DShomshak

An important point I forgot to mention. Thanks for covering it! Dean Shomshak

Misspelled name: It's Haidt, not Haight. (Sorry, my computer freezes up when I try to use the Edit function.) Dean Shomshak

Well, psychologist Jonathan Haight finds pretty major differences between libertarians and conservatives in his "Moral Foundations" research. See his book, The Righteous Mind, for details. They tend to vote along with Republican/conservatives more than Democrat/liberals, though. That may be more a function of the left having strong statist and anti-corporate streaks more than real sympathy between, say, Ayn Rand fans and Christian conservatives. A common enemy rather than real alliance. But I'm speculating there and won't argue if anyone says I'm wrong (on either count). Dean Shomshak

I recommend listening to the Oct. 2, 2028 episode of the public radio program Fresh Air. The guest is Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker, The Big Short, Moneyball), talking about his latest book, The Fifth Risk. It's about what the Trump administration is doing to the boring Cabinet departments that people don't think about much, such as Commerce and Energy. Lewis has reported on this for a year now (the magazine Vanity Fair was mentioned). Now he pulls it together. Lewis' argument, in a nutshell, is that much of what government does is manage risks that no individual, company or lesser body could do much about. Many of them are long-term and diffuse, such as climate change or weather events, so many people don't even think of them. What government does to manage these risks therefore goes unnoticed. And now it's all in the hands of a man who never thought he needed to know how government works, appointing people who are equally ignorant or actively hostile -- when he appoints them at all. Lewis ends with an anecdote about a woman he met who wished for years that a tornado would come and just rip away this decrepit old barn on her property. It finally happened. But... "I didn't think it would also take the house." A lesson for all those people who want to get rid of the "deep state," when they don't even know what it does. Dean Shomshak

Heard on the radio today: First evidence of an exomoon. Estimated to be the size of Neptune, orbiting a planet the size of Jupiter. First clues sifted from Kepler data; more obtained from Hubble; but the astronomers say they need more Hubble observation time to be sure. Heard on the radio yesterday: A trans-Neptunian object dubbed "The Goblin" strengthens the case for a Ninth Planet that's deflecting TNOs into bizarre orbits. IIRC, the Goblin's orbital period is 40,000 years, and it never comes closer to the Sun than about twice Pluto's orbit. Sep. 22, 2018 issue of The Economist has an article on experiments to see if antimatter has negative gravity. That is, will it fall up instead of down? Most physicists are pretty sure it won't, but they need to find some way that antimatter is not the perfect opposite of normal matter. According to current theories, the Big Bang should have produced matter and antimatter equally, which should have annihilated each other just as quickly. The existence of the Universe represents a significant experimental error.\ that requires explanation. The technical challenges of testing the gravitational properties of antimatter are... extreme. Dean Shomshak

Heard on the radio today: First evidence of an exomoon. Estimated to be the size of Neptune, orbiting a planet the size of Jupiter. First clues sifted from Kepler data; more obtained from Hubble; but the astronomers say they need more Hubble observation time to be sure. Heard on the radio yesterday: A trans-Neptunian object dubbed "The Goblin" strengthens the case for a Ninth Planet that's deflecting TNOs into bizarre orbits. IIRC, the Goblin's orbital period is 40,000 years, and it never comes closer to the Sun than about twice Pluto's orbit. Sep. 22, 2018 issue of The Economist has an article on experiments to see if antimatter has negative gravity. That is, will it fall up instead of down? Most physicists are pretty sure it won't, but they need to find some way that antimatter is not the perfect opposite of normal matter. According to current theories, the Big Bang should have produced matter and antimatter equally, which should have annihilated each other just as quickly. The existence of the Universe represents a significant experimental error.\ that requires explanation. The technical challenges of testing the gravitational properties of antimatter are... extreme. Dean Shomshak

As long as small states use their senatorial advantage only to extract Federal tax money for themselves, I'm okay with that. The problems that concern me arise from the split between predominantly urban states and predominantly rural states -- and rural states tend to have lower populations than urban states. Uran/rural in turn correlates strongly with liberal/conservative. So, small, rural, conservative states have disproportionate influence on things like confirming Supreme Court justices, where the Senate alone has power. As the big, urban states continue to grow faster than the smaller, more rural states, the disparity in the House will grow ever greater. If populous but purple states such as Illinois may turn firmly blue as urban Democrats finally swamp the structural advantages conservative Republicans have built through gerrymandering. Plausibly, the US might end up with a House that is permanently Democratic. At that point, a Senate that is genuinely in play (or even permanently Republican) could be desirable. Perhaps with a Constitutional amendment that both the House and Senate must approve any government action, such as confirming justices. As that is as neutral, structural change that does not (yet) clearly favor either party, it might have a chance of ratification. Dean Shomshak

On Friday, the KUOW "Week in Review" program devoted a large segment to discussing the Kavanaugh-Ford testimony. Former Tacoma, WA mayor and current Seattle Chamber of Commerce president Marilyn Strickland noted that (I'll try to quote her as closely as I can remember) "If a woman had cried and sniveled and carried on with histrionics the way Brett Kavanaugh did, she would never be taken seriously again." For the second half, NPR's Legal Affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg raised an interesting question: Given the naked partisanship that Kavanaugh expressed, how often will he be asked to recuse himself from court cases with political aspects? (And nowadays, just about everything has political aspects.) Dean Shomshak

September's issue of Scientific American had only one space-related article, a rehash of Ward and Brownlee's "Rare Earth" argument by John "Jupiter Effect" Gribbin. The dust storms on Titan give me additional reason to think the Rare Earth argument is a load of dingo's kidneys. That a world that is much smaller, much colder, and with radically different chemical composition, nevertheless displays so many Earthlike features, suggests that planets may not be so sensitive to initial conditions that any deviation from any feature of Earth changes everything so much to make complex life impossible. With just one example of a life-bearing planet to study, Rare Earth is just ridiculously cocksure. Dean Shomshak

In this spirit, I'd like to stress that my speculations about Republican and Democrat motives and methods refer only to the national parties, especially Congress. I would like once again to recommend Our Towns, by James and Deborah Fallowes. They found a whole parallel United States of America of municipalities in which it's hard to tell the self-styled conservative Republicans from self-styled liberal Democrats. Or in the case of Burlington, Vermont, the Socialists. They are solving real problems without turning everything into a culture war knife fight in an alley. I want to live in that USA instead. I don't doubt the rest of the world would prefer it as well. Dean Shomshak

After the way you caricatured and exaggerated what I said, I find this funny. I read in the paper this morning that Kavanaugh has tiptoed a little in the direction I suggested.. "'I drank beer with my friends, usually on weekends. Sometimes I had too many. In retrospect, I said and did things in high school that make me cringe now.,' Kavanaugh planned to tell the committee, according to prepared remarks released by the committee Wednesday. 'But that's not why we are here today. What I've been accused of is far more serious than juvenile misbehavior.'" (New York Times, reprinted in my local paper) Indeed, sexual assault goes far beyond "juvenile misbehavior." But it's not just about what Kavanaugh did in high school. It's about his character now. He has now admitted that the past portrayal of him as such a perfect young man, ever treading the upward path, was a lie. When you endorse a lie, that makes you a liar too. And that makes the accusations against Kavanaugh more credible, at least to me. Let's try this, as an example of what someone seeking high office might try when backers portray them as perfect plaster saints: "I thank the President for that extremely flattering portrayal. It's the man I have tried to be. I admit, it's a work in progress. Back in high school I had, well, problems. Sometimes I drank -- way too much. I remember saying and doing things that now make me cringe. I can only hope that I didn't say or do anything that caused anyone lasting harm. If I did, I cannot apologize enough. I thank God that I learned better. It has made me both more forgiving of others, and eager to help others lead better lives. I hope this committee gives me the chance to bring that spirit of compassion and helping others to the Supreme Court, because as a judge I have striven always to remember that the law is not just some abstract system of rules. It's about people's lives." Okay, that came out a bit unctuous, but, well, politics. It may seem paradoxical, but I wonder if such an early concession of imperfection might not have blunted the force of attacks. Confessed imperfection can bend under attack where brittle perfection would break. Dean Shomshak

That was Lawnmower Boy who pointed out this was a hiring committee, not a trial. I just repeated his insight. A few further thoughts: First, Kavanaugh made himself easy to attack by presenting himself (or letting Trump and others present him) as such a perfect plaster saint. Plaster saints invite hammers to smash them. If he'd begun by saying that he'd had a wild youth but he'd repented of it and tried to be a better man, he'd be... Well, maybe not untouchable, but he'd be harder to attack. For instance, while insisting that he doesn't remember any such attack on Ford, if it did happen he apologizes and wants to help her and urges all women to report such attacks right away. Just from the most cynical, tactical standpoint, that would limit the damage. Lots of people love a repentant sinner, and it would avoid the question of his current honesty. Second, I wonder if the blocking of Merrick Garland has something to do with current Republican intransigence on Kavanaugh. They escalated from trench warfare to scorched earth, total warfare; that no rules would constrain their attempt to win a total victory. They may feel they can't afford to back down, ever, to any degree. If they showed any weakness, they would invite worse attack and lose the support of their base. Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature has a good discussion of this prickly need to never back down in cultures that lack the restraining -- but also the protecting -- hand of law. Dean Shomshak

Today's episode of The Daily, a public radio program of news analysis associated with the New York Times (host's name is Michael Barbaro, to help with finding it) had a nice guide to Republican reactions to the allegations against Kavanaugh. The analyst said reactions fell into three general categories: 1) Okay, maybe he did it, but he was a drunken teen, move on. Kavanaugh, however, has declared absolutely that it didn't happen. Therefore the issue is not just whether Kavanaugh committed a drunken sexual assault, but whether he is lying about it now, which is perhaps more immediately relevant to his fitness for the Supreme Court. 2) We don't know one way or another, but it's serious enough we can take the time to look for more information. Let Prof. Ford testify, do some investigation. Some people in this group think it's possible Ford has confused Kavanaugh with someone else and evidence for this might be found. This is perhaps the lowest stakes viewpoint, as it leaves options open. 3) Lies! It's all evil Democratic partisan lies! The analyst said this camp is actually growing at the expense of the other two, as tribal passions are aroused and the herd closes in to defend one of their own. As the analyst put it, Kavanaugh is proving he has the right enemies. Confirming him has become a matter of poking a finger in the eyes of Democrats. It does occur to me (my own thoughts here, not from any expert's view) that Democratic strategy may have a second branch: That if Republican senators are seen ramming him onto the court and brushing aside allegations, it may disgust enough independent and moderate Republican women voters to switch their votes to Democrats or at least to stay home -- maybe enough to flip a few states or districts from red to blue. Cynical but, like I said, this is knife fighting. (The analyst on The Daily is less cynical than I am. He thinks it is possible that all concerned do believe they are acting from high principle... while noting that we all tend to have principles that tend to follow our interests, even if we aren't consciously aware of it.) Dean Shomshak

As part of its coverage of the Kavanaugh hearings, the public radio program All Things Considered asked a former FBI agent whether Prof. Ford's allegation could be investigated, given the paucity of details. He said that yes, there's plenty the FBI could investigate to find whether Ford's claim is plausible or not. As Ternaugh mentions, other people are already doing some of this: Interviewing people who knew either of them, any documentary evidence from that time (such as yearbooks), and so on. Such evidence probably could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Kavanaugh committed the assault. But this is not a criminal trial. It is merely enough to find sufficient evidence that Ford's allegation has a strong likelihood of being correct. So, why does it matter? What does Kavanaugh's conduct in high school and college have to do with his skill at legal reasoning? Nothing, directly. But if it can be shown that he's probably lying about sexual assault -- the more his squeaky-clean image can be shown to be a fraud -- well, the less he looks like a high-minded, sincere legal scholar and the more he looks like a squalid political hack being put on the court to advance a squalid political agenda. That he cannot be trusted to judge cases fairly. Republican senators may decide they want their five reliable conservative justices so badly they don't care about political blowback from voters. Possibly they imagine that they'll have won so completely that voters won't matter anymore. Democrats, meanwhile, are rather obviously trying to run out the clock in a long-shot hope that they can delay appointment of a replacement Supreme Court justice until after the midterm elections, and maybe they will control the Senate then. If they do, they refuse to confirm Kavanaugh or any other Trump appointee, using the Republicans' refusal to confirm Merrick Garland as their precedent. Then they hope that in 2020 they can take the White House and keep the Senate, and ram through whatever nominees they want. Neither side is acting from high principle here. This is politics as knife fighting. Dean Shomshak

The Sep. 15, 2018 issue of The Economist has an interesting article on Kavanaugh's nomination, with a bit of Supreme Court history and where political struggles over the SC could go from here. The article notes that the SC has never really been an impartial arbiter; it's nothing new for court majorities to follow definite political programs. In the first decades of the 20th century, a conservative (or at least pro-business) SC struck down minimum wage laws and New Deal programs. It backed down and reversed earlier rulings only after Roosevelt threatened to "pack the court" by appointing new justices sympathetic to his program -- nine justices is only tradition, the Constitution doesn't set a number. Later the Warren court swung the other way, becoming activist on the Left. Kavanaugh's seating (there is really no way the Dems can stop it) likely marks a return to the SC of a century ago, for decades to come. Unless... Unless the next time Democrats hold both the White House and the Senate, they take a cue from Roosevelt and pack the court to swing the majority the other way. This would of course prompt Republicans to do the same once they had control. Which leads to a final dismaying thought: As the Supreme Court becomes not merely ideological, but blatantly partisan, it is likely that some other organ of government will simply refuse to follow a ruling. Once someone says the court itself is not legitimate, well, the republic is in a pickle. More than it is already. Dean Shomshak

In this regard, I recommend The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers. Arthurian fantasy set during the Siege of Vienna. The Fisher King is also involved, along with the oldest brewery in the world. These elements are all related. Dean Shomshak

Back in my Exalted days, I jotted notes for a society that centered on a volcano goddess who demanded a periodic sacrifice of a male virgin to keep her happy. When the lava fountains rose above the lip of the crater, sending drifts of fertilizing ash over the fields, people knew their offering made her very happy indeed. Sometimes the sacrificial men even came back... carrying a baby. Those infants were raised as the priests of their mother. Dean Shomshak

I just saw the movie Valerian, which stands out for having nothing original at all. Here are a few cliches from it that I'd like to see reversed: A utopia that is *not* the result of some magic McGuffin such as cute critters that poop energy crystals or (vide Pandora, from Avatar) a divine super-intelligence threaded through the biosphere. Nor is it some beautiful, naturally abundant environment. Instead, it's the result of people working hard to make the most of a marginal location, and following simple, sensible ideas such as, "Don't waste resources fighting each other." The people whose near-annihilation is the Terrible Secret are not especially nice. At least, not notably better than other cultures. The heroes help them not because the victims are saints, but because the victims are people. Male and female partners who have no sexual tension between them at all. They are smart, competent, dedicated to their jobs, respect each other, and the writer has to come up with some other basis for drama and character development. Dean Shomshak

Michael Hopcroft's "Church of death" suggestion reminded me of Michael Reeves' fantasy duology, The Shattered World and The Burning Realm. In this setting, everyone believes that a thousand years ago (or so) the Necromancer, who became the most powerful wizard in the world by finding how to harness the power of the dead, destroyed the world when he couldn't conquer it, and all the other wizards made the runestones that keep the fragments habitable and prevent them from crashing into each other. Turns out, that was almost backwards: The breaking of the world was a natural cataclysm, and the Necromancer sacrificed his life making the runestones. Now that the runestones are wearing out, somebody needs to learn necromancy to recharge them. And the dead are happy to donate their power to this end. The dead don't hate the living, and their power isn't evil: After all, the living are their descendants, whom they want to protect. The books were not great -- after 20+ years, I remember almost nothing of the plot or characters -- but I thought it was a pretty neat reversal of the usual "Death = Evil" cliche. Dean Shomshak

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Visually spectacular. Luc Besson knows how to make a pretty picture, and CGI has advanced enough to portray darn near anything. The acting is second-rate, but fully adequate for the hackneyed plot and characters. I am glad I didn't pay money to see this. Dean Shomshak

Yeah, alienating Canada is spectacularly stupid. Alienating everyone in the world at once is even stupider. Maybe the US could "win" a trade war with Canada and force its government to grovel. The US isn't going to do that to China, or the entire EU. Picking a half-dozen or more such fights at once is a plan for absolute defeat. I remember a couple books called The Case for Goliath and Empires of Trust. Each, in its own way, made the case that an important leg of American primacy is by being useful and reliable. For all that people in other countries bitch about US dominance sometimes with justifiable irritation for American cluelessness and clumsiness -- they count on it to set limits to conflicts, stabilize markets, provide a safe haven for investments when their own country has a crisis, and so on. Trump seems determined to destroy that order in pursuit of a cruder dominance that he will not get. Dean Shomshak

HPL's At the Mountains of Madness is worth examining in this light. Physically, the Antarctic "Old Ones" are incredibly alien. At first they seem monstrous, too. After all, some of them dissect the humans who discover them. By the end of the story, though, the narrator admires their courage and says, "They were men." Now, at no point does the narrator personally interact with any Old Ones. He knows only that some individual Old Ones have scientific curiosity,and he infers courage. (And dissecting some humans was fair. After all, the human explorers had dissected one of the Old Ones, thinking it was dead.) From the illustrations he's seen of the Old Ones' history, he can infer a few other points of potential resemblance between how humans and Old Ones think and act. Beyond that, he's probably projecting. But one of the points of the story is that moment of feeling a connection with something that first seemed wholly alien. And it's awe-inspiriting, because Lovecraft first took the trouble to present the Old Ones as so convincingly alien. The Great Race are another instance where creatures that physically seem outrageously alien turn out to have aspects of thought and culture that humans can understand and empathize with. And also some that are not so empathetic, such as how they plan their species' mental survival across billions of years and from planet to planet by swapping minds, sometimes forcing entire other intelligent species to die in their place. The alien-ness of the Great Race lies their perspective as much as their appearance. But an SF campaign with the Great Race at its center, with characters hopping from body to body across eons and planets, interacting with other human epochs and other species, could be incredible. Dean Shomshak

Actually, that reminds me of a story. For a while, I followed a Babylon-5 newsgroup where series creator J. Michael Straczinski sometimes dropped in and answered questions. JMS was very proud of the social structure he invented for the Minbari. He thought that a society based on three castes -- worker, warrior and religious -- was cool and exotic. Cool, maybe. Exotic, no. As I recall, he was... slightly disappointed when someone asked if it was a conscious imitation of Medieval European social theory -- "Those who work, those who fight, those who pray," was how Medieval people put it. He hadn't even gone beyond Western culture. I don't mean to rip on JMS. Babylon-5 is still my favorite SF TV show. I simply hope to show that trying for alien aliens is harder than perhaps it sounds. Dean Shomshak

Eh, my own experience is that when people just do what seems cool to them, the result usually turns out trite and over-familiar. But that's just my taste. A few thoughts from people who thought more than most of us about attempting the truly strange: Nothing is stupider than the common complain that poetry lacks “human interest” unless it concerns itself with human emotions, actions, problems and viewpoints. Anything conceivable by the imagination, any speculation of what may be beyond, above and beneath the mundane sphere, can possess “human interest” by enlarging the horizon of that interest. —The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith Humanism: a sort of cosmic provincialism; the egomania of the species; the jingoism of earthlings; the religion of Lilliput. —The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith Show me a creature that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man. —attributed to John W. Campbell Portraying the profoundly alien is one of the greater challenges in SF though it is indeed one of the genre’s special attractions. Success does not mean, philosophically speaking, that you are not in some way explicating human consciousness and experience. Quite the contrary: You show the limits of ordinary human thought by trying to show what may lie beyond it. And in doing so, challenge those limits. If this is a “teaching moment,” it is not a tidy or comfortable one. Dean Shomshak

Thanks for the clarification. Still, the point remains: This is not a game where a temperamental player can say, "If you don't play by MY RULES and let me win, I'll take my ball and go home!" The game continues. It just gets uglier and less profitable. While I haven't actively followed the US/Canada trade talks, it comes up often on the radio program Marketplace from PRI. All Things Considered from NPR also covers it now and then. They both reported Trump's alleged insistence that the US will dictate trade terms to Canada and not compromise on anything. Which suggests that Trump not only doesn't understand international trade, he does not understand national sovereignty. Or just doesn't care, in his paranoid, narcissistic world of zero-sum dominance and submission. Canada is not so small that even the US can get away with treating it like an unruly satrapy. I'm sure the Economist will report on it in full. Dean Shomshak