DShomshak

A member of Congress said yesterday that ousting Shokin for his own corruption -- and the threat to withhold aid if it wasn't done -- was policy developed at the State Department, and he knows because he was part of the office that developed it. Te demand was also shared by the IMF and some other governments. Biden was chosen as the messenger with enough heft to focus the Ukrainean government's attention. That's what was on All Things Considered, anyway. It was also reported that much of the push for the impeachment inquiry came from the new cohort of centrist Democrats electred from Trump-friendly districts. Pelosi said they knew it hurt their chances for reelections, but many of them have military or intelligence backgrounds and found Trump's alleged misuse of office a step too far. Dean Shomshak

I heard the first 20 minutes or so of Trump's news conference and mostly I ws left thinking: Wow, what a crybaby. Nuthin' but "I'm so great, I didn't do anything wrong, why is the press saying mean things about me, it's all a Democratic plot, wah wah wah." This is the hero of Conservative Real Americans? The one who sells himself as the Tough Guy, whom they worship because he fights for them? If Trump speaks to how they feel, well, that's discouraging in its own way. Dean Shomshak

Discussion last week on All Things Considered brought up another factor: China. The PRC is even more dependent on Persian Gulf oil than the US. They will deeply not want war between two major suppliers, incidentally interrupting supplies from everyone else. In fact, the only party I can imagine that benefits from war between Iran and Saudi Arabia is... Russia. Gulf War III drives up the price of petroleum, which is Russia's chief commodity for sale. When oil prices are high, Putin has lots of money to buy off the Russian people with subsidized goods and pensions. When oil prices drop, the Russian people get squeezed and start resenting their life in a clumsy kleptocracy. I would almost think Russia staged the attack on Saudi, if it weren't for the Houthi claim of responsibility. The Houthis are an Iranian ally, but I have not heard anyone say they are a Russian proxy. Too bad; it would make a great spy thriller. But I would not rule out that Putin might be making promises to the Iranians that would give them greater confidence in such a risky move. (All wild speculation on my part, of course. But if I were a high muckymuck in a Western intelligence agency, I'd order a search for evidence to confirm or reject the hypothesis.) Dean Shomshak

Discussion last week on All Things Considered brought up another factor: China. The PRC is even more dependent on Persian Gulf oil than the US. They will deeply not want war between two major suppliers, incidentally interrupting supplies from everyone else. In fact, the only party I can imagine that benefits from war between Iran and Saudi Arabia is... Russia. Gulf War III drives up the price of petroleum, which is Russia's chief commodity for sale. When oil prices are high, Putin has lots of money to buy off the Russian people with subsidized goods and pensions. When oil prices drop, the Russian people get squeezed and start resenting their life in a clumsy kleptocracy. I would almost think Russia staged the attack on Saudi, if it weren't for the Houthi claim of responsibility. The Houthis are an Iranian ally, but I have not heard anyone say they are a Russian proxy. Too bad; it would make a great spy thriller. But I would not rule out that Putin might be making promises to the Iranians that would give them greater confidence in such a risky move. (All wild speculation on my part, of course. But if I were a high muckymuck in a Western intelligence agency, I'd order a search for evidence to confirm or reject the hypothesis.) Dean Shomshak

Discussion last week on All Things Considered brought up another factor: China. The PRC is even more dependent on Persian Gulf oil than the US. They will deeply not want war between two major suppliers, incidentally interrupting supplies from everyone else. In fact, the only party I can imagine that benefits from war between Iran and Saudi Arabia is... Russia. Gulf War III drives up the price of petroleum, which is Russia's chief commodity for sale. When oil prices are high, Putin has lots of money to buy off the Russian people with subsidized goods and pensions. When oil prices drop, the Russian people get squeezed and start resenting their life in a clumsy kleptocracy. I would almost think Russia staged the attack on Saudi, if it weren't for the Houthi claim of responsibility. The Houthis are an Iranian ally, but I have not heard anyone say they are a Russian proxy. Too bad; it would make a great spy thriller. But I would not rule out that Putin might be making promises to the Iranians that would give them greater confidence in such a risky move. (All wild speculation on my part, of course. But if I were a high muckymuck in a Western intelligence agency, I'd order a search for evidence to confirm or reject the hypothesis.) Dean Shomshak

Well, it's not good for the n"Rare Earth" argument that h a bazillion different factors need to be just right for life to appear. Well, OK, the exact argument is that a bazillion factors need to be just right for complex life to evolve -- in their book Ward and Brownlee graciously concede that bacterial life may be common in the universe. But we can only argue so far as there is evidence, and the evidence of the Solar System suggests that the temperate zone for liquid water is fairly wide, and that planets can diverge significantly from Earth in mass and rotation while remaining temperate for extended periods. I'm inclined to suspect there4's a fair bit of "slop" in other habitability factors, too. Dean Shomshak

Agreed. "Seized up" suggests, what, gears turning and getting jammed? Suddenly, perhaps accidentally? The author clearly is trying to sound breezily nontechnical and exciting -- "seized up" sounds more exciting than "stopped,", yes? But it also completely misrepresents what happened. It's the sort of bad writing that results from assuming the readers are idiot children. Dean Shomshak

I have my own hypothesis on the urban/rural political divide. (And it is only a hypothesis: I know of know empirical research to back it up, so take it with a grain of salt.) It's that small communities and large communities create different social incentives. In a small community, you interact with pretty much the same group of people throughout your life. New people are born, old people die, but turnover is slow and one rarely encounters people who have no social context. This means you must fit in, because the people around you have great influence on your own well being. Take barbershops for an example. Suppose you run a barbershop in a town that can only support one or two barbers. You have a limited supply of potential customers. If people decide you're a weirdo and Not One Of Us, you quickly go out of business. A small community thus encourages sentiments of loyalty and social conformity. Anyone outside the community is an unknown quantity and therefore threatening. And thanks to modern media, rural Americans receive threat-signals of freaky, Not Like Us outsiders every day. In a big city you interact daily with people you don't know and whom you might never see again. It is very important to get along with strangers. If you don't know who's a threat, you also don't know who's an opportunity. And it's worth keeping your eye out for new opportunities, because so much of your life depends on people you don't know: The business where you work could close, your house could be demolished to make way for a bypass, a bank in another country could throw the economy in a tailspin, and so on. Again, consider barbershops. In a city that can support a hundred barbershops, your challenge isn't to fit in -- it's to stand out! Because why should customers go to your barbershop instead of the other 99? Maybe your gimmick is to cultivate a social niche, like being a Black Barbershop, or a Punk Barbershop, or a Blue Collar Barbershop, or whatever. (Cue Ray Stevens' "When You Get A Haircut.") This difference in incentives becomes especially important, I think, in reactions to immigration. In a small town, the sudden arrival of several hundred people from a place you never heard of, who talk, dress, dine, worship and do everything else differently, is an existential crisis. The social order you have known all your life must change. And down in your genes, ten thousand generations of Stone Age ancestors who lived in tiny homogeneous communities are screaming that an enemy horde has arrived and you'd better be ready to fight for your life. In a big city, the arrival of several hundred ethnic strangers is a drop in the bucket... and an opportunity. If you're a politician, maybe it's a new constituency you can cultivate that could tip a close election. For anyone else, the most it likely means is there's going to be a new ethnic restaurant. Impress your friends by being the first to discover it! City folk can feel xenophobia, sure. They have the same ten thousand generations of Stone Age ancestors as rural folk. But there are countervailing incentives as well. Like I said, just a hypothesis. I won't be offended if people with more and wider experience of both big-city and small-town folk say it's full of crap, that's not their experience at all. Dean Shomshak

I've only read the 1st, 2nd and 3rd books. I didn't notice jarringly contemporary phrases; but I found Martin's occasional variant spelling ("Ser" for "Sir," IIRC, or "wayn" for "wain") obtrusive. I and friends of mine have noticed other writerly tics that are a distinctive style if you like them, laughable if you don't. 6th season was past what Martin has written, so "Give us the room" probably didn't come from him. I wouldn't find the expression obtrusive, at least in the way as someone saying "fo' shizzle" or "What am I, chopped liver?" It's simple English words, in a straightforward metonymy (cf."Lend me your ears"). Even if it's actually a new phrase, I see no reason it could not appear at any point in the last 500 years of English usage. But then, I also don't keep up on contemporary usage very well: I don't offhand recall encountering the phrase before, though I probably have. Dean Shomshak

The Sep. 14, 2019 issue of The Economist has a brief article on exoplanet K2-a8b. It explains briefly how Dr Tsiara &co. spectroscopically detected water in the exoplanet's atmosphere (while admitting that, alone, did not reveal what form the water was in). They also found evidence for lots of hydrogen and helium, which emphasizes that the "Most Earthlike Planet Yet" description is very much grading on a curve. The issue also has articles about a new forensic technique for identifying the source of sand (sand theft is a big thing -- take note, Dark Champions GMs!) and a study proposing that Neanderthals were dangerously prone to ear infections. Because The Economist likes to report on the stranger sides of science to which most mass market publications pay little attention. The sand science article is titled, "Name That Dune." Dean Shomshak

I'm reading The Planets by Andrew Cohen "with" Professor Brian Cox (the cover includes is title), the companion book to the BBC/Nova series. Very interesting and almost as pretty as the TV series. Good to get some of the science behind the visuals. Professor Cox's chapter on Mars seems the best so far, going into more detail about things like how to estimate the age of Martian topography. Andrew Cohen, however, could have used another editorial pass to deal with redundant sentences. Cohen's too-frequent use of the word "vast" also became obtrusive for me. Yes, much of the Solar System is very big, but there are other words. Dean Shomshak

And the bigger and more obvious the lie, the harder they will work to defend it. One of Hitler's maxims, that. De3an Shomshak

Like I said: People are funny. Though it's often a very bad joke. Dean Shomshak

I heard about this on the BBC yesterday. The astronomer interviewed said Hubble found evidence of a cloud deck. I'm eager to learn how they managed that. Dean Shomshak

I heard about this on the BBC yesterday. The astronomer interviewed said Hubble found evidence of a cloud deck. I'm eager to learn how they managed that. Dean Shomshak

Oh, and from what I could see, Lewis doesn't seem to be fat in the movie. A little chubby, but not fat. Dean Shomshak

It came and went quickly, and with good reason judging by the trailer. The House now has a closet door that flies open to disgorge glowing CGI tentacles. No creeping realization that something is Very Strange and Very Wrong. Tart it up! Hit the audience over the head! Because we think kids are stupid! Typical Hollywood: They know it's a classic, but can't understand what made it so. Dean Shomshak

It's not that old, but "Eve of Destruction" is a fairly obvious tune to play on the radio. You mention the "Harry Potter" series, but I also get vibes of The House with a Clock in its Walls (book, haven't seen the movie and won't), or The Face in the Frost, also by John Bellairs. For old radio, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows! <sinister laugh" Though since The Shadow was a hero, this might not function well as a warning. It might hint at a power Shadow Boxer might develop, though. "The Chicken Heart that Ate the World," for old radio warning of apocalyptic danger? Or anything from Lights Out. I will give this more thought.

It's pretty common in conspiracy theories. For instance, I am told that in the Middle East it's not unusual to find people who believe simultaneously that the USA is an all-powerful overlord that controls everything their own government does, and a cowardly, decadent country that folds like a cheap suit as soon as troops start dying. Conspiracy paranoia is a defense mechanism to puff up the paranoid's ego. The more powerful and dangerous you proclaim the Enemy to be, the braver you must be to dewfy them. So why hasn't the Enemy killed you to shut you up? They must also be cowards. Also, courage is a virtue, and the Enemy must be completely lacking in admirable traits. <shrug> People are funny. Dean Shomshak

It's pretty common in conspiracy theories. For instance, I am told that in the Middle East it's not unusual to find people who believe simultaneously that the USA is an all-powerful overlord that controls everything their own government does, and a cowardly, decadent country that folds like a cheap suit as soon as troops start dying. Conspiracy paranoia is a defense mechanism to puff up the paranoid's ego. The more powerful and dangerous you proclaim the Enemy to be, the braver you must be to dewfy them. So why hasn't the Enemy killed you to shut you up? They must also be cowards. Also, courage is a virtue, and the Enemy must be completely lacking in admirable traits. <shrug> People are funny. Dean Shomshak

The article also suggests that observing a third class of event means gravitational astronomy has come of age as its own branch of science, rather than just an oddball technique for detecting one or two very specific types of events. But the real prize will be when gravitational astronomers detect some event that can't be mapped onto any known entity. Primordial gravitational waves from the Big Bang? Cosmic strings cracking the whop? Something even the wildest theories have not yet imagined? Gravitational astronomy might also enable testing of general relativity under conditions far more extreme than can be achieved on Earth. Heady stuff, at least for science nerds. Dean Shomshak

The article also suggests that observing a third class of event means gravitational astronomy has come of age as its own branch of science, rather than just an oddball technique for detecting one or two very specific types of events. But the real prize will be when gravitational astronomers detect some event that can't be mapped onto any known entity. Primordial gravitational waves from the Big Bang? Cosmic strings cracking the whop? Something even the wildest theories have not yet imagined? Gravitational astronomy might also enable testing of general relativity under conditions far more extreme than can be achieved on Earth. Heady stuff, at least for science nerds. Dean Shomshak

Since this doesn't actually harm the NRA, the designation is mere moral posturing to please the base. It also plays into the far right's hands by supporting their narrative of persecution by the evil and tyrannical (but weakling) urban liberals. Now, a racketeering investigation might turn up something prosecutable, which could be useful. Dean Shomshak

Why Nations Fail included an illustrative bit of Robert Mugabe history. Zimbabwe had a national lottery. The drawing was held and the winner was... can you believe the luck... Robert Mugabe! Mr Mugabe was already a billionaire from looting the economy and the government, but I guess you can never be too rich or be seen to win too many times. Dean Shomshak

Harlan Ellison was right: Reality and fantasy have traded places. Speaking of Fake News, whether spoof or malign, the Septembe issue of Scientific American is devoted to "Truth, Lies and Uncertainty." Some articles are relevant to this thread, such as the ones about "Contagious Dishonesty" and "How to Defraud Democracy." Dean Shomshak