Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Further commentary on this thread, which apparently spills salt on a raw nerve:

Hue, I agree with all of your remarks at the bottom of your first blog post. Proprietary software my ass. How hard is it to add up numbers and do a little cross checking? Nothing proprietary in that, and as open source software has shown for millions of other applications, it’s more than up to the task of just about anything. But your point about the need for speed is best — we don’t even need computers to do voting. There is no hurry. We could safely take 3 months every election to tally the votes. There’s no doubt in my mind that the system is corrupt; this news only makes it more concrete and widespread.

I couldn’t agree more.  Indeed, a three month wait to discover if you’re getting that new job could even kill off a few of the less worthy applicants.  I can’t help but wonder if TV dramas could be built around the idea….

NewScientist (15 August 2015, paywall) publishes one of the most mystifying popular science articles I’ve ever read.  Outside of string theory, of course.  This is on the subject of consciousness, and it’s worth mentioning the title and leader:

Consciousness evolved for the greater good, not just the self

So why did this powerful sense of conscious awareness that we feel on waking evolve? What purpose does it serve?

Wait a moment.  You just told us “… hence conscious awareness has no specific or generic cognitive function.”!

Although our conscious experience feels personal and intimately real to us, we suggest that it is a product of evolution that provides a survival advantage for the wider social group, rather than directly for the individual. We think that consciousness emerged alongside other developments in brain processing that conferred a powerful social evolutionary benefit of communicating our internal thoughts to others.

Which gives the individual a better opportunity to reproduce and carry on the species.

This all seems to be motivated by a certain set of experimental observations:

… measurements of brain activity reveal that muscles and brain areas prepare for an action, such as a reaching out for an object, before we are even aware of our intention to make that movement. As noted by the psychologist Jeffrey Grey and others, consciousness simply occurs too late to affect the outcomes of the mental processes apparently linked to it.

Which does have its fascinating implications, once you’re assured of the validity of the data, which is always primary in science (and way outside of my competency to consider, so I’m willing to stipulate it).  I’m considering the action of a parry in fencing: the attack of your opponent is coming so fast that sometimes I find myself lodging a command to what I conceptualize as the mental machinery responsible for the response to the attack: direct parry vs indirect parry, for example.  It’s rarely even perceptibly a conscious response, just that an attack in this line gives me several choices and this will be the choice; then I depend on reflexes to handle it.

30000 years ago reflexes would have been far more important, and consciousness may not have been fast enough.  That we’re measuring neurological responses anticipating conscious awareness is very interesting, but I’m not sure I see the explanation, as roughly described as it is to a layman, as convincing; there are others, as I darkly sense.  Unless all actions show an anticipatory neurological response!  In that case, it’s a different ballgame….

They finish up with this:

As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted, “consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings…consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature.” Consciousness therefore provides a powerful evolutionary advantage by allowing shared communication, and extending each individual’s understanding of the world.

I have not read Nietzsche, so the context of his remark eludes me.  Any philosophers care to elucidate his remark?

A reader reminds me of recent historical trends WRT voting:

This is how I know we are doomed.

They’ve been saying election results haven’t been matching exit polls for a few election cycles now.

Also, that whole “Republicans are less likely to answer pollsters” thing has always sounded like a whitewash excuse to me. That’s a sweeping statement about all GOP voters? As if they get a fax in the AM of election day instructing them not to talk to phone pollsters and exit pollsters? Nothing about that make sense. It seems like the number of people who don’t like to talk to pollsters would be evenly distributed among all parties in large enough sample groups.

The other “reason” thrown around for landslide victories in precincts where polling results didn’t predict that was the famous “They put some gay rights initiatives on the ballots, and we know those GOP people are going to turn out in droves just to vote against those.” While everyone was nodding yes to these reasons as making sense, like bobblhead dolls, red flags were going off for me.

Premier Election Solutions, previously Diebold Election Systems, has had controversy swirling about it.  Wikipedia helps us out here:

In August 2003, Walden O’Dell, then the chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends in the Republican Party, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.^[13]

In December 2005, O’Dell resigned following reports that the company was facing securities fraud litigation surrounding charges of insider trading.^[14]

And here, which is a discussion of various (and many!  they sound like a pack of amateurs) security flaws.  Or, perhaps, a machine designed to be easily compromised.  Mother Jones covered Diebold back in 2004:

As I have been working on this project, I noticed some duplication of the BNFs, but with different requirements, and this bothered me.  I felt this was required by production 80,

EncodingDecl   ::=    S ‘encoding’ Eq (‘”‘ EncName ‘”‘ | “‘” EncName “‘” )

The key in this production is that EncName names the code set for the input, implying that you may have to change your transcoding mechanism.  It seemed the most forthright approach was to use the parser to pull off the encoding name, so I duplicated the relevant BNFs and used a separately scoped recursive-descent parser to properly recover the encoding name.

Then I ran into production 28:

doctypedecl   ::=   ‘<! DOCTYPE’ S Name (S ExternalID)? S? (‘[‘ intSubset ‘]’ S?)? ‘>’

which looks rather harmless, until you read this:

Well-formedness constraint: External Subset

The external subset, if any, MUST match the production for extSubset.

I looked at that, and then traced out extSubset a little bit.  I could see it would require a different return value than the general case.  Here’s extSubset:

extSubset   ::=    TextDecl? extSubsetDecl

and if you trace it out, you see a lot of use of other, common, productions.  Common implies I’d have to duplicate them for the new functionality.  That irritated me – inelegant AND (to quote my colleague Chris Johnson) “copies aren’t”.

So I have worked out a refactoring.  The single package, sax, is now two: sax and sax_foundation. sax_foundation will be a generic package, which is to say, it is parameterized, in this case, along with the handlers [noted below], it also accepts a specification of a return value.  sax now manages the parsing effort.  sax_foundation contains the entire BNF and provides parsing entry points for the encoding, the general case (which I think could be conflated with the encoding case), and (anticipated) extSubset.  When sax needs an encoding from the document, it uses an instantiation of sax_foundation which returns a String containing the name; when it needs to execute extSubset, it’ll use an instantiation of sax_foundation that returns the Dtd structure; and in the general case, the return value will be a structure containing the handlers (content, lexical, error, and entity – so far), which is the structure sax itself will return to callers.

I am currently running regression tests to make sure the new structure works at least as well as the old structure.  One batch of problems resulted from splitting sax in two – exceptions went from sax to the inner, hidden sax_foundation, which is not appropriate, so I split the exceptions into an independent package that everyone can access.  The other batch of problems has come from inadvertently losing behavior that was implemented by the now-eliminated duplicate BNFs for EncodingDecl; this has been only a couple.  Once these are cleaned up, regression should be clean.  Then I can implement the link to extSubset.  This will be done using a callback function.  sax will send the callback function, and when it’s called (by production 28) it will invoke a new sax_foundation customized for returning a new Dtd (since that’s what extSubset is all about, as I understand it) and process the extSubset of the new instantiation using a yet to be defined entry point.

The callback function is, essentially, a hack, but not a bad one, since it removed a great deal of duplicated code.
On my TODO list: find (or, reluctantly, construct) a set of XML pages which may be considered to be an official test suite for XML parsers, including expected responses for a SAX-style parser.  Share the knowledge if you happen to know of such a suite!

Also, finding a few huge XML pages will be necessary as I’m interested to see if an internal hack I constructed for scalability has also had a positive effect on performance.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a way to construct a baseline, so this won’t be a professional-grade assessment, but just a “gee-whiz, that went fast”, or not.  This may also require waiting for the release of a new version of Mythryl, as the current version seems to have a problem with handling file I/O in the manner I need.  (Or perhaps I just haven’t figured it out.)

Sadly, there are concerns for the future of Mythryl.  Earlier this year, the primary (and only) compiler developer, Cynbe ru Taren, was afflicted with colorectal cancer.  Today I received news that while the removal of the cancer went well, he now has lung cancer.  He continues to work on the project, but I do not believe he has any fellow developers, so if he goes down, the Mythryl project will probably die with him, which would be a shame.  It has some great potential, and brings into sharp relief the excessive dangers of C & C++; the possibility of using formal methods for verifying code, impossible (or extremely difficult) in other languages, is quite alluring.  If you think you’re a compiler hacker with some sharp skills, you might want to consider getting involved.  Cynbe has done the majority of the lifting (which is to say, translating an academic project into a production-grade compiler), but I’m sure it could still use a lot of work.

A Wichita State mathematician by the name of Beth Clarkson is asking for access to voting records in order to research anomalies noted in summary voting records in Kansas and across the nation.  From The Wichita Eagle:

Beth Clarkson, chief statistician for the university’s National Institute for Aviation Research, filed the open records lawsuit in Sedgwick County District Court as part of her personal quest to find the answer to an unexplained pattern that transcends elections and states. The lawsuit was amended Wednesday to name Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Sedgwick County Elections Commissioner Tabitha Lehman.

Clarkson, a certified quality engineer with a Ph.D. in statistics, said she has analyzed election returns in Kansas and elsewhere over several elections that indicate “a statistically significant” pattern where the percentage of Republican votes increase the larger the size of the precinct.

While it is well-recognized that smaller, rural precincts tend to lean Republican, statisticians have been unable to explain the consistent pattern favoring Republicans that trends upward as the number of votes cast in a precinct or other voting unit goes up. In primaries, the favored candidate appears to always be the Republican establishment candidate, above a tea party challenger. And the upward trend for Republicans occurs once a voting unit reaches roughly 500 votes.

Her request to Kansas for access to the requisite information has been blocked by the Secretary of State, and she is suing for access.

This is very interesting – an attempt to quash the Tea Party faction?  Even more interesting, given the puzzling ascendancy of Governor Walker in Wisconsin, is her final comment for the Eagle’s story:

Clarkson became more interested in the issue after reading a paper written by statisticians Francois Choquette and James Johnson in 2012 of the Republican primary results showing strong statistical evidence of election manipulation in Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Kentucky.

Clarkson said she couldn’t believe their findings, so she checked their math and found it was correct and checked their model selection and found it appropriate. Then she pulled additional data from other elections they hadn’t analyzed and found the same pattern.

Clarkson’s blog is here.  Her most recent blog post (disregarding the post saying she has no progress yet on her lawsuit) discusses possible real voting fraud involving voting machines.

My statistical analysis shows patterns indicative of vote manipulation in machines. The manipulation is relatively small, compared with the inherent variability of election results, but it is consistent. These results form a pattern that goes across the nation and back a number of election cycles.

Which pushes me to recall the inappropriateness of using computers for voting, a position I’ve quietly held since they were first introduced.  Here’s my points:

1. People are corruptible, and when they are corrupted, it’s additive.  You have to corrupt a lot of people to get a real effect in any but the smallest of elections.
2. Computers are multiplicative.  Unless you’re using a network of independent computers using varying styles of security and computation, the payback for a successful corruption – even if it’s harder than corrupting people – is so steep that it’s easily worth the extra effort.  This is not about quantity of votes, but patterns of corruption.  Humans are not that hard to catch, but computers … they require specialized mathematicians, a rare breed.
3. Computer software is not open for public inspection.  Proprietary!  I cannot imagine how anyone lets them get away with that.  This is PUBLIC business, not PRIVATE.
4. Speed of counting is not important.  The public may think it is – but it’s not.
5. There are plenty of public spirited citizens to do that sort of work.

(h/t Scout Finch @ The Daily Kos)

TIME has published an article about a group interview of a collection of Trump supporters.  If you’ve found that phenomenon mystifying then this is fascinating:

A flock of two dozen mad-as-hell supporters of Donald Trump agreed to assemble on Monday night in a political consultant’s office to explain their passion for the Republican frontrunner. Gathered in a corporate-looking room with the shades drawn, they railed against Washington politicians who hire consultants, and sang their admiration for the one presidential candidate who promises to go his own way. …

The Donald devotees sang a contrapuntal tune, simultaneously a dirge to national decline and an ode to Trump. They believed Washington politicians and the Republican party had repeatedly misled them, and that the country is going down the tubes. They looked for relief in Trump. …

“We know his goal is to make America great again,” a woman said. “It’s on his hat. And we see it every time it’s on TV. Everything that he’s doing, there’s no doubt why he’s doing it: it’s to make America great again.”

The focus group watched taped instances on a television of Trump’s apparent misogyny, political flip flops and awe-inspiring braggadocio. They watched the Donald say Rosie O’Donnell has a “fat, ugly face.” They saw that Trump once supported a single-payer health system, and they heard him say, “I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created.” But the group—which included 23 white people, 3 African-Americans and three Hispanics and consisted of a plurality of college-educated, financially comfortably Donald devotees—was undeterred.

Their belief that government has failed them is, perhaps, unsurprising.  I think this may be an unexpected downside of the subtlety of Obama.  He doesn’t always sing his own praises from the rooftops, and sometimes it’s even counterproductive to do so.  But still, being citizens they have to operate on their knowledge base, so if they don’t know something (and it’s a huge country, I don’t necessarily blame them for not knowing), it’s a problem.  As Steve Benen points out,

In reality, border security has reached unprecedented levels, but Trump backers believe the opposite. In reality, there’s ample evidence that America’s global standing is strong and getting stronger, but Trump backers believe the opposite. In reality, President Obama has run circles around Putin’s Russia, but Trump backers believe the opposite.

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

Unlike most criticisms of the Iran deal, Lawfare is worth reading through.  First comes Yishai Schwartz, who worries about a possibly poor precedent:

This debate is important, but it also misses the larger point. What happened in the IAEA negotiations with Iran was precedent setting. The IAEA demanded access to an Iranian site in order to resolve questions about weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran refused, and in large part, the IAEA acquiesced. A set of arrangements was developed–which may or may not be technically sound for each and every one of the IAEA’s purposes (for this, we must follow the debate among experts closely)–which precluded actual IAEA access to the site. …

But what of the long-term, precedential effects? Based on the Parchin agreement, we can already predict what will happen 5, 10, 20 years from now, when Iran once again chooses to explore or pursue weaponization. The IAEA will demand access to a sensitive Iranian site, and Iran will stonewall. And when the time comes to negotiate, Iran will insist that IAEA and international community has already acknowledged it doesn’t really have a right to demand full access to military sites. After all, look at Parchin! And this agreement, rather than Iran’s actual legal obligations under its safeguards agreement and additional protocol, will become the new baseline.

Iranian negotiators have a track record of pocketing what seem at the time like limited and isolated Western concessions, only to argue (successfully) that they are of much larger significance. (This is, for example, what happened when the IAEA accepted that Iran wasn’t really bound by the Additional Protocol or Modified Code 3.1) With Parchin, I worry that we have just handed them another.

In contrast, Cody Poplin criticizes what appears to be a reasonable Congressional response – legislation permitting the President to respond to Iranian transgressions forcefully:

Middle of the road Iranians might just as well see an AUMF as adding sour bellicosity to a deal ostensibly meant to avert conflict—if not also as evidence of bad faith. As for hardliners, a force authorization, however conditional, could hand politically useful cover to officials and clerics eager to cheat on Iran’s side of the deal.

The doubtful efficacy can be paired with this downside, too: A rainy day Iran authorization likely would be a tough nut to crack legislatively. Under Einhorn’s formulation, for example, the president would be required to present “evidence” that Iran had cheated, before any force authorization could kick in. But as previous debates have shown, it’s not obvious what counts as evidence and at what threshold Congress should be convinced. Given the predictable political wrangling, a conditional AUMF thus present a great risk: the worst of all possible outcomes for deterring an Iranian breakout would be one wherein an administration spent significant resources to get a preemptive authorization only to end up failing.

I leave these with no comment.  However, I also received this video in email today:

To which a very simple response is necessary:

We are, after all, the Great Satan.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog points to a new column out by GOP pundit Irving Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, suggesting that the GOP field really needs a surprise candidate:

Shouldn’t Republicans be open to doing what Democrats are now considering? That is: Welcoming into the race, even drafting into the race if need be, one or two new and potentially superior candidates? After all, if a new candidate or new candidates didn’t take off, the party would be no worse off, and someone from the current field would prevail. If the October surprise candidate caught fire, it would be all the better for the GOP–whether he ultimately prevailed or forced one of the existing candidates to up his game.

Who could such a mysterious dark horse be? Well, it’s not as if every well-qualified contender is already on the field. Mitch Daniels was probably the most successful Republican governor of recent times, with federal executive experience to boot. Paul Ryan is the intellectual leader of Republicans in the House of Representatives, with national campaign experience. The House also features young but tested leaders like Jim Jordan, Trey Gowdy and Mike Pompeo. There is the leading elected representative of the 9/11 generation who has also been a very impressive freshman senator, Tom Cotton. There could be a saner and sounder version of Trump—another businessman who hasn’t held electoral office. And there are distinguished conservative leaders from outside politics; Justice Samuel Alito and General (ret.) Jack Keane come to mind.

Particularly interesting is the suggestion of Justice Alito, and not only for the question of whether or not a sitting SCOTUS justice could also hold the Presidency, but also why would the GOP base be enamored of him?  Trump is leading the polls, but not because of any intellectual flare – he appeals to the xenophobe, he appeals to the voter who wants a dictatorial leader who’ll do this, that, and the other thing – no matter whether it falls within his responsibility.  Subtlety and nuance are not his forté, nor is relevant experience – despite Trump’s claims that it’s all about management.  Despite his education, he does not come off as an intellectual, but as someone with little impulse control, and a base nature.  He’s willing to point his finger of blame at anyone who’s not a member of the GOP base.

Does Justice Alito (Princeton, Yale Law School) really fall into this category?  Indeed, any of his suggestions?  Until he ventures into “another businessman” territory, which his quite vague, he’s mostly mentioning GOPers with domestic experience – just what the base doesn’t want.  He’s talking about people who might use their judgment to come to a conclusion unacceptable to the base.

But let’s take a step out into left field here.  When I’m wearing my software engineer hat, there”s a certain feeling you get when you’re working in a well-designed system.  It doesn’t just meet the specs, have good performance, and scale well, but every time you’re asked to add something to it, it’s easy – there’s no mad hacking, when you find you need an algorithm to do something, it’s there and easy to use, and the whole thing comes together with an ease and a feeling of rightness because certain principles were followed in the base design.  (Let’s not talk about those principles further as they’re not relevant and I couldn’t enumerate them if they were.)

Let’s pull this idea out of the constricted field of software engineering and into real life, of which politics is a pale reflection.  I suggest, with absolutely no embarrassment, that a leading principle of life and politics should be truth, and its ally, honesty.  The interesting application of these principles is the GOP judgment of President Obama, which, to this independent, appears to be deliberately and dishonestly wretched in its assessments.  In virtually all he has done, the current President has performed at the highest levels and adhered to our best traditions.  Certainly, we can nitpick – why didn’t he prosecute the previous Administration for war crimes, for example?  But in the main, he’s been excellent.

But the GOPer, unless his name is Colin Powell, is obligated to condemn as feeble, or incompetent, or any denigrative adjective of his choice, the work of Obama.  Thus are the orders from on-high.

So, how does the matter of good principles interplay with the sordid behavior of the GOPer?  Think about it: can the GOP candidate for anything deviate from the anti-Obama script?  This is team politics, and now we see the dark side of this phenomenon: you can’t deviate, you can’t dispute what’s gone before.  What do you do?

The Iran Deal is the same as sending the Jews to the ovens.

Medicare needs to be rubbed out because no one likes it.

Paul Ryan’s budget devoid of rational mathematics.

The ACA is resulting in wrack and ruin.

The GOP has to walk on the wild side, because any tick of rationality, of agreeing with political opponents on anything substantive, will get you branded a RINO.  Here’s the thing about pig-headed anti-intellectualism – you eventually discover that the dishonesty you’re indulging in forces you to either recant and get kicked out of this big national party where you have coveted influence – or you can go farther afield as your predictions fall afoul reality.  As Benen notes here, now they’re flirting with the madness of slavery.

All because they put party loyalty, party purity, ahead of simple truth and honesty.  The importance of good principles for life is paramount, folks.  The GOP is becoming an object lesson.  How many can learn from it?

Dave Goulson, a biologist and bumblebee specialist, writing in NewScientist (15 August 2015, paywall) reports on some preliminary results of an European Union (EU) moratorium on neonicotinoid pesticides in the UK and, to a lesser extent, across the EU:

Crops sown in spring 2014, mainly sunflower and maize, were the first not to have the pesticides applied. Across the EU, their yields were higher than the five-year average, in some regions more than 25 per cent higher. …

Debate in the UK has focused on oilseed rape. Here it is mainly autumn-sown, so the first neonicotinoid-free crop wasn’t in the ground until August 2014, and is being harvested now. … it was down 5 per cent overall.

The original European Commission decision is reported here; a BBC report on that decision in 2013 is here.  Goulson also notes how Big Ag participated in the debate over instituting the moratorium:

The UK was in the minority of countries voting against. Perhaps the government was swayed by glossy reports funded by the agrochemical industry, declaring that the ban would slash crop yields and cause huge job losses.

One such document states that if the moratorium went ahead, in five years the European Union could lose at least €17 billion, 50,000 jobs could go, and “more than a million people engaged in arable production… would certainly suffer”. …

Debate in the UK has focused on oilseed rape. Here it is mainly autumn-sown, so the first neonicotinoid-free crop wasn’t in the ground until August 2014, and is being harvested now. However, the UK’s National Farmers Union (NFU), which opposes the ban, pointed to Sweden and said that up to 70 per cent of spring-sown oilseed there had been wiped out by pests. As it turned out, it was down 5 per cent overall.

The NFU also highlighted claims that on some UK farms up to half of the autumn crop was being lost to flea beetles. Recent figures show that overall 3.5 per cent of the sown area was lost. But remember that some crops are lost every year, even with neonicotinoids.

So Big Ag may turn out to be guilty of hyperbole.  But is this the end of the story?  Rebecca Randall, a journalist at  The Genome Literacy Project reported in January of 2015:

Yet, as activists continue to campaign to get neonics banned, news from Europe, where a two-year moratorium went into effect last year, suggests that farmers are unable to control pests without them. Partly in desperation, they are replacing neonics with pesticides that are older, less effective and demonstrably more harmful to humans and social insects, and farm yields are dropping.

The European Commission banned the use of neonics despite the fact that the science community is sharply split as to whether neonics plays a significant role in bee deaths. The causes of CCD and subsequent winter-related problems have since remained a mystery—and a heated controversy. …

But there is no bee crisis, say most mainstream entomologists. Globally, beehive counts have increased by 45 percent in the last 50 years, according to a United Nations report. Neonics are widely used in Australia were there have been no mass bee deaths, and in Western Canada, where bees are thriving. Over the past past two winters, bee losses have moderated considerably throughout Europe and beehives have gone up steadily over the past two decades as the use of neonics has risen.

While many environmental activists, and some scientists, have coalesced around the belief that neonics as a likely culprit, most mainstream entomologists disagreed. May Berenbaum, the renowned University of Illinois entomologist and chairwoman of a major National Academy of Sciences study on the loss of pollinators, has said that she is “extremely dubious” that banning neonics, as many greens are demanding, would have any positive effect.

That article is from January, which may mean it’s been superseded by Goulson’s.  However, there are two issues here: first, is discontinuation of the use of neonicotinoids causing devastation of crops, and, second, are bee colonies recovering?  The second point remains not only unaddressed by Goulson, but may not need addressing in this way.

But The Guardian published this article on Goulson’s research:

A study on which the UK government bases its position that neonicotinoid pesticides do not threaten bees may actually be the first conclusive evidence that they do, according to a leading bee scientist.

Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at the University of Sussex, reanalysed a 2013 study on the effect of the world’s most heavily used pesticides on bumblebees by the UK’s Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera).

Fera’s scientists said that bee hives “remained viable and productive in the presence of the neonicotinoid pesticides under these field conditions”. Yet, Goulson said the experiment found that all hives where clothianidin, a common neonicotinoid, was present had reduced numbers of queen bees.

Goulson said: “The conclusions they come to seem to be completely contrary to their own results section.”

“They find that 100% of the time there is a negative relationship between how much pesticides were found in the nest and how well the nest performed, and they go on to conclude that the study shows that there isn’t a significant effect of pesticides on bee colonies. It doesn’t add up.”

The study was never published in a peer-reviewed journal and has been rejected by the EU’s safety authority. Yet the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) cites it on their website as a foundation for its support of the pesticides.

It’s extremely disturbing that the UK is basing a position on an important, scientifically-connected matter on a research paper that has not been published, despite time to do so, and appears to have anomalies – although the authors are not given room for rebuttal in this newspaper article.  However, The Guardian continues:

The lead author on the Fera report left the agency just months after its publication to work for Syngenta – a major producer of neonicotinoids. This lead to suggestions that the government was too close to the pesticide industry.

Gathering this data has its own collection of pitfalls, namely derogations (the partial revocation of a law).  EurActiv.com provides an interview from 2014 with Martin Dermine, a bee activist, on the problems of data gathering:

In 2013, the Commission banned some neonicotinoids because of their suspected harmful effect on bees. One year on, how is this ban working?

The partial ban on neonicotinoids and fipronil was a fantastic victory for the environment, even though we would have liked to see a full ban on these bee-harmful chemicals. From the information we have, the ban is properly applied by member states. Unfortunately, several member states, such as Finland, Romania, Germany, Latvia and Estonia have provided derogations to their farmers to keep using neonicotinoids on certain major crops. This annihilates the benefit of the ban for bees.

What kinds of derogations did the ban leave for the pesticide industry?

Member states provide 120 days derogations for forbidden pesticides on a regular basis, in response to a request from farmers, or the pesticides industry.

European pesticide regulation clearly states that derogations can be given where no alternative exist, but member states do not actually respect this principle. For instance, in 2014, Romania provided a derogation for the use of thiamethoxam on maize, whereas Italy has banned its use since 2008, and has shown that it did not reduce yields. Furthermore, non-toxic alternatives exist on the market.

Adjusting for changes in conditions must be quite difficult for the scientists.

Giving Dave Goulson the final word on a recent UK action from the NewScientist article:

In highlighting losses, the NFU [National Farmers Union] was attempting to garner support for an application to allow UK farmers to ignore the ban. This has now been approved for a limited part of southern England, despite a 400,000-signature petition opposing it. So why was it approved? Getting an answer is hard. The NFU’s case is being kept secret on the grounds that it is “commercially sensitive”.

That means we cannot see why environment secretary Liz Truss decided some farmers could again use chemicals that the European Food Safety Authority says “pose an unacceptable risk to bees”.

The Conservatives are currently in power in the UK, and while they bear scant resemblance to the United States’ GOP, this action does make them appear to be unduly influenced by Big Ag – and the farmers who may not properly value pollinators.  Not that we’d necessarily all die if the bumblebees became a non-factor, but food prices would certainly go up – and perhaps obesity would drop?  Or would we just eat more of the bad food?

Oh, and the title of Goulson’s article?  “Sowing Confusion”.  Yeah, I’m confused, too.

In “New York’s Original Seaport”, by Jason Urbanus (Archaeology, September/October 2015, offline only), we learn that the notorious Aaron Burr, murderer of Alexander Hamilton and former Vice President, founded the Manhattan Company, which was tasked with supplying clean water to lower New York City using a web of buried wooden water mains – hollowed out tree trunks.  In fact, they still run across these disused remnants of the original system today, encountered during repairs.

The Manhattan Company struggled with this task.  But they didn’t go under, as the real purpose of Burr’s company was to become a bank, a difficult proposition at the time due to monopolies.  As Wikipedia makes clear, Burr’s company used a loophole in its charter, granted by the State, that permitted it to use surplus funds for banking transactions.   Opportunistic maneuvers during epidemics permitted the Manhattan Company to survive until 1955.

When it merged with Chase National Bank.

And, today, it’s the earliest of the predecessor institutions for JP Morgan Chase & Co.

The story of Michigan State Representatives Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat, both claiming Republican / Tea Party status, has been making the rounds, generating some baffled condemnation, by which I mean the progressives who despise them seem puzzled.  Here’s an example from Steven Payne @ The Daily Kos plus his commenters, which includes both an explanation of the timeline of events (the two had a love affair, Courser concocted a tale of being caught in a homosexual love affair, for reasons unclear, tried to get an aide to leak it to the press, but the aide refused and the entire sordid mess came to light), and some of Courser’s subsequent explanation.

As of now, neither has resigned their elective post.  The political world, particularly their opponents, the progressive faction of the United States, has had little sympathy for them.  I think this is a mistake.

1. Countrymen.  For all that they espouse a political philosophy much at odds with the progressives, and appears to have a sizable population of folks espousing positions of an outré nature, they are fellow citizens.  Let us not forget the primary causation of nations is the basic urge to band together to survive an hostile world; it becomes a logical conclusion, then, that having sympathy for fellow citizens, for whom we’ve not generated a personal antipathy, is a necessity for building a successful society and nation.  Attempting to co-exist in mutual disgust is not a prescription for a prosperous and peaceful society.  Is such a pattern of behavior taught and practiced by Jesus?  Gandhi?  Then why should we indulge our baser natures in it?
2. Understanding your opponents.  On the other end of the spectrum, engaging in a struggle with another human being almost inevitably proceeds to a more favorable resolution to the conflict when you understand their many important facets.  These include motivations, history, educational slant, fears, ambitions, and the list goes on, as I make no claim to completeness.   The progressives’ understanding of the Tea Party may be boiled down to this sentence: They’re stupid.  This attitude has twin sins associated with it: demonization and ignorance.  For just a taste, keep in mind that Senator Ted Cruz, one of the seemingly most lunatic of the fringe, happens to hold a juris doctor degree from Harvard Law School – magna cum laude.

So it’s worth looking at Courser’s remarks, and to view them as sincere in trying to understand him.  Here are some of the things he wrote, all from Payne’s diary on The Daily Kos.

In my life sin had its root and it worked to undo so much and has yet to undo so much more; my life, my reputation, my relationship with my wife and children and my extended family; not to mention my relationships and reputation around the world. This sin in my life has been and will continue to reap its reward.

He clearly speaks in a religious context, mentioning how sin seems to control his life.  We can ask if he has problems with impulse control, is married to the right woman, is addicted to sex or novelty.  He acknowledges the mistakes of his ‘sinning’, and how they negatively affect him; it not only raises the question of why he indulged in this, but also to reflect on our own lives & mistakes over the years.

In every one of these experiences it has been an incredibly humbling to me.

Humbling is an interesting word, as it brings up images of submitting to a greater power, admissions of failure, and that sort of thing.  His discussions with fellow sinners may actually bind him into the community at a different level than us less humble types might experience.

After some discussion of how this affects his family and some sad commentary on his critics, he writes,

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no the evil I do not want to do-this I keep doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in that does it.

The should of life, if I may write in fragments.  Learning what one should do in the context of society, in order to survive and prosper, is perhaps one of the great driving forces of human existence.  For most citizens of the United States¹, some form of religion offers a source of should, and whether the source is engaged intelligently or literally, it colors the outlook of the adherent.  Given his religious outpouring, we can understand he looks to the Bible for guidance for a world to which he lacks an intuitive understanding.  That same Bible offers ambiguous guidance on other matters, but to him, as his guide, he tries to apply it.  It is not so important to understand the Biblical portion, but the desperation portion; he dare not dispute with his guide in any portion, for that questions all in a perilous world in which he needs guidance – even if he ignores it.  It would be interesting to hear if he puts the Bible first, above Justice.  I suspect so; but has he considered the question?  The unquestioning injustice of reserving marriage only for heterosexuals must be terrifying, once it is acknowledged.

And, finally, redemption.  A key force in both religion and American life.  It is, in fact, no surprise that he and his lover have chosen not to resign their posts.  The publicity concerning their personal failures has, in effect, immunized them from further leverage; their sin has connected them to their communities in new ways, while permitting their constituents to realize that, in their humiliation, they’re just like themselves.

If this is their first public mistake, then I suspect they may both be re-elected (although Michigan has term limits on state Reps); another moral failing, say enrichment at the public’s expense, might get them booted out, though.

¹ Source: Gallup.

The Lone Wolf Meets a Lady (1942), a moderately amusing tale of a retired diamond thief who can hardly escape his past, with a diamond necklace disappearing and its loser, a lovely lady, bumping into him in her flight from a body.

Doesn’t quite have the right pacing, but a right relief from today’s frenetic blockbuster movies.

A correction and a note on the Iran Deal:

o Senator Menendez does indeed have political ties to Israel: he is under indictment for corruption, and his legal defense fund has a number of large donors with ties to Israel, as Lobelog points out.

o  MSNBC reports on another key supporter of the deal:

President Barack Obama’s controversial nuclear deal with Iran received an important boost on Friday from Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, who announced he would support the agreement.

The endorsement makes Nadler the only Jewish New Yorker in Congress to approve of the deal, which is being seen as a win for Obama even as other Democratic lawmakers in the Empire State – including Sen. Charles Schumer and Reps. Eliot L. Engel and Steve Israel – have refused to back the accord.

“I bring to my analysis the full weight of my responsibilities as a member of Congress, and my perspective as an American Jew who is both a Democrat and a strong supporter of Israel,” Nadler said in a statement after receiving a personal letter from Obama addressing some of his concerns. “I have sought to ignore the political pressures, as well as the demagoguery and hateful rhetoric on both sides that I think has been harmful to the overall political discourse.”

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

Jason Lobell reports in Archaeology (September/October 2015) about an affect of climate change on the oldest mummies:

The work revealed that, while the mummies have been decaying for at least a decade, the process seems to have accelerated, perhaps as a result of climate change, despite the museum’s climate-control systems. “The climate in this region has changed from cool and dry to warm and damp, and the increased humidity has caused microbes that are common to all of our skin, but usually get washed off, to grow and damage the mummies’ skin,” says Mitchell.

Of course, as water levels rise, archaeological sites located in zones thought to be soon flooded will disappear.  This doesn’t necessarily mean their destruction, of course, but certainly endangers them.  On the other hand, climate change can occasionally have a positive effect, as noted in another article from the same issue of Archaeology.  Entitled “Cultural Revival,” it is not available online.  Here’s the summary from the online Table of Contents:

Excavations near a Yup’ik village in Alaska are helping its people reconnect with the epic stories and practices of their ancestors

Long story short, back in 2007 carved wooden objects began washing up on the shores of the village of Quinhagak.  They were traced to an abandoned Yup’ik village a few miles to the south, the site of an internecine massacre in roughly 1650.  After the deaths of the inhabitants, the victors left and the the village left to the elements.  Now the incoming sea has washed away some of the covering turf, revealing the artifacts and washing many out to sea, and then back in where Quinhagak is located, fortunately.  So in this case, climate change is double-edged, as the site is being destroyed, but at least it was brought to the attention of the Yup’ik, and onwards to archaeologists.

And the rest of the story?  Usually, the Yup’ik leave the sites of their ancestors alone, but in this case the elders of Quinhagak saw an opportunity to connect their children with their ancestral history.  The youth have sketched the artifacts as they are excavated, relearned the old arts of carving, and even taken up the suppressed (by Christian missionaries) practice of dancing – although without the carved masks, so far.  And the village of Quinhagak is now making plans to move – away from the sea.

Forgotten for the previous post is this overview of the impeachment of the Economics Minister from AL Monitor‘s Arash Karami:

Ebtekar [an Iranian newspaper] published an article titled “A new season of political impeachments,” which read, “The Rouhani administration has reached the halfway point and already the record for most questions by members of parliament put to ministers has been broken. [Parliament] has asked approximately 2,000 questions of the Cabinet.”

The article said that while questioning ministers is part of the parliament’s function, “many believe that in the last two years another goal was used for this function.” The article states that with the exception of a handful of ministers, ministers “have felt the shadow of impeachment above their heads.” The article’s reasons for record number of summons and questions range from personal issues to having an eye on the 2016 parliamentary elections.

Arash Bahmani has written for Al-Monitor about the troubles facing Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ali Jannati, who Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reportedly reprimanded. As Alireza Ramezani wrote in Al-Monitor, “As the parliamentary elections approach, conservatives will try to find alternative solutions to drive the administration back and compensate for their loss in the battle over the nuclear deal.”

Iranian hardline conservatives, although not a majority in the legislature, nevertheless are unafraid to accuse anyone crossing them of incompetence in their quest for power, as sometimes the moderate conservatives will join them to make a majority.  Their tool of choice: impeachment, which apparently is not unusual.  Last year TIME reported on the loss of the Science Minister:

In what amounts to a major blow against the moderate president Hassan Rouhani by hardliners in Iran, the Science and Research Minister Reza Faraji-Dana was impeached on Aug. 20 by the Iranian parliament. The impeachment, which followed months of intense lobbying to prevent it by conservatives and reformists alike, has dealt a major setback to the implementation of Rouhani’s campaign promises of a more tolerant policy in Iran’s universities. …

“Faraji-Dana was one of the president’s main ministers,” says Saeed Laylaz, a political analyst in Tehran “He had been tasked with one of the most important assignments in internal politics, but the president’s success in economics and the nuclear talks caused his political opponents to react by impeaching one of his most competent ministers.”

The Iran Project has several articles on this ouster here.  AL Monitor‘s Ali Afshari gave the explicit reasons for Faraji-Dana’s ouster, and in this 2014 article summarizes the future:

Faraji-Dana’s impeachment was a warning sign to the moderate administration that the rival group has recovered from its loss in last year’s presidential elections. Rouhani, Vice President for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Majid Ansari, as well as his media team, were weak in their defense of Faraji-Dana. Rouhani’s rivals are determined to defeat him and make his supporters lose faith in him. If Rouhani cannot find a way to stop them, then his other ministers, who have already received yellow cards, will be impeached as well.

Adnan Tabatabai at Muftah suggests this is all about the raucous 2009 elections:

Most significantly, Faraji-Dana brought back to the universities “starred” students and professors who were expelled because of views expressed during and after the highly-contested 2009 presidential election—indeed, the core issue around which the impeachment process culminated.

Over the past five years, the 2009 post-electoral crisis has morphed into a latent, if not chronic, factional conflict; a ghost that haunts everyday politics.

Meanwhile, in multiple speeches, high-ranking officials including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself have maintained that the “sedition”—the official term describing the 2009 unrest and those supportive of the Green Movement—has ended and those “anti-revolutionary” elements have been crushed. The “political epic” (hamaase-ye siaasi) of the 2013 presidential election that won Rouhani the presidency have served as further evidence that the “sedition” had been overcome. …

Faraji-Dana’s impeachment demonstrates that, for a considerable number of conservative parliamentarians, anxiety over the 2009 unrest is still the determining criteria used to assess the eligibility, integrity, and suitability of Iranian officials.

Suggesting the conservatives are rattled when they discover the students are no longer with them, but would prefer a more open society.  Much like today’s GOP.  IranPolitik opined about a great divide:

The impeachment vote was not the result of the intransigency of the more hardline PFIR faction or an alliance between it and the Principlist faction alone. The numbers appear to indicate that moderate conservatives from Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani’s Followers of the Leadership faction must have joined the hardline factions to give the vote of no confidence its slim majority. This episode highlights the “great divide” in Iranian politics. On one hand, an elite consensus exists within the regime on the need to moderate certain elements of Iranian foreign policy, especially as it relates to nuclear negotiations with the West, for the time being. On the other hand, at best no consensus exists on whether or not to reform the conservative social,political, and cultural policies in place, and at worst a slim reverse consensus exists to block reforms.

Now Middle East Eye reports on the recent attempted ouster of the Education Minister:

Critics had accused Education Minister Ali Asghar Fani, part of Iran’s moderate camp, of failing to address complaints from teachers over low salaries.

But the impeachment effort, led by ultra-conservatives, was seen as an attack on the Rouhani’s government.

The impeachment motion was rejected by 167 lawmakers in the 290-seat parliament, with 76 voting in favour.

It had been expected to fail after the majority group in parliament, the moderate conservative “Followers of the Leader” faction, had assured the minister of its support.

A member of the faction, Behrouz Nemati, denounced the motion as “partisan hostage-taking by anti-government lawmakers”. …

The next one on the block is the Economy Minister, reports the Tehran Times in a report dated August 10th of this year:

Iranian Minister of Economy Ali Tayyebnia faces impeachment as he failed to convince Iranian members of the Parliament during a questioning session on Sunday.

This was the third time Tayyebnia was put to questioning by the MPs and failed at providing satisfactory explanations, Nasim news agency reported.

According to Iranian law, failing three times to provide convincing answers to lawmakers paves the way for impeachment.

During an open session of the Majlis (parliament), Tayyebnia faced two questions by MP Mehrdad Bazrpash. The questions were about a banking law and a tax report.

As the MP was not convinced with Tayyebnia’s answers, he asked other lawmakers to cast votes to show whether they were convinced with the answers.

80 MPs voted for the minister while 105 MPs voted against him and 10 others abstained.

While impeachment is a word with strong emotional connotations in the USA, in Iran it’s a more normal maneuver – President Ahmadinejad, President Rouhani‘s predecessor, lost at least 9 of his 21 ministers (when Ali Kordan was successfully impeached).  However, while (to make an example of him) Kordan was reportedly impeached for fabricating his educational background (“… after it came to light that a doctoral degree allegedly awarded to Ali Kordan was fabricated, and that the putative issuer of the degree, Oxford University, had no record of Kordan receiving any degree from the University.”), it is not clear that Rouhani’s ministers are being impeached for anything other than being active members of the Reformist camp.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog notes that if the Republicans wish to quash the Iran deal, they’ll need help from the Democrats – and they’re not getting enough:

That strategy is already unraveling. This week, Sen. Joe Donnelly (D) of Indiana, one of Congress’ most conservative Democrats, announced his support for the diplomatic solution. This morning, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) of Missouri, widely seen as an on-the-fence member, also backed the deal. The Kansas City Star published the senator’s endorsement.

“I’ve spent weeks digging into the details of this agreement. And I’ve had extensive conversations with both those countries who are part of the negotiated agreement, and those countries currently holding Iran’s sanctioned money.

“It is clear to me that there is no certainty that Iran’s resources will be withheld from them if America rejects the agreement. Instead, I believe it likely that the sanctions regime would fray and nothing would be worse than Iran getting an influx of resources without any agreement in place to limit their ability to get a nuclear weapon.”

At this point, the arithmetic is hard to ignore. As we’ve discussed, congressional Republicans, no matter how intense their zeal, cannot kill the policy on their own. GOP lawmakers will need no less than 44 House Democrats and 13 Senate Democrats to partner with far-right members to crush the international agreement.

As of now, the grand total of Senate Dems opposed to the deal is two, while in the House, there are 12 Democrats siding with Republicans.

According to The Washington Post, the two Democrats against the deal are Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).  The latter leans heavily towards Israel, and so is influenced by Israel government politics, which is against the deal.  Menendez was elected chair of Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and so may have enough experience to evaluate the deal – i.e., he may have an honest opinion and it happens to differ from his Democratic colleagues and many other experts.

Finally, flitedocnm @ The Daily Kos is waxing ecstatic over an Op-Ed piece by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).  While it is not a piece filled with overwhelming rhetoric certain to overwhelm even the toughest critic of the deal, it gives his credentials and then his evaluation in a calm, direct manner which I can appreciate.

I have studied both the science and the politics of the nuclear-age world we live in from an early age. I grew up listening to my father, who served in the Navy in the ’50s, tell what it was like to watch a nuclear blast firsthand and to see the formation of a mushroom cloud over Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. While studying engineering at the University of Missouri, I worked at one of the largest research reactors in the United States. More recently, I have seen the centrifuges dedicated to the peaceful production of nuclear energy, which are housed in New Mexico. …

The comprehensive, long-term deal achieved last week includes all the necessary tools to break each potential Iranian pathway to a nuclear bomb. Further, it incorporates enough lead time so that, should Iran change its course, the United States and the world can react well before a device could be built; a scenario I hope never occurs, but one that leaves all options on the table, including the military option.

It’s worth reading the entire piece, either at The Daily Kos or in the Albuquerque Journal.

Ever wonder about those crescent half moons rendered in gold?

These are known as lunula, (pl. lunulae).  Jason Urbanus has a lovely article on Archaeology.org concerning Irish lunulae, in particular the origin of the gold and how it changes our understanding of trading patterns during the Bronze Age, lends an insight into tribal power structures – and an even better picture.

(Image: Landsat 7/GSFC/NASA)

(h/t NewScientist 8 August 2015, paywall)

Stanford ethicist Jerry Kaplan wonders aloud in The New York Times why Robot Weapons causes concern:

The authors of the letter liken A.I.-based weapons to chemical and biological munitions, space-based nuclear missiles and blinding lasers. But this comparison doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. However high-tech those systems are in design, in their application they are “dumb” — and, particularly in the case of chemical and biological weapons, impossible to control once deployed.

A.I.-based weapons, in contrast, offer the possibility of selectively sparing the lives of noncombatants, limiting their use to precise geographical boundaries or times, or ceasing operation upon command (or the lack of a command to continue).

Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.

A couple of problems here:

1. The unstated assumption is that A.I. weapons will remain under the control of their creators.  A fully capable AI, however, is implicitly its own agent, because an implication of the capabilities required in the field is the ability to recognize and choose.  The first of these, recognize, may only require a very limited AI (more of a Big Data application), but the second, choose, depends on both the first and an assessment of the situation; depending on signals from superiors implies both an uncompromised communications channel and an uncompromised loyalty to those superiors.

In general, he could argue that a very limited AI is only required, but the more limited your AI, the less capable it’ll be.  The less capable your weapon, well, most conventional war leaders will believe the less chance they’ll have of winning – or just discouraging the next war.  (The unconventional leaders, a la the Resistance, will, as always, depend on wit more than firepower, if only out of necessity.)  The arms race will inevitably ramp up the AI … and, at some point, it’ll become self-directing – and it may choose not to worship its makers.  He may believe,

Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.

I disagree, see this post, where I discuss the possible reactions of an A.I. robot facing combat.

2. It’s not clear he understands AI.  His next paragraph reads:

Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.

He describes technology that I would not classify as AI; worse yet (for him, at least), this technology could be applied to the current weapons systems, in many cases, and realize safety gains comparable to his A.I. based systems.  So why develop a potentially dangerous (to its creators) A.I. system?

3. He is stumbling into morally ambiguous territory:

Neither human nor machine is perfect, but as the philosopher B. J. Strawser has recently argued, leaders who send soldiers into war “have a duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly.” In other words, if an A.I. weapons system can get a dangerous job done in the place of a human, we have a moral obligation to use it.

If our A.I. weapons system is self-aware and thus a moral agent, do we have an obligation not to place it in a situation where it can be destroyed?  Do we have an obligation not to place it in a situation where it could destroy another human, or another self-aware A.I. weapons system?

Slime molds is a topic which I seem to revisit with dismaying regularity, as they appear to easily solve problems which computers find difficult:

Samir Patel of Archaeology Magazine writes a report on how the Romans might have designed their transportation network:

… Physarum polycephalum, consists of a single large membrane around many cell nuclei, and has drawn the attention of a wide range of scientists because of its uncanny ability to solve almost impossibly complex computational problems.

Now NewScientist, in “What if … We don’t need bodies?” (8 August 2015, paywall), brings up the idea of transferring minds to computers:

What if we could separate mind from body entirely? Many now believe that we will transfer our minds on to computers, whether in a matter of decades or hundreds of years. “I would say that it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable,” says Graziano.

What would life as an upload be like? We’d still need outside stimulation. Cut off entirely, a brain would suffer sensory deprivation, says Anders Sandberg at the University of Oxford. “It’s going to fall asleep, then hallucinate and probably gently go mad. You need to give it a way of interacting with the world, although it doesn’t have to be the real world.”

Which provokes me to wonder, what if we take a baby step here and upload a slime mold to the computer?  Could the slime mold, er, representation, still retain its “uncanny ability” to solve tough computational problems?  If so, could the computer then isolate the capability and incorporate it into its own repertoire of tools?

Or do the inherent limitations of computation apply to the uploaded creature?  I’m inclined to think the latter, at least with the current crop of computers.  Perhaps someday we’ll have widespread biological computing and then the upload would retain all the capabilities.

The Iran deal gathers another Republican, but non-Congressional, supporter – former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, courtesy The Washington Post:

“It’s somewhere in between naive and unrealistic to assume that after we’ve, the United States of America, has negotiated something like this with the five other, you know, parties and with the whole world community watching, that we could back away from that – and that the others would go with us, or even that our allies would go with us,” Paulson said during a forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute on Thursday night to discuss his new book on China.

“And unilateral sanctions don’t work, okay?” Paulson continued. “They really have to be multilateral.”

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

So it seems if you’re not running for something, you can be rational, but if your job is on the line, then you have to play to the audience.  Not precisely the definition of leadership, not to my mind.

Not that this is an exclusively American illness, as the Israelis seem to have some version of it as well.  In contrast, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has released a strategic document, according to Ben Caspit at AL Monitor, which, as one might expect with an institution intimate with realities, handles the Iranian situation rather differently than the politicians:

Commentators have marveled that the Iranian nuclear threat is barely mentioned in the [IDF Strategic] document. According to the chief of staff, that threat is currently not sufficiently relevant to be included in the IDF’s strategy for the next five years. The threat can be shelved for a decade or two.

The document also confirms something published in Al-Monitor a few weeks ago: that the IDF top brass are far less melodramatic about the Iranian threat than Israel’s highest political echelons, i.e., Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his ministers. Instead, the IDF is much more concerned about potential Iranian involvement in considerable proportions of terror acts against Israel along the length of its various borders.

However, the Israeli politicians may find more justification in this part of the IDF Strategic Document:

The military exercise signals to players in the field that Israel will not hold back, but will respond forcefully to any scenario. Simultaneously, Israeli security sources emphasize that so far, all the terror activities against Israel in the northern zone have been perpetrated by Hezbollah, under Iranian inspiration. Not a single bullet, not even a firecracker, has been fired against Israel by the various organizations rebelling against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Israel hopes that this situation will continue, and to be on the safe side, it tried to demonstrate what would happen if the situation changes.

Finally, and with whatever validity you wish to assign it, Arutz Sheva reports a number of Jewish rabbis are urging acceptance of the deal:

More than 300 liberal American rabbis wrote members of Congress Monday urging them to support the international nuclear deal with Iran, signaling the US Jewish community is split over the historic but controversial accord.

The religious leaders come from across the spectrum, but hail overwhelmingly from Judaism’s Conservative and Reform streams as well as other liberal, non-Orthodox Jewish movements, a spokesperson said.

“We encourage the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives to endorse this agreement,” the 340 rabbis wrote in a letter to Congress distributed by Ameinu, a liberal charitable Jewish organization.

“We are deeply concerned with the impression that the leadership of the American Jewish community is united in opposition to the agreement,” the rabbis added.

“We, along with many other Jewish leaders, fully support this historic nuclear accord.”

The general approach to the problem of racism, or the more general problem of supremacism, has been to characterize its effects on its victims, who may be enumerated as those who the supremacists denigrate, and the costs to society in general; more rarely to suggest that the perpetrators suffer damage from their own views; occasionally, to argue the philosophy as unjust and the victims undeserving of their treatment. I have realized recently that there is another approach, a less post-hoc, more a priori approach, which really attacks a central emotional tenet.  No doubt this has been discovered before, but it is not mentioned to any great extent, and it strikes me that those groups, still existing, that adhere to these repellent, damaging philosophies, might be best decomposed by exposing their members to these thoughts.

Consider the philosophy: Group A is superior to group B because of C.  Characterize C – what is C?  It is some immutable and inherent, or nearly so, characteristic of A, always in contrast to B.  Its best known example is skin color.  Thus the American Civil War, when the odious practice of slavery was rationalized by the Fire Eaters and the Secessionist declarations¹.  Sometimes it is country of origin, or ethnicity, or religion.  Only the last is not immutable, but, as we shall see, religion may be treated as a special case.

So the reader may shrug and wonder as to the importance of yet another abstraction, and so I will give it to you:

What, in all these cases, has the racist performed, has the racist achieved, to belong to the group?  Have they labored in the trenches, have they earned a PhD, did they lead a side to victory in a great battle?

None.

No, that’s right.  None of these things are necessary to be a supremacist.

For the supremacist, this is the essence: they are.  No missing word here.  A supremacist exists, and that is enough.  No labor, no achievement – and no threat to their theoretical position, even if they endure worldly fears.

To render it in the vulgar, a supremacist is a lazy bastard who depends, for his position, on his skin color, or his ethnicity, or his religion, or some other unearned, inherited characteristic, all merely random states of being with no connection to effort, to achievement – to earned worth.  A supremacist claims a short-cut to worth through a characteristic over which he has no control, and thus betrays his true colors to those who know to look: a hollow man, unbeholden to honor, impossible to trust, unlikely to ever achieve much.

This is the supremacist.  One might consider him superior despite oneself, if not for the fact that such a thing might, if renderable, appear in a Salvador Dali painting solely for its ribald effect.

As to the matter of religion, it is a near equivalent of the other examples in that most of humanity rarely changes its spots in this regard; and given that the basic foundation of religion, that of faith, is an explicit belief in something for which there is no objective proof, it is difficult to credit one religion over another, except, possibly, on results, and those are so much argued over on grounds of a dubious sort that the entire structure soon collapses as if it were a skyscraper made of Silly Putty … if I may state an absurdity.  Let there be no doubt: those for whom faith is a central tenet often lead the way against supremacism; but there is nothing within faith that battles intrinsically against this pernicious philosophy of supremacism, only that which lies in the hearts of men apart from faith.  Faith, that great leader into Heaven, that great leader into Hell, is a tool, and nothing more; it is rationality that reveals the supremacist for what he is.

¹My thanks to LaFeminista @ The Daily Kos for this useful list of secession declarations and how most of them uphold slavery.

I missed this, but KCNA Watch did not:

   It was on August 15 when President Kim Il Sung, benefactor of national resurrection and peerless patriot, crushed the brigandish Japanese imperialists by making long journeys of anti-Japanese bloody battles and liberated Korea. It was the day of historical significance as it put an end to the history of national sufferings and brought about a radical turn in carving out the destiny of the country and its people.

The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land with 5 000 year-long history and culture and pursuing the unheard-of policy of obliterating the Korean nation.

And the masses were devastated at the loss of Korean Standard Time, I suppose.

(h/t Marcus Noland)