Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Once again we have a Vincent Price collection, but unlike the Poe-based vignettes reviewed earlier, these are based on Nathaniel Hawthorne stories and are more suspenseful. I speak of Twice Told Tales (1963), in which Price stars in the adaptations of the stories.

In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment“, Price is the friend of a doctor and scientist, Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot), both now elderly. A storm hits and lightning strikes the mausoleum of Heidegger’s long-dead fiancee, Sylvia, from whose death he never really recovered, and the old men venture out to examine the structure for damage. They find the woman’s body extraordinarily well preserved, and Heidegger hypothesizes that a liquid coming through the roof and finding its way into her coffin is responsible. In a devil-may-care moment, he drinks the liquid and regains his youth. Pressed, Price’s character does likewise, and now they are young bulls.

Heidegger becomes hopeful, and despite Price’s bland discouragements, presses forward to administer the solution to his fiancee’s corpse, and the ultimate is achieved! Sylvia revives. But as the doctor disappears to fetch clothing, we discover the disaster waiting to happen – Price and Sylvia had been lovers, cheating on the good doctor, and, the two filled with the hormones of youth after decades of decay, indulge in lust’s sweet embrace, much to the consternation of the doctor. He returns with a knife, with which is he is incompetent and suffers the indignity of a sudden death. Meanwhile, the effects of the liquid are effervescent, and Sylvia dries up, leaving Price to scrabble after the last few drops in a tomb run dry. A simple story of how the most base of sins will have repercussions even at the end of a life, spoiling all that one may have worked for, and for all that it is of the speculative fiction genre, it is effective.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” tells the story of a man’s obsession with keeping sin from his daughter: she becomes a poison, a danger to everyone. But one chemistry student aspires to her hand, nonetheless, and this cannot be tolerated, and so, rather than cure the girl, the man becomes poison as well – never able to cheat on her. In the end, all is lost. It is properly told: why is the bush poisonous, why is its essence administered to her, oh why why why? And so we’re hooked on the story, and the work of the actors, all the way to the end.

Unlike the first two, “House of the Seven Gables” lies in the horror genre, with supernatural forces at work, but for all that the moral questions are serious: are the relatives of a man unjustly executed for witchcraft required to help the family of those who accused that executed man find treasure? Do sins accrue over the centuries? Sadly, at least for Vincent, his family is a dusty, corrupt echo of what it once was, and he succumbs to the ghostly (and poorly done) skeletal hand around the throat, as a due answer to the questions du jour, and as the house collapses and the opposing family member escapes, we’re left to meditate upon the sins of the past and how they effect the current election, the general competency of the performances of Price’s bygone age, and how much was done with so little money.

There are more ways to tell a story than with 200 digital artists working on computers.

Merging black holes generate gravitational waves – the target of the recently successful LIGO experiment. But generating such a wave takes energy – a lot of it, as reported in NewScientist (18 June 2016):

The second signal, called GW151226, also came from a pair of black holes merging. But these were much lighter – about 14.2 and 7.5 times the mass of the sun. They merged to form a black hole of 20.8 solar masses, meaning about 1 solar mass of energy radiated away in gravitational waves during the collision.

“This event radiated the equivalent of the mass of our sun in a couple of seconds,” [Salvatore Vitale of MIT] says. “Our own sun radiated about a millionth of its mass in 5 billion years. This really gives you the scale of how violent and sudden this release of energy is, as compared to our everyday experience.”

That’s a lot of energy.

Alireza Ramezani reports that the United States has succeeded in sowing concern and anxiety in Iran, as the various intellectuals and factions attempt to predict the behaviors of Trump and Clinton with regard to Iran.  From AL Monitor:

Clinton, who claimed that she was the only adult in the presidential race when it comes to foreign policy, announced in January that her approach toward Iran would be to “distrust and verify.” She, however, welcomed full implementation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a major part of which focuses on lifting economic sanctions on Iran. Clinton described the landmark nuclear deal as an important achievement of diplomacy “backed by pressure,” referring to her effort to intensify sanctions on Iran. …

Trump has been critical of the nuclear deal, calling for an expansion of sanctions as a way to force the Islamic Republic to make more concessions, adopting “America First” and a “stay unpredictable” approach toward Iran. Yet, Raisdana believes that Trump could be more reliable as far as the nuclear deal is concerned given the GOP’s record on major foreign policy decisions. In this vein, Raisdana points out that Republican President Richard Nixon ended America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam and opened diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Trump comes from the same party as Nixon, a party that can easily change its hostile approach toward Iran if need be, Raisdana said.

Abdoh Tabrizi disagrees. He told Al-Monitor that Trump is “too risky” to deal with, whereas Clinton is more predictable. In this vein, he acknowledged that Barack Obama has been an “exception” among US presidents. “We have to take advantage of the several months of his remaining term to hammer out agreements in favor of our country and economy,” Abdoh Tabrizi emphasized, implicitly agreeing with Raisdana that Clinton would not be as favorable to Iran.

I agree with Tabrizi. It’s a signal error of analysis to equate the party of Nixon with the party of Trump. As the years passed in the post-Nixon era, the GOP has transformed from a good conservative counterweight to the Democrats to a right-wing fringe party which is willing to cannibalize even its own if they can’t deliver. Consider this report from Steve Benen @ Maddowblog:

The unhinged right starts with the ideologically satisfying answer – President Obama and Hillary Clinton are guilty of horrible Benghazi-related wrongdoing – and then works backwards, looking for “proof” that matches the conclusion. When their ostensible allies fail to tell these activists what they want to hear, they could reevaluate their bogus assumptions, but it’s vastly easier to believe Republicans have let them down.

Wait, it gets worse.

As Milbank reported, a former Ted Cruz adviser complained yesterday that Gowdy “did not draw a connection between the dots.” And why not? According to retired Gen. Thomas McInerney, the Benghazi Committee chairman “had his reasons – political” for holding back.

McInerney “speculated that congressional leadership had approved ‘black operations’ to run weapons from Benghazi to Islamic State forces in Syria.”

While such flakes existed back in the Nixon days, they were more or less told to stay in their fever swamps and fume. Now they’re the Tea Party and voters pay attention to them despite – or because of – their bizarre antics.

Back to Iran. Clearly, neither presumptive nominee is attractive:

One can perhaps argue that Clinton is more predictable than Trump, yet she has insisted that Iran “continues to threaten the peace and security of the Middle East” and that the country is “violating UN Security Council resolutions with its ballistic missile program.” These statements indicate that if her concerns are not addressed, Clinton could cause trouble for Tehran, just as she has in the past, pushing for tough sanctions.

There’s a certain grim entertainment value in considering the fact that Iran is fairly powerless in this situation – they can do very little to influence our internal politics. I think Clinton’s approach is very sensible, while Trump might back out of his vow to rip up the agreement – but, of course, it’s hard to be certain.

One of our favorites, because they’re bizarre!

… but I wonder if we can go a little further sometimes. Ryan Hagemann has published a commentary and entreaty in Lawfare on another encryption draft proposal, the Digital Security Commission Act, leading off with the observation,

The current encryption debate is gridlocked. For the past year, privacy advocates, civil libertarians, Department of Justice attorneys, cryptographers, and others have been stonewalling one another, exchanging a barrage of bumper sticker slogans. These engagements have drawn attention to an important issue, but have largely failed to illuminate the path forward.

Mr. Hagemann summarizes the Act as the creation of a commission of experts to make recommendations, etc. He ends the piece thusly:

We have but one path forward in this debate, and that’s the one that treats all the competing equities and stakeholders as equals. The intellectually honest and ideologically neutral option is to embrace politics as the art of the possible, not as a war of all against all. To do so, civil society, law enforcement, the technology industry, economists, cryptographers, and other leading experts need to sit down and reason through competing interests to arrive at a solution that protects encryption, the digital economy, and the security of all Americans.

Which strikes me as perhaps a trifle naive. It may, in fact, work – but today we don’t appear to understand that we have to come together to construct useful solutions, so I have to wonder if this call for civility and honorable conduct will really be respected.

But it struck me that a more aggressive approach might be considered. I would like to suggest that each person coming forward to assert a solution to the problem be presented with what the general consensus believes is the most pressing objection to the general class of solutions to which their solution might be considered to belong, and be required to explain how their solution adequately treats it. It’s one thing to explain the strengths of your proposal, but quite bit more interesting to explain how a proposal solves what is generally considered a weakness of that class of proposals. Those who refuse to honor such a request may be ignored as unserious about the debate.

The downside of such a proposal is that now the group has to identify solution categories and the best objection to each. Of course, the best proposals will resolve the objections by turning them into strengths, usually by incorporating the objection as an honest and serious assertion, and then use the strengths of their proposal to resolve it – and not just ridicule all opposition as we often see happen.

Courtesy my Arts Editor, I’m not sure what these might be, but they’re mighty fun!

Indeed it is. A friend directs me to a recent paleontological discovery, as described in National Geographic by Kristin Romey:

If you’re interested in the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage, the Royal Ontario Museum has information on the finding of the HMS Erebus, including videos (via american archaeology, summer 2016). And Archaeology (July/August 2016) has a full article:

The search to determine the fate of Franklin’s 1845 expedition began almost immediately after the realization that the ships were lost. Since then, explorers have turned up bodies, bones, weapons, tools, a sunken rescue ship, and even a handwritten note with precise coordinates of where the quest veered so horribly off course. But the shipwrecks themselves remained elusive, lost amid a constellation of archipelagos and the whims of sea ice. After nearly 170 years, Canadian archaeologists were finally on the cusp of a breakthrough in one of the great maritime mysteries. The potential find carried the weight of decades of anticipation and even modern geopolitical ramifications, as the nations that surround the now increasingly ice-free Arctic jockey for access to the natural resources that are thought to lie beneath it.

The romance of exploration mixed with the horror of running into conditions beyond our management. Is that our future as well, exploring outer space (or the Marianas Trench) and encountering disastrous conditions combined with failing equipment?

Is that the fate of an individualist, the likes of which has only arisen in the last 50 years? Or does this fate belong more to those who feel themselves an inextricable part of the human society, such as T. E. Lawrence, whose letters (T. E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters, ed. Malcolm Brown, although I shan’t dig out the page number as it’s been many years since I read that tome) include his envy that two of his brothers died in World War I, in service to the British Empire – a find that brought me up short many years ago. I would have reacted in horror, knowing the possible final fates of those men, cut down by machine gun fire, or choking to death on any of several poison gases employed by both sides, perhaps bayoneted… But, for him, it was their honor to give their lives in the employ of the empire.

Never mind his own exploits.

Franklin, Shackleton, Lawrence – no doubt very different men, but who put their lives on the line in very chancy circumstances. Will we see those days again? Will we see those days where craters are explored by future drones – not in search of new frontiers, but in search of those who went before, and became ever-silent?

Here we have Ornamental Onions, not so tasty but cute as all get out. These have gotten out of their corner and will have to be ripped out at some point.

And back behind them are the raspberry bushes!

Here we have the return of hollyhocks to our garden. They had disappeared for several years…

On the one hand, I’m not sure if I’m pleased to share the same thought process with Elon Musk, as reported by Geraint Lewis in NewScientist (11 June 2016, paywall):

ARE we, and the universe we are in, a simulation? SpaceX chief Elon Musk thinks there is a tiny billions-to-one chance that we actually exist physically, and it is much more likely that we are data swirling around on someone’s supercomputer. What leads him to this strange conclusion?

However, given how nominative determinism keeps popping up these days, one is forced to conclude the programmer-in-chief needs to cut down on the random correlations.

Musk is immersed in a technological world that has advanced rapidly, and it seems inevitable to him that a functioning human brain, consciousness and all, will exist within a computer in the not too distant future. With the growth in computing power over the next few millennia, this first lonely brain will be joined by many more in a computed universe.

Which all sounds quite pleasant, I suppose, but I have to wonder if the limits of computation would have an impact on our capabilities once we’re encapsulated in a computer. I’ve mentioned this before, but there are days in which, wondering at how woefully awful we are at understanding our world, even with the use of science, I have to wonder if, already embedded in a computer, we’re also already operating with some inherent burdens springing from the computational model used by whoever has put us in here.

Of course, both sides of the issue should be considered: perhaps we are improved by our sojourn in the speculative computer? Better memories, perhaps, although that might lead to insanity. One is left to wonder: how to determine the edges of our computer simulation? It’s an interesting thought, at least to me.

Once I got over the wretched title of I Bury the Living (1958), my Arts Editor and I discovered an eccentric little horror thriller, a low-key movie about a man named Kraft (Richard Boone) who is elected chair of the cemetery committee. A nearly honorary post, he’s assured, but soon he discovers the cemetery map under the management of a man-of-all-work (Theodore Bikel), full of white pins (reserved but unused lots) and black pins (lots with the body already in residence).  Soon he’s replacing white pins with black pins and watching the bodies pile up.

Is he, in some occult way, responsible? The movie takes the question seriously, and as we build to the dénouement, he quite logically removes the black pins he has placed (symbolizing his supposed ‘victims’) and replaces them with white pins, in the belief that, if he can end someone’s life by placing a black pin on their plot on the map, he can restore their life by changing their pin back to white.  So at this point, we wonder if we’re about to see a legitimate predecessor to the various zombie movies & plays of today?

But no…

This is not a movie of a man moved beyond his abilities by some power, but rather a man overwhelmed by a power, within or without him, and its arbitrary requirements of him, and all he’ll do – or not – to satisfy it. Eating away at the edge of insanity, as he watches his life fall apart around him, a moral man whose very life appears to violate those very moral norms of traditional society. What is the solution? A gun? A mad urge to dig the bodies up? He becomes a rag doll to the competing demands of morality and power. In deep ways, questions of responsibility become paramount, and this movie deviously leaves those answers to the viewer.

From CNN’s report on the turmoil in the UK Labor Party:

Benn’s sacking was followed by several shadow Cabinet resignations: shadow cabinet of shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander, shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray, shadow education secretary Lucy Powell, shadow secretary for environment, food and rural affairs Kerry McCarthy and shadow chief secretary to the treasury Seema Malhotra.

I want to know the nature of “shadow health”!

When it comes to the British Exit from the EU, Timothy Edgar is not happy from the perspective of international security. On Lawfare he’s published an opinion delineating a few possible ways this could go down:

The UK’s decision to leave the European Union could be a big blow for United States national security – and for global privacy.  The UK has always served as a bridge between America and Europe.  Its decision to leave the EU makes it a less effective one.

In the wake of Brexit, the United States government is emphasizing continuity.  President Obama is stressing the special relationship, and the intelligence community is saying its partnerships with both the UK and other European nations will not be affected.  Of course, if Brexit triggers a breakup of the United Kingdom, which seems an entirely plausible outcome, the impact on transatlantic security would be quite severe.

Which leaves me wondering if the USA should interfere if Scotland and Northern Ireland decide to hold a referendum on leaving the UK.

RedState quotes Ted Cruz’s statement:

The British people have spoken clearly: They choose to leave the European Union.

The results of the ‪#‎Brexit‬ referendum should serve as a wake-up call for internationalist bureaucrats from Brussels to Washington, D.C. that some free nations still wish to preserve their national sovereignty.

The British people have indicated that they will no longer outsource their future to the EU, and prefer to chart their own path forward. The United States can learn from the referendum and attend to the issues of security, immigration and economic autonomy that drove this historic vote.

In addition, we should treat the #Brexit as an opportunity to forge a closer partnership with our historic friend and ally, including immediately starting negotiations for a targeted US-UK free trade agreement.

Which seems a brilliant misreading of history, from the small margin of victory, the appropriateness of even holding a referendum, to calling the country with whom we’ve fought two wars a historic ally – we’ve had better relations with France. RedState then continues with its own comment.

To a great extent the #Brexit vote was a metaphor for our own struggle over federalism. Just as Brussels permeated every facet of daily life in the UK, from business practices and product labeling to family law, so, too, has Washington run roughshod over the historic autonomy of states and municipalities. The anxiety and anger expressed by the voters in 2010, 2014 and during the 2016 primary campaigns is no different that the anxiety and anger expressed by the voters in Britain yesterday. #Brexit was a vote for freedom and personal autonomy and against rule by a self-anointed elite.

I suppose the Republicans in the North Carolina statehouse fit that description, for just one fine example of the self-anointed running roughshod over the wishes of the public. Then there’s gun control laws (or lack thereof), marriage equality, and a number of other such topics. And you have to love the attempt to cleave the voters from those they chose, while blandly ignoring the fact that the GOP holds Congress

But, for perspective, that entire paragraph fits into the conservative strategy of inventing anger in the conservative voter against the Federal government. After all, how are you going to increase clicks if you tell everyone that everything is fine?

National Review’s David French echoes RedState:

Across the ocean, America faces its own crisis. Our technocratic elite has constructed its own self-serving system — one that mirrors the very system that Britain rejected yesterday. Our politics are more uncertain and chaotic than at any time in decades. We can’t predict what will happen. But one thing I do know — history never truly had a “side.” Instead, it is the story of action and reaction, and no outcome is inevitable.

As if the elite isn’t subject to voters. The echo chamber of the Right is sometimes amazing. But the Left has its own odd delusions, as simply the title of this Huffington Post article suggests:

Brexit Chaos Could Shock Trump Voters Back To Common Sense.

Why?

And definitely in the short term, Trump’s ideas just got a big test overseas and they failed — here’s hoping Americans are paying attention.

If that’s not clear to me, why should it be clear the average American voter who’s not paying any attention to overseas action? Still, this is interesting.

The specter of job loss hangs ominously over the U.K., particularly for 2.2 million financial workers in the country. Before the historic vote on Thursday, employers signaled that they’d flee the country if it voted itself out of the Union. In April, John Cryan, the British-born chief executive of the German giant Deutsche Bank said he planned to move operations to Frankfurt, Germany’s financial capital.

In Iran, AL Monitor‘s Arash Karami reports some initial responses:

Deputy chief of staff of the armed forces Brig. Gen. Masoud Jazayeri was the first Iranian official to offer a comment after the shocking June 23 vote that surprised most Western experts and analysts. “The desire by the people of England to leave the EU is in reality a ‘No’ by the majority of the people for the continuation of the compliance of the British government with respect the imposition of America’s will on this country,” Jazayeri said.

I can only think that the General, like most blogs and partisan media sources, insists on seeing everything through his own personal prism.  Arash summarizes the terrain in Iran:

There’s always fall out from SCOTUS decisions, and those good folks on the Web are always there to track them.  Here’s one for Obergefell v. Hodges.^1,2 I’m told it’ll be updated with every change by a crack team.

In case this surprises you, perhaps you should consider getting your news & views from some other source than Fox News and WorldNetDaily.

¹You are not being Rick-rolled.

²h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog.

Steven Weissman publishes an article on health care pricing in a blog on Center for Health Journalism:

I am going public to reveal the astonishing truth. There is a simple way to instantly, with ease, end our nation’s health cost misery!

When the founder of a Miami area hospital, who was a longtime friend and client died, I became interim president. The insider’s view of the healthcare system is enough to make anyone sick. …

Laws requiring health providers to publish price ranges or average prices are growing in popularity. Such so called “price transparency” serves as a public relations gimmick to relieve ever mounting public pressure on elected representatives. Simply put, each of us is entitled to know the actual price we will be charged for our healthcare. Limiting disclosure to price ranges or averages, while permitting providers to predatorily bill each person a different amount, unfairly benefits providers at the expense of all patients.

While it sounds nice, it remains a truism that a person in an ambulance doesn’t have time for price shopping. Now this may be ameliorated by the very act of publishing a price list, as then consumer groups can compare and publish conclusions to the general public, and hospitals and other providers who are out of line on price may then revise their prices downward – or possibly upward.

On the other hand, the sheer volume of procedures and prices may be such that ‘price transparency’ becomes a meaningless concept, even for consumer groups. On this I’m uncertain, but Steven’s conclusion rings some warning bells for me:

When rates are set, patients will be able to shop for good healthcare value. Providers will be forced to compete based on price, quality and service. Healthcare costs will plummet. The cost of health insurance, which is simply a direct function of underlying medical costs, will plummet as well.

Perhaps it’s just the cynic in me, but I think that last sentence is naive. Health insurance must include a profit margin, based on health actuarial calculations. Nor do I really see anything here about wellness pricing, which I recall Mayo Clinic had advocated a very long time ago – possibly before the Web was invented. It never seemed to go anywhere, but as I recall the concept was to pay the provider based on the health outcome of the patient. By removing the ‘price by procedure’ practice, duplicate tests become a negative, and the provider (especially the commercial side of the operation) is focused on outcome, rather than piecework. Sounds great in abbreviated theory, but how do you compensate, say, oncologists who work on what is currently terminal cancer? Or hospice centers? I suppose outcome expectations have to be detailed, but that becomes a moving target. Perhaps that’s why this concept didn’t make it.

Down in the comments section is a suggestion of something of which I’ve had a suspicion, but not the time to investigate.

Free market competion in healthcare.

Posted by Thomas Johnson (not verified) | Wed, 2016-06-22

More than a year ago I wrote about an ongoing effort to promote geocentrism, and now the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer (July/August 2016, apparently not online) has published an in-depth criticism of the movement’s film, The Principle. This bit caught my eye:

Ernst Mach is the next scientist brought to our attention, where it is claimed that his ideas show that you could get the same effect from a rotating Earth as from a stationary Earth with a rotating universe. [pp 51-52]

What about tangential speed? After all, the stars appear fixed and thus must be modeled as if on a disc, rotating about the Earth. From Wikipedia:

Tangential speed and rotational speed are related: the greater the RPMs, the larger the speed in metres per second. Tangential speed is directly proportional to rotational speed at any fixed distance from the axis of rotation. However, tangential speed, unlike rotational speed, depends on radial distance (the distance from the axis). For a platform rotating with a fixed rotational speed, the tangential speed in the centre is zero. Towards the edge of the platform the tangential speed increases proportional to the distance from the axis.

Or, in other words, the further from Earth, the faster they have to be going. Otherwise you’d see relative star motion, and lots of it. A lot more than you see today, where you have to wait centuries for the relative motion to become visible.

So, think about it. What happens when the that disc’s tangential speed is greater than the speed of light? Yeah, I have no idea. Maybe they treated that problem in the film, but the review doesn’t mention the problem nor a resolution.

I think this is a problem.

Unlike the previous review, so difficult to write it was, this review can say the worst thing about The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) may have been the title of the movie. An ugly, uncouth mouthful, devoid of grace or inspiration, it sits like a bad piece of cheese, neither mold nor food, but something in between.

But the movie itself – for its era, this is not too bad at all. Tension, anticipation, initial success, a setback, the plot elements are there and are competent. Shockingly, a pretty girl dies – so we know, again for the era, this is a serious movie with some thought in it. The acting is competent, or even more than competent; the sudden deaths somewhat macabre, somewhat mysterious; the characters have a life outside of hunting monsters, although the romantic subplot was a bit stereotypical. The cinematography was competent at worst; the SCUBA scenes were mostly very clear and well presented.

The special effects were variable. Much of it was actually well above our expectations; however, the final monster was a trifle cheesy. Interestingly, the extermination of the monsters left us with the question – are they really all dead? How do you know? Did the scriptwriter really mean to leave us with this ambiguous ending? The characters don’t seem to be aware of it, so was a sequel planned?

So it makes for a better afternoon movie than we expected, overall. We even looked forward to it (we spread it over three nights). Now, I’ll grant the themes appeared to be mundane and uninteresting, but there’s something to be said for a well-made monster movie.

And if you don’t want to strangle the little girl at the end of the movie, you’re a better viewer than I.

The poster is courtesy Wikipedia.

As I grabbed chocolate from a colleague’s jar, he turned, and I said, “Never mind me, it’s not worth it.”

“Come, you must take self-esteem classes!” he replied.

“I have, but I keep failing them.”

A few days ago we finished watching When Worlds Collide (1951), based on the 1932 book of the same title by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, which I’d read years ago. When I say, “a few days ago”, I do mean to imply that it’s taken me this long to try to review it.

Possibly the worst part about it is so much of it is fairly competent, from the acting to the script-writing to even the science (excepts the limited genetics part). The painted backdrops are actually rather striking, and my Arts Editor liked them a lot.

Yet, you come to the end of the movie and the reaction is, at best, “meh.”

There are minor variances to the book, such as the French metallurgist who doesn’t appear in the movie, or the chief scientist being left behind, but these engender no anguish. But perhaps the real problem lies in its treatment of a couple of moral problems. The movie is about the detection of a star and accompanying planet, and how the star will destroy the Earth, while the planet of the intruder will survive; the plan is to send a rocket ship off the Earth and to the intruder planet, hoping it’ll be habitable. There’s very limited capacity on the ship, and they correctly note that fuel is quite problematic as it takes fuel to lift fuel. The qualifications of the passengers is paramount, and a lottery is held amongst the highly qualified to decide who gets to fly.

Except a medical doctor uses his position to ensure a man, whose only qualification is as a airplane pilot, gets a place on the trumped up reason that the rocket ship pilot needs a backup. It’s purely to curry favor with a pretty girl, and there is no attempt to address the moral questions. What about the excluded, faceless person? Indeed, the pilot who is saved seems more aware of this than the doctor, purportedly highly educated, as the pilot, initially guaranteed a spot, gives it up in a moment of moral courage. The movie transitions from a momentary examination of how principle influences concrete life, to how moral turpitude can be ignored if you don’t know the person so impacted.

And it really dilutes the impact of the story. Better to have the pilot stay behind and hold off the rioters who are discontented at losing the lottery (and the ill-logic of the rioters needed its own examination), where he could show courage and leadership. True, the chief scientist gets to fill a similar role, but the impact is minimal; at best, we can celebrate the betrayal of the man who funded the spaceship, a dubious, if understandable, emotion to experience at that time.

This really isn’t worth your time.

This single entry thread finally gets a follow-on as the general election starts into full swing. Steve Benen was commenting today on Hillary’s early assault on the Trump campaign, as well as its generally weak state:

Today, she’s reportedly going to take another swing, this time hammering the presumptive GOP nominee over economic policy.

But before considering Clinton’s indictment, it’s worth appreciating what independent economic analysts are saying about Trump’s economic agenda. The Wall Street Journalreported yesterday:

A new analysis concludes Donald Trump’s economic proposals, taken at face value, could produce a prolonged recession and heavy job losses that would fall hardest on low- and middle-income workers.

The Moody’s Analytics report, which a person close to the Trump campaign strongly disputed, is the first that attempts to quantify the cumulative economic benefits and costs of Mr. Trump’s proposals on taxes, trade, immigration and spending. It determines that full adoption of those policies would sharply reduce economic output during his first term and reduce employment by 3.5 million jobs.

Under almost any scenario, the report says, “the U.S. economy will be more isolated and diminished.”

The report is available in its entirety here (pdf). Were it not for Trump’s campaign turmoil and anemic fundraising, it’s likely this scathing analysis would have been pretty big news yesterday.

Kevin Drum @ MotherJones has a schadenfreude article on the state of Kansas these days:

Ouch. From 2005 to 2011, Kansas was growing faster than the US economy. This continued for about a year after Brownback took office, at which point economic growth declined and then flatlined. But hey—maybe things are just tough in the Midwest? Not really, it turns out. Here’s how Kansas compares to her neighboring states since 2011:

I think this is the right chart, I had to recover it after the link disappeared. HAW

The chart comes from EconBrowser, run by Professors Hamilton (UCSD) and Chin (UW-Madison). And – fully acknowledging that a single economic factor isn’t going to have that much of an impact – I can’t help but notice the ascendancy of Colorado in terms of economic growth and note that Colorado is one of the few states that have legalized marijuana. This occurred in late 2012, and the first stores opened the first day of 2014. The chart indicates Colorado was already well ahead of Kansas, and the story just gets worse as time flows by.

The Colorado story could easily be one of personal freedom / responsibility, but that’s a bit of a fairy tale without numbers. I’d like to see a time-series for each state indicating how the tax changes each state has implemented (or not) has impacted the the personal income quintiles of the citizenry. That is, in the typical division of the citizens into 5 chunks by income, how much tax burden by percentage does that quintile carry? Taking that as an inverse proxy for personal freedom might indicate that the Kansas tax cuts have, in reality, increased the relative burden of most folks, while benefiting just a few. And that might explain, in some small part, the Kansas disaster.

My Arts Editor espied a dragonfly tonight, and I went click-happy on it. First, her two favorite pics:

And now my two favorite. I should probably just pick one…

Let me know if you have a favorite…

Jonathan Chait published a report in New York Magazine on Trump’s campaign that rang a bell in that interview with Arne Carlson. First, Jonathan:

Trump dominated the Republican primary because he mastered one weird trick. The trick was to constantly spout wild and offensive comments, frequently targeted at women or people of other races or nationalities, generating a constant stream of news coverage focused on Trump’s latest outrage. Since most Republican voters really like outrageous comments, especially when they’re directed at women and people of other races or nationalities, this technique worked well enough to overcome Trump’s massive strategic and organizational liabilities as a candidate. But since most voters in the electorate as a whole feel differently, Trump’s outrageousness is now compounding rather than hiding his technical incompetence.

And from Arne Carlson’s interview in City Pages:

Two people came into the campaign with public policy. And it was Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. And the media very quickly galvanized behind Donald Trump. They saw their ratings go up the more they covered Trump. They ignored Bush’s attempt to talk about public policy, and virtually ridiculed him. I’m not often critical of the media, but I am this year. And it’s driven mostly by television, and ratings.

I.e., money and ego – because the very few people do something and hope to be ignored. While I had no great hopes for Jeb, it’s unfortunate that the hollow circus performing in his neck of the woods attracted more attention, and now the GOP is left with a nominee who not only has little chance of winning, but is beginning to drive GOP members away.

But for all that it’s tempting to blame the media, it’s important to note that the facts of the matter are out there, available to everyone with a computer and an urge to do the research. To my mind, it’s more accurate to blame the sub-culture involved, a culture nurtured by the radio talk show hosts and Fox News (recall that Fox News viewers are not as well informed as other segments of voters), spoon-fed misleading views, false ‘facts’, and trained not to really think. Trained on outrageous statements, as Chait notes Donald has that down to a T – but he’s not on their leash, and so the GOP threatens to spin so hard it may fragment.