Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Sue Branford and Maurício Torres (NewScientist 7 March 2015) in “Dambusters” (paywall) cover the latest events in the Amazon Basin.  Key information:

According to official satellite data, 22 per cent of the forest has been felled. But this is an underestimate as it fails to account for selective logging, which the satellite images don’t detect. After several years of marked declines in forest clearance, which won Brazil international plaudits, the level of deforestation has risen again.

As we all should have learned in school, there is a cycle of evaporation -> rain -> evaporation called the water cycle.  In the Amazon the forest is a key part of this cycle:

While this may be a result of natural climate variability, Antonio Nobre, a senior researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research in São José dos Campos, says that the disruption is linked to deforestation. Recent research has shown that Amazon vegetation, particularly large trees, play a central role in maintaining the hydrological cycle. “In a single day a large tree in the rainforest can pump over 1000 litres of moisture from the soil into the atmosphere. If this is scaled up for the whole forest, it means the Amazon forest transpires 20 billion tonnes of water a day,” he says. Cut down the forest and you destroy the flying rivers.

So do trees make evaporation more efficient?  That’s not clear in the article.  The “flying river” is a nickname coined by a Brazilian scientist for the clouds formed from this evaporation that delivers rain to the south.  But:

São Paulo, the industrial heartland of Brazil, is in the grip of the worst drought in living memory. The clouds from the Amazon that make the basin itself so wet and also deliver rain to the south of the country – dubbed “flying rivers” by one Brazilian scientist – have failed to materialise.

And so on to the chase.  The forest of the Amazon has been under attack for decades by slash and burn farmers, by miners, by developers – many of whom are operating illegally against Brazilian law, and all of whom are impacting local tribes, most in a negative manner as the forest they have existed in for centuries are now torn from them simply because they do not conform to modern notions of ownership – although the authors of the NewScientist article do cover the efforts of the Munduruku to take ownership of their bit of it.  I think most folks would consider this to be … evil-doing.  Not that the perpetrators see it that way, but then English colonialists hardly ever felt badly about killing American Indians, either.  Here’s the thing: I think you can identify true “good guys” by the their activity patttern: they are cooperative.  They have a sense of justice and they are aware that in order to achieve justice, they must work with each other, compromise.

The other side, what I find myself calling the bad guys tonight, cannot do that: they are motivated by unmoderated greed.  Not that the good guys don’t have a spot of avariciousness in whatever they use for a soul, but it’s moderated and used for positive purposes.  But if you look at criminal gangs, evil regimes, and even fiction: the bad guys tend to destroy each other.  Working together tends to deny the greed which they feel.  So:

if deforestation continues, the viability of the large dams may be compromised. Until recently most scientists thought that cutting down trees near dams increased the amount of water flowing into them. But a recent study by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in San Francisco, California, came to a very different conclusion. It found that by 2050, when on present trends at least 40 per cent of Brazil’s Amazon forest will be gone, there will be a significant decline in river flows and energy generation (PNAS, vol 110, p 9601). This would make the reliability of the dams as an energy source highly questionable. …

Along with growing doubts from scientists, another factor is creating the perception that the authorities’ love affair with Amazon hydropower may be waning. Historically, one of the biggest drivers of dam-building has been a cosy relationship between big engineering companies and their political allies. “Energy planning in Brazil is not treated as a strategic issue but as a source of money for engineering companies and politicians,” says Felício Pontes, prosecutor for the Federal Public Ministry in Pará.

But many of the companies are now caught up in a massive corruption scandal involving bribery and money laundering by the state-owned oil company, Petrobrás. Investigators are examining the contracts for the Belo Monte dam, and a leading executive of one of the companies, Camargo Corrêa, which has been funding viability studies for the São Luís do Tapajós dam, has been arrested.

So, in order to build a dam, they have to destroy that which makes the dam economically viable, transgressing against folks who’ve lived in these areas for centuries; and in the process of deciding who gets to do what, the government and the companies indulge in corruption.  As the scientists take in the new data and come to (always contingent) conclusions that this project will self-destruct, it is becoming less likely that hydroelectric power will be implemented on the Amazon.

The IndyStar is getting irritable about the Indiana legislature:

Update!  Washington State governor Jay Inslee bans taxpayer funded travel to Indiana:

“I find Indiana’s new law disturbing, particularly at a time when more and more states and people in America are embracing civil rights for everyone. Washington will join other states and cities in opposing this law and I will impose an administration-wide ban on state funded travel to Indiana.

“Indiana’s law appears to legalize private discrimination. Washington state fought against this very thing in a case Attorney General Bob Ferguson brought against a florist.

“We in Washington stand for equality. I applaud those companies and organizations that have spoken out against the law and said they would not locate or expand operations in Indiana. I want to invite all those organizations, and anyone interested in a state that promotes equality and opportunity, to come visit Washington. We are open for business, and open to all people.”

(h/t Sydney Sweitzer)

Update!  Connecticut may have beaten Washington to the punch!

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy signed an executive order on Monday barring state spending on travel to Indiana and any other state enacting legislation that protects religious freedoms but ultimately discriminates against gays and others groups.

Malloy, the incoming chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, called Indiana’s new religious objections law “disturbing, disgraceful and outright discriminatory.”

REASON’s Robby Soave suggests the travel boycott may be hypocritical:

Malloy is speaking, of course, about Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s decision to sign the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which critics believe would provide cover to Christian businesses that wish to discriminate against gay people. I wrote last week that most boycotts are hypocritical (since the boycotters inevitably fail to sanction all immoral actors), but this one is especially hypocritical: Connecticut also has an RFRA in place, albeit one with some meaningful differences.

I pointed out this hypocrisy to Malloy’s office and asked for clarification on the extent of the travel ban. I received an email from one of the governor’s press people informing me only that “We will have more information this afternoon.”

If Connecticut is going to prohibit government-subsidized travel to RFRA states, perhaps they should respond in kind and prohibit travel to Connecticut? (A libertarian can dream, I suppose.)

And it’s not hypocritical to criticize Connecticut without analyzing all the relevant information?  That strikes me as an intellectual error.  But he’s saved – he thinks – when another blogger suggests Connecticut is even worse:

The Federalist‘s Sean Davis argues that Connecticut’s RFRA is actually more expansive than Indiana’s. The Indiana law prohibits the government from substantially burdening religion; Connecticut’s law does not inclue [sic] the word “substantially,” meaning that all government-enacted burdens on religion are illegal—in theory, at least.

I’m not a legal theorist or practicioner, so I’ll not pretend I can tell the difference between the two statutes.  However, I do wonder if Connecticut’s RFRA was passed during the current session, or if it’s the responsibility of some other Connecticut legislature – and governor.  Treating a grouping of people – a state – as a single entity, of a single mind, does not have the heft of a trustworthy argument.  Perhaps Connecticut will repeal their RFRA tomorrow and thank Indiana – or Robby – for pointing out their flawed law, if indeed it is.

(Updated 7/27/2015 – added missing link to previous entries in the thread)

A few days ago I described my current project, and this morning I had one of those early morning thoughts that rings clear as a bell, probably because my critical faculties aren’t online yet.  I’ll bring it up anyways; I think it not only holds true for me, but for a lot of software engineers.

I’ll start with an analogy: physicists, especially theoretical physicists, aspire to mathematical descriptions of phenomena which are not only accurate and tractable, but also elegant.  I am not a mathematician, so I’m not quite sure what makes for elegant mathematics, but I can say that, within programming, there are elegant programs and there are hacks.  I don’t know that anyone’s ever defined an elegant program, but I’m sure a number of these qualities might be ascribed to it:

• Immediately comprehensible;
• Documented (somewhat redundant with the first point);
• Abstracted such that modification of one part of the program only positively affects all other parts;
• Extensible, which is to say adding new capabilities is easy and does not require working on parts not directly applicable to the problem to be solved;
• Others that don’t come immediately to mind

Extra points if it’s

• Scalable; which is to say, if you pump more data through the program, or sometimes even change the data’s topology, the program’s consumption of resources (memory, CPU cycles) does not grow even more vigorously; we often talk about the complexity of a program, measured by “order of”, symbolized O().  So if your amount of data is symbolized with the number n, then we hope to do no worse than O(n).  Order of, say, O(n^2), in which doubling the amount of data would result in the amount of time and/or memory used is SQUARED rather than doubled, is definitely a bad program, resulting in a program that runs in an unacceptable amount of time, or actually crashes due to consumption of all available memory; O(log n), on the other hand, is doing quite well; nirvana is O(1), i.e., your algorithm is insensitive to the amount (or topology) of the data.
• Performs well; this is allied, yet sometimes opposed to, the Scalability point.  For example, sometimes you can really make a program fly by profligate use of memory, which then makes you vulnerable to that user who applies a great deal more data to your program than you ever expected.

So I bring this all up to better explain the project I mentioned earlier.  I am well aware of yacc and lex, the standard parsing tools.  I view them as inelegant to the point where I don’t use them, because they are not part and parcel of any other language than themselves; instead, they are used to generate C source code, which then must be sometimes massaged into usefulness, and even if not, there are other problems, such as the use of global variables, a key source of inelegance; and I’ve come to regard the mixture of languages in a single program to be a hack in itself.  I am well aware of “the right tool for the right problem” philosophy, but I take the position that we all have only so many neurons available, and using them on multiple languages is a waste and a kludge when it should be eminently possible to create a language that can resolve all of these problems.

So this is an evaluation of this intuition, you might say.  Does a language from the functional paradigm (Mythryl) have the capability to take code that looks like a BNF and result in a parser that is easy to build, expand, and fix, while running well in terms of performance and scalability?  I have some concerns on the last point, but they’re not worth going into at the moment; better to wait until I’m at least testing partial functionality.

And for those wondering, I have nearly all of the BNF for the XML specification in place.  I have discovered, unsurprisingly, that recursive and mutually recursive BNFs cannot be handled with BNF-like code, so there’s a minus.  OTOH, they can be handled and with only some small disturbance to the general feel of BNFs.

I have, BTW, ignored the question of whether or not BNFs are really readable.  They are, to my knowledge, the most common method for specifying something requiring parsing.  Reading one easily takes some practice; but then, nothing easy is worth doing, said JFK.

Or is it wrong to mix politics with programming?

Given the importance of algorithms in today’s society, this is not exactly a jest.

Continuing this thread, Indiana TV station RTV6 reports more business unrest:

The CEOs of Emmis Communications, Anthem, Cummins, Eli Lilly & Co., Dow AgroSciences, Angie’s List, Indiana University Health, Roche Diagnostics and Salesforce sent the joint letter to Gov. Mike Pence, House Speaker Brian Bosma and Senate President Pro-Tem David Long on Monday afternoon. …

The letter says the companies are “deeply concerned” about the impact the law is having on their employees and the reputation of the state.

“All of our companies seek to promote fair, diverse and inclusive workplaces,” the letter reads. “Our employees must not feel unwelcome in the place where they work and live.”

The letter ends by asking lawmakers to immediately enact new legislation that “makes it clear that neither the Religious Freedom Restoration Act nor any other Indiana law can be used to justify discrimination based upon sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Governor Pence, considering a Presidential run, appears bewildered, reports Tim Swarens at the IndyStar:

I asked the governor if he had anticipated the strongly negative reaction set off by the bill’s passage. His response made it clear that he and his team didn’t see it coming.

“I just can’t account for the hostility that’s been directed at our state,” he said. “I’ve been taken aback by the mischaracterizations from outside the state of Indiana about what is in this bill.”

In defense of the legislation, he noted that 19 other states and the federal government have adopted RFRA laws similar to Indiana’s. And he pointed out that President Barack Obama voted for Illinois’ version of RFRA as a state senator.

The governor also criticized the news media’s coverage of the legislation. “Despite the irresponsible headlines that have appeared in the national media, this law is not about discrimination,” he said. “If it was, I would have vetoed it.”

Yet, those justifications, cited repeatedly by the governor’s supporters in recent days, have done little to quell the controversy.

Pence reportedly will submit a “clarification” bill to supplement the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but this is the sort of unsettling controversy which will leave independent voters wondering if he’s really ready for the national stage.  Meanwhile, another legal scholar, Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy, suggests this is a tempest in a teapot:

Are the claims made against the new Indiana law accurate? Not really. This law, like other RFRAs, merely requires that state laws meet a demanding, but hardly insurmountable, test before infringing upon the religious practice or conscience of religious believers. If the law imposes a substantial burden on religious belief, the law must yield unless the law serves a compelling state interest and is the least burdensome way to advance that interest. Here’s more background on how these sorts of laws work.

Business leaders rarely reach the C-Suite based on charisma or other irrational reasons; instead, they tend to be hard-headed rationalists. They’re certainly not always right, but they also don’t always move in concert (here’s a report on a pro-union business owner, for example).  If business leaders of especially large businesses, such as Eli Lilly, are expressing concern and making, at least, contingency plans, then that suggests their legal departments have conducted their own analyses of the bill in question and have come to conclusions at variance with Mr. Adler and others.

Naturally, most small businesses are geographically constrained and cannot make threats of this sort; indeed, they may feel that complaining about this law would redound on their bottom line, and so they are remaining mum.  The fact that these businesses are willing to incur the costs of moving out of Indiana is deeply indicative of their concern for their employees.  It may be going too far to suggest this is a large split between the GOP (who currently controls the Indiana government) and Big Business, given that BB is hardly a homogenous entity, but it’s certainly a tremor indicating deep religious conservatism may not be congruent with a business constrained to working in the real world and unable to tolerate irrationalism.

(h/t Gwennedd @ The Daily Kos)

Fascinating title:

The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria

Totally misled.

Sometimes a science story isn’t significant to me, it just catches my attention.  Catherine de Lange reports on the observations of shaking hands in NewScientist (7 March 2015) in “After handshakes, we sniff people’s scent on our hand” (print: “Shake hands, sniff palm, read signals“) (paywall):

YOU won’t believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you will lift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour, revealed by covert filming, suggests that humans use bodily smells to send signals, much as other mammals do. …

After shaking hands with someone of the same sex, both men and women sniffed their shaking hand for more than twice as long as they did before the handshake. If the person was of the opposite sex, they smelled their other hand twice as long as before (eLife, doi.org/2jz). …

One surprise was just how much the volunteers smelled their hands. “When we were coding the videos we would see people sniffing themselves just like rats,” says Sobel. “It’s like blindsight – you see it all the time but you just don’t think of it.”

Now I’ll just sit here and squirm a bit.

I’ll pass on that date, thanks.

(h/t our Arts Editor)

NewScientist (7 March 2015) suggests in “Droughts in Syria and California linked to climate change” (paywall) (print: “Syrian war’s dry roots”) that climate change may be linked to the extended drought in Syria, and be one of the precipitating factors of the Syrian war.

Colin Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues analysed Syrian weather data since 1931, and found that the winter rainfall that is crucial for crops has steadily declined. Over the same period, temperatures have risen, drying soils faster. The only explanation lies in humanity’s greenhouse emissions, says Kelley. Climate models, his team found, predict such changes for the region.

The team used statistics to tease apart annual ups and downs in precipitation from the long-term drying that seems to be linked to climbing carbon dioxide emissions (PNAS, doi.org/2jw).

Still, correlation of drought to climate change to war seems a bit of a stretch, as the article later notes:

“Placing stress on a society tends to make violence more likely,” says Andrew Solow of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. But, he says, political unrest in the Middle East might have led to violence in Syria anyway.

Teasing out the exacerbating factors causing a war seems to be quite a hazardous occupation; on the other hand, other voices have suggested that all wars are predicated on the acquisition of arable land, no matter what facade is used as an excuse for the war.  Watching how the land reacts to the warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns in the near future may yield more clues as to probable outbreaks of warfare.

From the original PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) article:

… made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.

In a Facebook post linked to this conversation (here and here), old friend James Moore says he doesn’t understand the issue.

Jim, beginning with what I posted on Facebook…

An example is a bakery that refused to fulfill a special order of cupcakes for a gay couple on the grounds that their relationship was sinful under their religion. This is not a recent example, but I ran across it as real life example that happened in Indianapolis, in contravention to a City ordinance banning such discrimination.

The pro-side claims that not being permitted to pick customers based on religious dogma infringes on their religious freedoms; thus, the name of the act (Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act); those discriminated against will naturally also feel their rights have been violated.

To continue … or so I understand a possible consequence; I have not read the Act myself.

In my opinion, if we permit such legislation such as this Act (IRFRA), we may find ourselves with a society which becomes increasingly fragmented and insular – businesses pre-selecting customers based on criteria of a religious nature, rather than a business nature; alienation of minorities from the main streams of thought due to what they are rather than what they think; and the general loss of talent as the general pool of outcast talent, as it would become, becomes discouraged from participating in the United States. As the meritorious deployment of talent by American busiiness is an enormous reason for our long term dominance of the world economy, any loss of talent is an issue of concern to the general populace; a loss over what seems to me to be an irrational reason would be tragic.

I am not making legal arguments; these are economic forecasts of the results of permitting these Acts to stand and proliferate. A meditation upon the hierarchies of institutions and the limitations thus imposed upon institutions is, no doubt, in order, since the arguments I generally see on this topic tend to be both sides crying out about infringements on their freedoms without any deeper analysis occurring. Perhaps such can be found out on the web, but I know not where. I would start by constructing a religion in which human sacrifice is demanded, and then perhaps consult a lawyer to discover the legal decision not permitting such an activity, and the language limiting religious freedoms might be found therein.

More to add to this post:

Gencon, a convention for gamers that reputedly brings in $50 million a year, is threatening to move to another state when its current contract runs out.  (h/t Emily Summers Leabch)

In this IndyStar news article comes the report that the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) also notified Indiana that they may move its annual convention to another state:

“Our perspective is that hate and bigotry wrapped in religious freedom is still hate and bigotry,” Todd Adams, the associate general minister and vice president of the Indianapolis-based denomination, told The Indianapolis Star.

(h/t Evan Hurst)

The same article reports that Kiwanis International, celebrating its 100th anniversary at its convention this June, has expressed concerns:

“We have received inquiries from members asking if any of our international guests (of varying religions) might be denied service in Indianapolis. This is attention our city does not need,” said Kiwanis International Executive Director Stan D. Soderstrom.

Meanwhile, supporter of the measure Micah Clark, Executive Director of the American Family Association of Indiana, believes there will be little negative impact:

 “I just don’t see how this prevents conventions from coming here,” Clark said. Popular convention cities such as Chicago, Orlando, Phoenix and New Orleans are located in states with similar (religious freedom) laws in effect, and there’s no outcry by convention organizers to pull out of those locations, he said.

The IndyStar is continues on to note the law is not like those in the other states in one key way:

Daniel O. Conkle, a law professor at Maurer School of Law at Indiana University [and professor of religious studies], said the law that has passed the Indiana legislature differs from similar laws in some other states by extending religious protections to businesses, not just individuals.

Not a frenzied rush for the exits, but at least a few are willing to look at the negative impacts and do something about it.

Turns out the fantasies of the religious right, as exemplified in the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, do not mesh with the sensibilities of business:

Since the year after its 1995 founding, Angie’s List has been headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. The $315 million corporation which lets users review local businesses, especially home improvement professionals, has been planning a $40 million renovation of its own, moving its headquarters across town and adding 1000 new jobs over five years.

But thanks to state lawmakers and Republican Governor Mike Pence‘s new Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, those expansion plans have been canceled.

“Angie’s List is open to all and discriminates against none and we are hugely disappointed in what this bill represents,” CEO Bill Oesterle said in a statement today, adding, the expansion is “on hold until we fully understand the implications of the freedom restoration act on our employees, both current and future.”

The NBA and the Indiana Pacers:

“The game of basketball is grounded in long established principles of inclusion and mutual respect.  We will continue to ensure that all fans, players and employees feel welcome at all NBA and WNBA events in Indiana and elsewhere.”

Additionally, Pacers owner Herb Simon stated:

“The Indiana Pacers, Indiana Fever and Bankers Life Fieldhouse have the strongest possible commitment to inclusion and non-discrimination on any basis.  Everyone is always welcome at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.  That has always been the policy from the very beginning of the Simon family’s involvement and it always will be.”

The liberal Huffington Post summarizes the bill thusly:

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) quietly signed legislation Thursday that could legalize discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow any individual or corporation to cite its religious beliefs as a defense when sued by a private party. But many opponents of the bill, which included business leaders, argued that it could open the door to widespread discrimination. Business owners who don’t want to serve same-sex couples, for example, could now have legal protections to discriminate.

JOHN MCCORMACK over at The Weekly Standard, a conservative publication,  defends it:

Is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act really a license to discriminate against gay people?

No. Stanford law professor Michael McConnell, a former appellate court judge, tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email: “In the decades that states have had RFRA statutes, no business has been given the right to discriminate against gay customers, or anyone else.”

The Human Rights Campaign reports Arkansas may do the same thing:

Today, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and HRC Arkansas condemned the Arkansas senate’s passage of H.B. 1228, an Indiana-style bill that will open the door to discrimination against LGBT people, people of color, religious minorities, women and other minority groups across the state. After a formal procedural hurdle, the bill will be on its way to Governor Asa Hutchinson’s desk. HRC has repeatedly called on the governor to veto this legislation, including at a press conference featuring HRC president Chad Griffin yesterday.

Salesforce’s CEO cancels events in Indiana over concerns:

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says he doesn’t want his employees subjected to discrimination as part of their work for the San Francisco-based company, and he is cancelling all required travel to the state of Indiana following the signing of a religious freedom law that some say allows business to exclude gay customers.

Here’s what’s what: in business land, talent is all important, and talent doesn’t pass over the LGBT community.  Historically, it is often the outcast, whether it’s because of sexual or religious sensibilities, who is the most innovative, the most driven to succeed.

But the religious community doesn’t thrive on innovation.  The religious community values the orthodox, the community members who know their roles and fills them.  In a community where the roles have evolved into a good balance, this can result in a stability that lasts for centuries and benefits its members.  But for the oddball who sees the world a little differently, who may not give credence to a more outre’ religious precept, or has urges at odds with a rule of the sect, this can be a problem that makes both member and community uncomfortable, angry, or even murderous.  The outcast brings nothing of obvious value to the community, so there’s no motivation to reconsider the rule, arbitrary as it may objectively seem; not even an exception granted, even if it impacts a central family.  In this way, new sects are created and old ones slowly fade away.

But in the business world, “fade away” is what JC Penney and Sears are doing, right in front of everyone.  The LGBT’s most effective defenders may not be those putatively devoted to it, but instead those who benefit the most from the talents of LGBT members: Big Business.

(h/t Libby Summers Boucher)

The current flare up of election day sabotage in Nigeria reminds me of the doubts I hold concerning the implementation of democracy in many societies.  It has to do with allegiances.  Humans tend to group together, both as a matter of survival and being social beasts, and to retain these social attachments as a long term, semi-exclusive arrangement, which is to say that we may have a number of these relationships, but rarely more than one of any given type.  For example, the sports fan with more than one allegiance to a football team is rare.

These categories are also hierarchical.  A sports team allegiance could be considered to be at the bottom of the pile, as it’s a rare sports nut who’ll actually put their life on the line for their team: exceptions may be found, but they merely prove the rule that some humans have a really large standard deviation.  But consider these categories, ranked hierarchically (Citizen A):

1. Religion
2. Country
3. Tribe
4. Family

Or, to drive the point home (Citizen B):

1. Country
2. Family
3. Religion
4. Tribe

And now apply them in the context of an election.  Who does A vote for?  Well, if he’s a Zoroastrian, he might vote for the Zoroastrian in the race, as a matter of course – not when all else is equal, but as the most important factor to consider.  B, on the other hand, holding country as the most important allegiance, might evaluate all of the candidates and select the one exhibiting the best skills at governance (which is quite the topic in itself), or perhaps advocating policies B thinks best suited for the country, disregarding the religion or tribe of the candidates.

We can construct some tentative hierarchies.  An American independent voter, such as myself:

1. Family
2. Country
3. State, maybe

I fear I’m not very tribal, actually.  Now, a party zealot:

1. Political Party
2. Country

I don’t point fingers at either party, actually – this is known as voting the party line, a term most of us know quite well.  Here’s a party loyalist:

1. Political Party
1.1 Country

Here might be an Iraqi voter:

1. Tribe
2. Religion
3. Party
4. Country

This might also apply to many other voters in countries of dubious democratic nature.  It seems to me (and I’m sure many political theorists are way ahead of this simple minded software engineer) that certain hierarchical examples are toxic to the democratic experiment, while others are conducive.  I’m not a big fan of the party zealot, but at least I do not think they’re toxic; the party loyalist will actually listen to arguments and occasionally cross over.  Being an independent myself (I voted for Jesse Ventura for MN governor, and I would have done so again if he’d run for re-election), I think the independent’s hierarchy is close to ideal – what is best for the country, in whatever terms seem most important, is the top priority.  Religion doesn’t even enter into it for me, unless I feel the religious inclinations of the candidate may have an undue negative influence on the candidate’s actions.

Given those thoughts, I have to wonder at how accurate it is to designate a number of countries as having reached the gold standard of being democratic.  Those countries in which most of the voters are of the profile, above, for an Iraqi voter, may be regarded with skepticism, because allegiances to tribe and religion are difficult to break once they’ve become set, and if the penalties for breaking those allegiances are severe, well, then the contest is not decided in the general election, but in the nominating contest for the one entity controlling more votes than the others – assuming it’s a winner take all format.  This suggests that democracy will not flourish until the old hierarchies are sufficiently broken to permit citizens to put heterogeneous country above the demands of other institutions.

United States of America

This leads naturally to considering the origins of the United States.  The colonists who eventually established the country were often outcasts: Pilgrims who felt, or were, oppressed; the economically disadvantaged who sought a new country to begin again; criminals whose punishment was exile and often indenturement; slaves, without a prayer of returning to their homes.  These are not people with unbreakable allegiances to much else than their religion. And even that, over a generation or two of exposure to other modes of thought, proves not to be impervious. While the Amish and a few other groups persist, we’re hard put to find surviving members of other groups such as Shakers, Friends, Pilgrims; and the larger sects, while having trends for voting one way or another, are not normally known for a en masse voting habit.

But I think another factor also comes into play: the idea of justice, or fair play.  The stricture that all are equal before the law is a reflection of the idea of fair play.  Dogs and monkeys have this down cold; when we implement it, then we must admit the concept that we do not cheat at elections.  Not that it doesn’t occur, but it is considered to be such a minor affair that it doesn’t swing elections any longer, although of course Richard Nixon might have grounds to disagree.

So I shudder every time I hear we’re “putting boots on the ground” to install democracy in some benighted country lacking same; our government “professionals” don’t really seem to have a clue as to the prerequisites of making a democracy work.  Where are we going this time to fail, once again?  Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti … who’s next to join our list of failures?

Senator Harry Reid (D – NV), Minority Leader and former Majority Leader, announces his retirement:

Given deep partisan tensions on Capitol Hill, Mr. Reid’s tenure has become increasingly combative in recent years and included a procedural change on nominations that infuriated Republicans. He also came under fire for blocking floor debate, and even some of his Democratic colleagues suggested that he was stifling the Senate. Just this week, he alienated House Democrats who thought he was sabotaging a compromise on Medicare.

Mr. Reid’s re-election fight would have been a high-spending slugfest in the presidential battleground of Nevada. Conservatives such as Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who were a favorite target of Mr. Reid’s criticism in 2014, would most likely have spared no expense in trying to oust him.

First elected to the House in 1982, and 75 years old, it’s time to let someone else take the seat.  And who will it be?  Surely not his last Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, who was Reid’s preferred opponent:

“The campaign began to prepare at the beginning of 2010 to face Sue Lowden, the deep-pocketed, telegenic former anchorwoman and state senator. ‘She was the person,’ as one insider put it via E-mail,” says [the Las Vegas Sun’s Jon] Ralston, “‘we were least interested in facing so we set out to make sure that she either 1) came out of the primary bruised and battered or 2) didn’t come out of the primary at all so we would face Sharron Angle or Danny Tarkanian.’” Meaning Reid’s political team could spend its time working to help the GOP pick its nominee.

In case memory fails you, she was the one who ran from unwelcome questions during the 2010 campaign:

Angle invited members of the media to her first big press event since her primary win. However, once the event ended and the press tried to ask her questions, Angle bolted.

This truly baffled me.  You’re an American politician running for one of the most important elective posts in the country and you aren’t even willing to say, “I don’t know”?  I vividly recall then-candidate Jesse Ventura answering a question, during a gubernatorial debate, with, “I don’t know, but I’ll get the best experts I can find” – and he won that race, as a member of the Reform Party, against two highly experienced opponents, Mayor of St. Paul Norm Coleman (later Senator) and State AG and State Legislator “Skip” Humphrey, son of the famous Hubert Humphrey.

Nevada in general runs politically red, so the Dems will have trouble retaining the seat.  I suspect there will be a pitched battle for key members of Reid’s campaign team.  The Republicans need to worry about the last debacle, as the Angle team was shocked to lose the election; their polling right up to election day showed them with a lead.  One presumes they brought in polling experts in the post-mortem to discover their methodological errors.  Too bad primary methodologies are not so easy to correct.

The recent Germanwings tragedy, in which one of the pilots apparently deliberately crashed an airliner, brings to light several other crashes thought to involve suicidal pilots.  Brad Plumer at Vox writes a fascinating report:

In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed near Nantucket, Massachusetts, killing 217 people. Before the crash, the plane’s pilot had apparently excused himself to go to the bathroom. The black box recorder then picked up unintelligible commotion and banging on the door. The co-pilot, Gamil El Batouty, could be heard muttering over and over, “I rely on God. I rely on God. I rely on God. I rely on God.” The captain eventually forced his back way in and could be heard saying, “What is this? Did you shut the engine[s]?” As the plane crashed, the captain was heard trying to right the plane, saying, “Pull with me. Pull with me.”

The Prozac Pilot opines this has nothing to do with depression:

The only thing I know about Lubitz is that he was an evil coward. This type of hideous behavior is not created by depression. This is something that sprouts from pure evil. I feel badly if a person wants to commit suicide. However, when a person takes their own life and commits mass murder at the same time, that is the ultimate act of selfishness.

I am not sure if we will ever understand what caused this person to do what he did. But I do know that he caused a great deal of pain to many people.

How about simple insanity?  Back at Vox, Joseph Stromberg covers the current state of aviation safety.  A good source in case you’re nervous about flying, but they supply a flawed  chart:

SOURCE: Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives

Absolute numbers in a variable context.  I’d rather see number of crashes per miles flown, or crashes per total flights, although some folks over Quora suggest that normalizing using miles flown is flawed.  Given the expansion in air travel, normalizing the numbers to reflect expanding use of air travel should make the improvement in safety even more dramatic.  Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association supplies data concerning accidents and fatalities per flight hour (100,000 hours) in a tabular format here, but not an immediately useful chart; the summary is that improvements, particularly in fatal accidents numbers, is definitely there.  It’s not so clear in total accidents, but I’m not a statistician.  Statistics Brain supplies some analysis for the geeks.

Finally, last August NewScientist (paywall) examined the future of pilotless aircraft.

At the heart of this revolution lies a simple fact: computers now do so much on planes that airline pilots rarely have cause to take the controls. Autoflight computers can take over when the plane is just 30 metres off the ground, maintaining whatever speed, heading and height the crew tap into the flight management system. And the computer has long been able to home in on a runway radio beacon and land the aircraft automatically.

I can only hope the FAA requires the airline makers to take a more serious approach to computer security than evidenced by today’s computer makers.

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi summarizes the current state of social media in the Arab world on PS21:

Although Al Qaeda has used social media to a limited degree over the past few years beyond posting their videos on YouTube, their breakaway group ISIS has taken its use another level. For starters, ISIS videos have been of a much higher production quality than Al Qaeda, using Hollywood-like special effects. In one of the videos posted online, the ISIS killer draws his knife to behead a hostage as the film cuts to slow motion to increase the dramatic effect. In a subsequent ISIS video of the beheading of 18 Syrian regime soldiers, the sound of beating heartbeats is added to the soundtrack. ISIS’ most gruesome upload to date featured the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot in a 21 minute video“that imitates the production values of documentaries aired on outlets like the History Channel”. The film ends by showing alleged homes of other Jordanian pilots identified through aerial mapping technology.

Since July 2014 ISIS has also been publishing an online magazine called Dabiq, now in its fifth issue, available to download in PDF and published in English. The propagandist publication, which without the gruesome content would look like a lifestyle magazine, features interviews with fighters and stories about recent conquests by the terrorist organization. The group has also used popular hashtags such as #WorldCup2014 to disseminate their videos and flood Twitter with their messages.

Conclusion:

What initially was a space for liberal minded technology geeks and activists is now a darker, gloomier world in which threats are made and videos of brutal beheadings and government flogging of liberal activists are shared and cheered. Today the social media landscape in the Middle East resembles the squares and streets of the Arab Spring cities of yore: it is a new battleground for hearts and minds between regimes, Islamists and activists; between young and old; between freedom and constraint.

There are signs of hope, though. In the midst of the all the doom and gloom, comedy from the likes of Bassem Youssef, Karl Sharro and Fahad Albutairi has become a tool to counter the growing online restrictions. Satire, “the weapon of the powerless against the powerful” has angered brainwashed ISIS followers and countered racist and Islamophobic coverage in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacres. One thing is clear: the liberal minded activists of the Arab Spring may be down, but they are certainly not out.

The easy thought: any weapon can be turned against you.  But there’s a limited audience for brutality, and brutality begats brutality and little else.  For those who exist through its employment, they may enjoy limited success, but I do not imagine living in such a society brings one much pleasure.

The fight to retake Tikrit appears to be running into trouble.  From the New York Times:

By Day 2 of the American airstrike campaign against militants holed up in Tikrit, the mission appeared beleaguered on several fronts on Thursday: Thousands of Shiite militiamen boycotted the fight, others threatened to attack any Americans they found, and Iraqi officials said nine of their fighters had been accidentally killed in an airstrike.

In Washington, American military leaders insisted that things were going according to plan. They said that they were stepping into the Tikrit fight only after the Iranian- and militia-led advance on the city had stalled after three weeks, and that they welcomed working solely with Iraqi government forces.

Gen. Lloyd Austin, the head of the United States Central Command, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that no Shiite militias remained in Tikrit.

While the withdrawal of Iranian-led Shiite militias was one of the preconditions for the Americans to join the fight against the Islamic State in Tikrit, the sudden departure of three of the major groups risked leaving the Iraqi ground forces short-handed, especially if other Shiite militiamen also abandoned the fight.

Al-Jazeera:

The Kataib Hizbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq militias both suspended their participation in Tikrit on Thursday , although the Badr Organisation, which is the largest and most powerful group within the Hashid Shaabi, said it would continue to fight.

The US-led coalition joined the fray in Tikrit at the request of Iraqi military commanders, but Shia militia commanders publicly rejected any US role in the campaign to retake the ISIL bastion.

“We were able to conclude the battle ourselves, but the US came in order to usurp this major victory,” Asaib Ahl al-Haq spokesman Naim al-Uboudi said.

Ghassan Charbel at The Arabist explains why the battle for to liberate Tikrit from ISIS forces is important:

It is not insignificant for ISIS to control Tikrit, a city with much resonance in recent Iraqi history — not because Saddam Hussein’s tomb is in the nearby village of Awja, but because it is symbolic of the Sunni Arab role in Iraq. The Iraqi government could not leave Tikrit in the hands of ISIS, but the conditions of the current surgery raise concerns that if Tikrit falls into the hands of its attackers – which is the necessary outcome – this could lead to the collapse of balance required for Iraq to remain united and part of the Arab world.

These concerns would not have been prompted if the Iraqi army was the one leading the charge to retake Tikrit and had adopted measures to quell the concerns of the inhabitants of Anbar, Saladin and Nineveh. But what is happening now is that “popular mobilization” is playing the main role in combating ISIS, and “mobilization” means an alliance of Shiite militias. The attack is also marked by an American refusal to provide air cover and an increasing tendency by Iran to openly admit that it is managing the campaign.

The Shia are roughly 65% of the Muslim populace of Iraq, the balance being Suuni.

To return to Iraq, this past January in Baghdad and Erbil I heard people expressing concern that Sunni Arabs will be the biggest loser in the war to eliminate ISIS. The war is being fought in their areas, with all that entails in terms of death, destruction and displacement. However, there was a belief that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was interested in convincing Sunni Arabs of the legitimacy of the fight before going to battle in their strongholds. There were also those who believed that the American role would moderate the Iranian conduct of this war. Because of fears that the spirit of revenge would break out, Ayatollah al-Sistani repeated calls to avoid vengeance and even to arm the Sunni tribes that were willing to take part in the war.

Iran is accused not just of meddling, but of having the ambition of being the most important country in the region.  Keep in mind that Syrians and Iraqis are considered Arabs, while the Iranians are Persians – two groups with a history of enmity.  Here’s a map, courtesy Google:

Nour Youssef covers an incoherent scene centering around ISIS.  Here are two examples, one centering on a sort of faux denial, the other injecting personality (and presumably a desire for notoriety) into the mix:

Hoping to stand out, the Lebanese Tony Khalifa decided to fake a beheading on air just to prove that it can be done. Personally, Khalifa believes that ISIS brutally kills people all the time, but he finds the most recent videos, especially James Foley and other Westerners’, to have been tampered with. Strengthening his doubts were the interviews with the families of the victims, who appeared too calm, “like their children were still alive.”

El-Mehwar TV, on the other hand, got itself a hacker with a soul patch, wearing a jacket over bare skin. He claimed to have hacked a jihadi forum (which they pretended was ISIS’s official website) and server, and to have watched the unedited version of the 21 beheadings, where the victims were screaming despite their mouths being mostly closed and that there was an un-ISIS-like woman on a crane and an American-looking film crew. “I can tell the nationality (of a person) from their appearance” he explained.

Not really too different from the conspiracy theories we see in the West, from Lunar Landing denial to the personalities often seen in the UFO / Roswell conspiracies.  People will see what aligns best with their ideologies, their psychological needs, and the occasional psychosis, especially when the incident is difficult to personally research and/or understand.

The St. Louis Fed supplies a chart of mortgage rates:

(h/t The Motley Fool)

In 1981 it was 18.5%.  I would expect mortgage rates to be related to demand, so I would (naively?) expect this to mean there is little demand for mortgages, or way too much money pursuing same.

Joan McCarter at the Daily Kos relishes Senatorial combat.

Betsy Hiel in the Pittsburg Tribune-Review:

The men worked in Sirte, midway between Benghazi and Tripoli on Libya’s coast and the birthplace of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was killed there by rebels in 2011.

They lived in 15-room compounds, each with a fenced and gated courtyard.

The ISIS gunmen easily scaled the fences, they said.

“There were two rooms for Christians,” recalled Hamdi Ashour, 29, a construction worker who shared Mahrouf’s quarters. “We pointed out one.”

He and the frightened workers said Christian men sleeping in the second room “were our cousins from our village and were Muslim,” Ashour said. “If they opened up that second door, we would have been killed, too,” because the gunmen would have easily discovered that the sleeping men were Copts.

“They opened up the first room and took seven Christians.”

“Of course, we were afraid,” said Mahrouf, explaining the horrible decision they made at gunpoint. “These people came at us with weapons loaded and banging on the door.”

Hostages dead, survivors saddled with guilt.  What drives men to commit such crimes?  Mundane problems such as lack of jobs?  Or is religious mania to blame?

(h/t The Arabist)

At The Weekly Standard, Jay Cost claims,

As I argued here, and in my new book, the Republican party has been aligned with big business for almost 150 years. In many respects, this is a good thing for conservatism. People who are employed by a business, after all, do not need the government to prosper. And big business employs a lot of people, so conservatives have common cause.

It’s a lovely delusion – but only that.  Without the government, you do not have national defense.  You might be able to have private police – but, speaking as an engineer, that system is naturally unstable.  You might have private fire fighting service, but that appears to be uncommon (I have not tracked that phenomenon since my days reading REASON Magazine).  You don’t have a national currency – arguing that Bitcoin makes government unnecessary merely highlights the fact that the technologies supporting Bitcoin – namely computers – were developed only with critical government support.

Small points?  Maybe he’s a bit sloppy?  Perhaps; yet all of the inaccuracies, the hidden biases, they all add up, until the entire paragraph, superficially comprehensible, becomes incoherent when read in depth.  Searching for some even minor truth, and I become overerwhelmed at how a collection of fallacies masquerade as some self-evident truth.  And at how his readership will swallow it without blinking.

In any case, President Calvin Coolidge said it sooner:

“the chief business of the American people is business.”

Earlier this month, NPR reported job creation numbers:

February’s report showed 295,000 jobs added, and a drop in the unemployment rate, down to 5.5. percent. It follows on the heels of January’s strong report, which showed strong wage gains.

Good news?  It turns out it’s so hard to know.  Here’s an absolutely charming graph from The American Prospect comparing job creation for various Presidents:

The X axis is in absolute numbers, which of course will never do, given population growth – so this graph is more or less useless.  They supply another utterly fascinating graph to remedy this fault:

But, as author Paul Waldman points out,

Of course, none of those presidents took office in the midst of an economic calamity of the kind we were suffering through when Obama began his term. If you want to be more generous to Obama, you could measure from the trough of the Great Recession, which in terms of jobs was February 2010. The economy has created over 10 million jobs since then, and if we continue the current trend, Obama could claim 16 million jobs between that point and the end of his term.

OK, so if we make an awkward analogy, comparing oranges to oranges doesn’t work if one orange is in a glass of water on Earth and another is in a glass of mercury on Jupiter.  It’s really a lot harder to accurately display data in graphical form than one would think, especially when that data is only partially numerical.  Each of these Presidents faced unique challenges and environments, and while a partisan might condemn Bush I for his poor performance in this group, a more independent observer might find factors belying such a conclusion.  As much as I enjoy a good graph, I think any such must be approached with the greatest suspicion, especially those originating from partisan sources.

Charles Joseph Minard was a 19th century pioneer of the field of information graphics.  He is the author of a famous graphic, representing Napoloeon’s March on Russia, which hangs on the walls of many nerds; I have it on my living room wall, in a place of honor.  It contains 6 categories of information which, with just a little study, correlates troop losses with geological location, chronological location, temperature, distance, and direction of travel.  It’s the sort of thing you stare at with your mouth hanging open the first time.  Every creator of a graph should aspire to such artistry. (A big h/t to Don Lee, a colleague who introduced me to this wonderful graphic perhaps 20 years ago.)

(with apologies to the NewScientist Feedback column for using Blue Whales as a measurement.)

Liquid Consciousness.

Let me know your guess.