Unsightly Mental Blemishes

The Guardian’s Damian Carrington gathers up a report on coal consumption and CO₂ emissions in China:

Coal-burning in China is in significant decline, according to official figures released on Tuesday, signalling a major turnaround for the world’s biggest polluter.

The new data is good news for the fight against climate change but bad for the struggling global coal industry.

China saw a huge increase in coal-burning for power and industry in the last two decades but has suffered serious air pollution as a result. However in recent years there has been a surge in low-carbon energy and a slowdown in the economy – GDP growth fell in 2015 to its lowest in 25 years – as China moves away from manufacturing. …

China’s coal use has fallen in 2015 across a wide range of measures and its national carbon emissions are likely to have fallen by about 3% as a result. There was a 3.5% drop in coal production, coal-fired electricity generation fell 2.8% and overall power generation dropped 0.2%, the first fall in 50 years. There were similar decreases in coal-intensive heavy industry such as iron, steel and cement.

Other recent developments were coal imports to China plummeting by 35% year-on-year in December 2015 and the government’s ban on new coal mines for three years.

In contrast, renewables investment in China hit an all-time high in 2015 at $110bn. Overall low-carbon electricity generation – hydro, wind, nuclear and solar – increased more than 20% in 2015.

Continued positive developments – and given the government structure of China, this could move very quickly.  And what about that coal industry?  BloombergBusiness reports

U.S. coal producers Alpha Natural Resources Inc., Patriot Coal Corp. and Walter Energy Inc. have sought bankruptcy protection [in 2015]. …

“As commodity markets fall further, production will have to be cut,” said Christoph Eibl, CEO of Tiberius Asset Management AG, which has $800 million in commodity investments. “Producers will have to go bankrupt.”

InvestmentMine provides this chart on coal prices:

It occurs to me that the front line workers in this industry should perhaps be an explicit target for retraining.  After all, through no fault of their own they are in an industry identified as detrimental to the continued survival of human civilization, after years of being a positive.  They are often ill-paid and very dependent on the industry, so if it goes away, especially because governments have determined that it is damaging our future, then those who labor in the mines should be first up for compensation & training.

Tonight I’m not feeling a lot of sympathy for management and shareholders.

(h/t Michael Graham Richard @ Treehugger.com)

NewScientist’s leader (6 January 2016) covers another problem tied to climate change: global browning:

Now there is a new pollution problem on the horizon: global browning. Like global dimming, it might at first sound almost comical – but like global dimming, it is anything but. All over the world, increased inflows of dead organic matter are making lakes and rivers murkier. The full extent of the problem is still being assessed, but it is likely to be bad news for wildlife. It is also bad news for humans, because it makes water purification more difficult and expensive.

Somewhat predictably, the cause of global browning is also industrial pollution, although not in the form of smog. Instead, it is largely the unanticipated consequence of another clean-up success story: the reduction of acid rain (see “Global browning: Why the world’s fresh water is getting murkier“).

That hangover will eventually dwindle, but browning also seems to be driven by climate change itself. If so, it will be harder to tackle than global dimming. And if we do tackle it successfully, there may be unexpected knock-on effects – as there were with dimming. The pollutants in that case, while generally undesirable, alleviated climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space.

The referenced article is in the same issue, and explores in more detail.

Acid rain began increasing in the mid-1800s as the Industrial Revolution took off, powered by fossil fuels. Burning these hydrocarbons, especially coal, produces sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which react with water in the atmosphere to produce acids. By the 1970s, it was apparent that this was damaging trees and aquatic ecosystems, and governments started enacting legislation to clean up smokestacks. Acid rain began to decrease. But there was an unforeseen consequence. In many temperate and subarctic areas, deposits of sulphur had changed the chemistry of soils, making them “stickier”, says Chris Evans, a biogeochemist at the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council. This meant most DOC [Dissolved organic carbon] stayed put, and didn’t run off into surrounding rivers and lakes. But as soil sulphur concentrations dropped, DOC became unstuck.

In the mid 1990s, Evans and two colleagues were among the first to notice rising DOC levels. A decade ago, their research revealed that concentrations in 22 rivers in the UK had increased by an average of 91 per cent over the preceding 15 years. Two years later, Evans collaborated with a larger group to reveal that rising DOC wasn’t restricted to the UK. Their results, published in Nature in 2007, showed that 522 remote lakes and streams in North America and northern Europe had seen nearly a doubling of DOC concentrations between the 1990s and 2004. They also firmly tied the trend to decreased sulphur deposition, which had halved during the same period.

The result?

The link between browning and climate change is yet to be confirmed, but one thing is clear: more browning is bad news. One survey of 168 lakes in Norway found that while initial increases in DOC were linked to increases in brown trout numbers, continued rises caused the population to steadily drop. The initial benefits were probably due to DOC’s ability to block UV rays and the fact that when it drains into watercourses it often brings phosphorus and nitrogen too, key nutrients that fuel the growth of organisms at the bottom of the food chain. However, DOC levels reach a tipping point when the water turns a deep brown, says Anders Finstad at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who led the study. This prevents sunlight from reaching bottom-dwelling algae and, if the water is dark enough, free-floating plankton. No sunlight means no photosynthesis, and no food at the base of the food web.

From pothole to pothole, it seems.  Sometimes I wonder if we’ll find our way to a relatively stable position.  That would actually be rather unnatural, though.

The GOP appears to be floating further and further from the American mainstream, and even from its nourishing river: Wall Street. Joshua Green publishes a piece in BloombergPolitics concerning how the anti-gay attitude of the chairman of the critical Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises, Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, is clashing with the banking industry:

Garrett’s committee is vital to Wall Street. “The rules of the road for handling money and anything with the SEC go through this committee,” says Marcus Stanley, policy director of the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform. “There’s a ton of money at stake.” In Washington, the committee is known as the ATM, because banks and hedge funds shower the chairman with contributions. After the Dodd-Frank financial law forced hedge funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Garrett, already the recipient of more Wall Street money than almost any other member of the House, got millions more. The banks pay to have a voice, ensure they’re at the table when new rules are discussed, and insinuate themselves into the chairman’s good graces.

Where does the money go?

Much of the money Garrett collects from Wall Street is supposed to be passed along in the form of party dues to the GOP’s campaign arm, where it’s used to help other candidates get elected. So the committee is also important to Republicans because it binds the party with the business community in a mutually profitable arrangement. But back in July, Garrett threw a wrench into this smoothly humming machine.

At a private caucus meeting, he got into a heated dispute with his colleagues by declaring that he’d withhold hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Republican Congressional Committee dues to protest the party’s support for gay candidates. His outburst immediately caused a rift in the caucus. “I was shocked,” says Richard Tisei, a Massachusetts businessman who was one of the candidates Garrett objected to. “The first time I ran, I was nervous my sexuality would be a problem. But everyone was just great. John Boehner, Paul Ryan—they went out of their way to let me know it wasn’t. Eric Cantor pulled me aside and said, ‘You know, I’m the only Jew in the caucus, so I understand better than anyone how important it is to have you down here to broaden and diversify our ranks.’ ”

And this is a problem because the banking industry is progressive on the issue of LGBT rights:

The political fallout from Garrett’s remarks pales compared with the anguish it’s created in some corners of Wall Street. The financial industry ranks among the biggest donors to the Republican Party. But it has also been a pioneer in advancing gay rights.

To summarize the balance of Green’s very interesting article, banks – some of the largest in the nation, are beginning to taper off or stop donating money to Garrett.  While others are still donating, they are under pressure.

While there are certainly gay members of the GOP (the Log Cabin group), the party’s decades long drift to the right and encouragement of the most regressive of attitudes amongst otherwise good people is well-known.  It seems unlikely that it will swiftly change these attitudes, or dump those members who hold them, whether or not they are elected officials.

A political party is more than just about the votes, but money as well – and I’m not talking about corruption.  It costs money to come up with credible foreign policies, military policies, domestic policies — all of these require discussion, meetings, and research.  When a major source of funding to a party begins to dry up because the social policies of the party clash with those of the source, this is a source of danger to the party and, in the case of a major party, the country, because the country benefits from those discussions, these clashes of ideas.

Without that money, we’ll be stuck with more Rubios, Trumps, Bushes, and the rest of the current clown field – candidates and party who think the political clash of ideas is all about saying NO as loud as possible (how many times has the House tried to abolish the ACA while knowing Obama would simply veto the bill?).  And while this may benefit the Democrats, it’s not beneficial to the country in the long term.

It’ll be interesting to see how this comes out in the end.  Will the banks stand by their conscience, or will their wallet – their raison d’être – overcome their distaste and compel them to continue donations?  Will Garrett lose his seat in the next election, to a primary challenger or to a Democrat?  Long shot: will the Democrats take the House next cycle?

This may be one of the most pivotal races in the next cycle to watch.

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

The current saga of my Mythryl coding project, the last entry with regards to replacement text in DTDs suggested I would take this approach:

The extSubset production will be handled via a callback function that can then build a new recursive descent parser that knows about parameter entity references and generate a new string with all the replacements accomplished. I have not made a decision about intSubset, or perhaps markupdecl – a solution is not readily apparent.

I ended up abandoning that approach – my first approaches tend to be a little Byzantine compared to the final approach, so it’s not surprising.  However, the final approach (which is a bit of a grim thing to say in a programming project, really) is not much more appealing, as I decided to take the straightforward, but clumsy, approach of creating a new production rule:

pe_reference_replacement’ = p_in 1000 & |ws_i| & is_this “%” & name & is_this “;” & implement_replacement & p_out 1000;

pe_reference_replacement = <(irrelevant_ws & pe_reference_replacement’)> ;

This is in Mythryl using the recursive descent parser’s operators.   In the second production, the <> means 0 or more matching productions, while irrelevant_ws simply means there may be discardable whitespace. Basically, there may be multiple appearances of pe_reference_replacement’, separated by optional whitespace.

The first production uses the operator ||, which indicates the contents are optional, while ws_i is a synonym for irrelevant_ws, so this part is probably redundant (and if you’re thinking, on these two items, My, he’s sloppy – well, you win a prize!).  More interesting, there’s a check for a match to ‘%’, then a name, and then the required semi-colon – this is the definition of a parameter entity.  If all of these are matched, then implement_replacement will be called to actually implement the replacement.

Because implement_replacement is highly dependent on my implementation back end, I’ll just say it puts the replacement text on the input and continues onward for more processing.

References to pe_reference_replacement are now sprinkled throughout the relevant productions.  An example, first from the spec, then the original Mythryl code, then the updated:

EntityDef ::= EntityValue | (ExternalID NDataDecl?)

entity_def = p_in 73 & (entity_value | (external_id & |ndata_decl| )) & seventy_three_p & p_out 73;

entity_def = p_in 73 & |(pe_reference_replacement)| & (entity_value | (external_id & |ndata_decl| )) & seventy_three_p & p_out 73;

Subsidiary productions, where appropriate, also contain sprinklings of pe_reference_replacement as optional accompaniments.  Is this a satisfactory approach?  Barely.  It obscures the the production’s purpose, and it’s prone to errors.  I do not look forward to searching out bugs.  But I was not able to find an approach with a better balance in the limited time I allot to this project.

My first test of this comes from the W3 document itself, specifically Appendix D, entitled “Expansion of Entity and Character References (Non-Normative)“.  The example is labeled as particularly difficult, and is as follows:

1 <?xml version=’1.0′?>
2 <!DOCTYPE test [
3 <!ELEMENT test (#PCDATA) >
4 <!ENTITY % xx ‘&#37;zz;’>
5 <!ENTITY % zz ‘&#60;!ENTITY tricky “error-prone” >’ >
6 %xx;
7 ]>
8 <test>This sample shows a &tricky; method.</test>

(Ignore the line numbers.)  I can now parse this properly and report the expected results (which consist of all of the expected entity values, as well as the proper PCDATA for element test).  Yes, yes, this is hardly complete testing, but I’ve done enough damage today.

Discover reports on a dinosaur dancing ground:

Paleontologists from the University of Colorado Denver discovered a “dinosaur dance floor” in Colorado, where they say ancient theropods scraped deep furrows into the earth as they twisted, turned and kicked in an effort to impress females. The scrape marks were found in the Dakota Sandstone, a layer of sediment laid down around 100 million years ago in the Midwest and West during the Cretaceous period.

The researchers believe that some of the marks represent evidence of mating rituals among a species of dinosaur called Acrocanthosaurus, a large, predatory species of bipedal theropod that could grow up to 38 feet long and weigh as much as 6.8 tons.

That must have been a shattering experience to watch.

Maurice Bedard at LoanSafe.org has a lovely article on the Icelandic banking industry:

Iceland just sentenced their 26th banker to prison for his part in the 2008 economic collapse. The charges ranged from breach of fiduciary duties to market manipulation to embezzlement. …

… Iceland is also noted for being one of the Nordic Socialist countries, complete with universal health care, free education and a lot other Tea Potty [sic] nightmares.

(h/t Ron Anderson)

Which is an interesting reference, because, as Emily Ekins at Reason.com documents, the Tea Party grew out of opposition to the bailout:

Republican members of Congress faced vehement opposition from grassroots conservatives and libertarians opposed to providing taxpayer money to private businesses. And many of these angry grassroots grew into the eventual tea party movement.

So what did happen in Iceland?  Maurice:

When Iceland’s three major banks collapsed, it resulted in defaults totaling $114 billion in a country with agross domestic product (GDP) of only $19 billion. In October, 2008 the parliament passed emergency legislation to take over the domestic operations of the major banks and established new banks to handle them. They did not, however, take over any of the foreign assets or obligations. Those stayed with the original banks, right into bankruptcy.

They then brought charges against several banking executives for fraud and market manipulation, resulting in sentences ranging from four to five and a half years. As the special prosecutor said,

Why should we have a part of our society that is not being policed or without responsibility?

I suppose I’m a little confused as to the difference between takeover and bailout – the institution continues, if with a different name and face.  On the other hand, I don’t advocate their destruction, as the impact on society would be incredibly negative.

Eventually, one could say the Icelandic approach was a balance between saving society pain and punishing criminal failure, while the American approach also preserved society, while paying off the bankers, the class that funded the politicians.

We recently had the opportunity to view the Swedish classic THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), Ingmar Bergman’s meditation on death.  A large part of the popularity of movies is simply the novelty effect, the exploration of a new topic, or an old topic in a new way. Often, this is how classics are born, and is also, in an entirely different way, why some books and movies (OK, stories in general) have outsized effects on us. To elucidate, I have occasionally found something I experienced as highly stimulating the first time is dull or, more embarrassing, well, embarrassing the second time (Heinlein’s I WILL FEAR NO EVIL falls into this category).  The particular story gains classic status because of newness, not because of deepness; and so one might suspect this is true of THE SEVENTH SEAL.

So, as no longer a carrot freshly dragged from the ground, what is still interesting about THE SEVENTH SEAL?  As a helpful reminder, a Swedish Crusader returning home washes up, with his squire, on a beach near his home, only to meet with Death.  He challenges Death to a chess match, and then goes on his way, occasionally playing a few more moves as he traverses plague-ridden Sweden, searching for his wife, married 10 years ago and not seen since.

Cinematography

Is marvelous.  It’s a reminder, for those mesmerized by color, that monochromatics in the hands of a master can be profoundly striking, emphasizing important details and setting scenes in unforgettable ways.  30 seconds into this film, my Arts Editor muttered, “Wow, this is beautifully done!”  As she’s highly visually oriented, I knew she meant the cinematography.

Characters

Every character permitted to speak has a story to tell; from Death and the Knight, worn out from his crusading, to the acting troupe they meet on the road, all have something to say, even if not enunciated, as their inner urges, from abstract worries about God, to avarice, fear or lust, force them to their actions.  Too many stories are filled with faceless, prolix spear-carriers; here, the spear-carriers are present but are essential landscape, admirable for their appearance and their silence.

The Carts

I actually only mention the Carts, used to haul the Witch to her fiery doom and by the Acting troupe for transportation and housing, because they looked brutally painful to use on those rutted roads; an element of realism in a work beset with realism but seasoned with allegory.  For the careful viewer, the casual brutality of travel in them brings to mind questions of convenience vs environmentalism: could we, if we had to, go back to using horses for travel?  …But I digress.

Death

The personification of Death is not unique to this story, but it remains an unusual element. As a character, he (a pronoun I find preferable to ‘it’) remains within the bounds one might imagine such an entity should inhabit, while still summoning our interest and wonder.  Yes, he harvests the living for his dance, but to what purpose would he agree to a game of chess?  At the end of the movie, we wonder whether he has ever lost; for he has, in order to gain an advantage, mislead the Knight into revealing his strategy.

Is this a metaphor of the inevitability of our own mortality?  May we delay our termination through various human devices, but never abrogate it?  While my interpretation may be easy and even obvious, the questions behind them remain those that most of us will eventually confront.  Death’s willingness to play chess also lets him discuss some philosophy with the Knight, illuminating one man’s inner quest and preparation for the inevitable, and that is of interest to the serious audience no matter what the era or their maturity.

Incoherency / The Death of Skat

We speak here of a story, an ordered set of actions and reactions, or so the manuals on story-telling would have us believe.  Yet in this movie the plague is moving through the countryside.  Death, for all that it is personified, is neither an active nor reactive force, even if he consents to the proffered game of chess.  Even as a gender pronoun, he simply is.  Such is the plague, a mindless random force that eliminates people.

This is what happens to Skat, the satyric actor.  One might say that Death takes a bit of vengeance on him, for in order to escape the fury of a cuckolded blacksmith, Skat fakes his own suicide.  Upon his successful escape, he climbs a tree to avoid wolves and ghosts, and at this point Death appears and, despite the semi-comic entreaties of the actor, proceeds to fell the tree, thus destroying the actor.

But Death evinces no grievance over Skat’s deception; Death’s reactions to the actor’s entreaties merely indicate this is a task for Death to undertake, and if he takes some pleasure in it, it is irrelevant to the finality of the act.  Skat will now dance at Death’s direction.  And this lack of vengeful attitude leads to this conclusion: It’s a random act.

An action without inner motivation.  Not a reaction to another’s.

At this juncture, I thank my friend Ward Rubrecht for directing me to a fascinating article by Galen Strawson on the nature of personal narratives, in which she argues,

‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ And, for good measure, another American philosopher, Daniel Dennett: ‘we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’

So say the narrativists. We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy. It’s standardly linked with the idea that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.

I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.

At length, Strawson suggests that some people have strong senses of a personal, coherent story, while other folks are more witnesses to an incoherent Universe – or self.

Similarly, the reaction to the plague will depend on one’s sense of how much the Universe is a story, or a random set of actions in which we attempt to act, senselessly, in some coherent fashion.

Epitomizing this agony, near the end the Knight questions the Witch, a teenage girl named Tyan condemned to be burned for carnal knowledge of the Devil.  As to whether she had actually had contact with the Devil, we are left to decide. From here:

TYAN: But he is with me everywhere. I only have to stretch out my hand and I can feel his hand. He  is with me now too. The fire won’t hurt me. He will protect me from everything evil.

KNIGHT: Has he told you this?

TYAN: I know it.

KNIGHT: Has he said it? [Said forcefully]

TYAN: [Unaffected by the Knight’s forcefulness] I know it, I know it. You must see him somewhere, you must. The priests had no difficulty seeing him, nor did the soldiers. They are so afraid of him that they don’t even dare touch me.

The Knight’s pursuit of the question of God is interchangeable with the question of story: are we part of a greater story, or is our consciousness an evolutionary experiment in the ongoing quest for survival, and our perception of a story – as strong or weak as it may be – a mere illusion in a random Universe devoid of meaning and purpose?

For the viewer for whom their religious persuasion has become part of the bedrock of their lives, questions of these erupt, if ever, with great rarity but with debilitating force, fracturing lives long spent in certain assumptions.  But for those of us who find our religious assumptions more frail, questioned, or even outright false, the subject of meaning and purpose can be devilish if we have failed to find the inner meanings as instructed by the atheists and agnostics of the age.  These eternal questions will attract generations of audiences.  That’s what ultimately makes this such a classic film.

This review contains contributions from my wife and Arts Editor, Deb White.

Congress and select parts of the USA are not the only interested listeners to the SOTU speech.  So is the Kingdom of Jordan, as AL Monitor‘s Aaron Magid reports:

Addressing members of Congress that evening, Obama emphasized, “As we focus on destroying [IS], over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands.” The American leader’s assertion that such dire warnings about IS are misguided directly contradict one of [King of Jordan] Abdullah’s main talking points when traveling overseas.

Over and over — whether at the United Nations General Assembly podium, during an interview with PBS’ Charlie Rose or even in Kosovo — the Jordanian monarch has declared that the battle against IS is “a third world war, and I believe we must respond with equal intensity.” …

Obama’s minimizing of the IS campaign speaks to a fundamental divergence with Abdullah and has led many leading thinkers in Amman to question America’s determination and willingness to, in the president’s own words, “degrade and ultimately destroy [IS].” If the world’s strongest and most advanced military cannot defeat a far inferior and less organized group, what are Obama’s true intentions?

Which speaks to different viewpoints: for the United States, IS is a danger when abroad, and a danger to allies – but for the United States mainland, terror attacks, no matter how horrifying, are not a real threat.

But, for Jordan, they are an existential threat, particularly as IS attempts to don the mantle of fundamentalist Islam, declaring all other sects to be heretic.  They exhibit recruiting success, millitary success, they put into place new governmental systems (lost my reference there, but I know I’ve written about that) … Abdullah has good reason for being quite nervous.

In addition to the battle against IS, nearly five years of fighting in Syria have dramatically impacted next-door Jordan. Jordan has absorbed over 630,000 Syrian refugees, according to the United Nations (one diplomat estimates that Syrians represent about 20% of Jordan’s population), and Abdullah has repeatedly called for decisive action to end the conflict. Yet, in Obama’s brief mentioning of the bloody crisis that has killed some 250,000 people, the US president appeared satisfied with US policy. Obama cites Syria as an example of the “smarter approach, a patient and disciplined strategy that uses every element of our national power” by partnering with local forces — despite the fact that the conflict’s violence has only been spreading.

This might be more serious, yet it’s hard to say what else can be done in Syria in view of our already extensive activities, as this DOD report makes clear:

As of Dec. 15, 2015, the total cost of operations related to ISIL since kinetic operations started on Aug. 8, 2014, is $5.53 billion and the average daily cost is $11 million for 495 days of operations. A further breakdown of cost associated with the operations is here.

In the end, a speech must have a focus, and Obama chose to focus on the United States – not the MidEast.  No doubt, Jordan, the recipient of a multitude of refugees from Palestine (border on the west) and now Syria (border on the north), has good reason to be frustrated.  But this speech was not the place to look for succor.

The Ultra-Orthodox of Israel are a close-knit community which values a good wedding, but often doesn’t appear to be able to afford it.  How do they achieve a good wedding?  AL Monitor’s Mordechai Goldman explains:

In most basic terms, there are two components to how the ultra-Orthodox manage to marry off their children: a system of interest-free loans and restrained consumption (especially compared with the broader society). …

One type of charitable institution actually lends money. Dozens of such banks operate in the ultra-Orthodox community, lending sums large and small, at 0% interest and without commissions or other costs, to anyone who asks. Smaller loan societies deal with amounts up to $1,000, while the larger ones might lend as much as $15,000 to individuals. Charitable wealthy individuals provide the funding for these institutions, hoping to help individuals in need.

Less-familiar charitable institutions for personal savings operate alongside the free-loan societies. When the time comes for depositors to withdraw their money, they also have an opportunity to obtain a loan under extremely favorable terms. For example, the main savings society in the ultra-Orthodox town of Beitar Illit allows families to open a savings account for each child when the baby is born. The monthly deposit is limited to about $30 per child. Twenty years later, when the “child” is ready to marry, the accumulated sum ($7,200) is returned, and the depositor is eligible for a loan double the accumulated amount, at 0% interest and paid back in 80 to 160 monthly installments.

So this informal banking system works to ensure the cohesiveness of the culture – not just make money.  In fact,

The main loan society in Beitar Illit explained that deposits are limited to just $30 per month for fear that if people saved more, they would have more money to withdraw, and the weddings they arranged would become too extravagant. A source at the society who requested anonymity told Al-Monitor, “We reached the conclusion that 120,000 shekels — savings of 40,000 shekels and an 80,000-shekel loan — is a reasonable amount for marrying off a child, including the cost of the wedding and dowry. If we were to allow people to deposit more, they would only waste more. This would be detrimental to our guiding principles of saving money and avoiding unchecked consumption.”

Good?  Bad?  That judgment will pivot on your view of unbridled individualism, which I’ve certainly explored over the years, but have come to distrust bit by bit as the costs – especially those unloaded on the environment, which can neither fight back nor send a bill – become more apparent.  But it’s fascinating to see how various segments of society, as focused by a religious order, pull together to ensure certain customs remain active and vital.

NPR broadcast a story this morning concerning the fairness of forcing non public union members to pay some share of union fees to unions in their workplaces:

It’s the showdown at the Supreme Court Corral on Monday for public employee unions and their opponents.

Union opponents are seeking to reverse a 1977 Supreme Court decision that allows public employee unions to collect so-called “fair share fees.”

Twenty-three states authorize collecting these fees from those who don’t join the union but benefit from a contract that covers them.

The decision later this year will have profound consequences not just for the California teachers in Monday’s case, but for police, firefighters, health care workers and other government workers across the country.

And I thought to myself,

Fine, if you have some objection to the union which you think is fundamental to your very being, then let’s find a way to accommodate you which is fair to all sides.

Since you object to paying a fair share for the work of the union, we’ll eliminate that requirement.

And since the union objects to representing you for free, we’ll eliminate that requirement.

My suggested resolution is that your salary, benefits, and workplace conditions will be based on the lowest offer from the employer.  So if the union negotiates a salary 15% over the lowest offer of the employer, then your salary will be … ah, you understand.

Or you can negotiate for yourself.

I think this is undeniably a very fair approach to the problem for those who think unions are un-American, and for those who simply don’t want to try to reform the union.

Further along in the NPR offering, I see this:

In the Supreme Court on Monday, lawyer Michael Carvin, representing the challengers, will tell the justices that what are technically called “agency fees” are unconstitutional.

“You’re forcing the employee to subsidize somebody else’s speech,” Carvin said. Negotiating a public employee union contract, he maintains, is different from negotiating one for workers in the private sector.

I disagree.  Just as companies lobby, quite often against the philosophical beliefs of their employers, without accusations of violating free speech rights, unions should as well.  And while I played with the notion of permitting the objectors to only pay the costs of the immediate contract negotiation, a good union’s activities should be constrained to those benefiting the union members; differentiation is a fool’s task.

That, of course, is an ideal union; but a good member should be reforming the bad union, not running away from it.

Mr. Carvin then moves along with an emotionally appealing, but basically, idiotic argument:

“When we’re talking about public unions,” he said, “everything they do is inherently a matter of public concern, because every time they get pension, health care and salary benefits, that comes out of the public fisc … so every dollar you spend on health care or salary is a dollar you can’t spend on roads or children.”

You bump up the taxes a trifle and pay the folks educating your kids without stealing from the other chores.  And, oddly enough, paying the teachers better means your ARE spending more on children.

All that said, I’ve never been a union member and probably never will be.  Probably won’t join AARP, either.  Not a joiner at heart.  But, given the disgraceful behavior of employers in the private sector, I do not deny the need for unions, for their ability to bring the viewpoint of the line worker to the table, with regards to safety, salary, and many other matters.  Face it: the workplace is not an easy matter, and leaving it to management, with an overriding interest in profit (in most places), leaves the matter greatly unbalanced.  The smart places embrace unions, in my view.  Unions, for all their flaws, are a valuable addition to the workplace, private or public.

Jon White writes about the sociology of tipping in NewScientist (19 December 2015, paywall) and has a surprising fact:

There are also worrying similarities between tipping and bribery. In a comparison of 32 countries, Magnus Torfason at the University of Iceland found that countries where tipping was most prevalent also tended to have more corruption. “My intuition is that if you don’t have tipping, you don’t have a population that is experienced in informal exchange. That makes bribery difficult,” he says. His native Iceland is a case in point, with little tipping and a strong cultural bias for transactions to be very transparent.

But I’m not sure I’d equate “informal exchange” with bribery; they seem to be rather different.  (I’m also a trifle suspicious of such a small sample size, and wonder about cherry-picking – but that’s not really a worthy thought, hopefully the journal publishing these studies had good reviewers who looked at basic questions like these.)

From the same article comes this:

Tipping divides economists too. Why would you pay more for something when you don’t have to? That’s irrational. Even if a tip is designed to encourage good service, surely the most logical time for cash to change hands is up front. Paying extra after the event makes little sense, especially if you’re a one-time customer in a restaurant or a passenger in a cab whose driver you will probably never see again. What’s going on?

I’ve run across similar statements from and about economists, which has puzzled me a little bit.  In particular, I remember a reference to some classic experiment in which someone is given some money and told they can give some other person any amount that they wish, and keep the rest.   The expected behavior is to give the minimum and keep the rest, yet this does not typically occur; instead, an average of about 25% is given.  Or something like: I cannot remember exactly, nor have I been able to find my reference, or any other good, dependable description.  To me, it seems like these surprised economists (a visual out of FAMILY GUY) should consult with anthropologists – or evolutionary psychologists.  In any case, economists think we’re just calculating machines…

Wondering about world wide corruption?  Here’s Transparency International.  Juicy fact: Afghanistan, ranked 172nd/175, has a score of -1.620813904.  Perhaps a little rounding is in order.

… and not trying to get back into the swing of things just yet.

We’re binge watching HEROES REBORN, actually.

Robert Macfarlane, author of recent book Landmarks, remarks in NewScientist (19 December 2015) on the castoffs of the Anthropocene’s dominant species:

The [potash] mining is done by £3.2 million machines, which – at least to my zoomorphic eye – resemble Komodo dragons, low-slung and sharp-toothed. These machines are taken down the main shaft in six or seven sections, then assembled in bays a kilometre below the surface. Once complete, they take three days to trundle out to the production district, where they begin work.

Years later, when a machine has been exhausted by the demands of its labour, it’s just too expensive to bring it back to the surface, for this would mean suspending the transport of the profitable potash itself. So instead it is driven into a worked-out tunnel of rock salt, and abandoned.

Slowly, the pressure of depth squeezes the tunnel, and translucent salt flows around the machine, encasing it. Thus we lay down a future fossil of the Anthropocene: a machine-relic in a halite cocoon.

Great visual.

The Fiscal Times reports on efforts in the US Congress to defeat the market:

The combination of regulatory oversight and class-action litigation can keep companies in line. But a bill in Congress consisting of a little more than 100 words would not only prevent Kaplan from seeking justice but also cripple virtually all class-action lawsuits against corporations. It’s known as the “Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act,” but lawyers and advocates call it the “VW Bailout Bill.”

The bill, which will get a vote on the House floor in the first week of January, follows a series of steps by the judiciary to block the courthouse door on behalf of corporations. “There’s no question the Supreme Court has ben moving in that direction to limit access to courts,” said Joanne Doroshow, executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy. “But Congress has never done something like this, trying to step in and wipe out class-actions.”

It’s always interesting how the greatest beneficiaries of market economics – corporations – often hide from the darker results of the market when it doesn’t suit them.  The natural place to run is the closest thing to a manager, the government, and attempt to find some way to ameliorate their misstep.  Removing class action suits continues an approach we’ve already discussed once here, where small-print agreements with consumers contain unbreakable requirements that disputes will always be handled via mediation, rather than the judicial system.

But I have to wonder if the members of Congress involved in this action have considered the long term problems this action may provoke.  The most important will be the market backlash: the American public, accepting that we have something resembling a free market, may be enraged that a company competing in the free market will be artificially protected from its misdeeds by an Act of Congress (will the President go along?).  Remember when the Bush Administration decided to support the “too big to fail” banks?  A lot of folks were really angry.

Second, changing the rules of the game is never a good philosophy.  Even business leaders will not be happy, as predictability, so prized by managers, goes out the window when Congress thinks it should be protecting one company from its own mistakes.

Third, an entity which doesn’t suffer for its mistakes will never learn from them.  Any parent knows this, and it applies to corporate critters as much as it does to singletons.

Fourth, if VW doesn’t have to deliver honest products to customers, why should anyone else?  The free market system excels when good product is delivered at an honest price, and that’s not what we’re seeing here – and it may be discouraged if this legislation becomes law.

To take one more quote from the Fiscal Times article:

The simplicity of the VW Bailout Bill belies the chaos it would create. Proponents like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the bill’s leading lobbyist, say they merely want to get rid of “non-injury” class-action cases, based on potential damages from defective consumer products or corporate actions that have yet to result in harm. Lawyers for class-action litigants argue that defective products deserve compensation even if the consumer hasn’t yet been injured.

This ignores the concept of irremediable harm.  There are some actions that can result in injury or death that cannot truly be remediated (despite legal attachments of value to human life, it’s little more than a gesture to the needs of the survivors).  By prohibiting such actions before they occur, damages can actually be less; by prohibiting class action suits referencing such actions, such as those resulting in climate change, we put more people at risk of preventable injury, and in that way the government fails to fulfill one of its key functions.

Finally, it’s interesting how we seem to be moving back to mercantilism, the economic system preceding free markets, in the sense that certain firms prosper because of governmental protectionism, while others no doubt will never survive because they lack the favor of the government.

Sometimes, in order to preserve something, we have to destroy it – a phrase with a delightful double meaning in this case.

But it’s really important that the US government dispense its favor in the commercial world as it does in the religious world – that is, not at all.

If California continues to dry out, inhabitants may face more occurrences of valley fever reports NewScientist (19/26 December 2015):

The Coccidioides fungus lives in the desert soil of the Southwest US and Mexico, but on dry, windy days it can get kicked up into the air. Inhaling a single spore can cause pneumonia – or worse. A drone designed at the University of California, Merced, aims to be a nose in the sky, searching for the airborne fungus to warn people when levels are high.

The fungus infects an estimated 150,000 people a year, causing a flu-like condition called valley fever. If properly diagnosed, valley fever can be treated with antifungal drugs, but little is known about how the spores spread through the environment, or how to stop this happening. The goal of the Merced project is to find out. The team wants to test for spores in flight, mapping their flow and potentially warning communities to stay indoors or wear masks on the most dangerous days.

Their initial approach is to use drones that can sample the air in real time.  The vision of warnings of high risk of catching pneumonia, depending on weather conditions, may be only the first as climate change moves our ecological niche in ways that make our adaptations less advantageous due to the release of more dangerous substances – both natural and unnatural.

In the same issue I was surprised to read that golden eagles will, when starving, kill adult reindeer by striking the large veins in their necks and waiting for them to bleed out.  Now I’m seeing other large creatures going after another large herd creature … humans ….

From NewScientist’s (12 December 2015, paywall) article on the research of Antarctica’s bedrock comes the word chemoautotrophic, referring to creatures (in this case bacteria) which leach energy from bedrock, so that they have neither a direct nor indirect dependence on energy from the sun.

Chemoautotrophic.  Remember it.  Use it.

Previous posts on this thread referred to identifying good human governments, but even elephant government appears to feature stability, as noted on Discover Magazine‘s D-brief blog:

Wittemyer and Goldenberg were particularly interested in how elephant social networks responded if a matriarch was killed. What happens when a matriarch’s wisdom and social skills suddenly vanish from a group? To see how elephants responded to dramatic changes, they combed through data collected from roughly 100 elephants during a 16-year period between 1998 and 2014 .

All four matriarchs that Wittemyer started watching nearly two decades ago were killed during that time period. In fact, just 30 percent of the elephants that were alive in 1998 were still alive in 2014, due to the impacts of poaching and a devastating drought. Surprisingly, the elephants’ social structures remained intact, and here’s why: After matriarchs were killed, their daughters stepped up to maintain the extended relationships their mothers had formed with other elephants.

Additionally, the daughters reached out to old acquaintances from their bond and clan groups to renew relationships and reconstruct their core and bond groups. Ultimately, the daughters reconfigured their social networks until they reflected the structure that was in place prior to a matriarch’s death. In other words, younger female elephants kept their mothers’ legacies alive, and, more importantly, prevented social collapse.

I wonder if we could learn from their example sometimes.

A list of words deemed unworthy of use on the Internet, courtesy Lake Superior State University: Physicality, Vape, Manspreading …

As a measure of my disconnectedness, I had never heard of that last one; on the other hand, I am a guilty party in the one most often asked to be stricken, that being the use of So to start a sentence.

(h/t various friends 🙂

One sector so far undiscussed is the free press.  This sector has difficulties, for while everyone is guaranteed free speech, there are no guarantees of free access to the necessary machinery of a free press.  Thus, there is a required intrusion of the private sector, which is the constructor of things, into the sector of news.

First, we should give a purpose for the sector of the press, and that is the delivery of news to the citizenry for its use in the everyday and long term conduct of lives.  Necessarily, fees are charged, but because of the achievement of scale in the collection and dispersal of the news, the prices are rarely onerous; audiences of specialized publications may find their pocketbooks taxed, but for the general consumer, the price of information is almost free in this age.

But the achievement of scale comes via the use of things, prosaic and specialized: vehicles, printing presses, journalistic skills, the Internet.  These are necessary and thus we cannot preclude the intrusion of the private sector into the free press sector.

The vigor of the free press can be said to correlate with the perception of veracity, and can apply to various players within the sector as well as the whole.  Consider the interests of the consumer: false information used as input for decision-making processes will, more often than not, lead to suboptimal solutions.  This dry, academic phrase can imply actions like driving off cliffs, losing retirement accounts to shysters, and even worse results.  Don’t blow it off: false information is a negative survival strategy.  Therefore, if the free press – or some segment of it – is providing false information on a systematic basis, then public trust in that institution will weaken, and that impacts both the organization and the sector¹.  The currency of the free press sector is the trust the public places in it, and nothing else.

The private sector does not necessarily hold veracity as a highest ideal, neither theoretically (all they want to do is produce and sell goods and services, and honesty is not necessary to make that sale to the consumer) nor in practice (consider the moral outrage of the denial of the tobacco-lung cancer connection by Big Tobacco): the goal is to make and trade things to others.  This is not the goal of the free press.   Thus, the private sector processes must be considered to be inappropriate until proven otherwise.

It’s worth explicating a little further: while pursuing private sector (or other sector) objectives in the free press sector isn’t necessarily impossible, using inappropriate processes such as disseminating false information will lead to short-term success but, as the consumers learn to distrust the compromised institutions, long-term weakness and even failure as consumers abandon the institution(s) in question.

Given the requirement of some private sector intrusion, how do we currently attempt to firewall that operationality to only positive uses in terms of the robustness of the free press sector?  In a phrase, journalistic ethics.  Wikipedia provides a useful summary:

While various existing codes have some differences, most share common elements including the principles of—truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability—as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public.

An explicit acknowledgement of the importance of previously noted requirements for the sector to flourish.  Through an implementation of these requirements, both on an individual level and through the concept of “editorial independence”, wherein the advertising section of the organization is asserted to have no influence over the news and editorial sections of the organization, the influence of private sector preferences is obviated and the attentive consumer of the free press’ offerings, that being information, can have a better hope of receiving information congruent with reality. Contrariwise, the breaching of this wall is the private sector leaching beyond prudency into the purview of the free press.

A marvelous example of this (h/t Steve Yelvington) is discussed in this Facebook post by Steve Majerus-Collins.  Steve, explaining why he is quitting his job, puts it best:

I work for a man, Michael Schroeder, who in 2009 bought the small daily that has employed me for two decades at a time when the future of The Bristol Press looked dim. He came in promising to shatter old ways and to help push the financially troubled paper to new heights. As is so frequently the case with newspaper publishers, his rhetoric didn’t mean much. By 2011, my wife – a superb fellow reporter who’d been at my side the whole time – quit in disgust after Mr. Schroeder cut a deal with a major advertiser, the local hospital, to keep a damaging news story under wraps. Because she could not let the community know the local hospital had fired all of its emergency room physicians, my wife, Jackie Majerus, handed in her resignation. It means very little to be a reporter if you cannot report the news. I stayed on, though, continuing to write about government and politics, because we could not get by without any paycheck. …

I have watched in recent days as Mr. Schroeder has emerged as a spokesman for a billionaire with a penchant for politics who secretly purchased a Las Vegas newspaper and is already moving to gut it. I have learned with horror that my boss shoveled a story into my newspaper – a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage about the court system – and then stuck his own fake byline on it. I admit I never saw the piece until recently, but when I did, I knew it had Mr. Schroeder’s fingerprints all over it. Yet when enterprising reporters asked my boss about it, he claimed to know nothing or told them he had no comment. Yesterday, they blew the lid off this idiocy completely, proving that Mr. Schroeder lied, that he submitted a plagiarized story, bypassed what editing exists and basically used the pages of my newspaper, secretly, to further the political agenda of his master out in Las Vegas. In sum, the owner of my paper is guilty of journalistic misconduct of epic proportions.

There is no excusing this behavior. A newspaper editor cannot be allowed to stamp on the most basic rules of journalism and pay no price. He should be shunned by my colleagues, cut off by professional organizations and told to pound sand by anyone working for him who has integrity.

So I quit.

Note that his boss probably thinks he did nothing wrong.  Unfortunately, his goal is not consonant with the free press sector goals.  He should not be permitted to own the newspaper, as he has violated, in gross fashion, the primary rule for a robust free press.  My hope is that the more robust institutions will proceed to take subscribers away until the paper which he bought goes under.  Steve’s salutation is admirable but incomplete:

Whatever happens, I am going to hold my head high and face the future with resolve. Journalism is nothing if we reporters falter and fade. We are doing something important and men such Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Adelson – no matter how much money they can toss around – cannot have their way with us.

I would suggest that an American society lacking a robust free press would be unstable and, ultimately, fail.

So that brings us to Bruce Bartlett (with a h/t to Sydney Sweitzer).  Mr. Bartlett is a conservative historian who worked for the Reagan and Bush I administrations in the area of economics.  His recent release of an article summarizing a collection of studies of Fox News is instructive not only for the information – but for the fact that, as a conservative, he has little use for Fox News.  This article gives a handy history and psychological warfare insight into how the angry conservative movement, fragmentary at the start, was co-opted by Fox News and some collaborators.  For example:

Limbaugh’s move was fortuitous. At the exact moment he launched his show, the AM band on the radio dial was essentially dying. Since the late 1960s, music programming and listeners had deserted AM radio in droves. The FM dial provided a better signal and could broadcast in stereo, which became increasingly important as musical styles changed. Unable to compete by broadcasting music, AM stations searched for alternative programming. Talk proved to be very viable. Soon there were talkers across the AM dial, many expressing a conservative viewpoint.

There are many reasons why conservative talk radio worked so well. One is that conservatives finally had a news source that fed their philosophy. Another is that conservatives viewed themselves as outsiders and were attracted not only to the philosophy of conservative talk radio, but its tone and articulation of outrage toward liberals that many listeners themselves had long felt.

But hard results?  Here’s one:

A follow-up study in 2010 questioned people about misperceptions related to domestic issues.

Again, Fox viewers were more likely to be misinformed and hold incorrect views than those primarily getting their information elsewhere. As the study found:

Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that:

• most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (8 points more likely)
• most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
• the economy is getting worse (26 points)
• most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
• the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
• their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
• the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
• when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
• and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

These effects increased incrementally with increasing levels of exposure and all were statistically significant. The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it – though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican.

There’s more, which I’ll forebear quoting as Mr. Bartlett’s paper deserves to be read in full by the interested reader.  I’ll simply note that Republican shock at losing the last two Presidential elections was widespread and should have led to hard questions being asked about the veracity of their sources of information.  Instead, reportedly questions were raised about the purity of the various candidates, and the GOP moved further right.

At this juncture, it’s fair to wonder: what are the goals of those in control of the Fox News organization?  Why, in a society which must, in the end, value honesty over ideology, is this organization permitted to indulge in a style of reporting which cripples its audience, while its allies work hard to ensure the audience never double checks the information and uses its critical faculties? Does it commit suicide purposefully?

More generally, the intrusion of private sector methodologies into the sector of the free press, which is a long running tension, is a matter for constant monitoring and management.  It’s quite one thing for manufacturers of printing presses to compete to build cheaper, better presses; it’s quite another for the more devious strategies of the private sector to be employed in the free press sector to achieve goals peculiar to the private sector – or even the political sector.

¹ The use of the financial position of a free press organization as a measure of its health is an intellectual error in that this would be the use of a private sector operationality to evaluate a free press organization (or the whole sector).  William Randolph Hearst may have been a very rich man, but his publications are notorious, rather than famous, and are worthy of study only for his pioneering efforts in manipulation of public opinion – not for his honorable intentions.

Rachel E. Gross at Slate references a Science Magazine article discussing how legislative bills attacking the teaching of evolution have, ummm, evolved:

But how did creationists think of such a perfect way to frame their anti-science agenda? You might think that such a bill came into this world fully formed, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But actually, it had a predecessor. An ancestor, you might even call it.

In what is almost a too-clever illustration of how evolution works, a scientist at Australian National University has created a chart to show us the evolution of anti-evolution bills. The study was published last week in Science, on the 10th anniversary of the historic Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which struck down the teaching of intelligent design, an attempt to mask creationism with pseudo-scientific language. Evolutionary biologist Nick Matzke revealed how these bills have evolved over time to avoid potential predators such as the pesky Constitution and public outcry.

However, the fact that it passed a state legislature (two, actually, the other being Tennessee) while explicitly denying that it violates the Constitution does not mean it’ll not fall victim to the Great White of the political landscape, SCOTUS.

It might, however, be better classed as a transitional evolutionary form.

Usufruct: “the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.”

I ran across its use here, as in

Another problem is that the people of South Sinai are unable to own land in Sinai and are only allowed to have usufruct rights.

Louis Friedman, executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society, has a new book out and gives Discover Magazine‘s The Crux blog an interview in support of it, where he suggests Mars is the outer limit for the next 10,000 years:

[Discover]: Even so, do you think that will be enough for everybody? Wouldn’t some daredevil take a human mission to points beyond at some point, just to show that they could do it? Is it so unrealistic to think that China, India, Brazil, Russia, the United States, the United Nations, or for that matter a government that has yet to exist on Mars, could find itself in a new space race where the goal is to get people — live people — where no one has gone before, for that prestige factor?

Wanting to do these things just seems to be part of human nature, we always produce people who want to visit new places, even if there’s no logical reason, don’t you agree? Do you think artificial intelligence and other technologies will change something about us, so that nobody will ever take a distant, dangerous space voyage that has no practical value?

[Friedman]: You have raised several questions here. You are right about the possibility that if we can do something, someone might just want to. We have all kinds of extreme sports here on Earth. I don’t rule out some daredevils or tourist extremists from our Earth-Mars home trying a daring mission to the asteroid belt or Ganymede. But it won’t be very relevant or even as much a part of our Society as those extreme trips to Mt. Everest.

Somebody jumped out of a balloon from the edge of space a year or so again, interesting, but not relevant to human development. Humans will already feel present on Ganymede (and lots of other places) and the development of human life support to engage in those extreme efforts will be expensive and pointless – if even possible…I think NASA has it right now. Their Journey to Mars puts into context why we have human spaceflight. In my opinion, there is no other purpose to human spaceflight.

In his answer he’s referencing a previous answer where he suggests advanced telepresence will replace actual human presence beyond Mars.  What caught my attention was his suggestion there’s only a single purpose to spaceflight.  Surely this contradicts all of human history in which a multitude of purposes coincide into single – if composite – actions. He’s not suggesting there’s a physical barrier that cannot be overcome, but almost a bureaucratic decision not to go.

My suspicion is that commercial interests will find use for telepresence and limited artificial intelligence¹ in such exploration, but there will be various limits imposed by simple physical requirements², and that eventually those folks not interested in adapting to (or terraforming) Mars will make a go of it – for their reasons.

Not for Louis’.

¹By “limited artificial intelligence” I mean an artificial intelligence lacking a survival drive, as I see a mission of this sort probably not returning – and you can’t send something with a survival drive on a suicide mission.  Yet, without the survival drive, there is a lack of motivation to solve problems….

²I exclude the breaking of the laws of physics.   Instantaneous communications would mean rethinking all the current concepts.

Saw PEANUTS today.  Voices & artwork were spot-on, wherein the latter was new but, I thought, very appropriate.  There were many references to the classic Peanuts tropes, perhaps too many, Snoopy was marvelous and a great way to cut the tension.  In the end, the story was slightly un-Peanuts, but fit well within the scope of a story that teaches good behavior of Western tradition, so it didn’t make me as uncomfortable as it did my Arts Editor.

I enjoyed it!

A couple of nights ago we enjoyed a movie that rather brought home the timelessness of the conundrums of crime and redemption: KISS OF DEATH (1947), with Victor Mature and Richard Widmark.  Mature plays Bianco, a man with a criminal past, a wife, and children to support.  Unable to find a job, he returns to his roots and knocks over a jewelry store; the silent alarm is rung and, as the store is on an upper floor of a skyscraper, Bianco (but not his assistants) is caught and convicted.

Initially, he refuses to give up the names of the other criminals, but a few months later, word comes that his wife, despondent over finances, has committed suicide, and the children are consigned to an orphanage.  All this despite the promises of an elder in the criminal hierarchy, and it dawns on Bianco that loyalty to the criminal subculture has brought him heartbreak, his dreams to naught.

Betrayal becomes the name of the game, as Bianco gives evidence that Tommy Udo (Widmark) is involved in a murder, as well as a babysitter who sees Bianco as the man of her dreams (and now it occurs to me that maybe she knocked off the wife!) and marries him.  Out on parole, his children retrieved and a home bought, Bianco must now testify against Udo to make sure he goes away forever.

Juries can be such dicks.

Udo is completely psycho, and Widmark makes it believable, as the writers give him the task of pushing an old woman in a wheelchair (a little gem herself, evidencing a bit of humor in what could have been a colorless role) down a flight of stairs.  He feeds off that initial bit of insanity to evidence narcissism and arrogance certain to color the memories of viewers.

However, I find it hard to agree with the categorization of this movie as noir, because it’s usually such a personal thing; in this movie, the noir may be considered to refer to the situation of ex-cons in general, rather than the poor decisions of Bianco.  In noir, no angel descends to save the hero from their bad decisions, but rather they die in their cars, maybe in the midst of evil, perhaps even as they grasp after the good (as in RIFIFI).

But if you enjoy the old movies, this is certainly worth a gander.  The dialogue doesn’t dance like that in the THE THIN MAN, or have the charisma of THE CRIME DOCTOR series, but the nitty-gritty may be more important than those two facets – the grind of the everyday life for a convict trying to make good.