Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Thinking about investing, but not the sort to jump in on your own? Be careful about your financial advisor. From a Motley Fool newsletter:

There are lots of people out there trying to sell annuities, and some of them engage in misconduct. A recent study examined the records of more than a million financial advisors and former financial advisors between 2005 and 2015 and found that 7% of them (that’s about 87,000 people!) had been disciplined for misconduct or fraud. The top complaints were unsuitable advice (21.3%), misrepresentation (17.7%), unauthorized activity (15.1%), omission of key facts (11.6%), fees/commissions (8.7%), and fraud (7.9%), and the specific products involved in the most misconduct were insurance (13.8%), annuities (8.6%), stocks (6%), and mutual funds (4.6%). You’re not likely to experience trouble, but it’s good to be careful.

Do a little research.

In the case of the recent commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence for releasing secret material to WikiLeaks, Lawfare presents both sides of the controversy, on the one side their own Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, on the other Cully Stimson at The Daily Signal. First up will be Cully:

To some, Manning was a whistleblower who deserved a pardon, or at least a sentence commutation. Indeed, one of the videos Manning gave to WikiLeaks showed U.S. military personnel in Iraq engaged in a deeply troubling, if not illegal, shooting incident.

But there was so much more to Manning’s crimes than exposing that killing.

By downloading hundreds of thousands of secret documents about some of the most sensitive information related to the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, by disgorging highly sensitive diplomatic emails for the world to see, and recklessly exposing top secret files of terrorist detainees we held at Guantanamo, Manning betrayed the oath to our country, armed our enemies with information that they could only dream about acquiring, and forced our government to expend untold hours and money to minimize the damage inflicted by this criminal conduct.

Benjamin and Susan’s position, which they originally wrote about last year:

There were members of the national security community who viewed our position as somehow disconsonant with our broader tendency to support more, rather than less, robust security policies and laws. A different part of the ideological spectrum criticized us for arguing for Manning’s clemency in the context of arguing against a pardon for Edward Snowden.

We think both of those lines of criticism miss a few important distinctions, the most central of which is that national security is about real security, not simply vengeance. Moreover, Manning’s case is not like Snowden’s. And critically, Manning did not get a pardon. The distinction between a pardon (which voids the underlying conviction) and a commutation (which merely lessens the punishment) is important here. As we argued then:

If there is a case in which to exercise executive prerogative to heal a rift regarding the treatment of self-proclaimed whistleblowers, Manning’s is infinitely more deserving than Snowden. We do not argue that Obama should consider a pardon: Manning committed serious and consequential crimes and was properly convicted. But the President should consider commuting the sentence either to time served or to some reasonable period of additional years. Manning has been imprisoned for more than six years; she could be eligible for parole in the next several years with good behavior. She clearly presents no ongoing security risk and it’s hard to imagine how her circumstances would inspire others in the military to believe they can disclose classified information without consequence.

 I’ll admit that I haven’t paid much attention to this case, whch appears to involve the release of thousands of pages of information, including at least one incident of a war-crime. And if you stopped reading right now, I wouldn’t blame you, as I don’t know much.

So I’ll make this march. On the one hand, we have potential and real damage to the national security apparatus, while on the other we have what appears to be at least one war crime, possibly being covered up. Cully makes this point:

Under the law, military trial judges are required to take into account all aggravating and mitigating evidence before sentencing the accused.

And while Cully makes this remark in the context of the gender identify disorder from which Manning suffered at the time of the crime, I am going to switch the context to the mitigating circumstance of the revelation of at least one concealed crime, as Cully admits. But I think there’s a wrinkle here: the sentencing is at a fixed point in time. But as time passes, circumstance changes. Perhaps the former President (as it’s now afternoon on Inauguration Day, so now we have a President Trump to endure) judged that the crime revealed was far more severe than originally thought; perhaps other important data came to light. The point is, if the evaluation of the importance of the data changed, then the judgment of the trial judge may become obsolete and require modification.

A second wrinkle, independent of the changing context, is this: the judge is a military judge, and is thus constrained to view the incident through military eyes, and apply military sector standards to the incident. However, the military is subordinate to the government, because the government is charged with the overall welfare of the country – not the military. The reason we have a President, as constrained as he (or she) is by Constitutional checks and balances, is to make evaluations for the good of the entire country. If the evaluation comes out that Manning did some good for society, balanced against the damage also done, well then perhaps commutation is the proper action to take. She was sentenced to 35 years, but Cully claims she would have been eligible for parole in the next few years. She still bears the stigma and dishonor of a 35 year sentence.

I also have to take issue with this statement:

By commuting Manning’s richly deserved sentence, Obama is sending a horrible message to dedicated U.S. public servants, in and out of uniform, that honoring their responsibility to keep national security secrets from the public eye isn’t all that important.

This is a slap in their face.

There’s certainly a message here. It’s that awareness of a possible war crime requires action. Perhaps Manning overdid it with the amount of data released – I won’t try to judge. But as Cully notes, a 35 year sentence is more symbolic than real, since parole was anticipated to begin soon. If so, then isn’t that a slap in the face?

Finally – and I hope this is merely an unpleasant and fallacious paranoia – perhaps Obama was concerned about the incoming Administration victimizing Manning. After all, among the more fringe right elements of Trump’s supporters, gender change and release of secret documents are not going to engender any positive feelings – and I’ve noted a certain lack of balanced judgment on their part; they prefer the mob with flaming torches approach. This may be Obama’s attempt to put Manning beyond the legal reach of the fringe-right.

In light of the widely reported request by the Trump Administration for certain Obama Administration officials to stay on, perhaps a trifle of schadenfreude is in order. Let’s have Steve Benen set it up:

What’s more, let’s also not forget that some of the people Team Trump have asked to stick around for a while have reportedly said no, which means those offices will be literally empty at 12:01 p.m. (ET) this today.

Christopher Lu, the Deputy Secretary of Labor and the former executive director of the Obama-Biden transition, talked to Rachel about this on the show last night, and he noted how unusual it is for an incoming administration, 24 hours before the inauguration, to reach out to current officials, pleading with them to stay. It’s evidence of a team that’s woefully unprepared.

Asked if he’s worried about the Trump administration’s preparedness, Lu said, “Of course.”

I can appreciate why this seems crazy, but the fact remains that Donald Trump and his aides knew they had a responsibility to find qualified, competent staff to run key agencies of the world’s dominant superpower, but they just didn’t try very hard to complete this task.

Giving her a title might be problematic, but you know her love of country would force her to serve.

Which just leaves me wondering: has Trump considered contacting Hillary Clinton for a little help? After all, she expected to win, and, more importantly, she not only took the job seriously, but she has experience in the field.

She’s competent.

Which is more than most of the members of the Trump Administration appear to be in the government arena.

Maybe we can force some life into this one!

Theater of Blood (1973) possesses that odd quality that many British movies of the 60s and 70s are burdened with – a certain indefinable brittleness, which I find to be undiluted irritation. Much like Hitchcock’s similarly brittle Frenzy (1972), the characters show little growth, little nuance, but are defined by their grosser qualities; they do not exhibit any awareness of the dramatic tableaux, nor do they contain much beyond the lightest hint of positive character traits; they are self-absorbed, with the exception of the police, who appear to be overwhelmed chaps of dubious intelligence and insight.

The editing of the movies is erratic, spastic, even, amongst the vulnerable, given to inducing spasms of wild discomfort. Don’t get me wrong, a discomfortable movie that knows whyfore it evokes such a feeling may be of great value, but in combination of the self-absorbed, there is little to gain. The audio is erratic.

And so in Theatre of Blood, the central conceit, the murder of theater critics by a spurned leading man (Vincent Price) as guided by the occasional literary murder brought on by the dyspepsia of a certain Wm. Shakespeare, has its virtue let out much like the helium from a birthday balloon by the reckless child. For hours, he may have gamboled with this balloon, watching it hover at the ceiling, bounce obligingly at his least tug, before obsequiously finding its freedom, only to find the whine of a beebee, projected by the tyke’s gun, to be its final end; and so, this movie, too, might have presented us with hours of fun, both in the initial viewing, and then in the post-viewing meditation, as each turn of the plot was savored.

But no. (Yeah, this left me all cranky.) Even in the category of head cold movie, it is, with no possible defense, found wanting. Thrust this unwanted & unwatched back into the movie pantry, and select another.

Even if Vincent finds himself burning down a castle, yet again, at the end of the movie. The temerity is not earned.

John Edmark:

His website is here. And here is Blooms 2. Maybe think of it as animated math.

Channelopathy:

Several developmental diseases are caused by channelopathies, or malfunctions of our ion channels. They include Timothy syndrome and Andersen-Tawil syndrome, rare diseases that cause neurological, heart, and skull and facial defects. Even fetal alcohol syndrome, which can develop if a woman drinks during her pregnancy, can produce similar defects because alcohol blocks many of the same ion channels.

Noted in “Grow with the flow,” Jason Bittel, NewScientist (7 January 2017, paywall). An ion channel:

Ion channels are pore-forming membrane proteins whose functions include establishing a resting membrane potential, shaping action potentials and other electrical signals by gating the flow of ions across the cell membrane, controlling the flow of ions across secretory and epithelial cells, and regulating cell volume.

Zach Shaner of the Seattle Transit Blog notes the failure of Pronto, the Seattle bike sharing system, concluding:

So while there may be future chapters for bike share in Seattle, the Pronto saga will come to a close on March 31 with a series of unforced errors and unnecessary political pain. Severely undercapitalized, hobbled by helmets, and going against best practices for network design, Pronto was doomed to disappointment at least and failure at most. For those of us broadly supportive of public biking in Seattle, the slow-moving demise was sad to watch. For now, a second try will have to wait.

I don’t know what went wrong here, but it’s safe to say either it’s not bike friendly territory, the experts have a lot to learn – or experts were not in charge or not properly funded.

(h/t Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com)

Julian Pecquet of AL Monitor thinks South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, nominee of U.N. Ambassador, is a shoe-in after her Congressional hazing:

Diplomatic novice Nikki Haley easily won over her Senate interrogators Jan. 18 by reassuring them that the incoming administration will at least have a steady hand guiding the US Mission to the United Nations.

On every issue from the Iran deal to Israeli-Palestinian peace to the global world order, the South Carolina governor offered a nuanced and measured counterpoint to President-elect Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. During 3½ hours before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Haley tactfully won over conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats with pointed answers to a wide variety of questions that repeatedly put her at odds with her future boss.

Rather than rip up the nuclear deal with Iran, “I think what would be more beneficial at this point is that we look at all the details,” she said. “And if it is not being followed, and if we do find violations, then I think we should act and I think that we should act strongly.”

A savvy politician, I’d say. She separates herself from Trump, even if she’s working for him. And she still appeals to the base by opposing a strategic move by Obama:

“What I think happened with [Resolution] 2334 was a kick in the gut to everyone,” Haley said. “We can think what we want to think on settlements, but you have to go back to the fact that the US abstention … was wrong. And I think the fact that we have not allowed the Palestinian Authority and Israel to resolve this themselves, and I think for the UN to have inserted themselves into that, I believe is wrong.”

I have to wonder how much contact she’s had with Netanyahu. I also wonder how far she’ll go – and what her ultimate ambition amounts to. First Indian-American-female President?

Cynosure:

And the brilliant star, the one that appears to be the center about which all others rotate, they also called Cynosura, from which we get our figurative sense of cynosure, something which is the center of attention.

Seen in Thereby Hangs a Tale, by Charles Earle Funk.

NewScientist (7 January 2017) reports on the activities our core of iron is engaged in:

DEEP below our planet’s surface, a molten jet of iron, nearly as hot as the surface of the sun, is picking up speed.

This stream of liquid some 420 kilometres wide has been discovered by telltale magnetic field readings 3000 kilometres below North America and Russia. It has trebled in speed since 2000, and is now circulating westwards at between 40 and 45 kilometres per year, heading from deep under Siberia towards the underside of Europe (see diagram). That is three times as fast as the typical speeds of liquid in the outer core.

No one knows yet why the jet has got faster, but the team that made the discovery thinks it is a natural phenomenon, and can help us understand the formation of Earth’s magnetic fields, which keep us safe from solar winds. “It’s a remarkable discovery,” says Phil Livermore at the University of Leeds, UK, who led the team. “We’ve known that the liquid core is moving around, but our observations haven’t been sufficient until now to see this jet.”

There’s a lot of mystery and speculation here, but this bit is natural:

Earth’s magnetic field seems to have been weakening, especially since around 1840, at about 5 per cent per century. The molten iron stream should help us predict if and when the magnetic field of the planet’s core will flip. And thanks to the satellite monitoring system, says [Xiaodong Song at the University of Illinois in Champaign], we have opened a new window to view in real time the activity of molten iron deep in Earth’s core.

We may think we have a dynamic, vibrant world – but we don’t know the half of it. If we could see electromagnetic fields without using lots of iron bits, what would we see? How does this change things?

The North Carolina legislature, bereft of control of the governorship, continues to muddle onwards. WAVY.com reports on their sudden attempts to shut down a clean energy installation because they think it might interfere with a nearby Navy radar installation:

North Carolina legislators want the incoming Trump administration to shut down a nearly complete, $400 million wind farm they believe poses a national security threat because it’s too close to a long-distance surveillance radar installation. …

A 2014 agreement between [wind farm operator] Avangrid and the Navy said that although there is potential for conflict between the wind farm and the radar array, the Pentagon also sought to enhance the country’s renewable energy resources. The agreement specified placement of the project’s wind turbines and an understanding that the company would curtail operations “for a national security or defense purpose.”

Perhaps the legislature’s corporate masters are using them to fight the competition? Perhaps they have overblown opinions of their own technical knowledge? One Senator doesn’t watch the farm dismantled, just changes to the agreement. Maybe they’re in earnest. Still, this is a Navy matter, not a state matter, so you have to regard their activities – in light of their bizarre behavior in relation to the powers of the governorship – with more than the usual concern for hidden agendas.

In the category of bad literary form we have Ed Yong, publishing this awful kickoff to an article in The Atlantic:

In Norse mythology, humans and our world were created by a pantheon of gods who lived in the realm of Asgard. As it turns out, these stories have a grain of truth to them.

Professor Mark Lilla reflects on his recent release, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, in an interview with Humanities:

Source: Vos Iz Neias?

MARK LILLA: One of the most common metaphors for history, and for time itself, is that of a river. Time flows, history has currents, etc. While thinking about this image, it occurred to me that some people believe that time carries us along and all we can do is passively experience the ride. Think of cyclical theories of history or even cosmology: The world runs its course, is destroyed, and is then reborn to travel the cycle again.

Other people, though, have a catastrophic conception of history: The river flows but it may not be heading in the right direction. It might flow into a channel full of shoals or rocks, where a ship can run aground or be shattered. This, I think, is the picture of history that reactionaries have. They believe that some calamitous event has taken place in time, that history has gone off course, and that the kind of society they lived in (or imagined they lived in) has shattered. They find themselves on the shore, looking on as the debris of everything they valued is swept away by the current. The present becomes unbearable, as does the prospect of the future. And so they convince themselves that something radical must be done to either recover or redeem what has been lost.

It’s a great metaphor. I tend to think that that those who end up on the beach, dismayed by the wreckage, are those whose psyche required them to be in control. The power seekers, those who sought certitude, those who became married to the reality of their day, rather than the social currents, for want of a better term. Perhaps they even manage to freeze the areas under their control for a while.

But change is inevitable. From technology to church, change is inevitable; and those that don’t become the fossils we dig up, from history books and mass burial pits, or they become those responsible for those pits.

Later, Lilla notes:

Conservatives and liberals argue about politics in terms of human nature, and their dispute is about the proper relationship between individuals and societies. Traditionally, liberals begin with individuals who are endowed with certain rights, and think of the legitimacy of political institutions in terms of consent and the protection of those rights. Conservatives begin with societies and the observation that we all come into them as dependents, incurring obligations as we are protected and nurtured by them. Our rights are conventional, not natural, and are not the essence of politics. Traditions and norms are.

And so I fall into neither camp. The liberal camp doesn’t work for me as it assumes some Divine being to assign those rights; or they have to make murky assumptions about how intellectual concepts are integral to biological evolution. The conservative approach smacks of slavery, such that liberty no longer has a value. Perhaps this would be better put as the creation of false obligations on those who had little choice in them.

My own interpretation of the granting of rights is more pragmatic; what will keep the mob from burning down the White House or lynch the Monarch in outrage, vs what will cause society to implode through overburden? While most would agree Justice is a human construct, a position that is showing signs of instability, oddly enough, I see it as playing a role in such assignments. For all that the American Constitution makes an appeal to the Divine, the actual assignment appears to work fairly well.

And now taken well out of context is this interesting sentence.

One learns infinitely more about politics by reading Isaiah Berlin than by reading John Rawls.

I don’t know a darn thing about either of them – but now I’m interested.

When it comes to foreign policy, possibly the most important duty of the President, there’s not much to stop a bull in the China shop, according to Julian Ku on Lawfare:

Neither U.S. nor international law prevents President Trump from abandoning the One China policy, recognizing Taiwan as a separate country, and even stationing U.S. troops and military assets there.

Put another way, China should probably take President-elect Trump’s threats on “One China” seriously because he has all of the legal authority he needs to carry out this seismic policy shift.

Under U.S. law, President Trump has complete constitutional discretion over whether to recognize a foreign government, and even whether to recognize a foreign government’s territorial and sovereign claims.  The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that Congress cannot restrict this power in the 2015 decision Zivotofsky v. Kerry.  In that decision, the Court held that the President has the “exclusive” power to withhold recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and that this power even extends to refusing to print passports with the designation of “Jerusalem, Israel.”  The holding of Zivotofsky was not particularly controversial and would plainly govern any attempt to challenge a decision by President Trump to extend US recognition to the Republic of China (Taiwan’s formal legal name).

And as his set of advisors is not particularly impressive (some might say ‘disheartening’), there’s not much to hold him back from trying to put his stamp on the world, even militarily.

I’m sure that during the Constitutional Assembly where the areas of responsibility were hammered out, it made a lot of sense to give the President a free hand in the fluid world of international relations. However, given the amount of raw military power now available, that decision now gives me some pause. Watching China move, however so slowly, closer and closer to the economic model of Taiwan, it would seem that a slow, slow victory is much better than a bloody, even catastrophic victory – or defeat, for that matter. Trying to hurry that matter along seems foolhardy.

The initial post on this thread indicated that China was promising to shutdown the Chinese ivory trade – but when? Jani Actman of National Geographic reports a date has been set:

China will shut down its domestic ivory trade by the end of 2017, according to an announcement made today by the Chinese government. …

China now has 34 ivory manufacturers and 130 licensed retail shops that sell ivory, Wei Ji, an independent wildlife researcher, told the Guardian earlier this month. According to today’s announcement, China will revoke some licenses by March 2017 and eventually stop all commercial ivory carving and retail sales by the end of the year. The plan to phase out the ivory trade also encourages ivory carvers to begin using other materials.

Also according to Jani, the Americans are also fulfilling their pledge:

The U.S., also a significant market for elephant ivory, held up its end of the agreement with China in June when it enacted a near-total ban on the commercial trade of African elephant ivory. The new rules further limited exports and sales across state lines and restricted a hunter’s allowable ivory trophy imports to no more than two a year.

Which leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe just because, as an engineer, I hate arbitrary exceptions. Or maybe I just see this as a way to keep tastes whetted – rather than properly smothered.

In Meet Boston Blackie (1941) we find the former safecracker (Chester Morris) accidentally entangled with murder on a cruise ship. Slipping off the ship, he trades barbs with Inspector Faraday, who is shadowing him in the belief Blackie pulled of another heist, nearly gets darted, punctured, sapped, and maritalized, but manages to pull the fat out of the fire before it’s entirely rendered.

And if you think my prose is a melange of cliches, of only light-hearted interest, consider that a reflection of the movie. These Boston Blackie movies do not examine profound themes, so they have to have really good plots, dialog, and characters. Sadly, this one doesn’t really meet the bar in any of those categories. The pacing tends to be static, the bad guys are cardboard and forgot to stand in line for their quotient of cleverness, and the cops are little better.

But for an evening of shared head cold, it was adequate. Don’t expect much, but you do get a giggle now and then.

NewScientist (7 January 2017) reports on the findings of Brandi McKuin of UC-Merced regarding sustainable fishing:

Source: DiveBuzz

By combing through papers and catch databases, Brandi McKuin at the University of California, Merced, and her team found that tuna vessels using more sustainable methods such as pole and line fishing consume about three to four times as much fuel to land the same catch as boats that use a large net.

The researchers also compared the climate impact of tuna with that of terrestrial sources of protein, like tofu, pork and beef. Sustainably caught tuna has a larger effect than any other protein considered, except beef, for which climate warming emissions are five times those for the same weight of tuna.

One of those findings you don’t expect to see – one expects good karma to work hand in hand with good karma, but no such luck here. I wonder if anyone is noising about the idea of requiring tuna fishing vessels to be sailing vessels?

A reader disagrees concerning Obama’s errors:

It’s much more than voter belief about the truth of hard facts like unemployment numbers, which have improved. It’s the fact that the federal government took on huge amounts of debt to save the banksters butts, businesses and bonuses, and did very little for the common man, many of whom lost their houses in the largest spate of foreclosures since the Great Depression. That just looks bad. The 98% took it on the chin so that the 2% did not have to. The way capitalism is supposed to work is those banksters should have gone bankrupt and been penniless themselves.

Granted. But the Bush Administration’s Henry Paulson led the effort to stabilize those banks. Did Obama really have an option to let them fail after Bush began the injection of capital to stabilize them? Younge suggests Obama had a choice about that; I’m not so sure.

But I could also argue this is part of Obama’s reluctance to prosecute for the errors of the previous Administration. After all, I think certain members of the Bush Administration could have been put on trial for war crimes, and Obama declined to even consider pushing that issue. While I can understand that he saw that as another wedge to divide a nation that desperately needed to come together, the price on that decision was to legitimize a war, and a party that pursued a war of dubious moral quality – and they knew it.

Of course, I’m way off the initial question. I’ll spare my readers my speculations – although I think Obama chose to achieve positive results, rather than prosecute errors. He felt he had to choose between the two, apparently.

So let me say this: I found the article unpersuasive for three reasons.

First, throughout the campaign I did not hear or read a single rumble about the unfortunate treatment of the banking industry at the start of the Obama Administration. I didn’t see a single poll that mentioned the issue. So far as I could see, it didn’t exist. Now, I didn’t have time for complete coverage, so if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But I didn’t see anything referencing the banking industry.

Second, there are no numbers in Younge’s articles to bolster his argument. No polls. No nothing. He’s putting an opinion out there, but is really failing to back it up with relevant objective facts. Not that I’m not guilty of that behavior, but I’m willing to flag it in others. I’d love to see a single reputable poll where the handling of the banking industry is cited as a reason for not voting for … Clinton. That would make his case far more believable.

Third, for all that he wants me to believe that Clinton lost because she was running for Obama’s third term, it’s crap. In fact, it’s differentiated faeces, in two ways. First, Clinton is a different politician with different priorities and policies, She spent a fair amount of time explaining that – between defending and sniping. But secondly, and more importantly, if she was running for Obama’s third term?

She would have won. Hands down.

Presidential Approval Time Series
Source: Gallup

I tried to capture this chart with the relevant data showing, but it didn’t work. On 11/11, which is close to Election Day, Obama’s approval rating was 55%. If Clinton was seen as Obama redux, she would have won based on his popularity. But it didn’t happen. She lost for reasons peculiar to her campaign – not to Obama’s actions.

So I can’t accept Younge’s assertion, based on this lack of evidence and some counter-evidence and logic. I can accept that punishment of the bankers should have occurred – see here for the punishment of the Icelandic bankers. Sure, it’s galling – but it’s also eight years in the past. It would be an improper cliche to say that voters have short memories – but there are certain things they don’t remember. So far as I can tell, this is one of them.

Watching the GOP seek to normalize, to excuse the actions of the Russians (now that denial won’t work) has been an annoying requirement for catching the news, reading the blogs, or anything that doesn’t involve getting your car fixed. This is the latest item that gives me the What the hell are you thinking! reaction:

A Texas lawmaker on the House intelligence committee says it wasn’t just the Russians who interfered in last year’s election.

Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland, is comparing the use of Mexican entertainers to energize Democratic voters to the email hacking that officials say was orchestrated by Vladimir Putin’s government.

“Harry Reid and the Democrats brought in Mexican soap opera stars, singers and entertainers who had immense influence in those communities into Las Vegas, to entertain, get out the vote and so forth,” Conaway told The Dallas Morning News this week. “Those are foreign actors, foreign people, influencing the vote in Nevada. You don’t hear the Democrats screaming and saying one word about that.”

Asked whether he considers that on par with Russian cyber-intrusions that aimed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Conaway said: “Sure it is, it’s foreign influence. If we’re worried about foreign influence, let’s have the whole story.”

It requires little thought to bring shame down on Conaway’s head, because we know there’s little comparison between a concerted attack to subvert an election by a foreign enemy vs a couple of songs by an acknowledged national of an ally. And this isn’t the only incident.

But, taken as a collection, this should be understood as a symptom of an underlying problem. Now, many folks, like myself, would simply call them conscienceless power-mongers and be done with it, but I think a little thought might yield a bit more insight. Like most commentators, let me pick up my favorite lens and examine the symptoms through it.

First and foremost, the behavior exhibited by most of the GOP consists not of foot-dragging, but active digging in of heels, of refusing to evaluate a problem with an eye towards justice – i.e., they have a baleful view of their own interests, and nothing else. Interestingly, this is also the dominant behavior in the private sector. Quite often companies sue other companies, not because some terrible crime has occurred, but because they can and they think some judge may be convinced that some law or another justifies the suit. There is little consideration for another company’s interests or fortunes; it’s a shark-tank out there. Oh, sure, you’ll find corporate alliances, but this is usually when a foreign-based competitor appears, and an entire industry feels threatened; see SEMATECH for an example.

This is a perfectly understandable behavior for a company, and therefore the executives in charge. The private sector is not in charge of justice. I have no problem with this attitude in this context, although I do think corporations that pay attention to cries of injustice have more potential to succeed than those who discard such notions in their crazed chase after money. But I digress.

But we know the big backers of the GOP are businessmen. The Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson are just two popular names in that category; I’m sure the readers can name thousands more. And it’s not that the businessmen are buying themselves politicians – it’s that the politicians are often businessmen folks themselves. Wonder about that? Look up the biographies of a few of them: Mitt Romney comes right to mind – don’t need to look that one up. Trump is another; Governor Bevin of Kentucky; Governor LePage of Maine; both Presidents Bush; VP Dick Cheney … notice how the names of the discredited GOPers (or soon to be, I suspect) come popping right up?¹

So think about it. Any parent can answer this question: where do kids pick up their ethics and morals? From those who are around as they grow up. Similarly, if you train as a private sector, corporate person, particularly an executive who makes these sorts of decisions, then you’re going to pick up the ethics appropriate to that environment. All for the team, no consideration for the other team.

And that’s not government. Folks, our ancestors understand this better than we do. Government is the definer & enforcer of justice, and therefore our Congresscritters must be aware that they have to think in terms of justice, because just as government enforces it, it also feeds off it. A just government is a stable government, because the people respect it, and a stable government leads to a stable society, and when we’re not all fighting with each other about the government, then we’re more likely to find our way to prosperity.

What happens to societies with unjust governments? Some implode – see the fate of Marshall Tito’s Yugoslavia. Some rebel – see Qadhaffi’s Libya, East Germany, the USSR, dozens of others. Sometimes they get lucky – the Nixon White House was just teetering into injustice when an alert free press caught Nixon’s men in the act of perpetrating an injustice and brought him down. The free press of the era is rightly celebrated, and today’s members certainly have a high standard to meet.

Of course, you may argue that those societies fell apart because of many other factors, and I won’t argue that there aren’t contributing factors. But injustice is key. When you see injustice perpetrated by government, then why remain loyal? Some would answer Well, does it benefit me? Problem is, what benefits you today may blow with the wind and run you over tomorrow. So why sign a contract when there is no enforcing authority? Oh, a libertarian might argue that then reputations will be sullied, business will fall off, and the criminal is thus punished. But in a large society like ours, it doesn’t work that way very well. Names are changed, new ignorant customers are found, and the scams continue. Even in today’s society, where there is an enforcing authority, we all know better than to accept an offer from some guy off the street to inspect your roof for hail damage.

Perhaps the nicest way to put this is that the GOP majority, with a few exceptions such as Senator McCain, has never been trained in government ethics. It’s been brayed in their ears that government is big & bad – and, of course, there’s always a little truth laying around to put some ooof in that inflated Santa Claus. The power of government is why there’s a necessity for government ethics – of course. But since they don’t trust government, government ethics is out as well. So all they have to use is their private sector ethics.

Which leads to some of the travesties we’re seeing now. 60+ attempts to repeal the ACA, a program which is apparently succeeding in its purpose. The SCOTUS nominee scandal. A refusal to take a Russian invasion of our electoral politics seriously. Nominees who are, for the most part, inappropriate. A refusal to compromise with President Obama for his entire term. A long history of GOP Administration scandals, while virtually none for the Democrats. I’m sure serious political pundits could come up with dozens more.

But let me leave you with this observation. In logic, there are several ways to prove a statement. One is by taking the statement to be proven and, instead, assuming it to be false. From this assumption you prove an impossibility, such as 1 == 0, and with the proof of the impossibility you now have proved the truth value of the original statement. This is known as Reductio ad absurdum. Given the utter absurdities we’re witnessing these days in the political arena, I think someone decided to prove the statement Government Ethics is good! using the Reductio ad absurdum technique – they negated it, set a bunch of politicians loose with some other ethics structure, and now our merry experimenter is watching the results of his proof. It’s animated logic, folks – try not to get stepped on.

¹You disagree about Romney ever being discredited? That’s OK. The point is most prominent GOP politicians are businessmen. A few do learn a different set of ethics for the new environment. Maybe Mitt did while he was governor of Massachusetts. He had a good teacher in his father, George, governor of Michigan and business executive, who did well by all accounts in both occupations. An example of a non-businessman is Governor Brownback of Kansas, who trained as a lawyer and then spent most of his life in various political positions. His brand of economic insanity, on brazen display in Kansas, while he insists the federal government should adapt Kansas policies, indicates some other defect in cognition or character.

Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson in a symbolic pose.

Strategic Air Command (1955) is a propaganda film for the US Air Force and its Strategic Air Command (SAC), and while I have very little exposure to propaganda films¹, I think this is a rather good example of the genre.

First, it has a bona fide star, the great Jimmy Stewart, in the leading role. (It also has Harry Morgan, but only in a minor role.) And he’s about as good as ever.

Second, Jimmy Stewart, a winner of the DFC twice in WW II, flew the planes that appear in this movie, and in fact achieved the rank of brigadier general during his post-war military career. While I knew he probably had flown these planes when I viewed the movie, I can at least hope the unknowing viewer would still find a measure of verisimilitude. We can also realistically hope that a measure of what the actual fliers experienced is brought to the theater: the claustrophobic quarters, the constant danger, and the occasional disaster.

Third, the patriotism that any propaganda piece will display in its attempt to invoke a sympathetic reaction is kept more or less to a minimum. Naked patriotism, so precious to those who display it, is often an awful sight, because while it reminds the displayer of a nation’s greatest moments, for others it may remind them of repugnant moments, for often those who commit war crimes are self-described patriots. For example, those who slaughtered Comanche women and children during the war with the Comanche may have thought themselves patriots – but those are still the bodies of noncombatants, virtually defenseless – and murdered.

Fourth, it has an actual story, and it serves to convey both official and human information. We see men (not so much women) and their spouses torn from their communities and jobs, called up to serve again because of their relevant experience – it admits that this is a great burden on some Americans. It makes no bones about low pay, awful conditions, and sometimes severe danger (rigorous work, but that’s more implied than explicit). Meanwhile, the motivation and mission of SAC is visited, but not at wearisome length. Just enough mint is added to the dough to make its presence known without overwhelming the viewer. By presenting the duty as a burden first, then an honor, it achieves more.

Now, it’s not a great story; intriguing characters are not examined for motivation and change, they just sort of bubble along. But it’s an OK story because it’s portraying a reasonable facsimile of what may have happened. Perhaps this was a wise scriptwriter, or perhaps this was a wise reading of a weary country that had recently endured both World War II and the Korean conflict, with World War I not all that far back; war as an opportunity for a young man to make a life for himself had begun receding before the might of the terrible weapons now available.

Courtesy the Truman Library.

Finally, if you’re a fan of the old USAF B-36 bomber, there are a number of luscious shots of this odd combination of pusher props and jet engines, and a bulbous nose to top it all off. And the insides! B-47s are also a major part of this movie, but not featured so prominently.

¹Or I have way too much exposure, and those antennae have died.

Gary Younge at The Guardian would have us believe that Obama’s to blame for the failure of the Democrats to capture the Presidency, and the core mistake was how the Great Recession was handled:

There is a deeper connection, however, between Trump’s rise and what Obama did – or rather didn’t do – economically. He entered the White House at a moment of economic crisis, with Democratic majorities in both Houses and bankers on the back foot. Faced with the choice of preserving the financial industry as it was or embracing far-reaching reforms that would have served the interests of those who voted for him, he chose the former.

Just a couple of months into his first term he called a meeting of banking executives. “The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability,” one of them told Ron Suskind in his book Confidence Men. “At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.” People lost their homes while bankers kept their bonuses and banks kept their profits.

Without referencing the implications of his argument – that Obama should have restructured the banking system somehow – I have to question whether all these voters who allegedly skipped this election really knew that he had an option to do so – if in fact he really did have such an option.

Here’s the thing – political columnists tend to know more, and impute more knowledge to the masses, than the masses actually possess. Look at the polls concerning how Obama has done vs how the American electorate thinks he’s done. Steve Benen constructs a nice graph from data supplied by Public Policy Polling:

May 2016

This is just one example. The place where the boots hit the road is the information in the possession of voters. I do not believe Younge has learned the lesson that Trump seems to know quite well – the reality doesn’t matter, it’s what the voters think is reality. Remember his relentless beating of the drum about violent crime? The worst in decades!

Or was it? From WaPo and The Pew Research Center:

And then Trump suggested the numbers were false. He understands. It’s all about what the voters believed was true, not the actual realities.

And while the voters may have been outraged that the banking system was not dismembered at the time, we should remember that healthcare reform was the priority of the Democrats, not banking. The result of the ACA, in measurable metrics, has been good so far, even as the GOP tries to put on its 20 fathom boots in order to destroy it.

So the question is, how to get the proper information to voters? While it’ll pain Obama to see the ACA destroyed, its immediate negative effect on many citizens may turn out to be a positive – teaching citizens to fucking pay attention to who you’re voting. On both sides.

This AP news item caught my eye today (thanks to Steve Benen):

It’s still six days before Donald Trump is sworn in as president and Sen. Marco Rubio is telling Florida Republicans they have to start working now to make sure he’s re-elected.

Rubio briefly addresses Republicans at the state GOP’s annual meeting Saturday and said Democrats will be working hard to try to take Trump out.

Rubio said, “Re-election has already started.”

One of the key American concepts that differentiated itself from our old masters, the England of King George, and even today from such places as Russia and North Korea, and the basic foundation upon which the all-American word meritocracy is built, is performance. When Americans are at their best, we do not judge based on what we are, such as color of skin, but on how well we do something relevant. Did he run the corporation well, or did he screw over customers, workers, and all in a greedy search for dollars? Did she run the prosecutor’s office in a just, efficient manner, or did she only worry about getting a guilty verdict in every case the police brought her, without regard to justice or even legal ethics?

Trump has no record. Trump has no record. Think about that. He’s never even been a city council member. He hasn’t sat as President for a single day. Yet the GOP is already supposedly planning his re-election. (Of course, this could be a ploy, and the real planning is for his impeachment.) What has happened to this key American concept of evaluating someone’s performance when they request a raise, or to have their contract renewed? It’s been discarded.

But not inexplicably.

My best guess is that the GOP sees the Presidency as a prize, not as the job it is. Something to be put on the mantelpiece, not as four years of hell (but with better prestige), with a single option to renew. My second best guess is that the plague of religious certitude has gripped the vitals of the GOP in its terrible, evil grip; it dictates that only the GOP is good, and the Democrats are evil, and thus the GOP must do all it can to hold the Presidency. By definition, the GOP President will be good.

Because that’s how feverish evangelism works.

And to hell with the United States.

If the GOP wants to be a party worthy of national recognition, it must stop playing idiot games like this and return to a sober, serious quest for learning how to govern. It’s a skill, a job, and very much like pole sitting. If you screw up, you’re going to hurt yourself.

Part promo, part artsy. The product might give me seizures.

… can be an ugly, dangerous place. AL Monitor’s Ben Caspit reports on the contretemps of Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu:

Over the past few years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has marked one particular individual as the arch-nemesis of his rule: Arnon Mozes, the publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. In Netanyahu’s world, Mozes is the ultimate demon, more than Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog or head of Yesh Atid Yair Lapid, and much more than Iran, the Palestinians or any other existential danger facing Israel. Mozes is the prime target, against whom Netanyahu fires off a paranoid, verbal barrage on a regular basis.

In 2015, Netanyahu started referring to Mozes by his nickname “Noni.” He posted about him on his Facebook page, with anyone who tried to undermine Netanyahu referred to as a “Nonist.” All who agreed to listen would be treated to a detailed account of how all the prime minister’s problems, haters and enemies could be traced back to that same mysterious “Noni.” After his stunning victory — against all the odds — in the 2015 election, hundreds of Likud supporters surrounded Netanyahu during his victory speech, chanting in a loud roar, “Oh! Ah! What happened now? Noni Mozes had a cow!” Not Herzog. Not Lapid. Noni.

For several weeks now, more and more information about police probes against Netanyahu has been revealed. This past week, it became clear that the mysterious businessman with whom Netanyahu engaged in long, corrupt wheeling and dealing was none other than Noni Mozes. The “deal” they reached could be seen as little more than a bribe. Israel was in shock. In terms of dramatic political developments, it may even have been unprecedented. It suddenly became clear to everyone that somewhere behind the scenes of this formidable political and economic rivalry, Netanyahu was engaged in intense negotiations with Mozes over a package deal. Mozes would tone down the Yedioth Media Group’s hostile coverage of Netanyahu significantly, and in exchange, Netanyahu would take steps to advance a law to prohibit the distribution of Israel Today at no cost. Israel Today is the free newspaper funded by Netanyahu’s patron, billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

Enough to make one shake their head, just to feel the balls bounce around in there. I wonder how Netanyahu plans to pacify Adelson?