Unsightly Mental Blemishes

A reader continues the thread:

I wonder if molybdenum is used to strengthen some metal parts — it’s commonly used for that in steel.

I noticed that, but why would a smartphone need reinforced steel?

Treehugger‘s Lloyd Alter reports that the first prototype of the Transit Elevated Bus has has been released on schedule:

Originally conceived by American architect Lester Walker 45 years ago, there is in fact some logic to it; the right-of-way already exists, and instead of having a bus stuck in traffic, the straddling bus can fly right over it. When we showed a model of it earlier this year, we noted that the designer promised a working one by August.

And here we are in August, and there they are, running a real full size straddle bus down a thousand foot test track. It is officially known as a Transit Elevated Bus (TEB), will consist of four cars each being about 22 meters [72′] long, 7.8 meters wide [25.6′] and 4.8 meters [15.74′] high, and can hold 1200 people.

The video is fun to watch and spawns some thoughts, such as what happens when an unaware motorist is overtaken by the elevated bus and panics? OK, no big surprise: he crashes and possibly damages a vehicle containing up to 1200 people. Then there’s the tracks themselves, which may be optional, which will need installation and will result in death and dismemberment if someone gets in the way – which is also true of trains.

Straddling bus is completely powered by municipal electricity and solar energy system. In terms of electricity, the setting is called relay direct current electrification. The bus itself is electrical conductor, two rails built on top to allow the charging post to run along with the bus, the next charging post will be on the rails before the earlier one leaves, that is why we call it relay charging. It is new invention, not available yet in other places.

The last of the ABG pictures, with no particular theme. First, if you’ve never seen okra out in the field, here it is:

A random stone path.

A lovely atmospheric from the tropics:

These are fun!

And we come to an end of our walking tour of ABG, having swilled an elegant lunch at the on-site Linton’s, walked until we could walk no more, and endured sad self-doubt about the Atlanta bus system.

As we remain stubbornly nation-oriented (yeah, the blue helmets aren’t invading anytime soon), the Internet brings tough questions about crimes in which the Internet may contain important evidence. The Obama Administration recently brought forth suggested legislation, and Jennifer Daskal and Andrew K. Woods of Just Security (via Lawfare) cover it:

Enter the draft legislation.  The legislation would permit the President to enter into agreements with foreign countries whereby US firms would no longer be prohibited, as a matter of US law, from responding to local law enforcement demands for emails and other communications in the investigation of serious crime.  Importantly, the legislation sets numerous human rights and privacy-protective restrictions on what these agreements would look like.   These agreements would only be permitted with foreign governments that afford “robust substantive and procedural protections for privacy and civil liberties” —a determination that takes into account, among other things, compliance with human rights obligations and respect for the principle of non-discrimination.

Moreover, the orders issued pursuant to the agreement must meet numerous requirements—including that the requests be tailored to a specific account, person, or device, of limited duration, and based on articulable and credible suspicion.  The requests must be overseen by a judge or other independent authority, may not be used to infringe freedom of speech, and are subject to a strict prohibition on the dissemination of non-relevant information unless necessary to protect against the threat of death or serious bodily harm.  These requirements apply at the request level—that is, each request by the foreign country must meet these standards.

Later:

This is, in sum, a remarkable effort by the administration to lay out, in great detail, a set of baseline privacy protections that apply to law enforcement access to data. Imagine, for a moment, that countries around the world implemented these requirements. We would see a significant enhancement of privacy protections globally.

The whole article is worth a quick read. Judging from the summary presented, this seems like a careful, workmanlike approach to the problem. In their judgment, it’s not perfect – but that’s for legislators to fix.

I can’t help but wonder if Trump and Clinton have – or will – endorse what appears to be thoughtful, careful legislative initiative.

A reader has a question about their smartphone:

So what parts are in my smartphone?

If your phone uses Lithium-ion batteries, the lithium will be the same as astronomers search for in the spectrum of stars, in particular TZO stars.

Molybdenum, another such target for astronomers, is also used in your phone, and may be in short supply, as noted by TechTimes last year. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t state how it’s used. Other articles tend to indicate it’s used in manufacturing circuit boards, but in the end I’m not sure I can make the case for molybdenum being actually in your phone.

I do not see any application for the third metal used, rubidium. However, I’m fairly sure more than just these three are produced by TZO-specific nuclear reactions, and the production of the higher members of the periodic table (above iron, IIRC) have always required exotic conditions, such as supernovas and the like.

The July/August 2016 issue of Discover Magazine has an apparently paper-only issue on astromical Thorne–Żytkow objects (TZOs), of which I’d never heard. From Wikipedia:

A Thorne–Żytkow object is formed when a neutron star collides with a star, typically a red giant or supergiant. The colliding objects can simply be wandering stars. This is only likely to occur in extremely crowded globular clusters. Alternatively, the neutron star could form in abinary system after one of the two stars went supernova. Because no supernova is perfectly symmetric, and because the binding energy of the binary changes with the mass lost in the supernova, the neutron star will be left with some velocity relative to its original orbit. This kick may cause its new orbit to intersect with its companion, or, if its companion is a main-sequence star, it may be engulfed when its companion evolves into a red giant.

I boggle at the thought. And now some in the astronomy community believe the star known as HV 2112 may be the first known example of these objects. SciNews covered the initial announcement more than two years ago here.

When they took a close look at the subtle lines in the spectrum of HV 2112, they found that it contained excess rubidium, lithium and molybdenum.

Past research has shown that normal stellar processes can create each of these elements. But high abundances of all three of these at the temperatures typical of red supergiants is a unique signature of TZOs.

“I am extremely happy that observational confirmation of our theoretical prediction has started to emerge,” said Dr Zytkow from the University of Cambridge, who is a co-author of the paper accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters (arXiv.org version).

Look at your smartphone. Odds are that some of its components were first created within a TZO.

Is it a world-wide movement towards autocratic rule? Here in the United States we’ve seen the candidacy of Donald Trump supported (currently) by an impressive (or frightening), as documented by a CNN Poll as being 42% (+/- 3.5%). Vladimir Putin continues has dominated a nominally democratic Russia for nearly 20 years. In Turkey, President Erdogan is cracking down on dissidents after an attempted military coup, although some question whether Erdogan is strengthening or weakening his position.

And in Israel, a historically strong democracy, question marks are starting to pop up regarding the behavior of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Ben Caspit reports for AL Monitor:

In the last seven years, Netanyahu has inched closer to autocratic rule than any other Israeli leader. He fortified his rulership and has consolidated several key government ministries under his wing. In addition to the premiership, Netanyahu also serves as foreign minister, communications minister, economy minister and regional development minister, in addition to other functions. Though the Communications Ministry is seen as an underfunded and small ministry, Netanyahu has no intentions of ever relinquishing it. …

Culture Minister Miri Regev did not hide the Likud’s aspiration to control the corporation. “It’s inconceivable that we’ll establish a corporation that we won’t control. What’s the point?” she asked. “We put down the money and theybroadcast whatever they want?” Minister of Internal Security Gilad Erdan, who initiated the establishment of the corporation about two years ago, tried to give Regev a lesson in democracy. But he seemed to be talking to a wall. Additional ministers attacked the establishment of the corporation and argued that there were not enough Likud supporters among the journalists in the corporation’s ranks. Others claimed that Naftali Bennett, the head of Orthodox Zionist HaBayit HaYehudi, has control over some of the journalists since they are “skullcap wearers” (Orthodox Jews). At this stage, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, a member of Bennett’s party, lost her cool. She banged on the table and blasted the Likud ministers, saying, “Stop it already with your lies! Learn to control [yourselves] and stop complaining. … You have your own newspaper, what are you whining about?”

The weakening of the free, neutral, independent press is worrisome; the reported behavior of the Likud ministers is horrifying. But it’s also edifying in that it recalls that one of the tools in discovering the activities of the forces of, well, let’s say the power-mad, those who adhere to rigid, tangible orthodoxies rather than the processes of democracy, have become aware that the light shined upon their activities by a free press are a discouragement to their activities and objectives. Their attacks on the free press are a signal event in the degradation of the body politic, and should be viewed with concern, and responded to forcefully, by those who believe that it’s better to have a democracy than a power-made dictator, no matter how scary the rest of the world appears.

After all, we didn’t need Donald Trump to defeat the Nazis; we were just fine with FDR and the Congress, Churchill and Parliament, and all the rest of our allies. Yes, the USSR was run by Stalin – but, alone, they would have failed.

ABG: Permanent sculptures. First, this adorable puppy.

And then, the lizard herd:

Which, for reasons that escape me (oh, I’m tired, the visuals are odd, oh so odd), reminds me of a very charming T-Rex built of scrap metal in Faith, SD. RoadSide America provides a bit of information and this lovely picture:

The artist is John Lopez, who I linked to yesterday.

A sort of ultimate found object sculptor, John Lopez has done some interesting work with scrap metal when not doing his day job – which is …

For the past ten years, John has been working on The City of Presidents project in Rapid City, SD. John Adams, John F. Kennedy and John, Jr., Calvin Coolidge, Teddy Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant are a few of the presidents John has placed on the street corners so far.

And here’s a sample of his off-hours work.

More here.

The ABG water garden in close up.

And as a hidden bonus, the coolest cactus I’ve ever seen:

Amazing stuff, dragging a wreck off the seabed.

And for all that I know it’s impractical, and even a negative in many cases, I’d still like to see humanity clean up its messes just like this: pick the whole thing up, salvage what can be salvaged, and make the sea clean again. There’s a few ships, such as World War II oilers and munition ships, that really need to be neutralized and removed.

Who would think that drilling a few holes could stop an earthquake? Kate Ravilious writes about the ambitions of physicist Sébastien Guenneau in NewScientist (23 July 2016, paywall):

But in 2001, French seismologist Philippe Guéguen realised that getting buildings to sway could have unexpected benefits. He was studying the effect on Mexico City of a magnitude 7.4 quake that hit it in September 1995. While various parts of the city should have responded in the same way, some neighbourhoods shook for nearly twice as long as others. Softer sediments wobble more than solid rock, but underlying geology wasn’t enough to account for the discrepancy. Instead, it turned out that tall buildings were creating secondary waves in the ground around them, prolonging the shaking but muting the original surface waves. This suggested that the swaying high-rise towers were redistributing the earthquake energy, and providing some protection.

The idea that the waves themselves could be modified, rather than simply withstood, turned earthquake engineering on its head, says Guéguen, who is based at the Institute of Earth Sciences in Grenoble. The key is controlling the way in which the ground responds to incoming waves.

Guenneau had a surprising idea for how this could be achieved. While simply drilling holes in the soil may not seem like it would have much of an impact, he knew that the principle on which it was based had already achieved the impossible.

A small-scale test nearly worked to perfection, with only the small problem that rather redirecting the energy in another direction, or harmlessly dissipating it, the energy was reflected. They are now working on an improvement.

I have a couple of thoughts.

1. Rather than redirect or dissipate, how about capturing that energy?
2. On a deeper level, how does this disturb the overall system? Is it predictable, or are we setting ourselves up for something bigger? I can’t imagine what, but I do worry about ad hoc fixes that result in bigger problems down the road. Chalk that up to a few disasters of my own in which a fix for one problem lead to larger, unexpected problems somewhere else. I’m not saying a computer program is the same as a natural system … just something to think about.

In a sidebar, another scientist is investigating a similar system for mitigating tsunamis, inspired by the 2004 disaster.

… interrupting our regularly scheduled vacation pics are some of the phlox:

An anomalous phlox, the only one of this color:

A cluster of cleome, perhaps in a gossip section.

And, finally, a random cloud.

Spaceweather.com reports on the misnamed proton arcs:

Aurora photographers see these structures from time to time–tight ribbons of light, sometimes red, sometimes green, writhing across the night sky.  They are commonly called “proton arcs.”

Yet aurora scientists say they probably have nothing to do with protons.

“My opinion, and I believe the consensus of most aurora scientists, is that these arcs are not proton related, ” says Jason Ahrns, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, “but I don’t know what does cause them.”

From Spaceweather.com’s gallery:

Taken by Sherri Grant on August 17, 2015 @ Just north east of Val Marie, Saskatchewan, Canada


Having just finished viewing The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1963, aka Spaceraid 63), it’s difficult to find much to praise in connection with this movie, beyond the clear cinematography and excellent audio. A movie about a NASA scientist in charge of the Mars probe, he returns home to his angry wife and their children, only to find various members starting to become terrorized by what it appears to be other members of the family.

It’s true, the 30 seconds of the Mars-roving robot is  inutterably adorable, and the daughter has a certain charming freshness about her. But I could not help but wonder if under the wife’s ornate hair style there might lurk a motorcycle helmet; the little boy could have been used to greater affect; and despite the use of a noir ending, the entire plot sadly crosses the line from tantalizing to insipid. I’m not sure why: we are not overly informed as to what’s happening, the special effects are adequate. It may be the characters, who do not exceed the limitations we automatically place on them. The wife is angry, then terrified, with no particular innovation in her responses; the husband understands her anger, is preoccupied with his data, but has heroically chosen to work on his marriage rather than the data; the daughter is dutiful with both parents and with her boyfriend (lucky guy), who in turn gets so little camera-time that when he is offed, we feel nothing. Even the assistant scientist, despite the devotion of a freakish pair of glasses, has little impact in his bizarre ending.

Perhaps the problem lies in its theme: I couldn’t identify one, really. Don’t explore? Don’t send cute probes? Nothing really stands out. The morality of the theme Don’t go to Mars! has little impact or relevance on the typical movie-goer.

Don’t bother with this one.

Oh, yeah, the family estate is immense. Makes you wonder if it was actually one of the homes of William Randolph Hearst.

Dipping into the old fishin’ stream, I hooked a bit of mail that, in part, starts out thisaways:

Charles Krauthammer is a brilliant man. Really. A man of character who lives life in a wheelchair. Among his other careers, he is a doctor of psychiatry. He was a devoted Democratic activist and presidential advisor. An independent thinker who won the Pulitzer Prize. He has both liberal and conservative stances and writes a weekly column in the National Review which is syndicated to 400 newspapers. He has been a regular panelist on a variety of programs, including Fox News. Mr Krauthammer is an independent thinker and has become a neoconservative. Why am I telling you this?, Because a brilliant man of character as he is can clearly see much that we do not.

Please read this article.

Recently, Charles Krauthammer alluded that he had no doubt some of the 30k emails Hillary deleted from her private e-mail server very likely had references to the Clinton Foundation, which would be illegal and a conflict of interest.

The first fatal weakness shows up here – “… he had no doubt …“. Why? Well, the article doesn’t say. Apparently he’s got the ol’ second sight.

The second weakness is that the introduction of this brilliant man is in itself a fallacy, the appeal to authority that has been discredited by skeptics. It’s going through your mind, right? A doctor of psychiatry and so many other careers, despite his physical disability, he must be so strong; he holds positions on both ends of the political spectrum, why, he must be fair-minded. Sorry, none of this makes any real sense, once you start thinking about it.

Finally, the factual parts are no doubt correct, and in fact I’ve heard Mr. Krauthammer described as a neoconservative many times. The writer depends on the ignorance of the reader to skip that little bit – but if you’ve been paying attention, it’s the neoconservatives who cried out for the war in Afghanistan, and then for the invasion of Iraq – indeed, it is their signature pair of achievements. But a large percentage of Americans do not approve of these wars, in retrospect.

Afghanistan, as ever, has proven to be a hellhole, while Iraq’s war was founded on fraudulent assertions. Both have resulted in immense civilians casualties, and to proclaim they have achieved their objectives is specious in the face of the number of casualties, disruptions, and unintended consequences (Islamic State, etc) that were a direct result of them.

I’ve never heard of a neocon admitting the error. Indeed, many of them call for bombing Iran, resulting, without a doubt, in many more thousands of innocent deaths, not to mention the comparatively fewer American deaths.

So I just threw this fish back into the flood, as it appeared to be black and moldy, snarling with the sharpest of teeth, just like a lamprey.

(Sea lamprey mouth (Photo: T. Lawrence, GLFC))

The sea-going neocon lamprey.

Finally looking more closely at the first picture in this post, I’d like to say I think the fountain’s water is actually more interesting than the Chihuly glass itself. It might have to do with the contrast of the static attribute of the glass to the dynamic appearance of the water.

Just sayin’.

Hal Hodson reports on a fledgling movement to take back the Internet from the big sites in NewScientist (23 July 2016, paywall):

AT THE heart of the internet are monsters with voracious appetites. In bunkers and warehouses around the world, vast arrays of computers run the show, serving up the web – and gorging on our data. …

“Very big and powerful companies own a huge chunk of what happens on the web,” says Andrei Sambra, a developer with the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the main standards organisation for the web. But we – the ones producing this valuable data – have lost control.

So what’s to be done?

Sambra is working on a project called Solid, which is led by none other than [Tim] Berners-Lee [inventor of the Web] himself. The idea behind this prototype software is to separate our data from the apps and servers that process it. With Solid, you get to decide where your data lives – on your phone, a server at work, or with a cloud provider, as it probably does now. You can even nominate friends to look after it. “We want to put the data in a place where the user controls it,” says Sambra.

Here’s an academic introduction to Solid by Berners-Lee and his team:

Each user stores their data in a Web-accessible personal online datastore (or pod). Each user can have one or more pods from different pod providers, and can easily switch between providers. Applications access data in users’ pods using well defined protocols, and a decentralized authentication and access control mechanism guarantees the privacy of the data. In this decentralized architecture, applications can operate on users’ data wherever it is stored. Users control access to their data, and have the option to switch between applications at any time. We will demonstrate the utility of Solid and how it is experienced from the point of view of end users and application developers. …

Each application (or set of applications based on one social network platform) controls its own data and often has its own authentication and access control mechanisms. As a result, users cannot easily switch between similar applications that could allow reuse of their data, or switch from one data storage service to a different one.

I think that last outtake strikingly summarizes the goal – if, say, there was a Facebook-2 out there, a competitor to Facebook, how hard would it be to switch over to it? Today, difficult – all the information that you value on Facebook, such as “friend” information, groups, etc, is owned by Facebook – Facebook-2 has no access to it. Imagine, if you will, that the information was not owned by Facebook, but was owned by you. This implies that both Facebook’s would have to know how to access your information – and you have given access permission to them – or not. Now the competition is sharpened.

There’s a lot of questions that will be inevitably asked of Solid, assuming it makes progress, both technical and social, and perhaps I’ll pursue them in future posts after digesting the previously linked paper, as it may have  answers to many that cross my mind. Instead, I’d rather return to Hodson’s article. This bothers me:

Andy Clarke, a philosopher studying artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that our loss of control goes even deeper. “When we use the internet in the ways it’s mostly available – through big nodes like Google and Facebook – we are giving ourselves away,” says Clarke. They are making big bucks out of us, and we don’t get a penny. Aral Balkan, founder of Swedish tech democratisation movement Ind.ie, calls such companies “people farmers”. If you’re not paying, you’re the product.

First, tThis strikes me as sloppy thinking. First, the use of the currency metaphor constricts the intellectual discourse to mere money. Rather, let’s ask this: does the work of these “big nodes” benefit us in any way? And the answer may be YES, in that we may be served marketing material for products we actually desire, to come up with just a single example; I suspect there are many more.

Second, all value is subjective: this is standard. All that trivial information associated to you has very little value to you; even as single bits, Google doesn’t care. But aggregated, then it begins to matter. By collecting it (a non-trivial activity) and analyzing it (also non-trivial) they are creating value from the detritus of us. This phrase, “They are making big bucks out of us, and we don’t get a penny”, is little more than rabble-rousing, and it’s unfortunate that it’s present in this interesting paper on disconnecting data from programs¹.

I’d recommend taking a look at that paper (I may need a rainy afternoon, and it’s sunny right now) to see a possible future for the web – whether you’re a technical person or just a web user. It echoes, in my mind, the problems faced by the labor force with respect to unions in that sometimes workers don’t like the activities their unions take, and yet they find they often must belong. One solution has been Right To Work laws, which permit workers to opt out of the unions that represent them, but they are imperfect solutions. And perhaps this analogy is imperfect, but it does stick in my mind.

¹I dislike this trendy word “apps”.

ABG was hosting a traveling exhibition of Chihuly Glass. It was quite a lot of glass, which I mostly avoided taking pictures of it, but here’s what we did take. First, my favorite:

And here’s a sequence on another installation:

A special gift shop was full of his material, from books to actual artifacts. I’ve been through his site looking for our favorite, but was not successful. It was $7600, so we don’t feel too bad at not snapping it right up.

On our vacation we visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens (ABG). Omitting mention of our actual travel to ABG and back to the hotel, we had a very good time and would happily recommend it to Atlanta-traveling gardeners. ABG has a number of different areas, from tropics to high altitudes to plants native to the Atlanta area. We’ll start with carnivorous pitcher plants:

As we can see, their pitchers are filled with a fluid which traps and digests the unfortunate insects which slip on the edge of the pitcher. Yes, we did wonder if they had to be specially fed by ABG staff, or if Atlanta insect life was sufficient to the job, but we did not find out. These were found, IIRC, in the tropics part of the displays. In the same area we found this charming orchid:

Three blooms on one orchid, but I fear the photo is a trifle blurry. This was also found in the tropics, I believe:

Charming, but we do not recall the name.

Just an update on the next step in the Flint, MI crisis, from The Detroit News:

Criminal charges leveled Friday against six current and former state employees center around allegations they altered or concealed alarming reports showing high levels of toxic lead in Flint’s water and the bloodstreams of the city’s children.

Attorney General Bill Schuette’s prosecutors contend much of the cover-up occurred on or around the same day in late July last year.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, prosecutors allege employees Nancy Peeler and Robert Scott “buried” an epidemiologist’s July 28, 2015, report showing a significant year-over-year spike in blood lead levels in Flint children.

Corrine Miller, the state’s top epidemiologist, later ordered a DHHS employee to delete emails about that July 28 report and prevented action to alert top state health officials and the public, Schuette said.

A Genesee County judge on Friday authorized charges against Miller, Peeler and Scott for misconduct in office, conspiring to commit misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty related to allegedly concealing or disregarding the test results.

Special Prosecutor Todd Flood’s investigation also found that on same date, three municipal water regulators at the Department of Environmental Quality altered a water-testing report to exclude some samples to keep overall lead levels under the federal limit.

Schuette filed charges against DEQ water quality analyst Adam Rosenthal on Friday for allegedly altering the report in coordination with water regulators Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby, who were charged with similar misconduct crimes in April as part of the attorney general’s wide-ranging investigation.

It occurs to me to wonder: it’s not unheard of to subject potential employees to various tests, such as polygraphs (dubious as they may be), as a condition of employment; and folks seeking admission to the Bar in Minnesota are required to pass an ethics test. I wonder if people working public safety jobs, such as these people, are given ethics tests, and if not, why not? This appears to be a failing of ethics, and since a failure in that area could result in severe injury or death, it would seem appropriate to test for the specialized ethics knowledge peculiar to their work.

I will be morbidly interested in hearing the motivations of these individuals, if found guilty, particularly of Miller, the head epidemiologist. The actions described sound deliberate, and if guilt is found, I’d hope for severe sanctions.

(h/t Steve Benen)

Love & Friendship (2016) is based on Jane Austen’s novel Lady Susan, and, for those unacquainted with this literary genre practically invented by Mz Austen, this is a very droll movie, indeed, so dry that one feels the sands of the desert slowly sifting through one’s mouth as Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), a widow, gradually wreaks carnage throughout her late husband’s family. Having a convenient intimate in Alicia Johnson (Chloë Sevigny), we get a view of both sides of the coin, as she plays the men for fools and then details her results and further plans to Alicia in what might be best described as a high sociopathic manner. The traditional mores of society have vanished completely from the metaphorical plateau, and we are delivered tart observations on the foolishness of men, and the dangers of other women.

The plot is trivial, the characters are all. Beckinsale is impeccable as Lady Susan, while Chloë Sevigny is more than adequate as her confidant. The other ladies are more or less competent in their parts. The other gender – for the most part, their foolishness makes me hesitate to actually place them in the category of men – is also more than adequately represented by their portrayers.

Alas, the pacing of the movie is flawed. For most of the movie, Lady Susan flirts here and there, nearly marries and then breaks the engagement. And then, her erstwhile swain is abruptly married to Lady Susan’s daughter, and then a note is delivered reporting the marriage of Lady Susan herself to the movie’s buffoon. There is no real build to a climax, and perhaps a comedy of manners doesn’t really need such a thing, for the goal seems to be to amuse the audience with a character who can illuminate some of the absurd manners which, oddly enough, serve to oil the machinery of humanity which works none-to-well (with thanks to Heinlein). Still, it instills in the tale a curious flat quality, a sense of no change in the rhythms of the lives of the characters. Characters change, yet life continues apace. Perhaps this is a goal of Mz Austen.

As a final note, at least for American audiences, one must be on the ball and paying close attention. Unlike most contemporary movies in which dialog and images are embossed into the brain much like a design is embossed into a leather gauntlet, Love & Friendship merely presents the dialog, with no cue as to what the importance of this line of dialog might be, or into what genre, if you will, it falls. One must garner from content only whether this is merely operational chatter, or if one character or another is committing a gross violation of the rules of polite society for the benefit of the humors of the audience. Do not plan to play with your smartphone during this flick, for it will serve you poorly.

Ingersoll & Jacoby (the biographer) on secularism, contrasted to Social Darwinism:

A secularist society would mean

“… living for ourselves and each other; for the present instead of the past, for this world rather than another … It is striving to do away with violence and vice, with ignorance, poverty and disease … It does not believe in praying and receiving, but in earning and deserving.”

A man who professed this humanistic secular creed could have hardly agreed with [Herbert] Spencer, who frequently said of the poor …

“If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die.”

In a short biography such as The Great Agnostic (effectively 190 pages, plus an Afterword, which I read, and Appendices, which I skipped) there’s scarcely room to properly treat all of the opinions of the man, and so there’s a lack of logical progression concerning the definition (or results) of a secular society that I would have preferred to have seen; if one plans to rip away the comforting religion to which humanity clings, at least something which can be logically studied should be presented¹. So what we have here is a conclusion, not a closely argued discussion: this is how he sees a secular future. Naturally, given that he was a creature of the 19th century, he did not see what are arguably the secular disasters of the 20th century: communism and its Gulag Archipelago. It might also be argued, however, that these were the natural and logical conclusions of a society previously arbitrarily ruled by the Russian supreme rulers, and since such societies typically have some large facet of force to hold them together, in the face of its disappearance, the traditional social norms outside of force are weak and ineffectual. A peaceful society has not had a chance to evolve, and with the exponential development of technology, a combination of immense military power and unrestrained ambition and paranoia came into being, with predictable consequences.

Herbert Spencer was a British philosopher of the day, a friend to Ingersoll, and

During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. “The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century.” Spencer was “the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century”[3][4] but his influence declined sharply after 1900: “Who now reads Spencer?” asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.

Spencer is best known for the expression “survival of the fittest”, which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection …

The quote of Spencer regarding the poor clearly ignores context: would the Royal Family of Britain be subject to such conditions? Of course not. I read it as merely giving cover to the discouraging observation that, with the limitations of the era, the poor could not easily be resolved.

He also seems to have suffered from the intellectual blind spot that anything natural is good, tangible or not. As we all know, arsenic is merely one product of nature inimical to ourselves; it’s worthwhile to ask about any other assumption, and I believe we may come to the conclusion that Social Darwinism does not pass muster, simply based on the obvious fact that it is contradictory to the basic impulse motivating society: we take care of each other. We provide for the common defense, the sick, the elderly, all those who have, or can, contribute to society. We understand that we’re greater together than apart. To use an unfortunate phrase, this is the social contract implicit in society.

This is important because if that contract is broken – if we euthanize the elderly, we walk away from the sick, we fail to care for the unfortunate – then those who have a choice, and something valuable to contribute, may walk away, endangering society by weakening it. A society which has a weak social contract may not attract those who can most contribute to it, and this is a world of competitive societies.

¹In fact, following Ingersoll’s death a Collected Works was assembled by his family and published, and while I do see them online here, I’ll also keep an eye out at estate sales – the Internet necessarily being a secondary source.

I just finished listening to Chelsea and Hillary’s speeches, and didn’t think them all that noteworthy. However, one thought finally did smack me right in the forehead:

This is the very first Presidential contest in my memory in which the central point of contention isn’t issues, but instead qualifications. I cannot remember, going back to Nixon, any such contest where the fight isn’t going to be so much over positions as whether the Donald Trump possesses the qualities for the office of President¹. Does he have the temperament, the stability to be handed the codes? Does he have the experience to run one of the largest government bureaucracies in the world?

What will he do when the leader of North Korea taunts him?

This will be fundamentally different in that rather than evaluating issues, we’ll be evaluating the candidate as the primary criterion – whether he’s too volatile, too hands off, too interested in himself – or not. And this will certainly make it a different election than those to which we’ve become accustomed.

[This post has been updated with the proper title.]

¹I vaguely recall some muttering about Reagan being too old for the position, but I don’t recall it being a pivotal part of those campaigns – particularly given his riposte concerning the youth of his opponent in the second campaign.