year, and it’s not looking good. The scandalous doings of the North Carolina legislature is getting to be emblematic, although the attempt at the Federal level to gut the ethics watchdog is certainly closer to what’s going on here.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes next, since, as Salon reports, the South Dakota legislature operated under a “state of emergency,” which nullifies any direct attempts to reverse the legislature’s action, as can otherwise happen. In some ways, it’s almost as if the GOP is asking to get booted in the teeth by the citizens; however, it’d have to be a big boot, as the GOP is in overwhelming control of the South Dakota legislature.

They’d be better advised to embrace these sorts of initiatives, to proclaim they’re so pure that there’s nothing to fear from such laws for their part; only their opponents need fear those laws. But right now, it looks like a bunch of cockroaches scurrying about, frantically trying to hide from God.

Or someone’s boot.

North Korea is working again on its financial sector and making banking facilities available. Andray Abrahamian on 38 North writes up a report on it, but one passage really caught my attention:

Interest in the financial sector has generally grown under Kim Jong Un, as more students and delegations have been sent abroad to explore issues related to banking, and relevant domestic education has increased.[11] Also in the last couple of years, North Korean media have made a rhetorical return to the mid-2000s by lamenting the wastefulness of “idle funds.” As The Kim Il Sung University Gazette noted in 2014:

Some of the funds that are being circulated in the market have strayed away from the normal production process and distribution passage and remain harbored in the hands of organizations, enterprises, and people … mobilization of idle funds shall meet the funding needs of the state and serve as a source of supplementary income to increase state revenue.[12]

The last sentence implies a key risk: if banks in the DPRK take deposits to fund loans, those loans have to perform. If banks are forced to make loans to economically non-viable state projects, depositors could lose out, quickly undermining the process of banking-sector development. Despite this potential pitfall, greater regulation and formalization of the system of deposits and lending would be a positive step. Informal financing currently dominates the commercial loan market with little guidance from the state and interest rates can surpass 15 percent. By offering formal loans that are cheaper, North Korea’s banks could help drive growth.

The bold is actually mine, not Andray’s. He sees a risk of one sort, but I see another: banks traditionally serve the needs of the customers and use their custodianship of their customers’ funds as an opportunity to make money through their own investments of those funds while in their custodianship. But the sentence that bothers Andray clearly indicates the purpose of the bank has shifted from serving the customer to serving the North Korean state, which almost certainly, in practical terms, will devolve to the Party as well. At a more basic level, and using my favorite lens, this change in purpose will also imply a change in the optimization of the methods of the bank – meaning that presence and supremacy of the needs of the State will almost certainly not benefit the customers.

If, at some point, the customers conclude that the costs outweigh the benefits, then the bank will be defunded by the customers, those late to the conclusion will lose everything, and the bank will implode.

This, of course, comes from someone with little knowledge of the North Korean situation on the ground. It just seems likely from general principles observed here in the West.

Concerning Tesla‘s batteries, a reader adds a technical note regarding my concerns:

The “blowing up” cell phones were caused by errors measured microns. I don’t think that will be a problem here.

Hope not. Hopefully they’re relatively stable in percussive environments such as an earthquake or tornado.

A new one on me. NewScientist (21 January 2017) reports on the possible detection of same on Venus:

A giant atmospheric phenomenon called a gravity wave has been spotted above Venus by the Japanese probe Akatsuki.

For those of us not keeping up, Wikipedia gives a definition:

A gravity wave results when fluid is displaced from a position of equilibrium. The restoration of the fluid to equilibrium will produce a movement of the fluid back and forth, called a wave orbit.^[1] Gravity waves on an air–sea interface of the ocean are called surface gravity waves or surface waves, while gravity waves that are within the body of the water (such as between parts of different densities) are called internal waves. Wind-generated waves on the water surface are examples of gravity waves, as are tsunamis and ocean tides.

The abstract of the technical paper from which the report is drawn:

The planet Venus is covered by thick clouds of sulfuric acid that move westwards because the entire upper atmosphere rotates much faster than the planet itself. At the cloud tops, about 65 km in altitude, small-scale features are predominantly carried by the background wind at speeds of approximately 100 m s⁻¹. In contrast, planetary-scale atmospheric features have been observed to move slightly faster or slower than the background wind, a phenomenon that has been interpreted to reflect the propagation of planetary-scale waves. Here we report the detection of an interhemispheric bow-shaped structure stretching 10,000 km across at the cloud-top level of Venus in middle infrared and ultraviolet images from the Japanese orbiter Akatsuki. Over several days of observation, the bow-shaped structure remained relatively fixed in position above the highland on the slowly rotating surface, despite the background atmospheric super rotation. We suggest that the bow-shaped structure is the result of an atmospheric gravity wave generated in the lower atmosphere by mountain topography that then propagated upwards.

Business Insider has a lovely pic in infrared light:

When I say “we saw Vincent Price’s Madhouse (1974)”, I mean this in a very special way. Vincent plays a retired horror movie star, known for his portrayals of Dr. Death, broken by the horrible fate of his fiancee. A decade later, he’s enticed out of retirement, but as he begins to work on a TV version of the movie series, people begin dying – all in the style of the deaths of the previous Dr. Death movies. All of this is supported by outtakes – a restrained number – from Price’s real movies.

And so this really is Vincent Price’s Madhouse.

It’s an interesting premise for a movie, but, as noted for other movies of the era, it suffers from the 1970s British movies malady – a certain brittleness, brought on in this case by characters who might have been sympathetic, but are not. Some are merely neutral, with no effort to humanize them, while others are faintly repugnant. Even Vincent’s character fades a little towards ineffectuality, even a note of pathetic failure. The plot jumps from scene to scene, some of which seem gratuitous – the blackmailing couple, for instance, are both unbelievable and disposed of with no consideration of consequence or sentiment. While the ending has a certain element of fun in its breaking of yet another wall, frankly, questions of fantasy and reality are not brought to mind, due to the mostly insipid characters and a basic failure to care for the fates of those induced to act in this, ummmm, madhouse.

And Peter Cushing is way shorter than Vincent Price. I’m just saying there’s a monstrous plot hole there.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com reports more abandonment of coal:

Earlier today, I reported that Deutsche Bank is going to stop financing new coal mines and power stations, and reduce its exposure to existing coal-dependent assets too. Obviously, this move has benefits in terms of the bank’s corporate responsibility commitments, but there’s another important aspect to this tale: It just doesn’t make sense financially anymore.

No sooner do I write this than I get another confirmation of the way the wind is blowing: Danish energy giant DONG (yes, snickering is allowed) has committed to phasing out coal from its energy mix by 2023. This move probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. As the graphic above shows, DONG has already reduced its coal dependence by 73% since 2006. But the fact that they are announcing a complete phase out is still encouraging: coal’s decline isn’t likely to plateau out with a reduced market share. It’s going to go the way of whale oil and steam trains.

Among his many promises, President Trump claimed he would bring work back to the coal miners, and now they’re waiting for it to happen. Congress has followed his lead in the matter, as reported by The New York Times:

Republicans on Thursday took one of their first steps to officially dismantle Obama-era environmental regulations by easing restrictions on coal mining, bolstering an industry that President Trump has made a symbol of America’s neglected heartland.

Using an obscure law that allows Congress to review regulations before they take effect, the Senate voted to reverse the Stream Protection Rule, which seeks to protect the nation’s waterways from debris generated by a practice called surface mining. The Interior Department had said the rule would protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests by keeping coal mining debris away from nearby waters.

CNN/Money explains why they think this is just shouting:

Despite Trump’s best intentions and regulation-busting actions, experts don’t believe they will be enough to save coal.

That’s because coal has a fierce competitor in the form of natural gas. It’s cheap, it’s clean and there’s a ton of it in the U.S. Plus, Trump himself supports expanded drilling of U.S. shale, the chief source of the boom in natural gas.

“The coal jobs aren’t coming back,” said James Van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University College of Law.

He called it “nonsense” to think lighter regulation will change that. “The coal industry is being pounded by market forces. It’s not regulation,” he said.

Even Robert Murray, the CEO of the largest U.S. private coal miner, thinks Trump is going to have a hard time keeping his coal promises.

West Virginia power plant
Source: Steam Engine Revolution

In a very real sense, and honestly no offense to the President or the GOP portion of Congress, but this is a betrayal of the coal-miners. Most of the out of work miners will probably never see the inside of a coal mine again, except as tourists. Coal is a dirty fuel, even without regard to climate change; I have a friend who is currently suffering from mercury poisoning, no doubt brought on by the burning of coal and its absorption into the oceanic food chain – he’s a tuna addict. There are cleaner alternatives, both fossil and renewables, that are cheaper or nearly cheaper than coal. And in the export market, the United States is not a dominant force; that position is taken up by Indonesia.

This is a false hope. Rather than trying to return to a Golden Age that will never be there for them again, we should be looking at how best to take care of those who worked in the coal industry, identifying those who need retraining, and get to work on taking care of the business of taking care of Americans. It’s a technology which was very useful a century ago, when its use didn’t damage the environment in meaningful ways, but today we need better solutions – and better thinking from the President and Congress. So far, they have been very disappointing in their performance.

As Reuters is reporting, GOP ideology is not the same as conservatism – especially when said conservative benefits from a government program. Rep. Chaffetz (R-Utah) had recently proposed legislation to sell off public lands – land used by hunters. Then he got caught in a snowstorm of complaints:

Republican U.S. Congressman Jason Chaffetz said on Thursday he plans to withdraw a bill that would have sold off more than 3 million acres of federal land to private interests after it drew a barrage of negative comments from hunters and outdoor enthusiasts….

“I’m a proud gun owner, hunter and love our public lands,” the Utah representative said in a comment, beneath a photo he posted of himself outdoors wearing hunting gear and holding a dog. “I hear you and HR 621 dies tomorrow,” added Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

I think the ideologically driven may discover there’s a lot of folks who don’t much attention to politics – until their apple cart is upset. Then, much like the Democrats were surprised in the recent elections, so will the GOP be surprised.

It’s a problem I’ve noticed with politicians and politic-groupies. For them, the world of politics is central, exciting, fun, and gives them a purpose – and, like a lot of people, they think everyone is like them, outside of a few cranks.

They even have a point. Governance is an important part of our cultural landscape.

And because of endemic human urges, they think they’re right and that most folks agree with them.

But a majority of the citizenry doesn’t care for it. Not a whit. You go out and vote because it’s a civic duty if you’re one of the 50% of the country actually susceptible to that sort of argument; if you’re not, you don’t worry about it. Election Day has slightly different traffic patterns, some people are wearing red stickers on their shirts, that’s all.

And, you know, in a country where a lot of us work way more than 40 hours a week, we’re raising kids, taking care of the house, and pursuing quite a few hobbies that have little to do with government (I used to say “go bowling and drink beer,” but I think that’s lost relevance), it’s not surprising that interviews with voters seem like they’re done through a dirty window. The voter is ill-informed (especially if they’re watching Fox News), votes how the family has traditionally voted (never mind that both parties have changed quite a lot over the years), or only votes for the City Council member that happens to live on their block. As an Irish software engineer once told me on her visit to our country, “You’re so big! No wonder you don’t know anything about other countries!” And we often don’t think big.

But someone’s bull was about to be gored, the word got out in hobby-land, and now we’re seeing a little of how politics works in the common citizenry – “forest rangers”, to make a metaphor, keep an eye on government and sound the alarm when a resource valued by the hobby is threatened, and the sleepy citizens suddenly leap to their feet and assault the fetid legislator who thought he was doing good.

Similar reactions may occur as other extreme GOP ideological points approach implementation. Indeed, there’s been several stories about the expected repeal of the ACA triggering panicky reactions among voters who have come to depend on it.

Look for more.

Snow sculptures from the St Paul Winter Carnival.

The problem of ineffective antibiotics won’t go away, as NewScientist (21 January 2017) sadly notes:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that a woman who died in Nevada last August was infected with Klebsiella bacteria that were resistant to 26 antibiotics – everything her hospital could throw at it. …

 

Her infection might have been cured by one drug that is licensed for uses like this in Europe, but not in the US. Fosfomycin is an old drug that was replaced in the 1980s by more modern cephalosporin antibiotics. Researchers are now trying to resurrect and relicense such drugs for use in the increasing number of cases where newer ones fail.

Concerning Fosfomycin, Wikipedia notes:

The drug is well tolerated and has a low incidence of harmful side-effects.^[5] However, development of bacterial resistance under therapy is a frequent occurrence and makes fosfomycin unsuitable for sustained therapy of severe infections. It is not recommended for children and those over 75 years old.^[8]

Additional uses have been proposed.^[9] The global problem of advancing antimicrobial resistance has led to a renewed interest in its use more recently.

Gotta wonder how long Fosfomycin will remain useful.

Alakazam the Great (1960), listed as Japanese anime (our version was dubbed by such names as Jonathan Winters) of a Chinese story, is quite candid about its message: punishment and redemption. Alakazam is the king of the monkeys, having obtained his throne through great, if reluctant bravery – and then going on to obtain great conceit and pride. (Side lesson: bravery does not make for leadership or management skills. These tests should be connected to the eventual skills needed, eh?) He compels a wizard to teach him magic, which he begins to use to his advantage. The king of Majutsu Land, aka Heaven, takes note of his pride and resolves to teach him humility, sending his human son, the Prince, down from heaven and requiring Alakazam to escort him through the desert and over the mountains.

Hey, lady, does that flower ever come off?

During the trip they encounter various obstacles, including a criminal pig and a human cannibal, both of whom the Prince and Alakazam convince to join them in their quest, thus giving up their former ways and playing into the theme of redemption. In their toils and troubles, yeah, let me save my fingers. We know how this ends, no?

Aaaand all this while ignoring the entreaties of a beautiful lady monkey.

This is mostly a pell mell movie, leaping from scene to scene with scarcely a segue to be found. Not that the pace is uniform, as we do drowse for a bit in a prison, and plod, if ever so briefly, through a desert; but it’s never leisurely, and quite often frantic – do not attempt to knit a shawl during this movie. And there is no lack of characterization of Alakazam, as we both acquired a great distaste for this impulsive, domineering monkey; many other supporting characters are also flamboyantly driven, including the wife of the primary antagonist, who was an ambiguous fascinating character.

So for all that it’s an obvious movie, we watched the whole of it. We were never quite sure where it would turn next, partially because we didn’t have time to think about it; the action was forced upon us so quickly that we spent more time deconstructing the art (which was surprisingly interesting) than thinking about the story.

Oddly enough, the style of animation also reminded me of a Russian version of The Nutcracker we saw at The Museum of Russian Art over Christmas, although much shorter in length, which can also be found here. I’m not entirely sure why; the points of similarity are the somewhat slap dash animation styles, the use of animals in key roles, a studied ignorance of physics, and a certain dispatch to the storytelling, although not with the same frantic nature of Alakazam the Great.

Today, this movie may be an orphan in terms of audience appeal. Certainly, the historical anime gourmand will take notice of it, but that is a small audience. Children will expect a more polished product and perhaps be bored with it, while adults will find this basically a bit too juvenile, although fun if you’re in the mood for it.

It’s hard to stamp Recommended on it, especially as we nearly gave up on it early on, but there is a certain charm to it. If you happen to run across it on TV, as we did, give it a whirl. Maybe it’ll tickle your penny.

Kate Bannen on FP reports on the National Security Council’s transformation:

Even before he was given a formal seat on the National Security Council’s “principals committee” this weekend by President Donald Trump, Bannon was calling the shots and doing so with little to no input from the National Security Council staff, according to an intelligence official who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.

“He is running a cabal, almost like a shadow NSC,” the official said. He described a work environment where there is little appetite for dissenting opinions, shockingly no paper trail of what’s being discussed and agreed upon at meetings, and no guidance or encouragement so far from above about how the National Security Council staff should be organized. …

The lack of a paper trail documenting the decision-making process is also troubling, the intelligence official said. For example, under previous administrations, after a principals or deputies meeting of the National Security Council, the discussion, the final agreement, and the recommendations would be written up in what’s called a “summary of conclusions” — or SOC in government-speak.

“Under [President George W. Bush], the National Security Council was quite strict about recording SOCs,” said Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia University who served on Bush’s National Security Council. “There was often a high level of generality, and there may have been some exceptions, but they were carefully crafted.”

These summaries also provided a record to refer back to, especially important if a debate over an issue came up again, including among agencies that needed to implement the conclusions reached.

Certainly the ascent of extremist Islamophobe Steve Bannon to a permanent seat on the NSC is a matter of concern – President Bush forbade the presence of political strategist Karl Rove at NSC meetings, and while Obama permitted his political strategists to accept invites, they didn’t have permanent seats – according to this article’s author, Kate Bannen. National security should not be warped by political considerations.

This lack of paper trail, though, is something of a sign of a modern Keystone Cops, the comedy troupe that lampooned the real cops back in the 1910s. Why? Because it’s a truism of modern management that in order to evaluate your methods, you have to know what was decided and why, develop baselines, and evaluate your results. These things must be recorded, or they don’t exist.

Avoiding writing things down and evaluating decisions? This is the mark of an amateur, someone who’s too tied up in his self-importance to realize that governance is a team game. Hey, he’ll remember this decision – after all, it had been made before the meeting started. He’s Just Too Good To Be Wrong. Everyone else should Just Remember It. Another sign of amateur hour? Kate notes that her source says, “There is zero room for dissenting opinion.” Think about it. No reasoned debate, enlivened with facts and interpretations. Either you’re singing in the choir or your job, your entire career is teetering on the edge.

This is, as anyone’s worked on hard problems knows, a recipe for disaster.

So what’s my point? He can certainly cause chaos and uncertainty – indeed, as a critical part of our defense infrastructure, the failure to come into governance with a plan for the NSC, as Bannen also reports, is an echo of just how much of a disaster the Trump Administration has been so far. Bannon is a critical part of this failure. His perception of Islam being a fatal enemy may cloud the fact that the Russians, as an homogenuous ethnic group and equipped with heavy weapons, are far more capable of causing us upset than a relatively lightly armed religious group riven with both theological and ethnic divisions. Obama’s strategy, no doubt built during meetings fraught with dissenting opinions, of picking off leaders and letting the groups run around more or less headless, keeps us out of painful wars that could prove disastrous. ISIS is being driven out of the cities is had conquered, out of territory it claimed. Does Bannon have a clue as to how this is working? Has he bothered to read the reports? Or does he regard himself as the expert? He’s dangerous – but he’s acting like an unconscious buffoon.

Honestly, if Trump was a smart guy (and he keeps telling us he is – makes you wonder how often Einstein reassured us he was smart), he’d thank Bannon for his help during the campaign – and show him the door. He’d get a troublemaking amateur out of the gears of government while giving more than half the populace some assurance that he’s taking the job seriously.

But Trump thinks he’s smart, so it won’t happen. Better to impeach Trump sooner rather than later, then see if Pence is smart enough to eject him – or if we’re going to have to up the count of Presidents yet again.

Politico asks 13 legal scholars to evaluate SCOTUS nominee Gorsuch, and, after agreeing that he’s top notch and a great writer, the usual cacophony of opinions are produced. I found Professor Farber to be a little naive:

Still, he’s a Trump nominee, and he’s nominated for a seat that should properly belong to Garland. So why not filibuster and try to block the nomination? One reason is that the Republicans were wrong in what they did to Garland, and the Democrats were right that this kind of behavior is damaging to the Supreme Court as an institution. But there are two other reasons. First, blocking a nominee for a year when you have a majority of the Senate is one thing; blocking any appointment for four years when you’re in the minority is much less feasible (and more damaging to the court).

Second, the key thing about Gorsuch from my point of view is that he’s principled—and he seems to have enough backbone to stand up to Trump. We could use that on the court. The fact that Gorsuch has spoken against judicial deference to the executive branch in matters of statutory interpretation makes it more likely that he won’t rubberstamp Trump’s actions.

The problem is that faced by all parents at one time or another: the little boy or girl who demands something that isn’t their’s and screams bloody murder if they don’t get it. Does the wise parent reward them by giving them the lollipop?

No. Proper punishment is administered, instead.

The Senate GOP, McConnell in particular, has behaved like petulant children, and they should be punished for it. I suppose, as many commentators have noted, that the GOP will change the rules to eliminate the filibuster, and thus the Democrats won’t be able to enforce a punishment – and that will be sad, because their should be consequences for the GOP abandonment of the rules of the United States in pursuit of raw political power. The sad thing is that the traditional punishment switch, the ballot box, will not reach to Gorsuch (and, yes, I remain in the corner of making judge immune to ballot boxes), and given the GOP’s gerrymandering ways, they have insulated themselves from the ways of adults in a number of States, such as North Carolina.

No offense to Judge Gorsuch. I’m sure he’s a very nice man, and legal opinion suggests he has the respect of many judges and Supreme Court justices. He’s just the guy caught in the whirlwind.

Perhaps he and Judge Garland should form a club.

Retraction Watch publishes an interview with Raphael Didham, editor of Insect Conservation and Diversity, on the problems of recruiting peer reviewers. This is particularly interesting – and amusing:

Retraction Watch: You talk about the current problem of “zero-sum” reviewing. Could you define that in the context of the scientific peer review system?

Raphael Didham: … Many scientists are inherently ‘analytical’ people, and naturally gravitate towards accountable metrics of performance. In a zero-sum game, researchers could quantify the minimum effort required to resolve the ‘reviewer debt’ owed when they publish one of their own papers, simply by calculating the number of reviews received per paper (k) divided by the number of coauthors per paper (n). This simple formula, Sk/n, seems disarmingly ‘objective’ and superficially ‘fair’ in apportioning obligation – but actually holds a number of inherent biases that are having an unduly negative effect on reviewer willingness to review.

RW: Why is “zero-sum” reviewing such a problem in science publishing today?

RD: We believe that a growing philosophy of ‘zero-sum’ reviewing is one of the factors contributing to the increasing difficulty in finding willing reviewers these days. What this does is create a bottleneck in manuscript processing, and growing delays in the publication of new research.

For scientists who are accustomed to subtlety, such a gross approach and lack of forethought is slightly shocking. As Raphael points out, there’s a lot more on the positive end of the scale than just … numbers. The problem may lie in the current general Western Civ attitudes towards anything – or, as I once retorted to my fencing coach, I’m part of the Instant Gratification Generation! But here’s Raphael’s far more measured response:

Readers should reflect on the reasons why they are doing science in the first place, and take a moment to consider the genuine competitive advantage they can gain in their career from receiving an advance preview of new developments in the field before they are even published. Peer review provides a low-cost synthesis of how up to date you yourself are with current literature, a benchmark of comparative performance with other researchers in the field, and the opportunity to shape the conceptual and technical direction of your field through critical feedback.

Michael Price on Lawfare discusses a specific problem the Muslim ban will encounter in the courts, at least so long as Trump tries to use § 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA):

And in 1987, Congress responded by passing the “Moynihan-Frank Amendment,” explicitly prohibiting the President from excluding foreigners based on their beliefs. The provision became permanent with the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1990, as codified in § 212(a)(3)(C)(iii). The statute made clear Congress’s intent to end the practice of ideological exclusion. As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee put it:

For many years, the United States has embarrassed itself by excluding prominent foreigners from visiting the United States solely because of their political beliefs. Among those excluded, or harrassed [sic], in recent years have been Nobel Laureates Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda, and authors Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, and Carlos Fuentes. In these cases and others, the excluded individuals had done no more than exercise rights to freedom of expression and association enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – rights promoted in congressionally-initiated human rights legislation and constitutionally protected for all U.S. citizens.

S. Rep. No. 100-75 at 11, 100th Cong., 1st Sess. (1987). The House similarly decried the Executive’s use of immigration law to deny American citizens “the opportunity to have access to the full spectrum of international opinion,” stating that “the reputation of the United States as an open society, tolerant of divergent ideas, has suffered.” H.R. Conf. Rep. No. 100-475 at 162-63, 100th Cong., 1st Sess. (1987). Indeed, according to the legislative history, the whole point was “to take away the executive branch’s authority to deny visas to foreigners solely because of the foreigner’s political beliefs or because of his anticipated speech in the United States”—in what the Senate Report deemed an “affirmation of the principles of the First Amendment.” S. Rep. No. 100-75 at 11.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com reports on the delivery of a battery farm designed to handle peak power requirements currently managed using natural gas peaker plants. The source? Tesla:

One of those alternatives that people dreamed about just a few years ago was giant batteries, and Elon Musk promised that he would make them in his new Nevada factory. What is really astonishing is that in just three months, Tesla has delivered a giant battery farm with 396 stacks of batteries that can provide enough electricity to power 15,000 houses for four hours,…

Natural gas peaker plants are expensive and controversial; you want them near the user, but the NIMBYs come out in force. Battery packs are much simpler, they are modular and they are scalable.

Not everyone is sure this will work out. Lloyd references skeptic Jamie Condliffe of MIT Technology Review, who opines:

But there are some problems. First, lithium batteries remain expensive. It’s not clear how much this installation cost, but Bloomberg last year noted that Tesla will sell anyone a system a tenth the size of California’s for $2.9 million. Still, as electric cars hit the mainstream, large lithium batteries are expected to fall dramatically in price.

A bigger concern is with the hardware itself. Tesla doesn’t say how many cycles that the batteries in its Powerpack systems, which make up the installation, can tolerate before they degrade and reach the end of their useful life. But like other lithium-ion batteries, it’s likely in the thousands—probably around 5,000, the same as its Powerwall units. That’s not bad in a domestic setting, but could be quickly devoured in a grid setting.

Problem is, we’re not overrun with alternatives. The quest to build a great grid battery doesn’t sound too tough: it simply has to be cheap, made using common materials, and resilient to repeated charge-discharge cycles. The batteries don’t have to be portable, so factors such as size and weight aren’t a design constraint.

Given recent incidents of little smartphone batteries blowing up, I wonder how Tesla has safeguarded this “battery farm”. Space separation? Physical barriers? It’d be terrible if a single defective battery destroyed the rest of the farm long before they physically just wore out. And do they have a plan for recycling once they’re worn out?

“It’s the American tradition that, when a SCOTUS appointment falls to a one-term President, the pick is delayed until the next two term President.”

– future Pelosi and Schumer

Kevin Drum is worried about the insurance companies and why they aren’t lobbying harder for retention of healthy contributors to the pools, aka the “mandate”, which Trump apparently wishes to do away with:

Julian Pecquet on AL Monitor reports the echoes of the objections from the US Foreign Service to the travel ban:

“As a result of this ban, many of those fleeing war and persecution have been adversely and unjustly affected,” the Mecca-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation said in a statement Jan. 30. “Such selective and discriminatory acts will only serve to embolden the radical narratives of extremists and will provide further fuel to the advocates of violence and terrorism.”

And the Saudi-backed government in Yemen, which is battling Houthi rebels and welcomes Trump’s stance against the Houthis’ Iranian patron, also denounced what they call Trump’s “ban.”

“We resent the US ban,” the Yemeni Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Such decisions support the stance of extremists and sow divisions.”

Even the Iraqi Kurds, many of whom trust Trump to be more supportive than former President Obama of their dreams of independence, are keeping a nervous eye on the developments of the past few days. Like other Iraqis, they are covered by new regulations denying them entry into the United States for 90 days.

Populist stands, popular as they may be, are naturally developed by those who have little experience in the relevant domains. As the amateurs muck about, the innocent victims cry out, but those responsible will never apologize and only relent with the greatest reluctance, for they will hide behind the bush of conveying the desires of the people, the deliverer of wishes; but such is not the role of our representatives in government, but to instead find and implement effectual policies; and, much like Trump’s self-proclaimed military wit, discard the merely popular; for the popular is the dreams of the inexperienced, unnuanced, unsubtle.

And the world is a very subtle, non-linear place.

The Independent has an article illustrating the dangers of reaching for goals out of legend – for scientists. They were in search of metallic hydrogen:

To do the research, the scientists crushed tiny bits of hydrogen beneath diamond anvils, exerting more pressure on it than is found at the centre of the Earth. Small steps forward have been made through the work, but no researchers have yet been able to show off the shiny metal that would be expected to be seen.

That is what the two Harvard scientists claimed to have done. But they cannot yet show off the piece of metal because it is still stuck between the jaws of the anvil – and they say that removing it might cause it to disappear entirely.

The researchers believe however that the reflective and shiny material they can see crushed in the anvil is metallic hydrogen. One of the scientists, Isaac Silvera, said that when looking through a microscope at the sample it looked to be shiny and so “you can only believe [it] is a metal”.

But …

The Harvard researchers first posted their work to arXiv, a website that collects scientific studies before they are published through peer-reviewed journals, in October. At that point it attracted huge amounts of criticism from other scientists who argued that it was based on a mistake.

But the paper was published this week in the journal Science all the same, heralding a succession of headlines that claimed that humanity had made a huge breakthrough that could shed light on some of the central questions of the universe.

The pressure to publish on research professors – especially those at high end institutes such as these two at Harvard – may have caused them to not be complete in their work. After all, the phenomenon of duplicate discoveries is fairly well known, and even if they didn’t know of any competing teams, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.

The two wanted to “… publicise their “breakthrough event”, and that further experiments would shed more light.” It’s not a gamble to not check your results thoroughly, it’s really just bad science. I can understand them wanting to get the stick in the ground, marking the territory as their’s – but I fear they may end up on the Retraction Watch web site.

Academy Award winning Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) stars Gregory Peck confronting anti-Semitism in its American form – the nearly invisible miasma of a people who might have formally accepted the American stricture that religion should not matter in one’s social and business dealings, but haven’t actually invested in it. A writer with an assignment, he begins telling all manner of people that he’s Jewish, and observes their reactions – until his own young son is subjected to the more honest anti-Semitism of small children, and while he was morally outraged at what he had encountered from both Christian and Jew alike, this emotional pain is the real lesson he needs to help him write his story.

As one would expect from an award winner, there are many superb aspects to this movie, from the the excellent illustrations of the moral arc of the movie, to the acting and photography (we saw it on TV in the original B&W). Peck is his usual sympathetic, complex self, showing a professional skill at squirming uncomfortably in social situations; the blanket covering hypocrisy is always a little rumpled. Within the greater arc of American history, this is some of the most subtle bigotry, unlike the more raw versions practiced on the Africans, Irish, Germans, Chinese, and no doubt others.

All this aside, while the story is fairly timeless, this telling is inevitably tied to the artifacts of the era, which is just after World War II. It could have hurt, but such things as the man who functions as the directory of a building has an organic, authentic feeling to it, which makes the movie interesting from the academic viewpoint of collecting archaic customs of the time.

While this movie is unhurried, it doesn’t drag through unnecessary scenes; each is important and will tell you something, although occasionally it’s nothing more than Love is a Blindfold. Indeed, beyond the title (I can’t think of a good replacement, but this title is awful), and the ending (I think he got the wrong girl in the end, but then the other one reminds me of my Arts Editor), it’s hard to find much to complain about. This is a long movie and you will find this movie is, as my Arts Editor says, good for you. If you don’t mind such movies, then it’s Highly Recommended.