Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Bloomberg Law reports that SCOTUS has changed its mind and won’t hear a case that it had agreed to hear (granted certiorari in legalese):

The U.S. Supreme Court sent a clear signal on Nov. 17: No more bait-and-switch tactics.

The court “dismissed as improvidently granted” — or “DIG”ged — an antitrust case involving billions of dollars and household names like Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, Visa Inc. v. Osborn, U.S., No. 15-961, dismissed 11/17/16.

The court infrequently DIGs cases, and even more infrequently explains why.

But there was no mistake why the court tossed the the Visa case.

After having persuaded the court to grant certiorari on one issue, the “petitioner ‘chose to rely on a different argument’ in their merits briefing,” the court said. “The Court, therefore, orders that the writ in this case be dismissed as improvidently granted.”

The explanation suggests that the court is trying to “deter and shape” future practice in the high court, Michael Solimine of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, Cincinnati, told Bloomberg BNA.

Or, as the late-Justice Antonin Scalia put it in a 2015 case, the court was trying “to deter future snookering.”

Billions of dollars possibly lost because those executing the appeal engaged in a dubious legal practice. I’ll bet that doesn’t go down well at the office, unless this was considered a very long shot. Big, big business doesn’t litigate with regard to the conceptst of justice, only with regard to the amount of money involved. When billions are involved, what’s a few million to lawyers who think this’ll work?

A pity entities with little concept of justice are still granted partial rights as persons. I still await Apple’s accession to a seat on SCOTUS. Say, maybe I should write a letter to President-elect Trump suggesting same …

From a reader:

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Julp53JWGrU

Nothing false but the speed!

[Edit – Sadly, the video seems to have been removed.]

Neoteny:

The retention by adults of traits previously seen only in the young is a subject studied in the field of developmental biology, occurring in two ways. In neoteny (/niːˈɒtᵻni/ /niːˈɒtni/^[1][2][3] or /niːˈɒtəni/,^[4] also called juvenilization),^[5] the physiological (or somatic) development of an organism (typically an animal) is slowed or delayed. Neoteny is found in modern humans. [Wikipedia]

Seen in Discover.

The Schiaparelli probe was an ESA Mars probe which crashed 19 October 2016 while attempting to land. The ESA is working on understanding what went wrong:

Cognomen:

The term “cognomen” (sometimes pluralized “cognomens”) has come into use as an English noun used outside the context of Ancient Rome. According to the 2012 edition of the Random House Dictionary, cognomen can mean a “surname” or “any name, especially a nickname.”^[4] So the basic sense in English is ‘how one is well known.’

Catalan cognom and Italian cognome, derived from the Latin cognomen, mean “family name.”

The term “cognomen” can also be applied to cultures with a clan structure and naming conventions comparable to those of Ancient Rome; thus, hereditary “cognomina” have been described as in use among the Xhosa (Iziduko), the Yoruba (Oriki), or the Zulu (Isibongo). [Wikipedia]

Used in Jack Vance’s The Killing Machine:

First: the Demon Princes are typified by grandeur. Consider the manner in which Kokor Hekkus gained his cognomen ‘The Killing Machine,’ …

Yep, I like Vance.

The Last Hurrah (1958) is a sprawling, dense movie, every moment packed with thought as an aging mayor (Spencer Tracy) handles the many duties in his New England city: constituent service, projects, funerals of leading citizens – and a re-election campaign which pits him against an inexperienced fool backed by sinister local powers who still see him as an outsider Irishman. We hear his pearls of wisdom, his insights into the duties of the mayor and the future of campaigning, his occasional strong-arm tactics, through the eyes of his nephew, a young man working as a journalist and currently employed by one of the mayor’s greatest enemies – a man quite irrational with the concept of privilege.

Perhaps the greatest lesson here is that a Mayor must understand what is best for the cities trailing citizens, not leading citizens – and to get the leaders to see what the downtrodden need and to prod them into doing it. The great failing of of the private sector is to focus on one’s own needs, and not see what others may need. The mayor, as a public servant, finds he needs to exert himself to better the city, even as the election comes close.

This is not an action thriller. There are no assassinations, bomb threats, or indeed anything beyond a snarl from men losing their privilege. But there is political intrigue, old-fashioned arm-twisting which still engenders resentment, even as it gets things done, and that’s where the interest in the film lies.

Even as ever-hostile fate closes in on him.

There’s little to criticize here, as the acting, story, and dialog are all very good. It is, definitely, a movie from another era – and, if you wish to sample such movies, this is a good place to start.

I’ve been mulling over a piece of mail I received a few days ago regarding Brandon Marshall:

Colin Kaepernick may have started the kneeling in protest of America’s national anthem, but Stephen Martin, owner of Prime Time Sports in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has started a patriotic rising unlike anything that’s ever been done before.

Martin first took a stand when NFL player Brandon Marshall refused to stand for the anthem. Immediately, Martin cancelled Marshall’s scheduled autograph signing event in his store. But he wasn’t done. He replaced the star’s event with something entirely different in his store, and in one week, it has grown to epic proportions that he can hardly even keep up with now.

He put out a post on Facebook, respectfully disagreeing with the disrespect of the nation’s flag and anthem, then proceeded to explain just what the flag means to him, and the sacrifice of all the men and women who have fought for it. Martin invited people to send photos of their loved ones who are veterans, in active service, or who have been injured or given their lives in the line of duty.

The photos started pouring in from all across the country, and as fast as they were emailed, Martin printed them off and taped them to his store front window. Americans are sharing their photos and stories on his Facebook page, as well as sending to him through email, and each day he has posted photos of the progress.

Getting past the obvious (and annoying) hyperbole, I cannot help but think that no one is really communicating here. Clearly, Mr. Marshall was attempting to communicate his disgust with the behaviors of too many members of one of the official organs of the American state: police.

Mr. Martin wrote a Facebook post (now inaccessible, according to one site I checked) explaining his position on the flag, which he’s apparently associating with the anthem, but since I can’t read it, it’s hard to evaluate. From the mail, I have chosen to conclude that the anthem & flag are inviolable in Mr. Martin’s mind, a position which hinders communication, as every action taken to disrespect the flag & anthem are now lumped into a single category, best labeled State blasphemy!, since men & women have died defending it. By being offended at any show of disrespect for an important symbol, there is little chance to communicate important observations and ideas; the attempts are ignored because, well, one’s feelings for the flag are far more important than anything else.

Today, I ran across this CNN report on recent activities at Hampshire College:

And here’s our dogwoods….

Lara Bazelon discusses in Slate the possible future behaviors of Chief Justice John Roberts of SCOTUS with regard to Roe v. Wade (abortion) and Obergefell (gay marriage), and pins her hopes on two points – stare decisis and his sense of legacy:

The Guardian is reporting that, under a Trump Administration, NASA should never look back, only forward to outer space. That is, no more climate monitoring for NASA:

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser [Bob Walker] on issues relating to the space agency has said.

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena. Nasa’s network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division’s budget set to grow to $2bn next year. By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8bn in 2017.

Some sort of bureaucratic reshuffling to satisfy someone’s lust for orderliness? Nope:

Walker, however, claimed that doubt over the role of human activity in climate change “is a view shared by half the climatologists in the world. We need good science to tell us what the reality is and science could do that if politicians didn’t interfere with it.”

However, research published on Skeptical Inquirer has indicated that it’s somewhere in the realm of 97% concur, 3% do not. I expect Planetary Report is not going to be happy about this, although their Casey Dreier has been bracing for it.

For those of us who enjoy extreme long shots, New York Magazine is reporting that …

Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

I checked on the blog of Beth Clarkson, a statistician I’ve quoted before, but no activity on her blog, and nothing apparent in the news. I’ve discussed my dismay at voting machines several times before in this thread.

My favorite extreme long shot would be the Electoral College voting for Clinton. Normally, I wouldn’t give this a chance in Hell, but this campaign season, it’d be the cherry on top of the whipped cream.

The L. A. Times is reporting a theory that the day President Kennedy died, he wasn’t the target – the target was Governor Connally, who was riding up front and was, in fact, hit as well. This is based partially on the repeated testimony of Oswald’s wife, and a page from a book found in Oswald’s apartment.

In the hours after the Kennedy assassination, after Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit and was identified as the president’s assassin, a Secret Service officer named Mike Howard was dispatched to Oswald’s apartment. Howard found a little green address book, and on its 17th page under the heading “I WILL KILL” Oswald listed four men: an FBI agent named James Hosty; a right-wing general, Edwin Walker; and Vice President Richard Nixon. At the top of the list was the governor of Texas, John Connally. Through Connally’s name, Oswald had drawn a dagger, with blood drops dripping downward.

It’s interesting stuff, but I am having trouble, as LBJ was Vice President at the time, and had been elected to the position in 1961; JFK died in latest 1963. My guess is that the conspiracy theorists will either ignore it or dispute the new theory vociferously, and perhaps use this oddity – perhaps the list was merely fairly old. Governor Connally assumed his position in 1963, but the list could have been assembled piecemeal. And this article is a secondary source, as it doesn’t reprint the page for examination – because it’s gone missing. Does it say Governor?

In the tradition of the best conspiracy situations, a key piece of evidence has gone missing. Interesting. Maybe Castro didn’t order the assassination after all.

Mark Sumner on The Daily Kos points out that the coal industry faces more than government regulations – it faces effective competition:

On Lawfare, Susan Landau finds herself advocating for securing communications now that Donald Trump is the President-elect, and to objections that this will cripple national security, she has an answer:

Protecting the privacy of speech is crucial for preserving our democracy. We live at a time when tracking an individual—a journalist, a member of the political opposition, a citizen engaged in peaceful protest—or listening to their communications is far easier than at any time in human history. Political leaders on both sides now have a responsibility to work for securing communications and devices. This means supporting not only the laws protecting free speech and the accompanying communications, but also the technologies to do so: end-to-end encryption and secured devices; it also means soundly rejecting all proposals for front-door exceptional access.  Prior to the election there were strong, sound security arguments for rejecting such proposals. The privacy arguments have now, suddenly, become critically important as well. Threatened authoritarianism means that we need technological protections for our private communications every bit as much as we need the legal ones we presently have.

Enabling encryption without exceptional access will not prevent law enforcement from doing its job. When the world went encrypted twenty years ago, the NSA claimed it was “going deaf.” But then the agency found other ways to collect intelligence (“NSA has better SIGINT than at any time in history,” according to its former director Mike McConnell). As many have observed, law enforcement will be able to find other ways to conduct investigations even without exceptional access.

Protecting our ability to communicate in private is vital. Congress must respond accordingly. Anything less threatens the very foundations of our republic.

Reminiscent of the libertarians claim that we’ll always find a way to get something done while lowering the cost, if only given the freedom to try. But it does become another piece of technology subject to failure and subversion, without the least little peep – at least for the non-specialist. It’ll be up to the specialists to make secure communications work with little or no notice by the users.

Sami Grover on Treehugger.com has news on the coal front:

Just as much of the world languishes in uncertainty over the future of a low carbon transition, the Globe and Mail reports that Canada steps up and announces an almost complete phase out of coal for electricity by 2030 at the latest. And this comes just a week after the UK confirmed its coal phase out plans, and France does too.

The France report catches me by surprise, so I checked it out. The Inertia‘s Alexander Haro provides some information:

François Hollande, the French President, stood in front of delegate at the UN’s annual climate change meeting and promised that France will have no coal-powered power plants by 2023.

Which makes sense – France is nuclear power rich, which is carbon-neutral once the plants are actually built. Until maintenance begins …

We have a couple of scandals today. First, CNN/Politics is reporting that Hillary won’t be locked up:

Recently, my Arts Editor and I spoke with an emigre from India, who told us about India’s decision to be rid of certain denominations of currency as those denominations are used to implement various corrupt practices. They are known as black money. Now LinkedIn publishes a column by Subodh Mathur, an economics professor, who suggests this particular choice may turn nasty for India:

In the meantime, there is a serious risk that demonetization will lead to a decline in the GDP. While we could analyze this policy intervention from a theoretical perspective, it is simpler to look at it from a common sense perspective.

The starting point is that many people will simply not declare the full amount of the black money that they have. Such a declaration would run the risk of further investigations by the Government about how the money was acquired in the first place.  As a result, they will have less money to spend.

A considerable part of the black money is used to pay for luxury-type goods and services, such as weddings, vacations, eating out, jewelry, and expensive clothes. Consider the lavish expenditures on weddings – specially important because the wedding season is just ahead. Much of the expenditures on food, saris, jewelry, invitation cards, decorations, cars, etc. is paid for by black money.

And the ripples continue.

It’s an interesting commentary on the perceived size of the illicit markets – not illegal products, but untaxed. So, assuming this does happen, what’s driving this? A few years ago I read a fascinating book named Being Indian, by Pavan Varma, a former diplomat who had spent a lot of time outside the country, and as a result gained an interesting viewpoint on his own society. I don’t have it handy, but I do recall noting that the myths of India do not encourage following the rules. I’m still a little astounded at the size of the black economy implied.

tectiform:

Sample tectiforms.
Source: Bradshaw Foundation

Between 2013 and 2014, [Genevieve] von Petzinger visited 52 caves in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. The symbols she found ranged from dots, lines, triangles, squares and zigzags to more complex forms like ladder shapes, hand stencils, something called a tectiform that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feather shapes called penniforms. [“Hidden symbols,” Alison George, NewScientist, 12 November 2016, paywall]

In an article by Aviva Rutkin (NewScientist, 12 November 2016, paywall) exploring the some tentative schemes for using Big Data, she begins with a relatively innocuous scheme to discount car insurance for first time buyers if the buyers will give the insurer (Admiral Insurance) access to their Facebook profile, known as firstcarquote. It was aborted before it ever made it out of the corral. But then comes this doozy:

Facebook itself may even be interested in finding ways to score users: it has already worked on theoretical projects that aren’t too different from firstcarquote. Last year, for example, Facebook patented an “authorisation and authentication” method that could allocate loans according to the credit scores of your Facebook friends. If their average score is above a certain threshold, your loan application will be processed; if not, you’re out of luck.

Can you imagine the churn as people begin to upgrade their “friends” list to better their chance to get a loan? And then dump those friends who might drag them down? I’m envisioning the development of Facebook ghettos, schisms widening between those with good credit scores and those without. First we were sliced by our political views, then diced by our credit needs.

Source: The Mingary Castle Restoration blog

On the bright side, it may result in more people learning to live without credit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the individual, although some industries would hate it. (Now I’m visualizing the Wicked Witch screaming about the solvent qualities of anti-credit. I’m a little short on sleep.)

In the end, Facebook might try to compensate by examining your former friends and trying to factor them in, but it sounds like a short term fix to me. While Facebook is too big to be destroyed by any single mistake, if they were to take a step like this, one of their walls would start to crumble.

More news on the Dakota Access Pipeline / Standing Rock, but this time from a commercial news source. WDAY / WDAZ reports on Nov 20:

On Lawfare, Timothy Edgar advocates that you learn all about Masha Gessen, a journalist-survivor of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Shortly after last week’s election of Donald Trump as president, she published a remarkable essay, Autocracy: Rules for Survival.  Her number one rule? Believe the autocrat.

Whether or not Trump becomes an autocrat will depend on whether Americans finally begin to take the things he says seriously.  If he does not mean them, let him say so.  Don’t dismiss them because you think they are foolish or funny or because you simply do not believe what you are hearing.

So what has Mr. Edgar unsettled? He provides this link, where Mr. Trump is documented to have said,

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just said the US should consider “closing up” the internet to curb radical extremism. Trump, a man that routinely claims everyone in charge of the US is stupid, believes that as president he could just call up Bill Gates to help him shut off the internet. Trump floated the idea at a campaign rally at the USS Yorktown in South Carolina tonight as a way to stop ISIS “jihadists” from recruiting Americans to commit acts of domestic terrorism. The idea is so dumb it almost has us, too, at a loss for words.

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet,” Trump said. “We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”

Mz Gessen’s number one rule is reminiscent of (apology, apology) Adolf Hitler, who infamously (if reportedly incoherently) published his plans in Mein Kampf. However, I hesitate to take the lesson to heart, as I’m not so sure Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov, Nikita Khrushchev, or many others published their plans; Hitler may be an exception. However, there is a great advantage to that simple honesty – those who are desperate and looking for earthly salvation may find it in those honestly spoken plans, and by implementing them, you guarantee their loyalty. A little honey on the knife, as it were.

So what tool would Mr. Trump use in the event? Mr. Edgar is a lawyer and expert in cybersecurity, and thus he knows about Section 606 of the Communications Act of 1934. His opinion on Mr. Trump’s options for shutting down the Internet?

Section 606 has never been applied to the internet, but there is nothing in the law that explicitly says it cannot be.  The question is whether the government’s statutory authority over traditional telecommunications under 606 extends to the internet.  The issue is similar to the question of whether the FCC can use its regulatory authority to impose “net neutrality” rules under other provisions of the statute.  In June 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC’s power to impose “net neutrality” rules.

If Trump wants to “close that internet up,” all he will need is an opinion from his Attorney General that section 606 gives him authority to do so, and that the threat of terrorism is compelling enough to override any First Amendment concerns.  It is critically important that a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee ask Trump’s nominee, Senator Jeff Sessions, what he thinks about this issue.

If such a thing happened, would the corporations have the clout to force it to be re-activated? Would the citizenry riot? Or would they be too stunned? Or even in favor, as some trumped up (apology, apology) excuse is given?

I am provoked to think about why Trump was elected (barely), as in the large number of Americans in desperate economic straits, with various others – Trump has said he’ll bring back all those jobs, so let’s assume he’s going to try. What if he fails? Do those folks give up on him in 4 years, or vote for him again because of his honey-smooth approach with them? How do the Democrats generate an appeal to them while holding their coalition together? It should be quite an interesting dance, starting just about now.

We’re already reaching a point where I want to take a shower everyday with the single purpose of washing the feeling of slime off my eyeballs just from reading the political news. Consider this small item, courtesy Steve Benen on MaddowBlog:

This is the same controversy in which Trump faced allegations of bribery when Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) dropped a probe into “Trump University” after the Trump Foundation made an illegal campaign contribution to the Florida Republican. Bondi is now a member of Trump’s transition team.

Even if it’s innocent as the driven snow, it looks like a quid pro quo (for those who prefer old-fashioned colloquialisms, you wash my back and I’ll wash yours comes to mind). Smells like it. And there’s smoke. Now we just need a good investigation.

Unfortunately, most voters, participating or not, ignore government as much as possible, so they’ll not get the good shock to the system that Trump will introduce after Obama’s scandal-free Administration. Counting the Trump University scandal (noted earlier in this thread), the only real question is whether Trump’s scandal count will put him in the lead with regard to the number of scandals in an Administration before he even assumes office.

That would be an impressive accomplishment.

The social sciences are often inexact and controversial, full of observations and speculative, inexact theories, because we are inexact creatures. Nevertheless, as I find honor killings to be repulsive and, quite honestly, inexplicable, when an article professing a usable theory on their existence popped up in NewScientist (“Reputation is everything”, Emma Young, 12 November 2016, paywall), I was quite intrigued.

Anthropologists and social scientists distinguish between what are sometimes called dignity cultures and honour cultures. Dignity cultures value people simply by dint of being human. Here, people seldom turn violent at the first hint of a challenge to their reputation, instead ignoring it or perhaps seeking redress in the courts.

Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy opines that all voices should be heard – no matter how repugnant they may be. The scenario? A presentation at Cal State Northridge (CSUN) on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and its interruption – and termination – by a collection of Armenian students. The latter’s statement:

Our presence at these events will send a clear message to the Turkish community that college and university campuses are not incubators for denialists. Treating college campuses as breeding grounds for Turkish nationalist ideology is offensive for the number of Armenian students who attend these colleges.

A more detailed defense of their activities is also mentioned. Eugene’s opinion?

Prof. George Gawrych’s book, “The Young Ataturk: From Ottoman Soldier to Statesman of Turkey,” won one of the Society for Military History 2014 Distinguished Book Awards. And yet it turns out that even a faculty-invited scholar with impressive credentials isn’t allowed to speak at CSUN. Naturally, no speaker should be shouted down this way, whether he wrote an award-winning book or not — but the stature of Gawrych’s work is just a reminder of how deeply the movement to suppress speech has spread at American universities. (Something similar, by the way, seems to have happened the next day at Chapman University.)