Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Back in 2011 NewScientist reported (24 October 2011, paywall) on an analysis of global capitalism and the rule of thumb that some firms are too large to fail:

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs). …

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

NewScientist now presents an extension of the analysis (23 May 2015, paywall) that continues to suggest that interconnectedness may be the key:

NEVER again? The global financial crisis of 2008 saw banks around the world bailed out to the tune of billions by governments worried that the entire financial system was in meltdown. “Too big to fail”, the thinking went, and since then, efforts have been made to increase scrutiny of large institutions. But the latest research suggests a much more sophisticated analysis is needed to prevent another crisis.

We already know that firm size isn’t the only problem in a financial crisis. In 2011, New Scientist revealed that 147 interconnected entities – not all of them large financial institutions – control the network of global capitalism. A problem with any of them could have a significant effect on the system, demonstrating the ongoing potential for vulnerability. …

The Financial Stability Board was created in 2009 to attempt to understand and monitor the situation.  They’ve published a list of firms, based on their interconnectedness rather than their size, which, if one gets in trouble, could trouble others.  Those meeting the criteria must increase reserves, even at the expense of profitability. From NewScientist:

Most of the emphasis in SIFI designation is placed on this interconnectedness, which has been much studied by academics, along with size, which is easy to determine. To date, relatively little attention has been paid to the third part of the SIFI designation – complexity – says Robin Lumsdaine of American University in Washington DC.

To better understand complexity, Lumsdaine and her colleagues used tools from network science to analyse the corporate structure of a variety of financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, Barclays and HSBC. The researchers anonymised the firms – identifying them only by their country – and used snapshots of data from 26 May 2011 and 25 February 2013 to see if the firms’ complexity had changed.

Their method involves mapping out a firm’s subsidiaries, and then each subsidiary’s subsidiaries and so on. These “control hierarchy” networks are then labelled according to the country or industry of each subsidiary (see diagram).

Sadly, the diagram is broken on the web page, but the print edition’s view is quite attractive and compares American and Japanese firms.  The former is unbalanced and difficult to understand, while the latter is almost pretty in that it appears the subsidiaries are carefully sized to match each other.  However, the US firm is characterized as “large”, while the Japanese firm is “small” – the complexity comes in the number of industries involved.

FSB’s work may be having an effect:

Across the board, country complexity seems to have fallen between 2011 and 2013, the researchers found. That’s in line with a recent report in The Economist showing that banks aren’t seeing the expected returns from globalising their operations and are starting to withdraw, says Stefano Battiston of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who carried out the 2011 interconnectedness work.

Conclusions?

In other words, we may be over-emphasising the “too big to fail” mantra: even small companies can be complex in a way that could threaten financial stability if they failed.

“It speaks to the size threshold as being inadequate,” says Lumsdaine. Regulators already know this, she adds, but the team’s analysis highlights the need for change. “There should be greater focus on complexity and more metrics are needed.”

So Bernie Sanders (I/D – VT) may want to rethink his proposal in light of this fascinating article.

The associated academic article on measuring complexity is here.

Some brief poking at the The Financial Stability Board‘s website did not reveal a helpful list of SIFIs.  If I can find them – or a helpful reader provides them – I’ll post them.

A correspondent on the situation in Egypt:

Just another of the many coming ecological and societal disasters resulting from overpopulation and “mining” of what could have been renewable resources (actual mining takes, e.g, gold ore out of the ground and once it’s gone, it’s gone — in contrast to harvesting wood from a forest, which can be done sustainably such that the forest continues to produce wood for eternity). We have been “mining” fertile cropland soil, water resources, forest resources, ocean fisheries, etc. for decades upon decades — centuries in some more localized cases, foolishly imagining them to be endless or simply living in denial. There are simply far too many people on the face of the earth, consuming far too many resources. We are effectively borrowing — well, plundering — them all from the future. It’s all going to start coming home to roost very soon.

The Earth is a big place and we’re very small beings, comparatively speaking – so it might be a bit harsh to suggest that we were fools 100 years ago.  No, just ignorant of how many of us were going to be around now, and how much strain that implied.

But your primary point is also evident in this WorldPress.org article on Egypt from Joshua Goldfond:

To say that Egypt is a country on the edge of crisis should be a surprise to no one. As one of the richest, largest and most influential countries in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, the state’s regression to military control four years after the Arab Spring has left many of the movement’s most hopeful advocates despairing. And yet, these ideological disappointments pale in comparison to the larger existential threat it now faces. Like much of the MENA region, Egypt’s failure to stem corruption, address economic inefficiency and directly address climate change is exacerbating its already acute problem with food security. A three-step plan involving subsidy reform, technological development and caloric diversification could ease some of this danger. …

The nation’s yearly shortfall of 7 billion cubic meters of water can be expected to skyrocket if rising levels of the Mediterranean Sea flood Egypt’s northern lakes, choking off fresh water sources and destroying its fish hatcheries.

A Facebook correspondent responds to my reaction to The New York Times:

While I agree that more more money chasing “product” tends to inflate the cost of that product, I think there are other large drivers of college tuition. Looking at a graph (which I don’t have at hand, sorry) of general inflation (e.g. CPI) over the past 4 decades versus the cost of health care versus the cost of tuition is rather revealing. Any personnel-intensive industry with well-compensated (i.e. including fully-insured) people is going to see its costs go up with the far steeper than inflation curve belonging to health care costs. (This problem is eating government, too.) But universities have managed to exceed even health care’s curve by as large a gap or scaling factor as it exceeds general inflation.

So I guess I’d say, I agree with you and I agree with the NYT at the same time — and throw in health care to boot.

I just see the excess funding provided by the cheap loans as the enabler of all of this.

The main water source for Egypt is the Nile, as graphically illustrated by this map from Lonely Planet:

Ayah Aman reports on the Nile’s condition for AL Monitor:

An intensive media and political momentum is taking place in Egypt in regard to the conflict with Nile headwaters countries over securing Egypt’s annual share of the Nile waters. At the same time, the pollution of the Nile River remains a pending issue that is being underscored in Egypt with every water poisoning incident caused by the dumping of hazardous waste in the river. The debate usually ends when the government reassures the public, and emphasizes that the water is safe and suitable for human consumption, without establishing long-term policies to resolve the crisis. …

Kareem Khaled, a water-quality researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen, spoke to Al-Monitor about the water quality in Egypt. He said, “The absence of a single administrative body in charge of water management and quality improvement from the High Dam to the riverbed, and up to the point where it [water] is delivered to people’s homes, is the reason behind water pollution in Egypt.”

Khaled added, “The state of the Nile water still needs to be precisely and scientifically defined, and we need to find out what pollutants are in the water. The river is subject to all forms of pollution, the most dangerous of which is the untreated, solid industrial waste, which is causing an accumulation of heavy metals in the aquaculture and drinking water, and therefore causes many health problems.”

Problems are blamed on management and pollution:

… since it consumes far more water than it can replenish. In addition to other problems that weigh down on the country — such as population density and the dilapidated pipe network, which alone is behind 35% of wasted water every year — Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, because there is not enough water to grow the crops locally.

Earlier this year Mz Aman had reported on an agreement between Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia as the nations seek peaceful means to allocate the Nile:

Since the presidents of the Eastern Nile countries of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia signed the Declaration of Principles of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on March 23, relative official and public acceptance have prevailed in Egypt. After a long historical feud over the Nile waters that Egypt considers part of its national security, Ethiopia and Egypt are trying to rebuild trust. …

The historical agreements giving Egypt an annual quota of the Nile waters, estimated at 55.5 billion cubic meters per year, remain the main issue for Egypt. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry asserted that these agreements will remain intact, particularly the 1959 water-sharing agreement signed with Sudan. Upstream countries have rejected the agreement, claiming that it gives the lion’s share of the water to Egypt. …

Sisi sent several messages in his impromptu statement during the signing of the Declaration of Principles in Khartoum.

“The Renaissance Dam still constitutes a concern for Egyptians, especially since the Nile is their only source of water,” he said, but asserted, “God commands water to flow into Egypt so that Egyptians can live and revive their civilization.” Sisi tried to break the ice with Ethiopia by saying, “We could have lived for years in dispute and doubt, but we have opted for cooperation and trust.”

FutureDirections International (referenced by Mz Aman, above) notes:

• The Entebbe Agreement has shifted control over the Nile away from Egypt and Sudan, who previously had a monopoly over the river’s resources as a result of colonial agreements.
• The food and water security situation in Egypt is extremely vulnerable, due to population growth and environmental factors that have raised deep concerns amongst the nation’s political leaders, already concerned about the geo-political shift in the Nile basin region.

And they agree concerning water availability:

These Nile Basin nations have a combined population of over 450 million people and estimates indicate that over 200 million of them rely directly on the Nile for their food and water security. The Nile is the only major reliable source of renewable water supplies in the region. The Nile Basin’s population is expected to double in the next twenty-five years.

Aljazeera America has a 15 month old opinion piece which is necessarily out of date, but does have an excellent interactive map of the Nile basin, including dam sites.  It is not embeddable, so I recommend you go to the site to see the map.

The New York Times claims to know the real reason for the rise in college tuition:

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

I see this as a chicken and egg argument.  In my previous post on the subject, I argued that the flood of federal and private loans amounts to the printing and infiltration of money into a market, which, as well all (should) know, results in inflation.  The New York Times not only hides their great discovery at the bottom of the article, they commit a flagrant foul – they fail to ask WHY administration staff grew at a much higher rate.  And while there are no doubt contributing factors such as regulations and laws to be supported, to my mind the great flood of money is the great enabler: someone or something must absorb it.  Staff is it.

(h/t Kathy Melaas and Mary Newstrom)

In response to this, a Facebook correspondent responds:

I’m confused. Lomborg is a climate change skeptic, and yet he calls for removing fossil fuel subsidies to reduce their global warming effect?

Perhaps he’s simply offended by the concept of subsidies for fossil fuels.  I certainly am, but I’m not familiar with the current arguments in favor of subsidies.

But from what little I have read, he doesn’t seem to deny climate change so much as claim it’s not going to be as severe as claimed; or perhaps he just meant the change will happen at the specified magnitude, but the impact on human civilization won’t be as severe as predicted.

Hal Hodson reports on another approach to the water problem in California in NewScientist (16 May 2015, paywall):

The traditional method of storage is to create a reservoir by damming a river. But dam-building is expensive, can be environmentally damaging, and most of the good spots are already in use. An alternative is to push water underground using recharge ponds or injection wells. Recharge ponds are constructed surface basins that allow water to collect and seep through the soil; injection wells use high-pressure pumps to actively push water down into aquifers. …

Groundwater management has several advantages over other methods. It is generally cheaper than building dams or desalinating water. What’s more, aquifers lose no water through evaporation, do not flood ecosystems, and in California they have capacity for between 17 and 26 times as much water as all of the state’s reservoirs combined.

This can require removal of man-made structures such as levees which restrict flooding of floodplains – which is precisely the mechanism for feeding aquifers, in many cases.  Can man’s pride – and perverse economic incentives – be overcome to, basically, return an area to a semblance of its natural state?

The National Ground Water Association is here.

Continuing this developing story, the dailytarheel.com reports that 46 degree-granting programs within the University of North Carolina system are being discontinued:

Thursday morning, the Board of Governors educational planning committee voted to discontinue 46 degree programs across the UNC-System, including one at UNC-Chapel Hill: human biology. Some of the programs will be reformatted as concentrations or consolidated into other majors. The entire Board voted Friday to adopt the recommendations voted on by the committee Thursday.

Other schools saw more programs discontinued than UNC-CH. East Carolina University and UNC-Greensboro saw eight programs discontinued each. …

[Board member Steven] Long said he didn’t think the programs addressed by the report necessarily needed more scrutiny.

“We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand.”

The report is relatively emotion free; the comments attached to the report are vitriolic.  Up until that last line about being capitalists, the report could be evaluated as simply some hard decisions being made by school administrators; however, Universities are not, or should not be run by capitalists.  Capitalists favor running corporations as the method for managing production.  While capitalists can run non-profits, most run for-profits.

Education is not an institution centered on the idea of profit, but rather an institute for equipping citizens for their participation in society.  Not all skills lead to directly to profit, and yet it is important to society that a fair proportion of the citizenry have those skills.  Attempting to run a full-blown university system based on the needs of the capitalist corporations that surround you – and, in some cases, no doubt having a poor understanding – or, to be blunt, letting your ideological sensibilities lead you off into the wilderness – is beneficial neither to society nor even those corporations you think you’re serving.

Equally as importantly, the research universities must support the researchers who are out in the intellectual wilderness, scouting for new knowledge, new ways of thinking – sometimes striking out, sometimes succeeding.  That’s the glory of the research university, but it’s not going to be directly profitable, and attempting to shape such research towards immediately profitable ends is a fool’s errand.  The businessman wants to know how much profit he’ll make in the next financial quarter; the researcher may pursue a plan that’ll last 20 years and perhaps fail in the end.  Who’s more important?

The researcher.

Some damage is easy to repair, but restarting degree-granting programs is probably a challenge.  Poor North Carolina.

(h/t LamontCranston @ The Daily Kos)

A reader works out a bit of frustration:

To reinforce their title of Scions of Entropy, one of the cats jumped on my laptop’s keyboard yesterday, jamming down the “p” key.  This pretty much locked the whole thing up, as all the machine had CPU room for was typing a “p” every half-second or so.  Of course I rebooted, then performed many other fruitless rituals over my computer.  No luck.  I even tried prying off the key and disassembling the rocker inside.  I basically took the keypad all the way down to its printed chip, and it was still happily “p”ing all over my display, to the exclusion of all else.

So, I took my laptop to Best Buy to talk to the Geek Squad:  Lug in the machine.  Wait in line for 20 minutes.  (Mind you, there was no line.  Just me waiting behind the “Wait here” sign.  About every 5 minutes or so, someone at the merchandise return window would lean over to tell me someone would be right with me.  That person had no line either.  He was just hangin’ around back there not going and looking for the Geek squad staff that would be helping me any minute now.)  Finally, a technician shows up and takes a look at my machine, which was happily “p”ing on his counter.  Breaks off stuff that wasn’t broken before.  (The P key and the two little plastic components under it were already off, but I figured with any luck they could be snapped back into place.  The Geeks at Best Buy ripped off the clear silicone pad that springs the key back up to a neutral position once you stop pressing it.  That’s a piece that definitely won’t snap back into place.  And I don’t have the piece any more.  They just threw it on the floor, then looked to see if I was watching.  I was.)

So, the Best Buy Geek has no idea how to fix anything.  Says the present keyboard can’t be disabled.  Says it’ll cost $200 to send the machine to Kentucky, where they’ll take 6-8 weeks to look at it, then they’ll call me with an estimate of how much additional cash and time it’ll take to fix it, if they even can.  Or, I can buy a new $500-$1500 laptop, and they’ll ONLY charge me $110 to transfer the data from the old laptop to the new one.  If they can figure out how to transfer the data without use of a keyboard, that is.

Oh yeah, and every last one of the non-apple machines that Best Buy sells has Windows 8 on it.  Because NO ONE still sells Windows 7, they say.  You just can’t get it anywhere, they say.  So you have to use the much, much crappier Win 8 interface, they say.

Compare that to Computer Revolution (formerly Computer Renaissance):  I took my laptop over to them the next morning.  In about 5 minutes, they unhooked the built-in keyboard so I can take it home and plug in a peripheral, and they ordered me a new keyboard component.  It should arrive in 5-7 days.  Then I’ll bring the laptop back to them and they’ll put it in while I wait.  Total bill:  $79.00.

Oh, and guess what?  They have computers for sale too, if your old one is just too far gone to salvage.  And if you buy from Computer Revolution, they’ll very happily install Windows 7 on any machine you choose, if it doesn’t already have it installed, which the vast majority of theirs do.

Did I mention that I’m never going back to Best Buy for computer stuff ever again?

It’s impossible to know if the front line folks are poorly trained or are trained to simply deny the truths as noted here, but someone somewhere is lying in the interests of increasing revenues and (presumably) profits.  Is this considered ethical by the Business Schools of our country?

Should it be?

This country has a mythology of it being a meritocracy, and consequently bumbling public officials are often poorly tolerated, although personal charm can be ameliorative.  Remember how Bush’s bumbling caused his approval numbers to drop into the dumpster?

Australia’s relationship to climate change continues to change as the University of Western Australia reneges on an agreement to host

…an Australia Consensus Centre to undertake detailed economic cost benefit analysis into many of Australia’s, and the world’s, biggest challenges.

The Centre is unique in that it’s to deliver robust, evidence-based knowledge and advice to the Australian Government on potential policy reforms and other interventions that will deliver the smartest, most cost-effective solutions in areas ranging from poverty, social justice and food sustainability. Many of these issues will form the basis of the United Nation’s post 2015 Development Goals.

It was to be run by Bjørn Lomborg, noted climate change skeptic (his web site is here).  Why is the University reneging?  The University’s President remarks:

However, the creation of the Australia Consensus Centre attracted a mixed reaction from staff, students and the general public. The scale of the strong and passionate emotional reaction was one that the University did not predict. …

I have stated many times that it is not a centre to study climate change, that the University was not providing any direct funding to the Centre, and that that Bjorn Lomborg would not be involved in its day-to-day operations. …

Despite all this, there remains  strong opposition to the Centre. Whilst I respect the right of staff to express their views on this matter, as all universities should be places for open and honest sharing and discussion of ideas, in this case, it has placed the University in a difficult position.

NewScientist (16 May 2015) notes that the government still wishes to establish the center, but

… the Royal Society of New South Wales, the country’s oldest science academy, has called on all universities not to accept.

This despite Lomborg’s association with Nobel prize winning economists.  He seems to be an interesting chap; I’ve heard his name from time to time over the last 15 years, particularly in Libertarian circles.  However, I’ve not followed his career or what he’s said.  So I have to depend on his Wikipedia entry, which I think paints him as quite nuanced and probably makes a lot of people unhappy:

The Lomborg Deception, a book by Howard Friel, claims to offer a “careful analysis” of the ways in which Lomborg has “selectively used (and sometimes distorted) the available evidence”,^[29] and that the sources Lomborg provides in the footnotes do not support—and in some cases are in direct contradiction to—Lomborg’s assertions in the text of the book;^[30] Lomborg has denied these claims in a public response.^[31] Lomborg has provided a 27-page argument-by-argument response.^[32] Friel has written a reply to this response,^[33] in which he admits two errors, but otherwise in general rejects Lomborg’s arguments.

A group of scientists published an article in 2005 in the Journal of Information Ethics,^[34] in which they concluded that most criticism against Lomborg was unjustified, and that the scientific community misused their authority to suppress Lomborg.

The claim that the accusations against Lomborg were unjustified was challenged in the next issue of Journal of Information Ethics^[35] by Kåre Fog, one of the original plaintiffs. Fog reasserted his contention that, despite the ministry’s decision, most of the accusations against Lomborg were valid. He also rejected what he called “the Galileo hypothesis”, which he describes as the conception that Lomborg is just a brave young man confronting old-fashioned opposition.

In April 2015 Lomborg gained further attention as a climate contrarian when he issued a call for all subsidies to be removed from fossil fuels on the basis that “a disproportionate share of the subsidies goes to the middle class and the rich”…making fossil fuel so “inexpensive that consumption increases, thus exacerbating global warming”.^[36]

It’s hard not to like someone who calls for removal of all fossil fuel subsidies.  I wonder how many members of the University of Western Australia are aware of his positions in detail.  Or how misleading the Wikipedia entry might be.

A Facebook correspondent responds to this post:

If we were imperial, wouldn’t all that roughly $1 trillion in “defense” spending be resulting in us “owning” a few new countries over the decades — like the former British Empire did?

Oh, I think we do – but because we’re the product of colonial Britain, Spain, and France, the American public is fairly allergic to the term “imperial”.  So we try to operate behind the scenes (for example, the Shah of Iran), and keep a few “territories” which perhaps fit the bill of being owned.  Then things blow up and the natives get their hate on and it’s all such a godawful mess….

Then there’s the inevitable corruption and waste for which we must pay.  And don’t forget the existential threats that Marco Rubio claims we’re facing … or was that Lindsey Graham?  I can’t keep track of who’s more afraid of the outside world these days.

This sage saga continues as Wisconsin Public Radio reports on the status of the investigation in an interview with Howard Schweber, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Secondly, Schweber said, the Wisconsin Supreme Court plays a primary role in the investigation.

“The claim is that Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, primarily, unlawfully engaged in campaign coordination with Gov. Walker,” said Schweber. “Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce made and funneled major contributions not only to Walker, but to the current sitting justices of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”

This puts the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an unusual position, according to Schweber.

“The Wisconsin Supreme Court has some of the loosest rules in the entire country, allowing its justices to rule on cases involving major campaign contributors,” he said. “Those rules, allowing the justices to preside over the case, were written by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and approved by the current sitting justices. The corruption of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court has reached a point of absolute nadir.”

BloombergPolitics updates with the news that SCOTUS won’t stop the investigation:

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to end a state investigation into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign, rejecting an appeal from a conservative group that says its constitutional rights are being violated.

The rebuff leaves the future of the investigation in the hands of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which is considering a separate bid to stop the probe. The criminal investigation, on hold during the court fight, might complicate Walker’s potential campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Pema Levy at Mother Jones has a lengthier report on the history of how the formerly august Wisconsin Supreme Court has been made into a laughingstock:

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC first began pouring millions into state Supreme Court elections in 2007, when the groups spent an estimated $2.9 million on ads backing conservative candidate Annette Ziegler for an open seat on the Supreme Court and attacking her opponent. Total spending on that election topped $5.8 million, four times the previous record for a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. The following year, the same groups spent more than $2.7 million on ads aimed at unseating sitting Justice Louis Butler, a liberal, and electing conservative candidate Michael Gableman. The election was so nasty that racially-tinged ads released by Gableman’s campaign were compared to the infamous Willie Horton spot from the 1988 presidential election.

The partisanship and massive interest-group spending of the 2007 and 2008 state Supreme Court elections spurred Wisconsin lawmakers to take action. In 2009, the Legislature passed the Impartial Justice Act, setting up a robust campaign finance system for Supreme Court elections, including a matching funds provision to help candidates counter negative ads run against them. But in 2011, Walker quietly repealed the public financing law with language tucked into his first budget as governor.

The New Yorker also has a fine article.  PR Watch notes the numbers:

In every single one of the most recent elections for the court’s four Republican justices — Justices David Prosser, Michael Gableman, Annette Ziegler, and Patience Roggensack — spending by WiCFG, its surrogates, and WMC amounted to almost all of the independent support for the candidate. Together, the two groups and their surrogates have spent over $10 million since 2007 helping elect the court’s four-justice conservative majority, in most cases spending more than the candidates themselves. Some of the elections were decided by just a handful of votes.

The total spent by the groups under investigation is higher than previously estimated, based on new documents obtained from WMC.

For those interested in a more in depth look at spending on judicial elections, there’s The New Politics of Judicial Elections Online.

PuddyTat @ The Daily Kos covers the change to the Wisconsin Constitution:

A very heavily promoted and propagandized Constitutional amendment recently passed in Wisconsin changing the selection of the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Since the Court was founded in 1852, the most senior Justice has automatically become the Chief Justice. With the newly passed amendment, the Chief Justice will now be elected by members of the State Supreme Court – a move designed to ensure that a RW Justice will become Chief, replacing liberal Shirley Abrahamson who has served as a Justice for the past 39 years and became the most senior member, therefore Chief Justice, in 1996.

Last week, as soon as the passage of the amendment was certified, the 4 RW justices of the State Supreme Court voted by email to make Justice Patience Roggensack their Chief Justice. The 3 liberal/moderate justices weren’t even consulted or notified.

PuddyTat continues with another post detailing more amateur-hour antics.  Finally, the Urban Milwaukee‘s Bruce Murphy goggles at the circus:

There was something unseemly about Supreme Court Justice Patience (Pat) Roggensack contacting state legislators and urging them to support a constitutional amendment that would allow members of the court to elect the chief justice. Court watchers assumed such a vote would result in Roggensack’s selection, so her lobbying looked Shakespearean, the younger justice looking to kill the queen.

It also contrasted with Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, who served based on having the longest tenure on the court and now stood to be displaced, yet desisted from lobbying, saying: “My position is that it is important not to politicize the court.” …

Roggensack could have simply contacted the paper and let them know she was abiding by the will of the people and hoped her colleague would accept this democratic outcome. Instead, the obviously miffed justice rushed to talk on air with incendiary radio host Charlie Sykes and quickly attacked both Abrahamson and the Journal Sentinel!

“I intend to work with people on a consensus basis, rather than a dictatorial basis,” Roggensack told Sykes, in an obvious dig at Abrahamson. Just one week earlier, Roggensack said her key task as chief justice was “to begin repairing damage that has been done to the reputation of the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” and so she does this by sullying her fellow justice, and letting the world know the bickering on the court is not about to stop.

Looks like our friends in Wisconsin have had the wool pulled firmly over their eyes.  Gotta wonder how long it’ll stay there…

Measles can result in brain damage or it can kill you.  And even if you survive it, reports Debora MacKenzie (paywall) at NewScientist (16 May 2015),

The measles virus kills white blood cells that have a “memory” of past infections and so give you immunity to them. Those cells were assumed to bounce back because new ones appear a week or two after someone recovers.

However, recent work in monkeys shows that these new memory cells only remember measles itself; the monkeys lost cells that recognise other infections. If humans get similar “immune amnesia”, childhood deaths from infectious diseases should rise and fall depending on how many children had measles recently, and how long the effect lasts, says Michael Mina of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Human models are better than monkey models, but they’re close enough that this is worth worrying about – if you don’t have a vaccination already.  So if you’re an anti-vaxxers kid, and you get measles, now you can count on repeating all those other diseases to which you thought you’d acquired immunity.  The hard way.

Our Arts Editor has some objections to Mr. Brodsky’s viewpoints.

OK, where to start?

In his commencement address, Brodsky seems to infer that:
1. One’s self is wholly good, and one’s own opinions and attitudes are, of course, correct and right.
2. Since I am wholly good, my “enemy” must, by definition, be evil, and (therefore??) all his opinions are wrong.
3. If my enemy seems good or right in any respect, then we can assume he’s just faking.

WTF?  Is Brodsky so full of hubris that he can’t conceive of a situation where he might be wrong, or his motives might not be totally pure?  If I’m reading him correctly, he seems to be saying that you need to continually assess your opinions, and that if you see that your “enemy” agrees with you on any point, you need to either change your opinion, or find out why he’s lying about agreeing with you.  Apparently, Brodsky’s world is painted in such a chiaroscuro of black and white that there’s no room for people to be neutral.  If you’re not for good, you must be evil.

Just because someone is an extreme individualist does not mean he is, by definition, good.  It just means he doesn’t give a rip what the larger community thinks of him.  That can be good.  That can be extremely bad.  I’d say more likely than not, serial murderers are a very individualistic lot, just to give one example.

In my observation, people in large groups tend to settle for a middle ground:  gravitating to those opinions that most of the group agrees to believe are correct.  Some dissenters are pushed out of the group if their dissent is too forceful.  Some fanatics in the group make it their mission to prove that their beliefs are right and all others are wrong.  But the vast majority of the group’s members really don’t much care about abstract ideology; they’re just trying to live their lives as comfortably as they can manage, and being part of a herd is generally safer than being alone, even if being a part of the herd requires one to espouse certain beliefs.

I would assert that there’s no such thing as good and evil, at least in the sense that Brodsky seems to be using the terms.  Yes, some creatures are mean.  They do unpleasant things to other creatures, sometimes just because it makes them feel good to do so, or purely for their own gain.  And some creatures are kind.  They strive to make the lives of other creatures more comfortable, simply because that’s the best way for everyone to live.

But most creatures are neutral.  They’re just trying to eat, sleep and reproduce in the easiest way they can find.  If that means living in a herd where there are certain rules, then maybe complying with the rules of the herd and espousing the beliefs of the herd is an acceptable price for gaining the security of living in a herd.  And when the rules of the herd become too burdensome, the creature may choose another herd, or no herd at all.  That’s not good.  That’s not evil.  That’s just the way it is.

I wonder if Mr. Brodsky would have distinguished between evil institutions and serial killers on a quantitative or qualitative basis.

No conspiracy talk in the UK: The new Conservative government has appointed Amber Rudd Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.  ConservativeHome comments:

The charge often made against the Cameroons, that they do not in their heart of hearts believe in the modish causes they espouse, is not levelled at Amber Rudd. The new Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is agreed, by admirers and detractors, to be a true believer in the science of climate change.

Her appointment was welcomed by the Ecologist, which warned she would face opposition from Conservatives such as Lord Lawson, Owen Paterson and Peter Lilley: “Rudd will have to fight a strategic, robust and constant rearguard defence against those who are ostensibly on her side.”

RTCC (Responding to Climate Change) agrees:

Her appointment over more hardline Tory candidates for the top post will be of relief to campaigners and environmentalists, given her unequivocal commitment to a UN climate deal and support for green investment.

In a Business Green interview last year, she said: “I don’t think you could get a cigarette paper between me and Labour on our commitment to getting a deal in Paris. We are all completely committed to it, whatever the outcome.”

But Rudd will face challenges — having to implement the Tories’ manifesto pledge to curb the growth of onshore wind farms, broker negotiations over a controversial nuclear power plant, and draw up the government’s fifth carbon budget to run through the next decade.

NewScientist reports on the reaction (paywall) of Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics:

“It’s reassuring to have a politician paying attention to reality rather than living in a fantasy world where the laws of physics don’t apply”

James Delingpole at the American conservative site Breitbart.com, on the other hand, is not happy:

For those country communities who’ve been unfortunate enough to have one of Britain’s 7,000 onshore wind turbines dumped, willy nilly on their doorsteps it’s an issue a lot more serious than mere dodgy personal aesthetics. I know. I hear their piteous cries almost every day.

It’s about: having your property values randomly trashed with no compensation; having cherished views blighted for at least the next 25 years (longer, probably, given that so few of these monstrosities seem to have had their decommissioning costs factored in to the contract); thousands of pounds from your own pocket wasted on often fruitless planning law objections and judicial reviews; disrupted sleep and health issues arising from intermittency and low frequency noise; obliterated bats, disturbed livestock, eradicated birdlife; communities divided between the “haves” (those landowners in on the scam) and the “have-nots” (everyone else who has to live with the consequences as the subsidised greedheads rake in their morally tainted profits).

Rudd’s statement, in short, is not a reasonable acknowledgement that wind farms are a matter of opinion and that there are two sides to the argument. It’s a slap in the face to reason, evidence and common decency.

And then he gets worse.

(h/t NewScientist 16 May 2015)

Robin Varghese at 3 Quarks Daily posts part of a commencement address from Joseph Brodsky, dating from 1984.  First, who’s Mr. Brodsky?  From Wikipedia:

Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky^[2] (/ˈbrɒdski/; Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский, IPA: [ɪˈosʲɪf ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvʲɪtɕ ˈbrotskʲɪj] ( listen); 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist.

Born in Leningrad in 1940, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled (“strongly advised” to emigrate) from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan.

Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”.^[3] He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991.

His commencement address has to do with the nature of Evil:

A prudent thing to do, therefore, would be to subject your notions of good to the closest possible scrutiny, to go, so to speak, through your entire wardrobe checking which of your clothes may fit a stranger. That, of course, may turn into a full-time occupation, and well it should. You’ll be surprised how many things you considered your own and good can easily fit, without much adjustment, your enemy. You may even start to wonder whether he is not your mirror image, for the most interesting thing about Evil is that it is wholly human. To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one’s notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc. One of the surest signs of danger here is the number of those who share your views, not so much because unanimity has a knack of degenerating into uniformity as because of the probability—implicit in great numbers—that noble sentiment is being faked.

Examination of one’s foundations and assumptions is always difficult but often instructive and entertaining – if one’s ego has been firmly encaged and placed in a local volcano.  Mr. Brodsky has a lot of meat and gristle and is fun to read.

Let’s take his statement about “things you considered your own and good can easily fit, without much adjustment, your enemy.”  Without straining too hard, we can see how this fits with the notion that objects lack moral dimension; only humans (or perhaps sentient beings) have moral dimensions, since they make choices.  Once we realize that most tangible created objects can be used by people regardless of their moral orientation, this statement shouldn’t surprise us; but it’s a wonderful reminder concerning how the creation of things is, typically but not always, easy for anyone to use, not just the righteous, well-meaning.  Earlier commentary here and here.

But far more important is his specification that things may include intellectual abstractions: “To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one’s notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future.”  Such abstractions often overtly state the goodness of their intentions, so this is all the more unsettling.  It also brings a few thoughts to mind …

When it comes to groups of people, they often band together to attempt to accomplish something beyond the abilities of a single individual.  If we use the word herd in place of group, then we realize that sometimes simple survival is beyond the individual, while, as a group, survival then becomes possible; it’s one of many survival strategies.  In this, I think Mr. Brodsky exhibits a fear of the capabilities of people in groups, especially when they are mislead, which may in turn be a symptom of his environment during his upbringing.  But there is no denying that some groups are subverted into, for want of a better word, evil.

If we continue our analogy to herds, there’s an interesting thought to be derived, which may be embodied in the single word baitball; alternatively, if we wish to avoid changing our terminology yet again, we can refer to the Native American hunting technique of using buffalo jumps.  In both of these hunting techniques, the tendency of the individuals to band together in a herd is used against them.  In the former, the fish are forced to school together in a spherical ball and abandon the tactics usually available to the school, at which time the predators attack using techniques that differ from hunting individuals.  For example, whales:

Some whales lunge feed on bait balls.^[8] Lunge feeding is an extreme feeding method, in which the whale accelerates from below a bait ball to a high velocity and then opens its mouth to a large gape angle. This generates the water pressure required to expand its mouth and engulf and filter a huge amount of water and fish. Lunge feeding by rorquals, a family of huge baleen whales that includes the blue whale, is said to be the largest biomechanical event on Earth.^[9]

A buffalo jump is the use of cliffs in the killing of bison en masse.  The bison are herded using various techniques, such as drive lanes and faux bison, so that they encounter the cliffs at sufficient speed that they cannot stop and end up, at best, with broken legs; the hunters then close in for the kill of the crippled animals.

The point in these two examples is that the strategy of individuals forming a herd for the purpose of survival is subverted by the predators to make feeding and hunting a more efficient event.  Perhaps I stretch a point, but I suggest we can see the same evolution in action with groups of people; they band together for one greater purpose or another, only to have the predators, which we may equate to evil in this one explanatory instance, use this behavior to achieve their own counter-purposes.  The purposes are also analogical – generally, the theft of labor, of genius, of productivity.  One might speculate that the Russian people came together, partially under the leadership of V. I. Lenin and his compatriots, to toss out the Czar and related nobility, only to find themselves once again virtually enslaved by the Communist Party as the Party learned to take control of the local soviets and subvert them from their original purposes to the purposes of the State, through the use of propaganda, spies, and the threat of force.

So, to Mr. Brodsky, how does one vaccinate against Evil?

By the same token, the surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin—not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do presumably with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs.

Again, lots of meat and thoughts.

First up, I’m drawn to his statement, “Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.”  I’ve watched the degradation of the Republican Party since the mid-90s, as their positions become more extreme, their ideas thinner and less frequent, their positions as rigid as a dancer’s backbone, and their fingers planted firmly in their ears. But why? I’ve wondered.

Well, ever hear the acronym RINO?  It’s Republicans in Name Only, and is used by conservative Republicans against the moderates to chisel them from the mainstream of the party, and then eject them into the formless political void.   I’ve become convinced that it is one of main operational mechanisms that is “purifying”, if I may use the term without laughing, the GOP into nothingness, splitting off non-conforming members on less and less significant features until all the RINO-users are pointing at each other, spitting their potent curse in confidence; ideological purity, to use Mr. Brodsky’s fine phrase.  Indeed, let’s look at that entire sentence, where we find mechanisms listed.  At first, I thought that the mechanisms made it easier to magnify the effect of evil (although it’s never evil in their minds); but perhaps the alternative is even more important: the process itself becomes the thing.  The balance sheet MUST balance, no matter what might be the human cost; the army must be drilled, the Party must be pure – all without reference to the humans ground to bits by each.  Perhaps that’s where the greatest evil lies.

And yet, in my observation, one of the characteristics of real Evil is its tendency to self-destruct.  What seems to have been the point of the Soviet Union?  Accumulation of power by any means necessary – including the exile and/or assassination of rivals, no matter how personally competent, and useful to the State, they might have been.  We saw this with Stalin, most vividly, but no doubt others, such as Andropov, also involved themselves in such activities.  An evil organization often becomes a concourse for the ambitions of the individuals, channeled above the needs of the group.  J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series features a faceless, redemptionless evil named Sauron, and his realm is less concerned about keeping out those outside, than keeping those inside within: the locks at the castle walls are installed such that the inmates cannot manipulate them.  So, in this sense, the situation may be self-correcting – but at what cost to the individuals who must co-exist with it?

Mr. Brodsky inveighs against the herd, against the group.  His definition of evil may drive his reaction:

I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this rendezvous, the harder its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: “Hi, I’m Evil!” That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one may derive from this observation gets dulled by its frequency.

So the bank robber, even the serial killer, is not truly evil in this context; it’s the social institution which he sees as more evil, potentially, than the guy skinning people for lampshades.  The government, the church, the political groups: they would all seem candidates for potentially embodying evil.

All that said, there is a personal connection for me: I’ve always found it hard to join groups.  I’ve really only managed to really join a single pre-existing group, the US Fencing Assocation; other memberships are symbolic, in which the contribution of my money is made in hopes that it will help enable the group in question to better society in some way.  I’ve often blamed this reluctance in equal parts shyness, introversion, and awareness of history – of how groups of people can perpetrate murder, mayhem, and massacre, all without feeling hardly a shred of guilt. From the Nazi party to the Comanches to the Texans taking revenge on the Comanches to the Inquisition to the lynchings in the American South, I suppose I read about most of them (the Comanches were just last year, actually) with too-young and impressionable of a mind; when the churches came calling, I rejected them as dangerous.

Mr. Brodsky hopes to forestall Evil, or great Evil, by forestalling the creation of groups of people.  Perhaps he achieved a little of his purpose, in the literal creation of groups; but, to draw another analogy, consider the creation of the engine.  At one time, farms & travel were achieved by horse.  The engine then replaced, not the horse, but the entire herd of horses; the herd was placed under the control of the farmer, or traveler, in a metaphorical way.

The analogy is this: the replacement of the group of people with computers, with automation, or with sentient machines.  The value of the individual to the group is mostly contained in the services he or she provides: computer programmer, hunter, farmer, farrier, metalsmith.  As the computing machine becomes more powerful, does this enable its human owner to sport it about as the equivalent of a group?  Is Mr. Brodsky’s hope itself then subverted by the computing power we’ve so fervently pursued?

The news on Iranian water becomes more complex, as explained by Mohammad Ali Shabani of AL Monitor:

Less publicized, but potentially far more devastating, is the Hari River debacle. Originating in the Hindukush, this waterway partly acts as an Iran-Afghan border and ends in Turkmenistan. In 1991, Iran and Turkmenistan agreed on the construction of a dam on it, with shared output. In 2004, the “Friendship Dam,” which provides major resources for irrigation but is also designed to secure the drinking water of Iran’s second-largest city Mashhad, was completed. Despite the Iran-Turkmenistan cooperation, there is currently no agreement with Kabul. Afghanistan is reportedly constructing two dams on the Hari River. It is feared that this will reduce the quantity and quality of the reserves of the “Friendship Dam,” which supplies drinking water to over 3 million Iranians. Once the Salma Dam project, delayed for decades because of a plethora of issues including war, is completed, it will cut flow in Iran’s section by 73%.

The Iranian reaction?  The Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Peterson reported, in 2013, one suspicion,

The other two “enemies” of the Salma Dam are Turkmenistan and Iran because it will diminish water flow to their own parched regions and dam projects. Afghan officials have often charged Iran with being behind dam-related attacks. When an Afghan district governor who had supported the project was killed in 2010, Afghan police officials suspected Iran’s involvement.

The stakes? Mr. Peterson lays them out:

For Afghanistan, key facts are clear: The Salma Dam will increase cultivatable land from 35,000 hectares to 80,000 hectares. It will also produce 42 MW of electricity, lowering the region’s dependence on Iran (which now provides 80 MW, cheaply) and Turkmenistan (which provides 50 MW).

“It will change much, because this project is not just for Herat,” says Zakeri. “If we can produce more fruit, we can send this to Kandahar, to other provinces. This project might change the situation in all of Afghanistan.”

For Iran, too, key facts are clear: The dam will cut the flow of its own Harirud River water by 73 percent, even though the number of Iranians dependent on that water – including the shrine city of Mashhad – is almost three times as large as the number of Afghans.

But perhaps the Iranians have decided to be more clever.  In an apparently unconnected article, AL Monitor‘s Arash Karami reports on a new order issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered that all Afghan children in Iran be permitted schooling regardless of their residency status. This decision impacts hundreds of thousands of children and can help improve the precarious status of the approximately 3 million Afghans in Iran.

This is interesting.  On the surface, it shows humanitarian concern for refugees and reflects well on both Iranian and Islamic reputations.  However, it is also an opportunity to inculcate in the children an affection for Iran, at the very least, and possibly other attitudes which Iran may find useful in the future, assuming the children eventually return to their homeland.  It’s certainly not a cheap decision:

Alireza Rajaei, an adviser to the Rouhani administration, said recent data show there are over 350,000 Afghan schoolchildren legally registered in Iranian schools, and approximately 500,000 who are not attending school. Rajaei said, “The problem is that their identity has not yet been determined.” Rajaei also warned that according to the Convention on Children’s Rights, the services provided to all children must be the same.

The International Water Law Project Blog provides legal details on Afghanistan’s water resources in general here.

Ever since I read that Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ), prospective GOP Nominee for President, had, according to various media,

… urged Congress on Monday to abandon its budget caps and boost defense spending.

Christie criticized spending limits required by the 2011 Budget Control Act, which Congress passed to bring federal spending under control and end a political standoff over raising the government debt limit.

His remarks on the budget caps are at odds with the views of many fiscally conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill who say the automatic constraints enacted four years ago have helped reduce the country’s budget deficit.

I’ve been mumbling to myself about the outsized budget we customarily accord the Defense Department.  Of course, many in the country believe we spend far too much on defense, but it’s also true that many believe we spend too little.

Perhaps the problem is communications?  The progressives, such as at The Daily Kos, seem to rely on a sort of hyper-sarcasm as they present facts (sometimes out of context).  The more intellectual campaigners, such as the folks at National Priorities, like to present facts, figures, and graphs, such as this one for the 2015 defense budget:

While the folks at Task & Purpose contend it’s closer to One Trillion Dollars (just to up my popped-eye quotient):

The United States spends a lot of money on defense. This is not an astounding fact. Just last month the president of the United States signed the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2015, giving the Department of Defense a base budget of $496 billion, plus $64 billion for what is referred to as Overseas Contingency Operations spending. This is because despite having a budget of nearly half a trillion dollars, the DoD base budget only covers normal operations and not combat spending. Also in the NDAA is $17.9 billion for the Department of Energy to spend on our nuclear weapons programs. If you didn’t know, our nuclear weapons, though deployed on Navy submarines and housed in Air Force silos, are actually paid for by the Energy department.
When you add all of the numbers up, the United States is on the verge of spending $1 trillion on defense for one fiscal year, nearly double what is authorized in the baseline DoD budget. This diffusion of the defense budget has led to a slow decrease in the percentage of money scrutinized by public eyes or open to public debate. This movement could also be seen as symptomatic of a nation so willing to deficit spend. The Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest expenditure outside of the DoD, and in many ways, covers the interest payments for the human costs of war.

Back at National Priorities prefers pie graphs to words, though:

So is the problem that we do not give enough information?  How about we do not compare ourselves enough to the world?  Here’s a pie chart for the UK:

Defense is 6%.  China:

Not quite 50%; however, the page states that “social spending” is pushed down to local governments and is much higher than one might think – and thus bias the pie chart.

Russia?  No luck finding one.

Certainly, the effect of war on the economy should concern everyone, and has been a topic of investigation by costsofwar.org:

What effect has war spending had on the U.S. economy? What would the U.S. economy have looked like without war spending?  War spending has probably stimulated the national economy to a degree. But the extra income attributable to war spending has been partially offset by the negative macroeconomic consequences of increased deficits and debt used to finance the wars. The net effect on GDP has probably been positive but is small and declining. An important impact of war spending has been to raise the nation’s indebtedness.

The increased military spending following 9/11 was financed almost entirely by borrowing.  According to standard macroeconomic models and evidence, rising deficits have resulted in higher debt, a higher debt to GDP ratio because debt has risen faster than income, and higher interest rates.

Washington’s Blog notes:

How could war actually hurt the economy, when so many say that it stimulates the economy?

Because of what economists call the “broken window fallacy”.

Specifically, if a window in a store is broken, it means that the window-maker gets paid to make a new window, and he, in turn, has money to pay others.  However, economists long ago showed that – if the window hadn’t been broken – the shop-owner would have spent that money on other things, such as food, clothing, health care, consumer electronics or recreation, which would have helped the economy as much or more.  If the shop-owner hadn’t had to replace his window, he might have taken his family out to dinner, which would have circulated more money to the restaurant, and from there to other sectors of the economy.   Similarly, the money spent on the war effort is money that cannot be spent on other sectors of the economy.

We have no enemies that can destroy us, or even seriously harm us.  So what will it take to make defunding the military to more sensible levels a fine Congressional sport?  We can point at defense contractors, our military past, etc etc – but what sort of communications is necessary for citizens who think we’re underfunding the military to realize this view may be specious and should be rethought?

… and musical.  If you have an interest in Cuba, Scott Chamberlain just returned from a visit while accompanying the Minnesota Orchestra.  He also runs a blog, and this is the first entry of several concerning his visit.  I haven’t finished all the Cuban posts, but he definitely writes quite lucidly.

In the interests of full disclosure, Scott is also my cousin.

Sadly, earlier speculation concerning the end of the Yemen war was unsupported, as reported in AL Monitor by Bruce Reidel of the Brookings Institute:

Saudi Arabia’s 29-year-old defense minister, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has staked his and his country’s future on achieving some kind of clear-cut victory in the kingdom’s war in Yemen. UN talks that leave Sanaa under the control of what the Saudis claim is an illegal Iranian-backed rebel regime are clearly not a decisive victory for the royals. Bin Salman needs much more.

Instead, after weeks of air attacks on the Zaydi Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies, the prince’s war looks like a stalemate. The immense damage done to Yemen’s weak infrastructure has created considerable bad blood between Yemenis and their rich Gulf neighbors that will poison relations for years. Yemenis always resented their rich brothers; now many will want revenge. Even worse for Riyadh, Iran is scoring a victory on its Gulf rival without any cost to Tehran and with only limited Iranian assistance to the Zaydis.

Mr. Reidel goes on to note the Deputy Royal Prince in charge of the war has no military experience; in sum, a new king who reorganized the hierarchy and started a war with a poor selection of military leader.  Signs of an inexperienced leadership team?

An earlier report by Madawi Al-Rasheed, also in AL Monitor, suggests that the royals need complete victory:

King Salman ibn Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and his son Mohammed cannot afford to achieve anything less than total victory. The king chose to inaugurate his reign with an aggressive foreign policy, to mark this new era as distinct from the soft power and charm offensives of the late King Abdullah. With the new king, a serious reversal of policy and outright military intervention became the hallmarks of his new reign.

Saudi audiences need to be assured that the new king is the master of Riyadh’s security and the kingdom’s future. His predatory son Mohammed needs to establish his credentials as soon as possible not only as deputy crown prince but also as minister of defense. There seems to be urgency in this matter, given Salman’s advanced age. Surely the young prince wants to be well established before his father dies.

So, the Saudis will be remembered for a few generations for air strikes on Yemen, and revenge will no doubt be sought.  Did they have a good reason?  Bruce Reidel, in a different article for AL Monitor, expanded on this last year:

It’s the House of Saud’s worse nightmare come true. The stunning success of the Zaydi Houthi rebellion in Yemen places a Shiite group with connections to Iran on the soft underbelly of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, erasing years of Saudi efforts to stabilize Yemen and keep it in the Saudi orbit.

The Zaydi Houthi movement, which calls itself Ansar Allah, took control of the capital, Sanaa, in September and now has taken control of the main northern port of the country at Hodeida. The Houthis have expanded far beyond their traditional stronghold in the north of Yemen around Saada near the Saudi border to take control of much of northern Yemen. They are dictating who and what they will accept in the nominal government of Yemen. They rejected President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s first choice for a new prime minister, and rejected his requests that they evacuate Sanaa and return to their bases in the north. …

Whatever the extent of Iranian aid to the Houthis, Riyadh believes it is extensive and critical to their success. A senior Saudi prince recently told me that the kingdom is now surrounded by Iranian proxies. He said Iran’s assets control four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. The Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat this month editorialized that “Iran is encircling Saudi Arabia.”

So Saudi nervousness is somewhat understandable.

Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam and supplier of water to California, Nevada, and Arizona, is at its lowest level ever, according to NewScientist (9 May 2015, paywall):

“We’re only at 38 per cent full. Lake Mead hasn’t been this low since we were filling it in the 1930s,” said a spokeswoman for the US Bureau of Reclamation in Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal contributes this:

Lake Mead is expected to shrink low enough by January 2017 to trigger a first-ever federal shortage declaration on the Colorado River, according to a bleak new projection from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

In its monthly forecast issued this week, the bureau predicts the reservoir east of Las Vegas could start 2017 as much as 15 feet below the shortage line of 1,075 feet above sea level.

The white ring in the above picture indicates the normal level of the reservoir.  The Review-Journal continues,

Already in record-low territory, the lake surface is now expected to drop another 4 feet by the end of June, to 1,073 feet above sea level. After that, forecasters expect the water to gradually rise again, to elevation 1,077 by January 2016, before plunging roughly 22 feet in six months to a new all-time low of 1,055.

Should the lake hit 1,050, the Southern Nevada Water Authority will lose the use of one of its two existing intake pipes, though that will be less of a concern after September, when a new $817 million intake should start drawing water from the deepest part of the lake.

On paper, Hoover Dam is also supposed to stop generating electricity. However, that minimum generation level is expected to be revised downward, to 950 feet above sea level, because of ongoing power turbine improvements.

If you prefer your view of slow-motion disasters in the form of graphs, arachnoid.com has this:

Interesting hiccup in 2012.  The Brookings Institute has a video interview with Pat Mulroy, who served as general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA).

And I just wouldn’t invest in these guys.