Unsightly Mental Blemishes

If you’re a young woman, or an old teenage girl, and wondering about the rules of dating, my friend Libby has written up a helpful collection of guidelines when dating her sons.

6. Become proficient at at least one video game, sport or some other “guy” thing.

It’ll blow his socks off and make you the most fascinating creature he’s ever met.

7. Don’t keep him on the string while you keep your eye out for someone better.

He deserves a girl who wants to be with him because he’s a great guy. And don’t sleep with his friends, chances are he will forgive them faster than he will forgive you. Being drunk is no excuse for acting like a slut, seriously.

My cousin Scott Chamberlain, steward of Mask of the Flower Prince, has written a lovely review of Sibelius’ Kullervo.  How do I know it’s well written and captivating?  Because at the end, he had me panting to go see it.  It seemed a lovely Valentine’s Day gift for my wife.

Too bad the last Minnesota Orchestra performance of it was the day before I read about it.

Continuing the saga of human rights in the, uh, person of Naruto the macaque, US District Judge Orrick has declined to grant rights to the photo, and damages custody, to the animal rights organization PETA.  From Ars Technica:

A federal judge on Wednesday said that a monkey that swiped a British nature photographer’s camera during an Indonesian jungle shoot and snapped selfies cannot own the intellectual property rights to those handful of pictures. …

“I’m not the person to weigh into this,” Orrick said from the bench in San Francisco federal court. “This is an issue for Congress and the president. If they think animals should have the right of copyright they’re free, I think, under the Constitution, to do that.”

The US Copyright Office previously ruled that the owner of the camera does not own the rights to the picture, despite his assertion that his actions led to the creation of the picture – even if he did not personally take the picture.  Assuming any and all appeals also fail, I suppose this leaves the picture void of the intellectual attribute of ownership, or, in other words, it’s now in the public domain.

To this software engineer, it’s a bit of a ticklish point.  A remote camera?  Sure, copyright to the guy who hit the remote button.  (But what if it wasn’t him, even though he owned the equipment and planned to hit the button, but his neice, say, hit it to take the key picture?)  How about someone who puts a camera where a critter might hit the button on the hopes that a good one’s selected?  Still a copyright for them?

The joyous insanity of inflicting human intellectual structures on creatures that are not human.

And we’ll let NewScientist‘s Feedback column (23 January 2016) have the final comment:

So now we know – although a room of monkeys chained to typewriters may eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare, the furry little bards will never see a penny in royalties.

Takes all the fun out of stochastic processes, doesn’t it?  OK, now I’m starting to think about an artificial intelligence choosing to hit the button as a serendipitous moment … an extension of previous discussion.

NewScientist (23 January 2016) echoes recent, better known controversies in their One Per Cent column:

A study from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, finds that websites show men ads for higher paying jobs than those women see.

Very puzzling, so I tracked down a rather more detailed publication, the CMU News.  Sadly, they’re bollixed as well:

The study of Google ads, using a CMU-developed tool called AdFisher that runs experiments with simulated user profiles, established that the gender discrimination was real, said Anupam Datta, associate professor of computer science and of electrical and computer engineering. Still unknown, he emphasized, is who or what is responsible. Was it the preference of advertisers? Or was it the unintended consequence of machine learning algorithms that drive online recommendation engines?

An interesting detail:

To study the impact of gender, researchers used AdFisher to create 1,000 simulated users — half designated male, half female — and had them visit 100 top employment sites. When AdFisher then reviewed the ads that were shown to the simulated users, the site most strongly associated with the male profiles was a career coaching service for executive positions paying more than $200,000.

“The male users were shown the high-paying job ads about 1,800 times, compared to female users who saw those ads about 300 times,” said Amit Datta, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering. By comparison, the ads most associated with female profiles were for a generic job posting service and an auto dealer.

Notice they aren’t saying the same jobs are being shown at a lower salary, they simply didn’t show the ads as often.  If we are willing to associate frequency with probability of attracting the attention of qualified candidates, then this all just seems like madness: why cut out the smarter half of the species?

And then there’s the larger context:

“This just came out of the blue,” Datta said of the gender discrimination finding, which was part of a larger study of the operation of Google’s Ad Settings Web page, formerly known as Ad Preferences. The finding underscores the importance of using tools such as AdFisher to monitor the online ad ecosystem.

I find something quite amusing about subjecting a commercial operation’s secret algorithms to study, almost as if it were a new, natural species.  It makes you wonder if a bunch of computer scientists, even with Ph.D.s, are really the proper researchers.  Perhaps some biologists should be doing the study.

Finally, returning to NewScientist’s One Per Cent column, was this additional tidbit:

In 2013, Harvard researchers noticed that searches for African American names prompted more ads offering to check for arrest records.

A few nights ago we happened across A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1942), a Loretta Young comedy. A young couple, he a successful murder mystery novelist, move into a New York City apartment in preparation for his next book – only to encounter dead bodies and a mystery in real life.  A plot with twists, a police department with character (and Sydney Toler, of Charlie Chan fame), and some good dialogue and character interactions is burdened with some minor plot and character holes and a foil which becomes a Z, but has the recompense of Loretta’s eyes used to maximum effect.  It’s fun.

In reference to the whitehouse.gov petition I started a week ago, we are now up to a grand total of … 15.

In 3 weeks or so I’ll be celebrating the least successful petition on whitehouse.gov, I suspect. Maybe my Arts Editor will make a celebratory poster.

Jeb Bush, one of the remaining contenders for the GOP Presidential nomination, has had a notoriously unsuccessful campaign, despite having the most success – by far – of the GOP pack of candidates, as documented in this New York Times article, which shows that he and his allied groups having raised $155 million, while his closest challenger in this category, Senator Cruz, is at $89.9 million.  (An interesting substory is that Cruz has outraised Bush in terms of personal fundraising, while Bush’s allied groups have crushed Cruz’s allied groups.  However, there are too many unknown variables to really be worth pursuing in this post.)

As my Arts Editor and I discussed the post on Senator’s Cruz campaign strategy, it occurred to me there’s a partial explanation for Jeb’s futility in Cruz’s success – so far.  But let’s start with former President Bush – who supported him?

One memorable group was the evangelicals.  Remember the lady who was convinced that God had picked George to be President, and said so in a TV interview?

So how important are the evangelicals in the GOP?  According to this Gallup poll, quite:

And how did Jeb’s brother do with the evangelicals?  They loved him, as this article, “The Real Reasons Evangelicals Love Bush,” from Christianity Today illustrates:

Yet while some evangelicals have soured on Bush, polls show the vast majority of evangelicals love him. Why?

It’s often said that they like him because he’s “one of them” and uses religious language, and that’s true–but only scratches the surface. Two new books and a new film on Bush and faith help us to see the real roots of his appeal. All three are campaign-style hagiographies but give a window into the spiritual sources of the Bush-evangelical connection: persecution, transformation, calling, and clarity.

So when Cruz swept in with an explicitly faith-based approach to the campaign, Jeb was deprived of a major group’s support enjoyed by his brother – a good 1/3 of the GOP may have ignored him in favor of the more familiar Cruz.  (Similarly, former Senator Rick Santorum lost out in the same way.  He won Iowa – barely – in 2012 by his popularity amongst the highly conservative and the evangelicals, while this year he polled 1% – and has since dropped out of the race, throwing his support to … Senator Cruz.)

As a former governor, Jeb comes under suspicion from many in the GOP, and as the support of many large contributors became known, he’s spattered with the mud of being part of the establishment and a possible puppet of Big Money.  Recall that governmental experience is now considered a negative by the GOP these days; Jeb has it in spades.

Jeb’s bad luck comes in not realizing that the GOP is changing – but it’s not moving towards the mainstream, as one might expect from a pendulum swing, but rather ever more extreme as the moderates continue to move away from the GOP, and those who used to be too extreme for the GOP now find it more and more congenial.  Whether this is a result of a takeover of the GOP, or just an unconscious slide caused by the neverending cause of purity, I’m not entirely sure, but we seem to be seeing the end of the “wait your turn” queue in GOP nomination politics, the queue that gave us Bush I, Bob Dole, Bush II, and Romney.

Brash, untried newbies such as Rubio and Cruz are butting in ahead of Bush III, Perry, Santorum, and they’ve done so by appealing to the sensibilities (if I may be so rash as to use such a word) of the newer members of the GOP – such a litany is unnecessary to repeat here, as many other commentators have pointed it out.

The winner of the GOP nomination is not clear, but the Presidential race may boil down to experience – Sanders and Clinton have it by the shovelful – vs novelty – either a businessman with zero experience, or an untried, unaccomplished Senator are the three (3) favorites in Trump, Cruz, and Rubio.  In crude terms, is America still a meritocracy (which requires the voters be knowledgeable, in the truest sense of the word)? Or will we revert to tribalism, voting for the person who’s part of our group and enunciates our own prejudices with impunity?

The first primary is over, and a few barnacles have finally shaken loose (Santorum, Huckabee, Rand Paul, O’Malley) and been lost to the deep.  No doubt the commentary has been quite prolix, with the fallout eliciting joy in some quarters, consternation in others.

I haven’t bothered to read the commentaries, so I don’t know if anyone has had any similar thoughts on the matter of the Cruz campaign overall.  Let’s take a few facts and put them together:

1. Cruz is a Senator.  This gives him a national name & reach, useful to a man of ambition.
2. Cruz is running without national accomplishments.  In fact, his short tenure in his position has been marked with absolutist rhetoric and positions; his colleagues, even in his own caucus, are reported to dislike him.
3. On the campaign trail he expresses thoughts and positions disdainful of general tradition. Perhaps the most iconic is his promise, if elected, to rip up the deal on nuclear power and weapons with Iran, rather than respect the progress and deals made by the previous Administration.
4. There’s a pervasive meme in the conservative community that government doesn’t work.  One of the favorite aphorisms is that the government doesn’t create jobs, for example.
5. There’s a pervasive meme in the conservative community that the government is corrupt.  The entire RINO movement is illustrative of this meme, as is the demonization of the concept of compromise.  The left has a similar meme, for what it’s worth.

In Senator Cruz we have a man who’s managed to get his name and, well, reputation onto the national scene, first through winning his seat, and then engaging in conduct well outside the mainstream for a Senator.  He doesn’t appear to work on bills, and I’ve never seen a report of him reaching across the aisle; the mainstream, seasoned political reporter finds his conduct mystifying, repellent, and certainly opaque.

But to the conservative mind of a certain bent, they may see a Senator, but without the attributes associated with abhorrency: compromise, participation, even acknowledgement of the traditions of government.  Without dirtying his hands, in those eyes, he’s managed to become a major player on the stage.  He has displayed his qualifications, which have nothing to do with honest achievement, but rather with a purity of spirit and commitment to the values referenced by these memes.¹ Essentially, he has managed to place himself in the middle of national politics without playing the game by its normal rules, and not only in the middle, but in what, at this juncture, appears to be a commanding position.

I have to wonder how long Ted Cruz has been planning this strategy.

And then there’s the ultimate goal.  Is he such an arrogant man that he believes the Presidency is within his grasp, that he can achieve that goal?  But why?  Simply because it’s there?  Or are there higher goals in place?

“I’m a Christian first, American second, conservative third and Republican fourth[.]”

(Politico)

Rumor has it that his father is a Dominionist, so one naturally wonders about the son.  But does he really think he can unite the conservatives?  Libertarians are not necessarily religious, and sometimes view religion with great suspicion; there’s little to keep them from voting Democrat if they can’t stomach the conservative candidate. Trump conservatives are reportedly new to politics; if their man doesn’t win the nomination, we may hear no more from them, even on Voting Day. Or he may be positioning himself for a long term leadership position in the conservative party.

Or we could simply take him at his word: a rock solid belief that his religious convictions are right; that religious freedoms are under attack; that God is calling him to be a leader in this mold. Having the glaring examples of theocracies staring at us in other countries, as well as European history, I cannot help but shiver at such a mindset; I do hope that Americans remember their history.

¹Since we would typically come to such conclusions through judging his works, of which he has none, it is appropriate to insert the word alleged somewhere in that sentence.

My correspondent is a better reader than I concerning Flint:

First sentence of the last paragraph of the Wikipedia article you cited says: “An emergency manager, formerly emergency financial manager, is an official appointed by the Governor to take control of a local government under a financial emergency.”

I also ran across this tidbit:

Local governments were required to pay the emergency manager.

As if the financial stress were not great enough.

A reader’s reply regarding Flint:

Sounds like there are several, ah, different views on who was really responsible for the decision. But I believe, and feel free to correct, that all of the emergency managers were appointed by the governor.

According to Wikipedia:

When the Referendum petitions were approved by the Michigan State Board of Canvassers on August 8, 2012 under orders from the Michigan Supreme Court, PA 4 was suspended and the previous version, PA 72, was reinstated.^[2] All current EM except for Michael Brown in Flint were reappointed as EFM by the Local Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board. Brown was previously a Flint City employee in the past five years and was not eligible under PA 72 to be an EFM.^[3] The Sugar Law Center filed to challenge PA 4 and PA 72. PA 4 was repealed by Michigan voters in the 2012 general election,^[4] and the Michigan Legislature subsequently passed Public Act 436 of 2012 to replace the revived Public Act 72.^[5]

Whether or not all of them were appointed through this board is unclear from that article, and I’m a little late in the evening to pursue this further.  The board’s composition?

The Local Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board (ELB) is ex officio formed board consisting of the State Treasurer of Michigan, director of licensing and regulatory affairs and the Director of Technology, Management and Budget as members or their respective designees.^[27] The Board selects the emergency manager and chooses between the emergency manager’s cost cutting plan and the local unit board’s alternative plan.^[5] The ELB approves all major financial decisions over $10,000 while a municipality is under emergency management, including transfers of publicly owned assets.

No doubt the governor has some influence.

Treehugger‘s Derek Markham reports on France’s latest roadway accessory: solar panels on the road surface:

… the new Wattway system doesn’t replace the road itself or require removal of road surfaces, but instead is designed to be glued onto the top of existing pavement. The Wattway system is also built in layers of materials “that ensure resistance and tire grip,” and is just 7 mm thick, which is radically different from that other design that uses thick glass panels (and which is also claimed to include LED lights and ‘smart’ technology, which increases the complexity and cost of the moose-friendly solar tiles).

While the techie part of me thinks this is cool, the engineering part is giving serious thought to the chronic maintenance costs these things may face…

A reader comments on Flint:

I just read the details of the actual cause of the lead poisoning in Flint. It’s a bit more subtle than most people would have gleaned from the popular press, but just as damning nonetheless.

It turns out the water from the river is more corrosive in just the wrong way so as to leach/dissolve the layers of minerals which have been deposited over the many years on the inside of the old pipes used in the water system. Those pipes were made of lead, a very common thing at the time. With an interior coating of things like manganese, iron or other salts which occur naturally in most water, those pipes are perfectly safe (they were not when first installed, of course, but we did not know better at the time).

Apparently the “cheaper” river water was a bad choice versus the more “expensive” lake water they had been using. The decision was made under a series of state-appointed city managers who were all about Republican-driven cost savings. The decision was made more than a year ago, or thereabouts. The problem was discovered by a third party 5 to 6 months ago (who knows when the water utility people spotted it — they’ve probably been threatened to silence). But the Republican leadership, from city appointees up to the governor himself were all busy denying and covering it up.

There’s no simple solution now. It’ll take years to naturally re-coat the interior of those pipes. Digging them up and replacing them is horrendously expensive. They’ve switched back to lake water, which stops the problem from getting worse, but the damage is already done. They may have saved a few dollars on the front end but they’ve lost millions on the back. Typical stupid right-wing planning.

Or at least, quarterly thinking – that is, gotta keep the shareholders happy each quarter.  Governor Snyder has a background in the private sector, according to Wikipedia:

From 2005 to 2007, Snyder served as the chairman of the board of Gateway, Inc., based in Irvine, California. Prior to his election as governor, he was chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Ardesta LLC, a venture capital firm based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Which is merely an observation, not a real accusation.  Still, the executive office must set the tone, to some extent, throughout the executive arm – especially when the governor is in his second term.

That said, here are the backgrounds of the relevant Flint Emergency Managers:

Darnell Earley: City Administrator and Municipal Administrator, with a Masters of same from Westsern Michigan University.  He’s named in a class action lawsuit, but claims it wasn’t his decision; a while ago he claimed it was not foreseeable.  I don’t know if that’s still his assertion.

Michael Brown: His career appears to be in various city administration positions.  He preceded Earley.

So those two appear to have respectable careers in city administration.  Ed Kurtz is harder to track down.  In his support, The Daily Beast reports,

In a civil deposition not reported until now, Ambrose testified under oath that emergency manager Kurtz considered a proposal to use the Flint River, discussed the option with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and then rejected it.

In 2014, Ambrose was deposed in a civil lawsuit brought by retired Flint municipal workers against the state over severe cuts to their health care benefits. Attorney Alec Gibbs questioned Ambrose about the water decision (a year before Flint learned it was being poisoned). …

Howard Croft, the former director of public works for Flint who resigned in November 2015, asserted more than four months ago in a videotaped interview with the ACLU of Michigan that the decision to use the dangerously corrosive river came directly from the Snyder administration.
In the interview, Croft said that the decision to use the river was a financial one, with a review that “went up through the state.”

“All the way to the governor’s office?” the ACLU of Michigan asked him.

“All the way to the governor’s office,” Croft replied.

It’s a pity that abandoned houses tend to degrade over time (as reported by The Detroit News).  Otherwise, I’d suggest the government of Michigan, as the responsible party, buy all the foreclosed, abandoned properties in the Detroit metro area and give them to the residents of Flint.  Everyone moves, and Flint becomes a ghost town, a monument to mismanagement by the Snyder administration.

So far, I have not heard the base cause of mistaken decision making.  I’m speculating someone didn’t want to spend the money, which would be attributable to the intrusion of private sector thinking into the public sector – but that awaits the discernment of facts.

[Updated to add a missing word – 7/30/16]

We finished up A Close Call for Boston Blackie (1946) in the last couple of days, part of a series of movies involving the title character ^{(played by Chester Morris)}, a reformed thief, one of which I’ve reviewed recently.  (Before you wonder, no, we don’t have the series, our DVR picks these up at random.)

The previous review indicated a mundane, fluffy bit of entertainment, and, indeed, as Boston and The Runt wave farewell to their cop friends in front of the building housing Boston’s apartment, an assault on a woman takes place across the street. Zounds! In broad daylight, no less!  Their dash to the rescue is not soon enough to catch the arch-fiends, but the lady turns out to be an old flame of Boston’s, Gerry.  She’s unhurt, unlike my teeth, which are beginning to itch already – they’re allergic to predictability.  It’s a bit early, but it is a B-Class movie from the ’40s, right?

But my teeth gain some surcease when Boston and the Runt escort Gerry to Boston’s apartment and they hear a baby squalling – in the apartment.  Without asking how she gained access to his apartment, Gerry reveals the baby is her’s, by her inmate husband, and she secreted him with Boston because the hubby has been paroled and she’s terrified of him.  At some point the police are called.

And then, yep, hubby shows up in a towering rage and a handgun held on all of them.  Will Boston play the hero?  Isn’t it, er, a bit early in the movie to bring together a resolution?

And the door opens a trifle and someone else shoots the husband.  Whoa.  The teeth are much happier.  Gerry flips out and dumps the baby on Boston and the Runt; the Runt takes the baby and legs it out the window as the police come in, wondering what’s going on with gun shots.  Eventually, they find the hubby in the closet.  Lacking a missing suspect, Boston is the default selection.

Still with me?

This is where it really gets interesting.  In a side scene, we learn that the baby isn’t even Gerry’s, but rather the son of criminal, who, with his partner, is going to extort money from the father of the hubby under the guise that the baby is his grandson.

Meanwhile, down at the police station, the cops try to shake information out of Boston, who’ll barely own up to his own hair.  Finally, the assistant to the detective, forever portrayed as an idiot, is left in charge of our eponymous hero, all the while protesting he should be practicing his wrestling moves for the police wrestling competition.  Alone, Boston offers to help him practice, and once again my dental work is in distress.

Briefly.

The cop executes a simple throw, bringing Boston to the floor, who laughs and says he’s impressed, but says he’d like to try again.  Then Boston throws the cop to the floor (rather clumsily, but the cop is rather larger than Boston), and the cop is knocked cold.  Boston laughs, and exits stage right, pulling on coat.

I shrug.  Right?

And then the cop, the idiot who catches on to double meaning word play 30 seconds after everyone else, pops an eye open, laughs, and also exits stage right.

Now that’s interesting.  Because it’s unexpected.

There are more twists, but I will say the writers, or whoever was in charge, failed to take advantage of these surprises to any real advantage.  It is, after all, a B class movie.  (But then, so was Casablanca, yet it’s a classic.)  The cinematography is undistinguished, the pacing basically the same throughout, the acting competent.  But the story at least kept my interest – as each scene unfolded, I asked myself, what will surprise me here?  And they did.  An unexpected choice. A twist showing a new motivation.  Wait, who’s this character?  Oh .. that actually makes sense.

Unlike the latter half of the latest Star Wars installment.

I shan’t go on to any more detail of this movie, but I will say that this reminded me, or, better, clarified for me, a certain nature of story telling.  The clash of two individuals, determined and resourceful, over something, is one of the most important parts of storytelling.  Too often we don’t see resourceful characters; these colorless dudes are called spear-carriers, doomed to carry messages to real people, and then die with a knife in the back.  And showing the resourcefulness in a subplot may be even more important than the main plot, because it shows they have lives, they have thoughts and dreams, they have common decency (“Save the cat!“) – or not.  All those things that make us believe they are close approximations to real people – and that the choices they make, and the consequences thereof, may have application in our own lives.

The editors at NewScientist have picked a curious incident around which to enunciate some worries over the killer robots previously discussed in this thread,  From their leader (16 January 2016, no paywall):

Called COTSbot, it is one of the world’s most advanced autonomous weapons systems, capable of selecting targets and using lethal force without any human involvement (see “Can this starfish-killing robot save the Great Barrier Reef?“).

A starfish-killing robot may not sound like an internationally significant development, but releasing it on to the reef would cross a Rubicon. COTSbot amply demonstrates that we now have the technology to build robots that can select their own targets and autonomously decide whether to kill them. The potential applications in human affairs – from warfare to law enforcement – are obvious.

As an event which can legitimately bring into focus the idea the issues of killer robots need to be confronted – yes. Unfortunately, the particulars of the situation do not lend themselves to a detailed analysis.  The issues of killer robots are numerous, but one of the most salient is proper selection of target, or, on the flip side, the deaths of non-targets – i.e., people who are not fighting. It’s not likely that a COTSbot will run rampant in Sydney, and the natural setting is hardly a war zone.  Given the breathlessness of other news outlets reporting on COTsbot, it’s not easy to suggest that COTSbot should be retired before it ever enters the fight against out of control starfish.

And that obvious argument makes it a little difficult to use this as a stepping stone to the real issues of killer robots.  Will folks really take it seriously?  A quick search of the web didn’t reveal anyone else expressing similar concerns.  I worry, a little, that some potential participants, who perhaps are not employing their strongest cognitive resources, will look at this, transport these arguments into the actual killer robot discussion, as ill-fitting as they may be, and conclude there’s little to worry about.

So this might be a bit of the boy who shouted the wolf was eating the starfish – and everyone stared at the boy and wondered about his sanity.

In contrast to more positive recent reports on the world wide coal situation, Michael LePage continues to beat the drum of worry in NewScientist (16 January 2016, no paywall).  He references an expert:

In fact, while coal use is falling in most rich countries, cheaper prices worldwide have prompted a remarkable coal renaissance, says economist Ottmar Edenhofer of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin, Germany. If just a third of the planned coal power stations are built, we will burn through the remaining carbon budget for 2 °C of warming.

This correlates with this morning’s MPR Kerri Miller show, where a surge in sales of SUVs and trucks is attributed to the precipitous fall in gasoline prices, as is a drop in sales of electric vehicles, and is quite logical, of course: lower prices makes fuel consumption less of an element in selecting what the next new vehicle should be.

So what to do about these planned coal-fired plants?  Well, seeing as they are still in the planning stages, we could attempt to spike the artillery before it fires: send the message that by the time these plants are built, the coal will be expensive, or worse, unavailable.

How can we do that?  I suggest banning the export of coal from the United States.  The United States is not the leading exporter of coal, according to the World Coal Association, but occupies the #4 spot, behind Indonesia, Australia, and Russia.  However, as the most influential nation in the world, a dramatic gesture of this sort – even with loopholes for special situations and that sort of thing – would certainly bring the issue to the attention of other governments.  While we won’t influence Russia, we can certainly influence Australia, who recently replaced a Prime Minister who blew with the wind with a new Prime Minister who is working towards a solution to climate change, and possibly Indonesia.

To this end, I have started a whitehouse.gov petition.  If climate change concerns you, I hope you’ll sign it – and spread the word.

We slurped up ONE MYSTERIOUS NIGHT (1944) last night, an installment in the old Boston Blackie series.  The lead, performed by Chester Morris, has an adequate charisma and patter; his partner, “The Runt”, is rather less well used. The police are adequate but not marvelous, as are the various supporting roles.

The plot is rather light and fluffy; when one character bites the dust, it carefully never lets us see his sister, as this would require adding a bit of gravity to an otherwise cotton candy like movie, and we all know what happens when cotton candy is asked to support anything more than helium.

And the dialogue never quite achieves the patter of, say, THE THIN MAN. Workmanlike, it rumbles and stutters along with hardly an ear for the ebb and flow one might look for.

So.  An adequate, sometimes slightly, every so slightly intriguing movie.  Good for a rainy, tired afternoon.

The news about the group in Oregon who busted into Federal lands and claim it’s theirs’ under some obscure interpretation of the law is well known, as is the muted response of the Feds – whether it’s the proper countermove will be judged by history.

But I found interesting this piece from AL Monitor‘s Ben Caspit of Israeli politician Moshe Ya’alon, current Defense Minister, in particular his response to the actions of certain fringe-right wing  settlers:

A new climax has been reached in the current crisis. A group of settlers, including branch leaders and other major figures in the Likud Party, purchased two buildings in Hebron. They entered these buildings under cover of darkness and left two new “facts on the ground.” This is how the settlers regularly operate; they follow a familiar “model” of secretly purchasing property, taking it over by surprise and then conducting negotiations with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which ultimately controls the West Bank, as to whether they can stay there or not.

Mentioned later is the fact that while the purchase is legal, it may be not be “settled” without the IDF’s permission.

Usually an operation involving the evacuation of homes such as this can last weeks, if not months or years. It gets dragged out in the courts, while the validity of the purchase is investigated and it is ascertained whether the owners really made a sale. Discussions ensue over security issues and how the incident impacts Israel’s diplomatic standing. This time, however, Ya’alon decided that it was enough. He heard about the occupation of the homes in real time while conducting his regular assessment of the situation with the IDF’s top brass at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. He then ordered that the settlers be removed, without any delays whatsoever.

They had not expected that. On the night of Jan. 21-22, the IDF forcibly removed the settlers from both homes. The coalition immediately erupted in turmoil, with attacks against Ya’alon launched not only by Bennett’s HaBayit HaYehudi Party, but even by many people from Ya’alon’s own Likud Party (as described by Mazal Mualem). But Ya’alon wasn’t taken aback. He received partial support from Netanyahu, though a day late. Still, Ya’alon stuck to his principles, and he refused to blink.

I have no intention of suggesting the situations are so similar that we should do the same thing.  But it’s interesting and instructive that immediate, decisive actions were taken and were a surprise to the perpetrators who have so little respect for the law.

NewScientist (2 January 2016, paywall) speculates on the future of encryption in “How 2016’s war on encryption will change your way of life,” giving the dry outlines of 4 possibilities:

1. Outright ban.
2. Back doors.
3. Rebellion from the corporate world.
4. Total encryption.

In none of these scenarios does encryption die off; NS believes that our need for, indeed, our addiction to encryption, whether we’re aware of it or not, will overrules any overt or covert attempt to smother it.  Pandora, pretty or not, is out of the box.

Most speculative is their fourth scenario, subtitled “All out encryption beats cybercrime”:

It all started with Ashley Madison. When the breach of the adulterous dating site in 2015 led to divorces and even suicides after profiles were leaked online, people began to wake up to the dangers of unencrypted data. But it was only after a string of further hacks in 2017, including on the UK’s centralised medical record service care.data, that the public started clamouring for protection.

Tech firms continued the encryption roll-out started as a result of the Snowden leaks, while cryptographers stepped up research on new and easier-to-use techniques to protect our data. At the same time, laws were brought in requiring that any unencrypted database be air-gapped – that is, removed from any kind of network – to significantly reduce the possibility of a hack.

The security services protested at first, saying these moves would harm their ability to protect us. But with cybercrime levels nose-diving, the FBI and other enforcement agencies found they had more resources to put into targeted, on-the-ground surveillance, enabling them to tail potential terrorists and foil a number of serious plots threatening the UK and US.

In our more secure world, an elderly Edward Snowden has been pardoned by the US for leaking state secrets, and allowed to return home.

The assertion that cybercrime would fall once everything is properly encrypted is charming, but, unfortunately, a little far out there.  First, it assumes everyone encrypts everthing; second, it ignores the social engineering aspects of cybercrime, where the acquisition of a password is adequate to access data that is otherwise encrypted.  In a world where everything is encrypted, and great value lies in the encrypted, it seems likely that criminals will shift resources into social engineering attacks.

Third, there is an assumption that encryption will remain effective; if someone solves the P=NP problem and proves P=NP, then cryptography, as currently envisioned, will be theoretically vulnerable to attacks.

Fourth, the denial of cryptography resources to criminals, terrorists, and adversarial states is a great lure for those responsible for state security, as communications is key for such endeavours.  Unfortunately, those in the field will tell you that those encryption algorithms developed publicly are the most secure; security through obscurity is more easily destroyed.  On the flip side, acquisition of the keys to an encrypted communications channel can permit silent monitoring of important communications.  This had devastating consequences for the Axis powers in World War II, as documented in numerous history books as well as the movies MIDWAY and THE IMITATION GAME; there’s little reason to think the same is occurring even as we consider the entire topic.

I suspect NS is blue skying a little bit here, but the topic is actually quite central to Internet users these days.

What is, or are, the point of tests?  Is it really just to assess master of material?  So goes the assumption of this article by Aviva Rutkin in NewScientist (2 January 2016):

A new algorithm could both improve your knowledge and do away with formal tests altogether. Developed by researchers at Stanford University and Google in California, it analyses students’ performance on past practice problems, identifies where they tend to go wrong and forms a picture of their overall knowledge.

But I think mere assessment is a little naive.  Tests are, by their nature, pressure-cookers, and the ability to perform under pressure is an essential part of the human experience.  I don’t like it; I hated tests.  But you must recognize they force students to prepare and to perform; those who do neither come to know their failures and adapt – or drop out.

No one lives a stress-free life – so why not prepare for it as a by-product of learning?

I’m a story junkie, so in a word, meh.  Great CGI, of course, loved the idea of working salvage on the remains of a battlefleet, a stormtrooper with a conscience was interesting, some of the new characters were excellent and the new actors seemed to do a good job – but, in the end, to quote my Arts Editor, I was never on the edge of my seat.  Not like the original.  It didn’t have me thinking about it for the next few weeks, unlike, say, THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE, or ART & CRAFT.   Every major plot turn had to turn the way it did, every major decision had to go the way it did – because that’s how such movies are made.  So long as you revel in such movies, full of spaceships and the forces of good and evil, this will fill the niche amply.

But the ending just about makes me gag thinking about it.  Of course Skywalker is waiting for her.  With his back turned.  With a grim, bewhiskered face from which sad wisdom radiates.

Of course.  A chipmunk could have predicted that.

Here’s a little thought experiment.  How about she climbs that mountain, seeking the legendary Skywalker, scion of the Jedi, and what does she find?

The old man, stuck in a hole with a broken leg.  When she asks why he didn’t just levitate out, he replies … I no longer have the Force.

End of film.

Now that would have left the fans clamoring.

As it is, I can’t even remember the name of the bad guys.

Literally, that is.  This slipped past me, as NewScientist (2 January 2016) reports:

The US government has told NASA to visit Europa in 2022. The latest budget set aside $175 million for a planned fly-by of Jupiter’s glacier moon, but it added a twist: NASA is required to land on the moon, not just fly past. Europa is a promising target in the search for extraterrestrial life, thanks to its liquid water ocean.

Via the Planetary Society, Van Kane clarifies:

“This Act includes $1,631,000,000 for Planetary Science. Of this amount, $261,000,000 is for Outer Planets, of which $175,000,000 is for the Jupiter Europa clipper mission and clarifies that this mission shall include an orbiter with a lander that will include competitively selected instruments and that funds shall be used to finalize the mission design concept with a target launch date of 2022.”

“…$175,000,000 is for an orbiter with a lander to meet the science goals for the Jupiter Europa mission as outlined in the most recent planetary science decadal survey. That the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall use the Space Launch System as the launch vehicle for the Jupiter Europa mission, plan for a launch no later than 2022, and include in the fiscal year 2017 budget the 5-year funding profile necessary to achieve these goals.”

– Final budget law for Fiscal Year 2016 regarding NASA’s Europa mission

While there’s at least eight years until it launches, this has been a pivotal year for developing NASA’s Europa mission. Last spring, NASA selected a rich and highly capable instrument set. This summer, following a design concept review, the mission moved from concept studies to an official mission. And just last week, Congress directed NASA to expand the mission by adding a small lander as well as launch the mission by 2022 and use the Space Launch System. These latter aren’t just suggestions: they are the law.

Whew!  NewScientist made it sound like the landing should occur in 2022 – virtually impossible.  Kane’s post is longish and full of interesting thoughts.  I’ll just quote one:

One aspect of this proposed lander concept is different than those I’ve seen before. Most lander studies have looked at small spacecraft (and this proposal would count as a small spacecraft) that would be carried by the mother craft until just before landing. For the design Berger reported on, lander and its descent stage would orbit Jupiter on their own for months to years before landing. This means that together they are a fully functional independent spacecraft with its own solar arrays for power, propulsion, navigation, and communications. Apparently the cost and mass of adding these functions to the descent stage and lander is a better bargain than adding the radiation hardening that would be required if the lander were carried past Europa 45 times.

So I’m guessing the main craft would survey Europa 45 times, and once a landing site is selected, the lander module moves into Europan orbit (only now exposed to radiation) and the descent stage goes into action.  Possibly the communications will go from the descent stage to the landing unit to the primary craft, which would carry the heftier communications gear required for communications with the Deep Space Network.  Although given how little power is available to the Voyagers and we can still hear them, we could still talk directly – but slowly – to the lander module (but maybe not the descent stage).  But I’m just a hand waver….

Just a quick impression of HEROES REBORN.  First, we caught the earlier HEROES shows on disc, so we know, sort of, what’s going on – we were disappointed by the cancellation after the Carnival volume, so we were looking forward to it.

I was disappointed.

Scope

First, the sweep of the new volume was appropriate to the overall arc of the show.  The focus is on people with amazing powers; it’s appropriate they face a challenge of amazing magnitude.  We saw that in the earlier incarnations, as they faced a corporate government bent on imprisoning them, a rogue power of nearly insurmountable capabilities, and another gone shrewdly mad.

Now the world itself is ending.  That’s a worthy problem.

Characters

But the characters … are not quite as interesting.  Most of the old cast is just gone.  A few are brought back, but play only small, supporting roles – Claire, who could heal any injury, appears only as a corpse.  This is the new generation of Heroes, and while they may start off interesting, I suspect they didn’t receive as much creative, organic attention from the writers as did the first couple of crops of Heroes.  For example, a married couple who loses their son in a disaster attributed to the Heroes (also known as Evos) begin hunting and killing Heroes …. until one day the husband begins exhibiting powers.

It could have been interesting.  Questions of bigotry, the value of the Other, even of redemption, could have been fruitfully explored – although the time pressure of a natural disaster does make such explorations a little more difficult.  The fascination exerted by the character of Sylar in the earlier shows, for example, was multiplied by sending him on a solitary quest where he explores his powers (he can understand how things work), his family history, and the nature of random violence and how it can rebound upon one’s head.  His clashes with other Heroes, his powers, the actions he takes and his character evolving over time – and the actor who portrayed him, Zachary Quinto, let’s not forget – all served to make him a fascinating, popular character.  That complex, yet organic, journey from violent madman to something much like a real Hero, in an arc spanning multiple volumes, really served to tie those early volumes together, while asking and exploring questions concerning how morality binds even the most powerful of Heros as well as men.

But in Reborn, this man (Luke Collins) and wife (Joanne) hunt Heroes, killing with no warning – she shoots them between the eyes with such accuracy you almost wonder if she has powers, too – in vengeance for their dead son.  But then his powers begin to manifest, and does she kill him for being a Hero?  No, no.  Of course not.  He gets to leave.  Menaced, of course.  But she’s too heart-broken to kill him, or have him around.

Predictable.  The bane of bad drama.  And then he confesses that he never enjoyed killing the prey, he just did it for her.  Again, it’s no surprise.   Ah, the guilt!  He’s one note, and because the time arc in this show is just a few days, Luke really has no time to further evolve in response to what has happened to him. In the end, we can’t tell if he loves her or not anymore, and he ultimately kills her when she nearly destroys the last hope of mankind.  I shrugged.  His final sacrifice was predictable from the plot – not from his power, which was not explained in sufficient detail to suggest, even in retrospect, that he could do what he did.

And what of Quentin, a nerdy man, and his sister Phoebe, a dark Hero working for the antagonistic side? He at least surprised me with a nifty bit of betrayal, but in the end, after a bit of impotent shouting, his shooting of his own sister betrays the most powerful message of the series: how do people who may be somewhat different live together?  There is no creativity in his responses, nor can there be, as the crisis is upon them and will wait for no one.  In the end, there’s hardly any lesson which can really be drawn from the shooting.

Casting

Jack Coleman as Noah Bennet, perhaps THE mainstay of earlier volumes, returns to anchor this show, and while his character is no longer as ruthless or amoral, he retains his charm and his knowledge of Heroes in general.  Angela, Matt, René (aka The Haitian) also appear, so we know they are solid; we know their history.  The newer characters vary, some projecting useful ambiguities, others more one-note, whether a shortcoming of the script or the actor is not entirely clear to me.

But what I found particularly interesting was the visual casting.  As dull as the character of Joanne Collins, the vengeful mother, might have been, she has tremendous visual impact, with a unique face highlighted by a hairstyle which, in her grim mood, makes her an agent of Hell, yet when she smiles it merely appears outré; indeed, her husband almost didn’t seem to measure up to her (however, judging purely on looks is certainly a faux pas). Molly Walker, a Hero with a location capability, is both attractive and unorthodox in appearance in a manner accentuating her role.  Oscar, a Hero who causes selective memory loss, is delightfully cast and clothed; I was slightly heartbroken when Vengeful Mom catches up to him.  Katana Girl looked, appropriately, like something out of a cartoon. The new Master of Time and Space is also quite striking, as he was in ONCE UPON A TIME. This may be a problem for this young actor, as he tended to either look fiercely pouty and sarcastic, or slightly puzzled; there was little nuance.

Characters

In the end, none of the new characters really stood out for me as characters in themselves.  To a large extent they fulfilled functions of the plot, rather than intelligent agents caught up and, sometimes, struggling against that plot.  Compare to previous volumes, where Matt fought mightily to remain a policeman, despite whatever advantages his mind-reading might bring him, or what the plot might require of him.  Or Sylar, who cut a vast, bloody slash throughout the series as a chaotic creature learning the ways of life as only he could – and bedamned if agents of Primatech, or the government, are after him – they are brushed aside so casually they don’t even always die.  That is a lovely, delicious disdain for the plot.

In REBORN, the exigencies of a civilization on the edge of destruction gives a universal and irrefutable motivation to the characters, and they respond as they must.  This sounds like good drama, and it is not: the responses are logical and predictable.  Great if you’re a logician, bad if you’re a dramatist, as the audience wants a topping of surprise to surmount their logic: not just a nod, but a blink-blink, then the nod, then a good Hmmm.  Remember the Eclipse that slowed speedster Daphne Millbrook down to a crawl (actually, back to her crutches)?  That was a Hmmm! moment.

Not that the writers don’t try, for there are competing solutions to the dilemma: Erica Kravid is a woman hell bent on using the raw power of the Heroes to jump a select group of humans to the future, and there they’ll rebuild.  She’ll stop at nothing, I tell you, nothing – and so she becomes broadly predictable. Everything is sacrificed – morals, family, anything – to achieve her goal of saving the humans and obliterating the Heroes.  One of the interesting facets of the earlier volumes was the obscure nature of the motivations of the antagonists, thus making questionable the limits on their actions.  What was the purpose of Primatech?  What was the goal of the government?  Even the Carnival was not entirely clear as to the limits.  But Erica, she’s saving humanity, so she thinks – although it’s not entirely clear how she knows a catastrophe is on its way.

The competition is more interesting: Angela prophecies two young Heroes will save the day.  At least there’s some vagueness, some questions.  And at the climactic moment, there’s some clever use of the Master of Time and Space.  But in the end, an artificial problem is inserted into the plot, requiring the noble sacrifice of a character.  Unnecessary, and a loss of an emblematic character.  In the end, I wonder why the Master of Time and Space didn’t simply move the Earth out of the way, and then return it when the danger had passed?  He could have called on Ando, the supercharger from previous Volumes, for help – or any large number of Heroes could have been called on for assistance.

Perhaps the most interesting character is a Marine, decorated for bravery which he never earned, who is closest to the old Ando and Mohinder characters in being a man desiring powers of his own; he designs and builds a powered suit, reminiscent of Ironman.  He shows some range of emotion, but the writers never really explore the character; indeed, at the end the suit is gone and he’s exercising his EMT training instead.  Did he discard it purposely?  Did the writers just grow tired of someone who dressed a little like a Mexican wrestler?

But I had almost forgotten: Erica’s hit man, Harris.  This is a character positively wreathed in mystery, someone who can clone himself easily and quickly, and has real fighting skills.  What binds him to Erica?  Is he a machine or a Hero?  He becomes a force of Nature, something unnegotiable, and even when a clone destroyed, you know it’s not the end of him, just a cessation.  He becomes a source of tension who is, unfortunately, lost at the end of the volume.

In the end, the tide of the plot comes washing in and the characters are caught in the riptide, pulled remorselessly into the service of helping civilization survive. No more semi-comic relief (think Hiro and Ando from previous volumes) to highlight the plot.  Just ominous old nature, out to do us in again.

Plot

Which brings us to this plot.  Or have I harped too much?  Let me pluck a minor chord, though, as in the first couple of episodes, the time travel and forced amnesia of Noah injects an enjoyable complexity and mystery.  Why did Noah forget the death of Claire?  Wait, why is René trying to kill Noah?  (Hey, is that a plot hole?  I can’t think of why he would have … since René reappears as a good guy.)   What sort of Power requires this other guy to wear a Mexican wrestling costume?  Will it be kitsch or parody or – oops, that was a lot of blood.

But, as previously noted, it all became predictable.  As our doom becomes imminent and the world begins to break down, one of our saviors is menaced, yet again, this time by Phoebe, who holds her above an abyss, and all I could think was, don’t let her scream, let her say something witty about this being dashedly irritating, or something equally out of character.

Nope.  It was a screamfest.

Special Effects

Adequate.  Awesome storm.  I will register a complaint that the fighting capability of Katana Girl was … visually suspect.  Ragged.  Unconvincing.  She needed a better fight choreographer.

On the other hand, seeing a flight of monarch butterflies on an ice field in the Arctic was effective.

Powers

And no review of a Heroes Volume is complete without mentioning new powers, which in this one ranged from vaguely and disappointingly formed (so what is the world saver doing, exactly?  When she works with the other world saver, what is going on, exactly?  How does being the Master of Time and Space make it possible to generate a force shield?  Compare to how Peter Petrellli’s power to steal other powers was used to temporarily defeat Sylar, a very logical and yet possibly non-obvious application), to Phoebe’s ability to suppress powers around her (sort of a walking eclipse), to the outré ability to insert a human being into a computer game – or take a computer game character out of the game and insert into reality, which was fascinating, if incredibly silly.

In The End

I think the major mistake of this new volume was to have the threat not be human or Hero based, but be a natural disaster.  It brooks no negotiation, moral questions, or anything else of real interest. There’s some interesting questions about how to survive it, yet HEROES is not about surviving natural disasters, or how to be superhumans – it’s about how to be just people, struggling with problems both old and new.  The real antagonist of this volume, a natural disaster, compresses and nullifies the subplots, the thematic explorations, all the little details that made previous volumes more interesting.  No more hard driving senators with hidden powers, obscured government plots, or family spats more deadly than most small wars.   We just need to get the kids to the town in Angela’s dream before Erica’s solution becomes permanent.  All the other bumps in the road were just … bumps in the road.  Does civilization end in this volume?  Of course not.  Angela told us it wouldn’t.  And where would the next sequel go?

Dramatic tension?  Nolo contendre.  The costs of losing to this antagonist were … too absolute.

Music in My Heart (1940) has a plot which may seem strangely reminiscent of the present, as the leading man is an inadvertent immigrant to the United States, brought to States as an infant and knowing nothing else, this deportation of a man with a quintessential American accent may tug at the heartstrings – but don’t be fooled, this is not a serious approach to the problems, whatever they may be, with illegal immigration.

This is fluff, unadulterated cotton candy, from male lead Tony Martin‘s superb vocal control when he sings, to the strangely cold-hot-cold portrayal of the female lead by Rita Hayworth, from the benevolent management of the opera company employing Tony to the family of Rita, a bunch of Italians pretending to be Romanovs from Russia, to whom money is more a distraction from life, rather than a goal.  All could have become a memorable focus of a few movies, but none are dealt with seriously, and the movie is nearly stolen, lock stock and barrel, by character actor Eric Biore, who plays a butler who schemes to steal back Rita from Tony for his own boss, Charles, a man who can hardly see the world for the curtain of money pouring over him.  The plot careens from random coincidence to fortunate meeting, all while no one seems too put out by this any of the unfortunate incidents that befalls them, whether it be a petulant millionaire setting up his future wife to fail, or a man on his way to a ship only to have an accident that makes him too late to catch it.

Is it worth your time?  Depends on who you are.  If you’re a fan of Rita, maybe – her performance is quirky, but perhaps a trifle under-confident.  If you like Tony, or at least his singing, then sure.  And if Mr. Biore has charmed you in other movies, he plays between the keys with a deft skill.