Unsightly Mental Blemishes

As no doubt we’ve all heard – at least those of us without selective hearing – it turns out Trump was lying again. From CNN:

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to “drain the swamp” — leading chants of the phrase at his rallies — part of an anti-establishment, anti-Washington message that was predicated on rooting out corruption and bringing an outsider’s perspective to government.

But since the election, the phrase has been turned against Trump with biting irony.

Critics have used it to assail Trump’s high-level appointments of Wall Street and DC veterans, like former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary and Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Ron Klain, a former Obama administration official, tweeted, “Sure, Drain the Swamp. Congrats to all you outsiders who thought that Hillary Clinton was too establishment.”

Turns out he was just replacing one brand of alligator with another. And while their corruption is in the future, and so cannot yet be criticized, I think we can expect it to happen. Why?

Because we’re talking about amateurs and businessmen. And to them, it’s not even corruption, it’s just “how you do business.” I’m neither kidding nor condemning; it’s simply that, for them, it’s all buy and sell, that’s how their minds work, that’s the optimization of their methods. They don’t have the training, the culture, the understanding that we’re not in government to make money, but to execute the goals of government – and without accomplishing those goals, the whole country will gradually fall apart.

The anti-government rhetoric of the last several decades is seeking a roosting place, and it may have finally found it. Don’t anyone look up or you’ll get you-know-what in your eye, all unadvertised.

From The New York Times:

As the grimy, gray smog spreading across northern China settled on the town of Linqi, its schools received a “red alert” notice to cancel classes and protect children from the acrid haze. But Linqi No. 1 Middle School decided it would go ahead with exams it holds outside.

On the school’s small sports field, at least 400 children sat or knelt this week in front of stools used as small desks, answering questions about math, English, Chinese and physics. It is common in China to hold exams outdoors, to deter cheating. But in this case, the students were bathed in cold, filthy air so dense that those at the back of the soccer field seemed like ghostly imprints in the air.

This is what would happen to us without the Environmental Protection Agency. And Trump wants to nominate someone who disdains its work.

Cocob on The Daily Kos sings the praises of Governor Dayton (and Governor Brown of California), concluding:

The reason Gov. Dayton and Gov. Brown were able to radically transform states economies into is simple arithmetic. Raising taxes on those who can afford to pay more will turn a deficit into a surplus.

On the subject of building with wood, Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com is reporting that Minneapolis has a new wood building, called T3. His conclusions:

There is much that is open for debate in that and the other claims. It’s not the largest*, it’s not the first, it’s hardly tall, and it is not some fancy new Mass Timber Construction, it’s good old post and beam with mill decking.

But hey, who cares. It is, no doubt, a great example of how the new can learn from the old to make better buildings and better cities: it is not too tall, it feels urban, built right up to the street. The rusty steel gives it a gritty industrial look right from the start. It is, as Michael Green describes it,

…a modern interpretation of the robust character of historic wood, brick, stone, and steel buildings with the additional benefits of state of the art amenities, environmental performance, and technical capability.

And we could use a lot more of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdjHWYuyRwI&feature=youtu.be

The T3 website is here. The builders note:

Our goal is to deliver the warmth and authenticity of a brick and timber building, with all the benefits of new construction. In addition, using wood to construct T3 generates numerous environmental benefits. The heavy timber throughout T3 actually absorbed C02 before being harvested and there are fewer carbon emissions during the manufacturing process compared to steel, concrete or masonry.

The site includes a link to a TED talk where the architect, Michael Green, discusses building skyscrapers out of wood. StructureCraft has its own report and this lovely photo:

Photo: Ema Peter via StructureCraft

I’ll have to find some time to visit. The address listing is 323 N Washington Ave, Minneapolis.

Daoud Kuttab canvases opinions concerning Trump’s Ambassador-designate Friedman’s assertion that the consulate will move to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in AL Monitor, and the reactions are uniformly negative. Here’s one:

Hanna Issa, a Palestinian expert on international law and a resident of Jerusalem, told Al-Monitor the United Nations has in various ways stressed the special status of Jerusalem. “This definition was made clear in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Resolution 181, and a year later, the status of Jerusalem was reaffirmed in a separate resolution, UNGA 303, in December 1949,” he said.

In the 303 resolution, Jerusalem and its nearby towns of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour were declared part of a UN-supervised international city. Issa noted that the US would not only be going against its own positions, it would be in direct violation of numerous other UN resolutions. He cited 11 UN Security Council resolutions that all say East Jerusalem is an occupied territory “and reject the annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel.”

I suspect if this is thrown in Trump’s face he’ll just threaten to withdraw from the United Nations – and his base will bark accordingly. This is the danger of the theory that experts just get in the way – people who know so very little dabble in a hotspot and, before you know it, people are dead – maybe your own people, even. You can’t just take it to court.

The bad cardboard cutouts killed the good cardboard cutouts. The good cardboard cutouts trash the bad cardboard cutouts. The good cardboard cutouts showed a little bit of cleverness. The bad cardboard cutouts? No, not that I could see.

That’s Rogue One (2016).

If you’re a boy at heart, then you’ll love the movie. Overwhelming odds, certified bad guys, self-sacrifice – at least in American culture, this is the heart of boy culture.

But for the rest of us? Midway through the movie, I honestly found myself wondering – have we seen the bedroom of any of the bad guys? The living room? I mean, what the hell is motivating the bad guys, anyways? Heck, I saw Episodes 1-3, which purport to show the creation of Darth Vader – and it was unimpressive enough that now I don’t remember. Why is he so hell-bent on exterminating the rebels?

At least the rebels are given some motivation in the form of a hellish bit of violence rained down on them.

All that said, the movie’s not a complete loss. The visuals are stunning and dramatic, the space battle was rather clever – for the good cardboard cutouts, at least. The bad cardboard cutouts tended to stumble over themselves a lot. And I suppose a devoted fan would argue this constitutes a face of evil, the one in which evil tends to defeat itself.

But, in the end, it’s just a boy movie. Maybe watching Bogie recently, the moral ambiguities, the facets of movies which really make them great stories, has spoiled me for something like this – but, in the end, will we be talking about Rogue One – or any Star Wars movie – in 20 years because of the issues it raises and explores through the movie? Or just because it was new and different, and Disney ended up spending a lot of money to make even more money?

My money’s on the latter.

Former Milwaukee conservative talk-show host Charlie Sykes writes about the disaster enfolding the GOP in The New York Times:

For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton — that he was a secret Muslim, that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.

And this is where it became painful. Even among Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of betrayal.

When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection retribution. As the summer turned to fall, I knew that I was losing listeners and said so publicly.

Note another conservative being run out of the GOP by the RINO-wielders, and an acknowledgement of the echo chamber effect. I fear the GOP base will actually have to touch a live wire, i.e., see their fantasies erupt into nightmares, before they’ll begin to question their knowledge-base – and then there’ll be even more uses of RINO, to purify the party. It’ll be interesting to see how long they can live in denial with Trump. Influence peddling has already started, and if the government swamp has been drained, the replacement water has a distinct oily sheen to it. How badly will the next four years hurt? Or will the next election cycle, in two years, already result in a change?

And when will we once again have a sane, valuable conservative party? At the moment, most of the elected officials seem to have sucked down the Kool-Aid.

(h/t pollwatcher @ The Daily Kos)

In a prior post on this thread, I expressed curiosity concerning the motivations of the players in this grisly tragedy. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has now indicted four more officials, according to CNN:

… and one is the Center For Inquiry (CFI), publisher of Skeptical Inquirer. From a funds seeking email received today:

 •  Betsy DeVos, the private school vouchers enthusiast tapped to lead President-Elect Donald Trump’s education department, once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to “advance God’s Kingdom.”

•  And take a look at this video of Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence, taking to the floor of the US House of Representatives to denounce evolution.

•  Just last week, Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s EPA director, had harsh words for Trump’s pick for the EPA: “I don’t recall ever having seen an appointment of someone who is so disdainful of the agency and the science behind what the agency does.”

•  And President-Elect Trump has met with anti-vaccination groups, and has made it clear that he sees a connection between vaccinations and autism.

Crusaders against church-state separation, climate science deniers, intelligent design proponents, and anti-vaccination activists used to be at the fringe of society. Now they are poised to run the country. Make your voice heard by giving a year-end gift that ensures we have the resources to fight.

Become a member, or give an outright gift… has it ever been more important than right now?

Just thought I’d point out that CFI fights the good fight, and you may want to help fund it.

NewScientist (3 December 2016) reports that Dutch policemen are now trialing augmented reality systems so that experts remote from crime scenes can direct first responders in their investigations:

You’re the first police officer to arrive at the scene: a suspected ecstasy lab. There’s drug paraphernalia everywhere, but which piece of evidence could be most helpful for your investigation? Then, a massive virtual arrow appears, pointing out a bottle of chemicals, accompanied by a note saying: “Bag this please”.

And what happens when an officer, following directions, suffers injury or death? Will the remote expert have counseling? And do these augmented reality systems carry their own vulnerabilities? How hard are they to hack?

Not that I’m nervous or anything.

… is the name of a blog which I ran across today while reading on FiveThirtyEight. Turns out they keep an eye on retracted papers. From a quick interview with FiveThirtyEight:

The first Retraction Watch post was titled “Why write a blog about retractions?” Five years later, the answer seems self-evident: Because without a concerted effort to pay attention, nobody will notice what was wrong in the first place. “I thought we might do one post a month,” Marcus told me. “I don’t think either of us thought it would become two or three a day.” But after an interview on public radio and media attention highlighting the blog’s coverage of Marc Hauser, a Harvard psychologist caught fabricating data, the tips started rolling in. “What became clear is that there was a very large number of people in science who were frustrated with the way that misconduct was being handled, and these people found us very quickly,” Oransky said. The site now draws 125,000 unique views each month.

From their current latest entry:

It has been a tough couple of years for surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, once lauded for pioneering a groundbreaking procedure to transplant tracheas.

After a series of documentaries prompted his former employer, Karolinska Institutet (KI), to reopen a misconduct investigation against him, KI has today released one verdict regarding a 2014 Nature Communications paper: guilty.

KI said it is contacting the journal to request a retraction of the paper, which has already been flagged with an expression of concern.

The government of India has apparently decided to take on a mega project in order to solve its problem of too much water in one place, while not enough in another. From T.V. Padma in NewScientist (3 December 2016):

The Interlinking of Rivers scheme, which government officials say is to get the green light from India’s environment ministry “imminently”, will create a water network 12,500 kilometres long – almost twice the length of the world’s longest rivers, the Nile and the Amazon.

Some 14 rivers in northern India and 16 in the western, central and southern parts of the country will be linked via 30 mega-canals and 3000 dams, costing $168 billion. In the process, 35 million hectares of new arable land will be created, as well as the means to generate an extra 34,000 megawatts of hydropower.

Geologists and ecologists are concerned, but India has its worries. From The Hindu, earlier this year:

For the purposes of monitoring, the CWC divides India’s rivers into 12 major basins. The largest of them – the Ganga basin – is not the worst case. The CWC figures for April 28 show storage to be 7.8 BCM. While that may be less than the 10.6 BCM storage at the same time last year it is 22.8 per cent more than the decadal average of 6.35 BCM.

However the numbers for the Indus basin and the Krishna basins are far from inspiring. The Indus this year is 35 per cent and the Krishna 67 per cent less than their 10-year normal.

The most updated estimates of per capita water availability in India’s river basins show stark inequality. The Brahmaputra basin, for instance, can annually support nearly 13000 cubic metres per person, whereas the Mahi has a scarce 260 cubic metres per person.

The Guardian estimates …

This year, 330 million Indians have been affected by drought. State governments used emergency measures to deliver water by train in the western state of Maharashtra; in other areas, schools and hospitals were forced to close, and hundreds of families were forced to migrate from villages to nearby cities where water is more easily accessible.

And Oblity provides this lovely diagram, along with an overview:

So what is the cost of the project? It’s in Quartz’s title of an article on the subject, “Why India’s $168 billion river-linking project is a disaster-in-waiting“. They interview a number of local experts, such as Professor Rajamani of Jawaharlal Nehru University:

The interest in river-linking now is due to the big bucks involved in it for dam builders. A canal is not a river and it cannot support an ecosystem. What happens to everything that is living in the river? When water flows, there are a number of factors associated with it. There are micro organisms and there are marine life. We are taking away all of that by building dams and diverting water for something that is not even natural. When you build dams, you are displacing too many people. What will they do? They land up in slums in cities. River-linking is a social evil, economic evil and will ultimately lead to collapse of civilisation.

Perhaps a bit of hyperbole. However, I do wonder if this is just a way for the current ruling party to secure its place through the provision of jobs on a long term basis.

The Diplomat reports on India’s neighbors’ reactions:

The ILR program’s Himalayan component envisages construction of reservoirs on the principal tributaries of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra in India and Nepal, and involves transfer of water from the eastern tributaries of the Ganga to the west, apart from linking the Brahmaputra to the Ganga and the Ganga to the Mahanadi.

As the Ganga and Brahmaputra are transboundary rivers, India’s proposed engineering of their waters would impact Nepal and Bhutan, where these rivers originate, and Bangladesh, the lower riparian country.

Nepal and Bhutan fear that, as in the case of other river projects in the past, India will pressure them to cooperate with the ILR through building dams and other storage infrastructure. There is “strong popular opposition to this idea” in these countries, Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden, has pointed out.

Such opposition could weaken already fragile ties between India and Nepal.

Bangladesh, meanwhile, is deeply apprehensive over the diversion of water from the Ganga’s tributaries upstream, and the Brahmaputra and Teesta rivers to the Ganga, as this would reduce water flows into its territory, increasing salinity of the water, rendering the soil unfit for cultivation, and resulting in the desertification of large parts of the country.

And, finally, back to NewScientist for one of the more unexpected potential results of this project:

[Chittenipattu Rajendran at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangaluru] says that the dams required by the scheme would push down on Earth’s crust, adding extra strain and possibly increasing the risk of earthquakes in the already quake-prone Himalayas.

Sirocco (1951) puts Humphrey Bogart in a familiar role, dancing on the line between legality and illegality, raising questions of morality, commerce, and conflict. He’s a gunrunner, Harry Smith, in Damascus, Syria, supplying whoever bids for his weaponry as the French Army invades under orders from the League of Nations. As an outsider, he has a few contacts in the local underground, and is making a mint supplying them.

The French Colonel in command of Intelligence also has a French woman with him, one who wishes to leave and tries to use Harry’s contacts to escape. At the same time, the French are trying to stop the flow of arms, and “Mr. Harry” finds himself caught in a squeeze, and his escape route is chancy at best. The world turns into quicksand, threatening to drag him down.

But the Colonel is also caught in a squeeze play, and Harry may have the contact the Colonel needs. He offers Harry a chance, and Harry takes it. The Colonel is looking for peace, for communication. Will the Syrians listen?

A few hours later, the French come to Harry again, offering him life … or the opportunity to do the right thing. Can he live with himself if he doesn’t accede to their request? Can he live if he undertakes the right thing?

While no Paths of Glory, this movie does not romanticize war, and does explore the impossible moral situations which war produces – but not as steadfastly, as thoroughly, as painfully as it might have. Harry doesn’t experience the full range of anguish he might have. He could have led us through a lot more of the lessons as a truly amoral gunrunner, and if he goes back into danger to rescue a man who, for all his own failures, is at least reaching for peace, it’s not entirely clear how painful the path to that decision might have been.

The movie has potential, with good actors and a fair script, but never quite gets their, as the story doesn’t have the guts to pursue the question as far as it might go. Bogart fans should certainly see this, but it’s not nearly as good as such classic fare as The Maltese Falcon.

On 38 North, Ruediger Frank has a longish report on the area of Rason, North Korea, the Special Economic Zone. Something odd is going on:

Nothing new on the northeastern front? Not quite. After just five days in “ordinary” North Korea we got used to the fact that taking photos from the bus is deemed, well, not appropriate. Not that this would have prevented us from taking a snapshot once in a while, of course, but admonishment usually followed and made the experience a bit straining. Now in Rason, what is the guide saying? “Take photos as you wish, no problem, you are tourists—isn’t it natural for visitors to do that.” Exactly; this is what I have been preaching to dozens of DPRK guides over the years. But it was like talking to a brick wall. Now that we have official permission to take pictures, it is almost no fun anymore.

Interesting. An experiment by the regime? To what purpose? This might be interesting to keep an eye on.

On Lawfare Andrew McClure recounts an uncomfortable moment for the Clinton team at the post-election get-together at the Harvard Institute of Politics:

After some more back and forth, a visibly rankled member of the Clinton camp sighed. “Were you guys worried about being hacked?… Were you guys hacked?”

Barely heard above the commotion was Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale: “That’s why we put security on our email… There’s this thing called two-layer authentication that came out like eight years ago. They should try it at the DNC.”

The sarcasm prompted a rare moment of vulnerability for the Clinton team: “At one point we asked the RNC a fair amount, like what kind of precautions they had taken. Did you guys take precautions after the hacking?”

Parscale’s response – “Yeah, of course. Like any business in the world we take precautions against all of our information technology.”

Evidently the wrong IT staff was hired by the Clinton campaign.

Readers react to the labeling of groceries report:

My first reaction is that Michael Le Page does not know what the hell he is talking about.

He starts by cheating with words: heated greenhouse grown produce “can” use more energy than produce flown in from “thousands” of miles away. Yes, if we make sure to waste a huge amount of energy in the greenhouse, and we somehow make that flight as short and efficient (and hey, maybe the airplane was already going that way) as possible.

Otherwise, it’s complete nonsense. Does he have any idea how much fuel a pair of jet engines gulp down per hour? Hint: lots. A Boeing 777 (twin engine) burns about $10,000 worth of kerosene in one hour.

So let’s say we flew some produce in from Arizona. That’s 1276 miles, not even “thousands”. Flight time is just over 3 hours. That’s $30k worth of kerosene. I bet one could heat a one acre greenhouse all winter in Minnesota for a less money (aka fuel aka greenhouse gasses) than that.

As for organic not being healthier — people argue both sides, but I know what I believe based on extensive reading on the subject. I believe I’m not ingesting as many man-made chemicals, most of which are harmful to my health. This can be discussed at length elsewhere.

And organic for environment? Sterilizing millions of acres of top soil with glyphosate (RoundUp) hardly seems good for the environment, yet is standard practice in the non-organic world. This too could be discussed at length.

Another reader:

He says yields on organic foods are lower. Proof? I contend he is making it up. Organic farming resulting in higher greenhouse gas emissions than chemical? Proof? This dude gets less believable by the paragraph. Climate labeling? Whose standard will be used? Not a bad or good idea, outside of the concept that some people will pay attention to some labels. It sounds as if LaPage is making a name for himself, not for the issues he’s discussing. If there is a new label every year for the “trendy” concept, people stop paying attention to any of them. Strawberries in January are not a bad idea, but the cost should reflect the actual input of flying them in from a warm place. There are plenty of heated greenhouses which use “waste” heat from power plants and other industrial processes. There are also unheated greenhouses which are insulated/double-walled and grow cold-tolerant plants for winter markets. In Maine.

I did check and Mr. Le Page is listed as a staff reporter for NewScientist.

Dan Jones discusses the post-fact world in NewScientist (3 December 2016, paywall) and who may be the worst malefactors:

In the real world of flesh-and-blood humans, reasoning often starts with established conclusions and works back to find “facts” that support what we already believe. And if we’re presented with facts that contradict our beliefs, we find clever ways to dismiss them. We’re more wily defence lawyer than objective scientist.

Psychologists call this lawyerly tendency motivated reasoning. Take climate change. The science here is unambiguous: climate change is happening and human activity is driving it. Yet despite this, and the risks it poses to our descendants, many people still deny it is happening.

The major driver, especially in the US, is political ideology. A Pew Research Center survey released a month before the US election showed that, compared with Democrats, Republicans are less likely to believe that scientists know that climate change is occurring, that they understand its causes, or that they fully and accurately report their findings. They are also more likely to believe that scientists’ research is driven by careerism and political views.

Many liberals like to think this is a product of scientific illiteracy, which if addressed would bring everyone round to the same position. If only. Studies by Dan Kahan at Yale University have shown that, in contrast to liberals, among conservatives it is the most scientifically literate who are least likely to accept climate change. “Polarisation over climate change isn’t due to a lack of capacity to understand the issues,” says Kahan. “Those who are most proficient at making sense of scientific information are the most polarised.”

I wouldn’t call it motivated reasoning, but rather retrograde reasoning – know your conclusion, then prove it. Classic bad logic.

I suspect this simply betrays the background of the conservatives, which is not, for the overwhelmingly most part, in science. They have backgrounds in business and/or politics – where the motivations they attribute the scientists’ behavior to is common and even mythic. (A religious background is even worse, as the conclusion is divinely mandated.) But that’s not how scientists function; in my experience, they are driven individuals who search relentlessly for the truth.

Not a sinecure.

This also reminds me of the Skeptical Inquirer article (discussed here) on who believes and disbelieves Evolution – with highly educated conservatives being the least likely to believe in evolution, rather than the poorly educated. (Incidentally, the original article is now available online here. While a trifle dry, its surprising findings are fascinating.)

Jones continues:

For Kahan, this apparent paradox comes down to motivated reasoning: the better you are at handling scientific information, the better you’ll be at confirming your own bias and writing off inconvenient truths. In the case of climate-change deniers, studies suggest that motivation is often endorsement of free-market ideology, which fuels objections to the government regulation of business that is required to tackle climate change. “If I ask people four questions about the free market, I can predict their attitudes towards climate science with 60 per cent certainty,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK.

I can’t help speculating if plotting understanding scientific information against properly applying the information to a specific problem would not yield a linear result, but rather a non-linear result. By this I mean that until mastery is achieved, the application of the scientific information yields wildly improper results, even without realizing it. Only when mastery is achieved do results correspond with reality.

I know I certainly experienced that in my formal education.

And sometimes the anti-regulation stance of libertarians just appears to be a denial that there is something like responsibility to the community. Here in the USA, where Money is the idol, the red-hot pursuit burns away the concepts of responsibility to anyone beyond the immediate family; thus when people are caught pouring pollution into rivers, there’s not even embarrassment.

It’s just a cost of doing business. We’re caught, we pay a fine. No shame here, no sirree.

Sort of like Trump refusing to pay his bills. If he can win in court, then the money is all his.

Sad, really. It’s so divorced from the underlying foundation of being able to run a just society, the ability to trust the person with which you’re doing business. Well, enough of this tangent. Trump will destroy the elevator he’s ridden to the top, and he’ll tumble to the ground, far below, in disgrace and dishonor. My guess is he’ll never even realize it.

Anyways, back to Dan’s article, which I found personally encouraging in one respect: who’s not as vulnerable to motivated reasoning.

Until recently, researchers had found no personality trait that mitigates motivated reasoning. But earlier this year, Kahan discovered something intriguing about people who seek out and consume scientific information for personal pleasure, a trait he calls scientific curiosity. Having devised a scale for measuring this trait, he and his colleagues found that, unlike scientific literacy, scientific curiosity is linked to greater acceptance of human-caused climate change, regardless of political orientation. On a host of issues, from attitudes to porn and the legalisation of marijuana, to immigration and fracking, scientific curiosity makes both liberals and conservatives converge on views closer to what the facts say.

Perhaps even more encouragingly, Kahan’s team found that scientifically curious people were also more eager to read views that clashed with those of their political tribe. So finding ways to increase scientific curiosity, perhaps by increasing the influence of people with this trait, could take the heat out of partisan disputes more effectively than promoting scientific literacy.

Which explains my conservative climate change scientist friend. And I think I fit right in there – I know I read about science with relish. So perhaps I haven’t misled myself as badly as some.

On this thread, Trump’s pick for the Ambassador to Israel has been announced, and its roiling up the Israelis. WaPo reports:

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday named David M. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer aligned with the Israeli far right, as his nominee for ambassador to Israel, elevating a campaign adviser who has questioned the need for a two-state solution and has likened left-leaning Jews in America to the Jews who aided the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Mr. Friedman, whose outspoken views stand in stark contrast to decades of American policy toward Israel, did not wait long on Thursday to signal his intention to upend the American approach. In a statement from the Trump transition team announcing his nomination, he said he looked forward to doing the job “from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”

Through decades of Republican and Democratic administrations, the embassy has been in Tel Aviv, as the State Department insists that the status of Jerusalem — which both Israel and the Palestinians see as their rightful capital — can be determined only through negotiations as part of an overall peace deal.

Mr. Friedman, who has no diplomatic experience, has said that he does not believe it would be illegal for Israel to annex the occupied West Bank and he supports building new settlements there, which Washington has long condemned as illegitimate and an obstacle to peace.

Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Paul Rosenzweig are incidentally on location and have a report on Israeli reaction:

Unsurprisingly, the reaction in Israel to the appointment has been sharply divided along ideological lines, with the right-wing nationalists who make up the current government enthusiastic and more moderate figures ranging from reserved to despondent. The lefty daily Haaretz actually called on the Senate to reject Trump’s choice. “If the settlers had a state of their own in the West Bank, he might be suitable to serve as ambassador there, and maybe not even that, because his basic identification must be with overall American interests,” the paper commented. “If Friedman’s appointment fails to pass in the Senate after close scrutiny of his background and a thorough hearing, that will be a blessing for Israel.”

Their concern?

I generally find slice of life descriptions to be interesting, even fascinating, and this one is no exception. It’s from NC state senator Jeff Jackson (D), describing the recent emergency legislative session – wherein the emergency is the GOP loss of the governorship – and is published in OrthoCarolina:

Protesters are chanting.

Lobbyists are running around, asking if anyone knows what’s going on.

Legislators from the minority party are speculating, caffeinating, reacting.

Legislators from the majority party are ducking in and out of conference rooms, saying little, and generally avoiding the press.

It was a legislative ambush. …

Inside the ambush, there are actually two fights going on.

The political fight is between Democrats and Republicans. But the legislative fight is between Republicans in the House and Republicans in the Senate, because they control both chambers. The way we calculate probabilities around here is by figuring where the common ground is between those two groups.

So, I have a question for the Democrats. Because the court threw out the gerrymandered districts and has mandated a special legislative election, everyone in the legislature faces an election some time in 2017.

Suppose the Democrats win.

Will they be just as punitive to their brethren as just happened now? I’d assume some or all of this legislation would be dismantled – over the shrieks of the GOP. But would they go further and indulge in their own bit of madness?

Or would they appeal to the better natures of the electorate?

Alexey Kljatov:

More here.

The view from our broccoli plant last summer. Ah, it was such a disappointment – it never broccolized!

Plagioclase:

Plagioclase is a series of tectosilicate (framework silicate) minerals within the feldspar group. Rather than referring to a particular mineral with a specific chemical composition, plagioclase is a continuous solid solution series, more properly known as the plagioclase feldspar series (from the Ancient Greek for “oblique fracture”, in reference to its two cleavage angles).

Seen in “Moon-dust cake mix shows moon may have had water from the start“, by Andy Coghlan, NewScientist (3 December 2016):

Only when water was included in the mix, at levels of just 0.5 to 1 per cent by weight, did the types and amounts of rock formed match those that have been observed on the moon.

Most importantly, the water-based mixture generated a layer of plagioclase – the main component of the crust – that when extrapolated to the moon would be around 34 to 43 kilometres thick, matching the average thickness measured with satellites. Dry mixtures led to a plagioclase layer twice as deep. This suggests that the moon’s current geology could only have evolved if water was there at the outset (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/btz8).

So this year we’ve already seen some warm blazing hot temperatures in the Arctic. But last year? Discover’s D-brief blog brings us this video from NASA.

Want more? Check out D-brief.

Regarding inhumation jars, my Arts Editor asks:

How does this differ from an ossuary? Or is an ossuary just one type of inhumation jar?

From the article:

… inhumation jars, which are buried ceramic vessels containing bones.

And from Wikipedia’s article on ossuaries:

An ossuary is a chest, box, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains. They are frequently used where burial space is scarce.

An inhumation is another word for interment or burial, so I think the difference is that an ossuary is above ground.