Unsightly Mental Blemishes

My correspondent responds regarding Trump’s mental condition:

I don’t think Trump is capable of empathy*. It simply would not occur to him to imagine how people (gun lovers or otherwise) would feel if he announced that it was all a joke.

*Not trying to be unkind. I believe he has full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. See symptoms: http://www.mayoclinic.org/…/basics/symptoms/con-20025568

Oddly enough I was just reading about narcissism in NewScientist (9 July 2016, paywall), which was not coincidental given the obvious correspondence to Mr. Trump. This paragraph seems relevant:

Looking at data on 42 US presidents up to and including George W. Bush, Ashley Watts of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her colleagues found that those rated higher for grandiose narcissism were judged as being greater presidents: they did better on rankings of public persuasiveness, agenda-setting and the initiation of legislation, for example. However, they were also more likely to be seen as impulsive and bullying, and to face impeachment charges. The study suggests that the benefits of grandiose narcissism stem largely from its association with extroversion, whereas the downside is largely due to lack of agreeableness.

But I myself think he may be a psychopath, in which case he’d probably be aware that dropping out would be an upsetting event for his supporters.

A reader writes regarding RINOs:

I don’t think the GOP will die that easily. There’s a lot of diehards out there, and nothing so far has swayed them away from supporting Trump and other extremists like Ryan, Bachmann, etc. Facts don’t sway them in the least.

It’s not so much that the diehards won’t leave the party so much as, to quote President Reagan, the party will leave them. The diehards will be hounded out as apostates and RINOs, despite changing their core convictions not a whit, and those who leveled the accusations will progress from fringe to right wing to solid “conservatives” to slightly suspect to RINOs to having their memberships revoked if they refuse to leave on their own in outrage.

I’ll suggest an estimated lifetime, from one edge to the other, of about 4 years.

I can hear the hooves of this noxious herd now.

A reader remarks on an alluring bit of technology:

Can they make a commercially viable product by next year, please?

No, I’m afraid you’re going to have to stick with your rocks and cute water fountain.

The dangers of talking to your wife while driving somewhere is that sometimes awkward phrases are uttered.

Like Premature Forgetfulness.

This reader suggests I might need the help of some demi-god to keep up this series:

You’ll need to get more server space if you do “Petulance of the day” for the next 3 months.

Another reader has a deeper analysis:

I think I’m starting to understand Trump’s ongoing outrageousness:

If (when) he loses the election, he plans to say that he was just pranking America. “Of course I was kidding,” he’ll say. “I never wanted the job. I just wanted to see how many idiotic, horrible things I could say before people caught on, but they never did. It was the ultimate reality show, and the American voters are a bunch of losers!”

I’m completely serious. It’s a way for him to save face when Hillary shellacks him in November. Plus, we all know how much he loves to joke around.

I almost buy it until I think about the audience to whom he’s playing – they’re not likely to take his jest lightly. I hate to think this of fellow Americans, but they might try to hunt him down for playing with their affections in such a slapdash manner. Is he too egotistical to realize this?

You know the answer.

Attack of the Killer Tomato.

Plants.

Water is imperiled from many sources: weather, neglect, malicious forethought – and sometimes karma. AL Monitor‘s Shlomi Eldar explores Israel’s self-inflicted water wound:

In May, Gaza’s sewage system collapsed, and raw sewage reached the water reservoir of the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council. Gaza’s sewage plants have ceased functioning due to the lack of electricity, and left wastewater flows into Israel untreated.

“Without electricity, water cannot be produced and wastewater cannot be treated,” said Eilon Adar, a hydrologist and the former director of Ben-Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, Department of Environmental Hydrology and Microbiology in Beersheba. “An aquifer knows no borders. Water does not stop at a border. At the moment the damage is negligible, but Gaza is now dumping its untreated wastewater near the Beit Lahia wastewater treatment plant. This site, founded a number of years ago with Israel’s agreement, is only about 200 meters [660 feet] from Israel’s border and the [effluent] ‘lake’ seeps into the coastal aquifer.”

According to Adar, when Gaza’s wastewater treatment plant does not function, Israel stands to suffer as well. The ramifications of this can already be seen.

“Gaza sends wastewater to the area of the nonfunctional treatment plant, causing the water level to rise. A virtual mountain of underground water has been created that will flow to the only place in Gaza that still has drinkable water. That water will become contaminated and then disaster will hit. Once [contaminated] water permeates potable water, it will be almost impossible to fix the situation.”

So why the shortage of electricity?

The electricity crisis in Gaza began after former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert instructed the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the transformers in Gaza’s electrical station in retaliation for the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006. Although the station was partially restored, it never returned to its former level of performance.

“Today there is only one operating turbine, which supplies a bit of electricity to Gaza residents,” said one of Gaza’s largest fuel merchants, who requested anonymity. He told Al-Monitor that there is just enough fuel to partially operate one out of four small, reconstructed turbines. Before the station was destroyed it supplied some 125 megawatts. The station’s capacity, together with electricity supplied through direct lines from Israel and Egypt, guaranteed a more or less reasonable level of electricity. Now, however, the station provides no more than 50 megawatts, and the direct electricity lines from Israel and Egypt often suffer temporary cuts.

Will Netanyahu work to resolve the problem? If he doesn’t then he hurts his own people as well as inflicting suffering on the Palestinians. Sort of a negative version of the Golden Rule.

Vincent Price stars in the surprisingly limp The Last Man on Earth (1964), a movie chronicling the travails of a scientist, Robert Morgan, who is the only unchanged survivor of an unspecified bacterial plague. There are other ‘survivors’, but they die in sunlight, are averse to garlic and mirrors, and… need I go on?

Through flashbacks we see his research attempting to cure the plague (unconvincing), his arguments with a friend over the nature of the plague, and the death of his young child (thrown into a pit and burned to prevent her from “returning”). The problem with the movie begins somewhere in this sequence, as Morgan’s argument with his friend has Morgan scoffing at reports of the dead returning to ‘life’.  It’s a rather lifeless argument, and within moments we transition to the loss of his child and the death – and return to life – of his wife. He may be horrified at these events, but we’ve lost some emotional punch that goes with Morgan realizing he was wrong about the argument.

Back in the present, the physically and intellectually weakened ‘undead’ batter at Morgan’s house during the night; during the day, he searches them out and kills them with a stake, a sad activity he performs more as a duty than a matter of survival.

And then one day a dog appears. He analyzes its blood… and kills it. I think. In any case, the dog dies. This ambiguity, unintended I’m sure, is puzzling and deflating.

And then a woman appears in the daytime.  She runs away, but he catches her and brings her back to his home to discover how she has survived. She is an emissary from another group of survivors who want to know if Morgan knows more than they.

Except it’s a lie. They want to kill Morgan. Why? It’s not clear. She claims they want to kill him because he has staked some of their undead family and friends, but that’s so unconvincing that it’s not worth discussing.

So the acting is OK, the script is inadequate but not laughable, the staging is good – I really believed it was an empty city – and the corpses of those caught in daylight are effectively underplayed. I really wanted to like this movie, but I didn’t.  While the premise was worthy of attention, the conclusion was abrupt and unsatisfactory.  I’m sorry to say I can’t recommend it.

Derek Markham @ Treehugger reports on a new dryer technology:

Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with support from the US Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office and GE Appliances, has developed a prototype of an innovative clothes drying technology that could shorten drying times down to just 20 minutes, and reduce the amount of energy used for each load by 70%. Instead of using heat to remove water from clothing, this prototype uses high-frequency vibrations – ultrasonic waves – produced by piezoelectric transducers driven by a custom amplifier.

I wonder about the gotcha – ultrasonics may need to be damped. Will this still require spinning? What about failure modes? It’s interesting since, as Mark notes, home dryers consume 4% of electricity produced today. And big efficiency increases are cool. The question will be whether this can be made consumer-tough and -safe.

The news is positively frothing with this. From CNN:

Trump was asked by host Hugh Hewitt about the comments Trump made Wednesday night in Florida, and Hewitt said he understood Trump to mean “that he (Obama) created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”

On Lawfare Stephanie Leutert interviews security analyst Alejandro Hope to discover the possible reasons behind a surge in murders in Mexico:

Hypothesis #1: Ongoing Cartel Fragmentation

Since 2007, the Mexican government has more aggressively targeted cartel leadership, effectively using the so-called kingpin approach to decapitate criminal groups. Former President Calderón killed or captured 25 of his 37 most wanted narcos and current President Peña Nieto has already “neutralized” 100 of his top 122. Such blows may weaken Mexico’s criminal groups, but they don’t mean less bloodshed. Often, it’s the opposite.

Each downed kingpin means a leadership succession, frequently characterized by power vacuums, internal struggles, and splinter groups. When Calderón took office in 2007, there were five recognized cartels. Today, if you take the Attorney General’s count, there are nine cartels and forty-three fragmented cells, or if you prefer to listen to Mexico’s chief criminal prosecutor, it’s two cartels and hundreds of splinter groups.

Either way, with each additional actor on the fractured criminal landscape, there is another set of armed criminals trying to enforce its rules over a slice of land. And there are the inevitable bloody clashes when those frontiers overlap.

In another section we learn Mexico supplies about half of the heroin used in the United States. While I find it difficult to justify the legalization of cocaine, since it’s far more destructive than marijuana, it would certainly be interesting to know – or at least model – the effect of such a legalization on the gangs of Mexico.

From a real court opinion:

We’re beginning to think we have an inkling of Sisyphus’s fate. Courts of law exist to resolve disputes so that both sides might move on with their lives. Yet here we are, forty years in, issuing our seventh opinion in the Ute line and still addressing the same arguments we have addressed so many times before.

Thirty years ago, this court decided all boundary disputes between the Ute Indian Tribe, the State of Utah, and its subdivisions. The only thing that remained was for the district court to memorialize that mandate in a permanent injunction. Twenty years ago, we modified our mandate in one respect, but stressed that in all others our decision of a decade earlier remained in place. Once more, we expected this boundary dispute to march expeditiously to its end. Yet just last year the State of Utah and several of its counties sought to relitigate those same boundaries. And now one of its cities tries to do the same thing today. Over the last forty years the questions haven’t changed – and neither have our answers. We just keep rolling the rock.

(h/t Howard Bashman of the How Appealing blog)

The Republican party continues to gnaw at its intestines, as can be seen in the reactions of some of Trump’s supporters to his formal endorsement of House Speaker Paul Ryan. This is from RawStory:

The trio of endorsements – especially the one for Mr. Ryan – shocked some of Mr. Trump’s diehard supporters.

“He has broken our heart doing this tonight,” said Trump supporter Sue Payne, a conservative activist working to defeat Mr. Ryan.

“We finally thought we had a voice to stand up against the RINO establishment. He sold us out,” she said. “What happened tonight is the establishment got their claws in him and they are pulling the strings. What do we believe now?”

Speaker Ryan was described by Nate Silver at the time of his selection for nominee for VP, in 2012:

Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

By this measure, in fact, which rates members of the House and Senate throughout different time periods on a common ideology scale, Mr. Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center. (The statistic does not provide scores for governors and other vice-presidential nominees who never served in Congress.)

The deployment of the epithet RINO – Republican in Name Only – against the most conservative House Speaker in living memory, and most likely since the Civil War, as if he were working with the Democrats, either correlates with the extremist views of Ms Payne and her compatriots, or with their thirst for power. In either case, to label them as ‘conservative’ seems like a typo.

I do not recall if I’ve suggested this before, but I believe that one of the tactical moves the GOP organization must make if it is to persist as a national party is to take action whenever one GOP member deploys the term RINO against another GOP member: return their dues, kick them out of the party, and publicize it. Otherwise the party will continue its accelerating race to extremist positions with which most true conservatives cannot, as a moral matter, be associated.

Eventually, it’ll be party of two people, and one will be on probation.

This is one of those achievements I admire because it uses waste materials to do something useful. Really useful. From IT News Africa:

Using orange peels and avocado skins, [Kiara Nirghin of South Africa] has managed to create a material, that can hold hundreds of times its weight in water, in the soil. This super absorbent polymer then acts as a water reservoir in the earth.

By saving water this way, her idea could have a massive impact on how the continent manages the effects of climate change in years to come. And, because it’s made from orange and avocado skins, it won’t break the budget of local farmers, like so many other water storage devices currently do.

I do wonder how this disturbance in water movement will impact the environment. Water – potentially a lot of it – won’t go somewhere that it was going. This could have effects ranging from someone else going thirsty or hungry to impacts on weather systems.

But it’s still really cool.

The final pics from the vacation …

From my mother-in-law’s garden.

Spaceweather.com is reporting on a monstrous bit of magnetism on the sun:

This is a type of prominence commonly called a “hedgerow prominence.” Hot glowing plasma inside the structure is held aloft by unstable solar magnetic fields. NASA and Japanese space telescopes have taken high resolution images of of similar prominences and seen some amazing things such as (1) tadpole-shaped plumes that float up from the base of the prominence; (2) narrow streams of plasma that descend from the top like waterfalls; and (3) swirls and vortices that resemble van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Follow the link for an amazing picture.

Thunderbirds are Go (1966) is a puzzling movie. What are they trying to do here? Make the argument that puppet movies are the way to go? Nothing like the profane and screamingly funny Team America: World Police (2004) in tone, the show features the attempt to reach Mars. The Thunderbirds are not those going, but are the search and rescue team that must rescue the explorers after sabotage and equipment failure imperils the explorer’s lives.

But why the sabotage?

Eh, not important.

Oh, wait, there’s hostile life on Mars! Surely this is important, it must mean something!

Nope.

And that illustrates the problem with this movie – it’s all about the puppets and sets; the story is scattered and incomplete, becoming little more than trivia and rendering the movie dull. The dialog ranges from mediocre to absolutely excruciating. We see old stereotype of various types.

And perhaps the movie makers achieved their aim, for soon we were watching merely to see the sets, various vehicles, and to a lesser extent the puppets (who spent so much time in chairs that my Arts Editor began speculating that nearly everyone in the movie was a quadriplegic). The vehicles were particularly impressive, having rockets, jets, and propellers as means of mobility, they were impressively presented.

Oh, and the explosions in the ocean. Also well done.

And I never want to see this one again. This one’s so threadbare it nearly defies analysis.

Meagan Treacy on Treehugger reports on an ambitious goal of brothers Massoud and Mahmud Hassani:

The 10-pound, six-armed drone, flies over a field and identifies dangerous areas with GPS way points. The drone then gets down to 4 cm above the ground and uses a metal detector arm to detect mines. Any mines found are plotted on a map. Finally, the drone flies back over the found mines with a robotic gripping arm that places a small detonator on top of every detected mine. The detonator is on a timer so that the drone is a safe distance away before it explodes.

The team has the ultimate goal of clearing the world of landmines in just 10 years.

Maddowblog presents on their front page a YouTube of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in which John covers the precarious situation of newspapers in the country. The entire video is of interest, but what really caught my eye was 2009 opinions from David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of the TV show The Wire, as he discusses one of the results of the shrinking reach of newspapers at the Conference on the Future of Journalism and Newspapers:

The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day I’ll be confident that we’ve reached some sort of equilibrium. There’s no glory in that kind of journalism, but that is the bedrock of what keeps, you know, the next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption, it is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.

And in the last seven years we’ve seen political extremism & corruption creep into our political system from the conservative side of the spectrum. The shining of the light of the press has been a crucial part of the ongoing American experiment, and as that light has dimmed in the distorted glare of the Internet, we’ve seen the American political scene fragment and become less and less realistic. Between the absolutists for whom compromise is a sin, and opportunists who take advantage of the dimness (not only metaphorical, but the dimness of the extremists as well), we’re getting an object lesson in what happens when the free press is starved of funding. John Oliver makes a great point about how the Internet is critically dependent on newspapers, on journalists, and yet by its very presence it is crushing this critical source of information.

I certainly have that blood all over my hands. I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in decades. (But I do subscribe to a several magazines.)

If there is a solid dependence of Internet news organizations on the dying newspapers and other traditional forms of journalism, at some point the Internet news organizations will be forced to either hire journalists themselves – or hire novelists to keep filling all those clicks.

Here’s the John Oliver video:

Local CBS affiliate WCCO reports the St. Anthony PD’s statistics on the racial composition of those they pull over indicates blacks are pulled over disproportionately:

At WCCO’s request, Orfield studied citations handed out by St. Anthony police in 2015 and 2016.

In 2015 about 15 percent were issued to black people. Roughly 60 percent went to white people. Those numbers are consistent so far in 2016.What troubles Orfield is the demographic for the area is about 6 percent black.

“It looked like they were stopping people about two and a half to three times as often as we thought what the driving population would be. It suggests that, consistent with our old studies, that there’s police profiling going on in those communities,” Orfield said.

In 2003, Orfield co-authored a report on racial profiling during traffic stops in Minnesota. It was requested by the legislature. While St. Anthony police did not participate, he says their current numbers mirror what he found in surrounding communities. That in Fridley, New Hope, Plymouth, Sauk Rapids and Savage combined, “Blacks were stopped about 310 percent more often than expected.”

I’ve been thinking about the context a little bit. I think there’s a superficial error in comparing the composition of the community to that of those pulled over because those who are pulled over, like Castile, are not necessarily members of St. Anthony, Falcon Heights, or Lauderdale (the St. Anthony PD service area). It’s probably superficial in that the composition is not too far off from the overall composition of the Twin Cities area, although I haven’t found a handy source for recent estimtaes.

Now, what does it mean? So far, I see that, statistically speaking, it increases the chance for a tragedy, which is always possible where guns are involved. Racial profiling may also be indicated. Still, the latter is an implication, not an overt (or proven) fact.

A reader is pressed for time when it comes to reading press releases:

Did that say anything of substance? Or unexpected? :-p

Sure. It said St. Anthony police spend more time on continuing training than do police in Minnesota do generally, and that its responsibilities are unique and require all that extra training.

Which leaves us with the question of why is Mr. Castile still dead?

Apparently the sheer number of hours spent in training is well beyond criticism, no? So we must cast our nets elsewhere – poor training, so they just wasted a lot of money? Poor attitudes towards blacks? They didn’t really seem to deal with those issues, especially not the first.

So it’s self-promotion dressed up in numbers, without any attempt to really drive at what went wrong, why they failed so horribly. Either the press release is a failure, or is unnecessary.

A reader comments on some discomfiting attitudes concerning government:

We’re doomed.

Or, more likely, we’re just entering a self-correction moment. Generally, a problem must be observed before it can be corrected; this may turn out to be when we finally really observe the problem and begin the process of educating the mislead.