“Gun manufacturers are in the midst of the worst business crisis in decades, with double-digit sales drops driving some to the brink of bankruptcy. The NRA, which gets its funding not only from individual members but also major gunmakers, is in a position to help. Nothing gooses gun sales like the threat of new gun-control measures. And behind the scenes, two senior GOP officials tell TIME, the NRA has given lawmakers the green light to float new gun limits without the threat of retribution. The logic: introducing those policies — or even better, debating them — will be good for business. Jennifer Baker, a NRA spokeswoman, denied that her organization made such overtures to Congress and said the NRA’s main concern was not gun sales but rather defending gun rights.”– Time online March 1, 2018
(and if you believe that the NRA’s main concern is not gun sales we can get you a discount…)
(cartoon courtesy of pixabay.com and Merio)
Today Mr. Trump announced that he would impose tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel. He has stated that he would commence the tariffs next week. He plans to claim that he is doing so as a matter of national security, which would be a loophole in the World Trade Organization rules.
This action is potentially the beginning of a trade war in which NAFTA may be the ultimate casualty and the global economy may be collateral damage.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed his views that countries with death penalty laws for drug trafficking have no problems with drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. The countries that have the worst problems have reacted to them in the most retrogressive fashion. The Philippines is one country that has devolved into open warfare between government agents and drug users, with many innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. Contrariwise, countries that have embraced decriminalization or even legalization have tamed their drug problems. Portugal is a good example of a country that has dramatically reduced its problems with drugs by legalizing them and putting their resources into treatment and rehabilitation for drug users.
Mexico may follow the example of Portugal in decriminalizing drugs– former President Vicente Fox has come out strongly in favor of this position (See this Time article from 2011). The bloodshed in Mexico that followed their declaration of a “war on drugs” has shown that drugs are simply too profitable and too popular to interdict successfully.
Mr. Trump’s retrograde position on drugs (and that of his Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) is openly hostile to the concept of rehabilitation and harm reduction, and in favor of failed, violent responses to the problem. If he is allowed to continue along this track, we will see increasing levels of reactive violence in the United States approaching those that have developed in Mexico. Those who make their money selling drugs, if they are threatened with the death penalty, will have no hesitation in obtaining firearms and dealing death to their competitors, the police, the DEA, and innocent bystanders.
Mr. Session’s retrograde attitude to the state-led decriminalization of cannabis has already been noted and discussed. It is clear that Mr. Session’s treatment of states that oppose Federal laws on this subject will only lead to more dissension and potentially violent opposition, not to mention the immediate disastrous effects for powerless individual drug users.
Parenthetically, again, the DEA’s reaction to the crisis in opioid overdoses is counterproductive and mean-spirited. They have reacted by directing prescribers and pharmacists to greatly restrict the prescription of opioids for pain, and directing manufacturers to reduce the production of painkillers by 25%. This is despite the fact that there has been little increase in the volume of prescription opioids dispensed over the last ten years– the recent huge increase in overdose deaths has been entirely due to use of illicit heroin, much of which has been fortified with illicit fentanyl. Reducing the availability of prescription opioids will only drive those desperate for pain relief to the illicit market (where it is cheaper in any case) and increase overdose deaths from the use of fentanyl-enhanced heroin.
(photo “rastaman” courtesy of pixabay.com and Alexas_Fotos)
“Americans’ apparent need to imagine a Russian adversary as cunning, masterly, and strategic is matched only by the Russians’ own belief in a solid, stable, unshakable American society. ” So says Masha Gessen in a February 20, 2018 piece in the New Yorker.
The problem is that American society is not solid, stable, or unshakable. Russian meddling in our elections has made matters worse, but even aside from that interference, our society is more unstable, more fractious, and more riven by partisan, economic, and racial divisions than even we are willing to admit. Prior to January 20, 2017, our government had a fairly competent, professional bureaucracy, but that has been steadily eaten away by Mr. Trump’s appointment of millionaire friends and sycophants to positions of control combined with the dismissals and resignations of committed nonpartisan officials. Even before the presidential election, our society was cut up into mutually hostile cliques that differentiated themselves by race, social position, and wealth– relatively stable divisions that flared into open partisan warfare during and after the election.
Again, the problem is that Russia is not cunning, masterly, and strategic to a first approximation. The Russian government is full of patronage, embezzlement, incompetence, and ordinary corruption. They are not masters of global strategy or even of internal economic planning. The government that Vlad “the Impaler” Putin has cobbled together is set up so that he can exercise control through a network of informal friends and business associates who are not selected for their competence but for their loyalty to him personally. What was left of professional administration after the end of the Cold War was broken up and destroyed, associated with the fire sale of state assets to friends of government officials. Mr. Putin rebuilt the state along personal lines after the collapse of government control by the turn of the century.
Serious, worldwide problems have not been addressed by coalitions of willing stakeholders. Instead, the powerful with vested interests in business as usual have taken the lead in fashioning their own versions of “the facts” and oppressing less powerful groups affected by the destructive results of their profit-taking from the common treasury. As a result of increased pressure on the environment, migration has increased, bringing with it more human misery.
The fundamental misunderstanding between the US and Russia is taking place from a nationalist point of view, even though nationalist thinking is already becoming obsolete. The rise of giant multinational or transnational companies has rendered the concept of nation-states weaker and may someday soon completely transcend nationalism, with fatal results for national governments.
(photo of actors in Bangkok courtesy of pixabay.com and sasint)
The Guardian reported this morning that Ben Carson has cancelled an order for a $31,000 dining room set that is separate from the $165,000 (“for lounge furniture”) he has already spent on redecorating his office as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Apparently, according to department rules, he was only supposed to spend $5,000 on redecorating his office– the cost, perhaps, of a fairly standard nice new desk (“not even enough to buy a decent chair” as Mr. Trump’s appointee complained). Mr. Carson doesn’t have much work to do as Secretary in any case, except perhaps to study on what the Department was created for and why Mr. Trump is cutting its budget by 14% (perhaps it is abandoning any commitment to working on the homeless problem.) Congress has been prodded into investigating Mr. Carson’s HUD after a whistleblower alleged that she was demoted to a job that apparently had nothing but a title and a salary, no job description, for complaining about the way the budget for redecorating was side-stepped– and for discovering a $10m budget shortfall as well as exposing mishandling of Freedom of Information Act requests.
All this makes one wonder what sort of meetings are supposed to be conducted in Mr. Carson’s new office– dinners, lounge parties, or ?
Parenthetically, Ben Carson is titled “Mr. Carson” following the British tradition of naming surgeons “Mr.” instead of “Dr.”
(photo– not of Mr. Carson’s new office– courtesy of pixabay.com and maryrodgers1982)
Under the category of ridiculous but true, today we have news that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is slated for a $6.8 billion budget cut in Mr. Trump’s first budget proposal, is spending $165,000 on new furniture to remodel the office of its new chief, Ben Carson– reportedly at his wife’s insistence. Reported in full by the Guardian.
(This is not the new furniture. Photo courtesy of pixabay.com and maryrodgers1982)
Many Republican propagandists have tried to tie Barack Obama to Saul Alinsky in some way, in part because of Alinsky’s radical reputation, but aside from a similarity in that both were, for a time, community organizers, Obama was only ten years old when Alinsky died– so it is unlikely that they ever met or that Obama studied under Alinsky. There has also circulated a document falsely claiming to show Alinsky’s goals, which I will not reproduce here. The web site snopes.com evaluated those claims and found them without foundation. They did, however, present a real list of rules from Alinsky’s work, published in 1971, and that is probably just as maddening to conservatives:
Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.
The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.
The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying “You’re right — we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”
The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
(photo of a radical skateboarder courtesy of pixabay.com and vivisorg; see Alinsky’s sixth rule)
Establishing the origins of such weapons has been difficult. In November, Russia used its Security Council veto to end the work of an independent panel investigating chemical weapons used in the Syrian conflict. The Joint Investigative Mechanism, as it was known, had found that both the Syrian government and Islamic State militants had used chemical weapons in the war, though Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations labeled the panel’s reporting “a joke.”
This is the last paragraph of an article in the New York Times that describes the extensive and long-standing (since the 1960s) cooperation between North Korea and Syria in missile and chemical weapons technology. The Syrians even built, with North Korean help, a plant to produce plutonium, whose primary use is in nuclear weapons. Israel bombed and destroyed that plant in 2007. Russia supports the Syrian government in the civil war and spends a small sum on supporting the North Koreans, primarily to keep the United States off balance.
Stories such as this undermine the futility of attempting to end the use of chemical weapons, or the war on civilians generally. The United Nations, the only world-wide organization with a mandate to end war, is hamstrung by a civil war that appears to represent the vendetta of a Syrian minority religious community and certain individuals in supreme power from that group against a country full of citizens from other religious faiths. There is no suitable mechanism in the United Nations to deal with civil wars.
Such disturbances are described as “internal matters” and the UN merely bestows legitimacy on one particular claimant to represent the nation.
After the next world war, if there is a civilization able to sustain any world-wide organizations, perhaps then the issue of civil wars with at last be dealt with by some mechanism.
An idealist would suggest a world-wide court of democratic adjudication which could document the claims of populations and somehow administer justice and rehabilitation to places in danger of destruction by civil war. Such a court would determine the areas of land to which people could legitimately lay claim and the forms of government that would be established (presumably by consent of the governed.)
Just over a hundred years ago, in 1915, Einstein introduced general relativity to the world. It was so complex that it was said that only three people in the world understood it. That is not actually true; quite a few people had a pretty good idea of what Einstein was proposing. What is true is that, a hundred years later, our computers are not up to the task of calculating solutions to his equations, as David Wilshire said in 2008:
“But Einstein’s equations (1915) are in general so complex that we cannot solve them for the distribution of matter we actually see, even on a computer.”
Many things have happened in the last hundred years. When I was a child, the concept of what I am doing right now was a distant dream: using a computer as a typewriter as well as a telegraph machine– with color illustrations. Computers brew coffee, drive cars, and help us observe galaxies 10 billion light-years away. We have decided that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, is expanding and is flat, but with no edges and no corners.
One of the things that has happened relatively (!) recently is that a mysterious quantity, dark energy, has been proposed as an explanation for a puzzling observation: the rate of expansion of the Universe actually appears to be speeding up. This really doesn’t make sense, particularly because if it were true, eventually the entire Universe would be ripped apart– possibly soon, as one recent science-fiction short story has made painfully real for us.
As David Wiltshire explained in 2008 in a simple overview and in this highly technical paper describes, this is only an apparent problem due to the inhomogeneity of matter distribution that was created when the Universe first appeared. Matter is inhomogeneously distributed because, due to the uncertainty principle (with which Einstein famously had a lot of trouble), when space and time first appeared, one couldn’t be sure whether there was matter or space in any particular place.
As a result of this inhomogeneity in the beginning, at the present time there are huge voids in the Universe– voids within which there is virtually no matter at all, only space. We exist within a filament or bubble which contains a significant density of matter; virtually all stars, galaxies, and so forth exist within these locally dense areas. The Universe as a whole can be thought of as a huge Swiss cheese, a very tenuous one.
Because of this, all stars that are observed to be travelling away from us following the Hubble Constant are apparently also speeding up their withdrawal. This apparent speeding up is due to our local clock time, which has slowed down in relation to the average clock time in the Universe; the average clock time runs faster because it is measured within those voids.
In other words, the apparent speeding up of cosmic expansion is due not to a mysterious dark energy (which has not yet been found) but to normal Einsteinian mechanics. Every “standard candle” we observe that is telling us how far away it is and what the Hubble Constant is, is located within a region of space that contains matter and thus has its time slowed down relative to the clocks within the voids. Of course, those voids don’t contain any clocks because they are empty, but if they did, they would run faster than ours.
Empty space is expanding at a rate that tells us that it is negatively curved, like a saddle; our space, the space that contains matter, is not expanding because its gravity binds it together. Here is a quote from the abstract of the latest paper:
“Generic averages of Einstein’s equations in inhomogeneous cosmology lead to models with non-rigidly evolving average spatial curvature, and different parametrizations of apparent cosmic acceleration. The timescape cosmology is a viable example of such a model without dark energy. ”
It’s pretty complicated, but eventually the majority of cosmologists will get their heads around it and forget about searching for dark energy. It has only been ten years or so since Wiltshire pointed out that our clocks are running slower than the Universe’s average clock, and less than a hundred years since Edwin Hubble discovered (in 1922-23) that there was a larger Universe outside the Milky Way– a universe that, he announced in his first published paper in 1929, is expanding.
(Here is David Wiltshire’s latest paper, with Lawrence H Dam and Asta Heinesen. Here are more references to the absence of dark energy: an article in the International Business Times from 9/14/2017 where the theory is called “timescape cosmology”; and an article from Science April 3, 2017)
(After that, you’re on your own. See Wikipedia for more information about Edwin Hubble and cosmology)
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and geralt)
(Please notify me in the comments about any errors)
Quote of the Day: The Russians are Coming
Washington (CNN) — US Cyber Command chief Adm. Mike Rogers told lawmakers on Tuesday that he has not been granted the authority by President Donald Trump to disrupt Russian election hacking operations where they originate.
Asked by Democratic Sen. Jack Reed if he has been directed by the President, through the defense secretary, to confront Russian cyber operators at the source, Rogers said “no I have not” but noted that he has tried to work within the authority he maintains as a commander.
Let us be clear: we expect Admiral Rogers to confront the Russians on his own authority and we do not find the lack of direction from Mr. Trump to be surprising.
On Tuesday, Rogers reiterated that he still views Moscow as a threat to the 2018 elections, a stance that is consistent with what he and other top national security officials told the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month.
“We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokesmen and other means to influence, to try to build on its wide range of operations and exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats previously testified.
“There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 US midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” he said.
A third grader should understand at this point that the Russians are coming and we should be very, very cautious around strangers.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 