Freedom isn't free

Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) writes well. In his first sentence he captures my own embarrassment: that a lifetime of skepticism, about the motives of those who govern, has turned out to be basic ingratitude for a real gift. RadioFreeTom

Speaking for myself, one thing I learned over the past few years - to my shame - is how much I took my Constitutional rights and the stability of the American republic for granted. I treated freedom of speech as my birthright, and never had to exercise a bit of effort for it.

I treated the granite-solid nature of the Constitution, the balance of the U.S. civil-military relationship, the independence of the judiciary - all as facts of nature rather than as precious jewels to be guarded against theft from within.

I was plenty vigilant about defending our nation from foreign threats, because I believed that my fellow citizens, whatever our collective sins or flaws, would never countenance attacks on our common home and our right to live in it.

Some out there will say this reflects “privilege,” earned by my skin or gender. Maybe so. But even when we did wrong, we - as a nation - wanted to do right. When we failed, we fought in public about our shortcomings. We prided ourselves on this.

On a personal level, I have never experienced the number of attempts to silence me, demands I be removed from my job, and even physically threatened as often as I have since 2015. Not in any post, not in any city, not during any other administration.

This, I realize, is how others have felt before this. But I always believed that the system, the society, the law, even most of our leaders, were on the side of right and would defend any of us against such thuggery. I know now I took this too much for granted.

We are not past the point of no return. But it is time to exercise every Constitutional right, especially *speech* and *voting* - with no excuses, without whining, without hedging. This is a time for fortitude, consistency, confidence, and dedication to the American idea.

We don’t get many second chances in a human life. The life of nations is even less forgiving. We have, as a republic, lived through multiple near-death moments. We are perilously close to running out of chances.

This is not greatness

Dave Winer lays it out in Scripting News:

Jewish people hiding while an armed fascist hunts them. In America. My grandfather said it would happen. I didn't believe him. Here we are.

On CBS and CNN and probably others the panelists all agree that of course Trump is not responsible for the massacre in Pittsburgh and the bombings of Democratic leaders. This is the bubble they live in. It's fiction. Of course Trump is responsible for all of it.

Shame on Trump. Shame on us. Vote, to put a stop to this bullshit.

David Frum on why Republicans chose Trumpocracy over democracy - Vox

David Frum on why Republicans chose Trumpocracy over democracy - Vox The whole article is well worth reading, but some bits were especially striking. Two examples:

When highly committed parties strongly believe [in] things that they cannot achieve democratically, they don’t give up on their beliefs — they give up on democracy.

The only way to check Trumpocracy is through a constitutional movement that’s bigger than politics. The whole reason we have constitutional politics is to manage our differences. The goal is not to extinguish all differences; it’s to protect the right to differ.

Intentional Liar

Scaramucci Says Trump ‘Intentionally’ Lies to Inflame Opponents - Bloomberg:

Scaramucci, who’s promoting a new book, said answers by the media and Trump’s opponents to the president’s untruthful statements have been ineffectual. They respond like bullied schoolchildren pleading to hall monitors -- calling out Trump’s lies, which doesn’t work, he said.

“If someone’s taking your lunch money in the cafeteria, if you call the hall monitor, it’s not going to help you,” Scaramucci said. Instead, “you’ve got to defeat the person at the table with your peer group.”

I get the diagnosis but not the prescription. Does he think the media and his opponents should gang up on Trump? Perhaps they should stop reporting his actual lies and instead replace the specifics of each lie with an assertion that "Donald Trump lied"? What exactly is he recommending they all do?

Kleptocrat

Sarah Kendzior, via Twitter:

Trump would rather have his base think of him as a "nationalist" than as a kleptocrat. In reality, Trump's a wealthy white supremacist who partners with international billionaires and crimelords to strip America down for parts and sell it off to the highest bidders. 23 October

Trump does not give a shit about America. His racism is real, but his circle is international. This is not even "America First". It's always been Trump first, America last. Follow the money -- from your pockets into Trump's and then into offshore accounts of him and his backers.

Sarah Kendzior understands authoritarians better than I ever will. But even I can see the sense in these assertions. And the similarities to the end of the Soviet Union are just as obvious: Putin and the Russian kleptocracy did exactly this.

When a government privatizes an asset that it controls, it is selling to a private concern a thing that was created through the collective efforts of the governed. Therefore the proceeds should be distributed evenly among the governed.

This seems especially obvious for a form of government such as communism, that emphasizes collectivism.

But that isn't what happened in Russia. I need to read "Winter is Coming", and to take notes this time, in order to understand what did happen. Where did the oligarchs find the wealth to buy privatized government assets? Did they just steal them, with the aid of the former KGB? Did they somehow depress their perceived value – label them junk or toxic – to get a better deal?

In any case, value that had been created by the Soviet people, collectively, was not distributed evenly among them. The kleptocrats stole that value from the citizenry as a whole, and then took it out of the country in order to secure it. The countries where they secreted it, including Great Britain, Cyprus, Iceland and the United States, turned a blind eye to its origins because they wanted to use it to enrich themselves.

---

The following are excerpts from "Kasparov, Garry. Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition." The book does not seem to explain in detail the origins of the Russian oligarchy. It does provide explain how they worked with corrupt leadership, starting with Boris Yeltsin, to strengthen their positions.

The history of left-wing dictatorships transitioning to democracy with market economies is a short collection of horror stories. Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else.

Even twenty-five years later, most outbreaks of socialist rhetoric are limited to populist would-be autocrats keen to redistribute wealth to their cronies and with stagnant economies dependent on natural resources.

On reasons why the former Soviet republics were so eager to become former republics:

There was also a power-grab incentive factor in many cases. Regional bureaucrats and party bosses dreamed of being autocrats and realized they would have more power and a greater ability to line their pockets in independent states, even if their economies and regimes remained largely dependent on Moscow.

By 1996, in Kasparov's telling, the oligarchy was already well established. They helped Yeltsin, who had helped them, to win re-election through illegally excessive campaign contributions:

In 1996, Yeltsin had little popular support but he could count on many of the oligarchs whose fortunes he had enabled and the financial backing of the West.

Every day struggling Russians read about the new billionaires being created by cozy deals with the government. You didn’t have to understand how things like privatization vouchers, loans-for-shares, and rigged auctions worked to realize there was a huge scam going on. Worried that reforms might be rolled back by conservatives, Yeltsin’s reform team, led by Yegor Gaidar and Chubais, started selling things off at a frantic pace at absurdly low valuations.

Such sanctioned looting continued under Putin, of course, and continues today. The difference was that in the 1990s Russians could find out about it.

On why Yeltsin and others turned to Putin:

After years of looting and capital flight it was getting harder and harder to scapegoat the West for how badly things were going. Yeltsin’s approval rating was dismal once again, another reason he and his oligarch backers were eager to find a fresh face to show to the frustrated Russian people.

On how the second "generation" of the oligarchy came to prominence through appeasement by Putin:

With no free media, no justice system to worry about, and no competition, Putin’s preferred oligarchs were like vermin whose natural predators had been eradicated. The chosen winners had the full power of the state behind them and the Russian treasury opened wide.

Sunday in the dog park

This morning in the dog park I learned it is possible to sneak up on a jackrabbit. (It would have been great if I'd known I was doing so...) When you do, it may rear up like a stallion and bound away, not like a hare, but like a gazelle.

Scheduling Notebooks at Netflix – Netflix Technology Blog – Medium

Scheduling Notebooks at Netflix – Netflix Technology Blog – Medium:

Notebooks are, in essence, managed JSON documents with a simple interface to execute code within. They’re good at expressing iterative units of work via cells, which facilitate reporting and execution isolation with ease. Plus, with different kernels, notebooks can support a wide range of languages and execution patterns. These attributes mean that we can expose any arbitrary level of complexity for advanced users while presenting a more easily followed narrative for consumers — all within a single document.

Since Papermill doesn’t modify the source notebook, we get a functional property added to our definition of work — something which is normally missing in the notebook space. Our inputs, a notebook JSON document and our input parameters, are treated as immutable records for execution that produce an immutable output document.

We just watched a U.S. president acting on behalf of a hostile power - The Washington Post

Max Boot lays it out.

We just watched a U.S. president acting on behalf of a hostile power - The Washington Post: "We are past the point when such statements can be dismissed as naivete — especially when Trump has previously admitted that Russia did hack the election. We are past the point where Trump’s conduct can be ascribed to his belief that it is imperative to improve U.S.-Russia relations. If Trump doesn’t care about the state of U.S.-German relations, U.S.-Canadian relations or U.S.-U.K. relations — all of which he has damaged in the past month — why would he care about U.S. relations with a country that has one-fourteenth of America’s GDP and one-tenth of its defense budget? We are past the point where Trump’s conduct can be ascribed to his general sympathy for dictators. If he is waging a trade war on China’s dictator, why is he cozying up to Russia’s dictator? We are past the point when Trump’s conduct — which leaves future elections wide open to Russian manipulation — can be ascribed to his unwillingness to do anything that will tarnish his glorious victory. It is true but insufficient to point out that that Trump’s unwillingness to acknowledge the Russian attack on America is putting his own interests above the country’s. Even if Trump were thinking only in terms of his own political survival — his usual mode — he would be tougher on Putin, because he must realize that kowtowing to the Russian only strengthens suspicions of collusion. But Trump just cannot bring himself to do it. Is that because he hopes for more aid from Putin in the future — or because he is afraid of what Putin can reveal about him? Either way, he gives every impression of betraying his oath of office. U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3: ‘Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.’ Trump’s own national security adviser said the Russian election attack constituted an ‘act of war.’ So what does that make his boss? Some — including former CIA director John Brennan — now dare call it treason. That conclusion was once unthinkable. No longer."

Extreme Heat Event in Northern Siberia and the coastal Arctic Ocean This Week – Ocean's Wrath

Extreme Heat Event in Northern Siberia and the coastal Arctic Ocean This Week – Ocean's Wrath:

An extreme heat event for this particular region…with high temperatures of greater than 40 degrees F (greater than 20 C) above recent normals…will impact the coast of the Arctic Ocean (specifically the Laptev Sea and Eastern Siberian Sea) Wednesday-Friday. This will generate maximum daily temperatures as high as 90-95 degrees (32-35 C) near the open ocean coast! Yes,  you read that correctly.

Meanwhile we continue extracting and leaking methane into the atmosphere. We continue generating and releasing CO2 at a high rate. Here in the United States, when we could be choosing representatives who have even slight interest in this problem, we are busy voting for the end of democracy. I marvel at our stupidity.

"Be a Good Ancestor"

China made solar panels cheap. Now it’s doing the same for electric buses. - Vox:

The rapidly growing megacity of Shenzhen, China, was choked with diesel pollution in the early 2010s. Though buses were just 0.5 percent of the city’s vehicles, they were responsible for 20 percent of the air pollution. So, as the World Resources Institute recounts, Shenzhen electrified them. All 16,359 of them.

It got there through some cleverness — they planned out charging infrastructure and pushed manufacturers to offer lifetime warranties on batteries — but mainly through government subsidies, which covered up to half the upfront cost of the vehicles.

In 2013, China was bopping along with 1,700 BEBs. ...it realized that its rapidly expanding urbanization could not continue to rely on diesel buses, lest it make an already crippling air-pollution problem even worse.

So it decided to make electric buses a thing. How? By dumping a giant pile of money on the problem, subsidizing the purchase of more than 350,000 BEBs in the following four years.

Other cities are beginning to get on the BEB bandwagon as well.

[BNEF writes that] “Paris aims to electrify all of its 4,500 buses by 2025, Copenhagen has committed to procure only zero-emission buses from 2019, and Los Angeles has the same target for its fleet of 2,200 buses by 2030.”

sometimes problems are big and urgent, you need scaled-up solutions quickly, and you just don’t have time to mess around. China didn’t nudge its solar industry, it kicked it in the pants. Now it’s doing the same to the BEB industry.

As economists will rush to point out, there have been enormous inefficiencies and waste along the way, money lost on graft or junk technology. Solar has often been poorly installed or curtailed. According to BNEF, some 43 percent of the BEBs allegedly produced in China in 2015 were basically fraudulent.

[China] rightly recognized that the problems (coal and diesel pollution) are intensely urgent and it’s not that huge a mystery how to solve them.

Amortized over the next 50 to 100 years, the next several generations of humanity, the cost of transition are a screaming deal at almost any price. It’s just a matter of learning (or perhaps relearning) to take a long-term view of human interests — to be a “good ancestor,” as they say.

Installing Ubuntu 17.10 on a 2013 13" MacBook Air: Wifi

Today I am remembering why I decided to give Mac OS X a try back in 2002: I got tired of spending most of my time configuring linux drivers. I thought the situation might have improved in the interim, and it probably has. Unfortunately, the universe of extant hardware is huge, and it's hard to fill all of the holes. Anyway, today I'm trying to replace macOS with Ubuntu 17.10 on my 2013 13" MacBook Air. Most of the installation has gone smoothly, with the main exception being Wifi. After more than an hour of flailing I found this, and it appears to have worked:

BCM43142 WiFi driver in Ubuntu. | How to install BCM43142 WiFi Driver in Linux

I had to copy a lot of packages from the Ubuntu installer thumb drive, not just the two mentioned in the article. The reason was that the Ubuntu installer didn't install gcc 7 or its supporting packages. Here are the packages that I needed to copy from the installer thumb drive. All files were located under .../pool/main:

• bcmwl-kernel-source_6.30.223.271+bdcom-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• dkms_2.3-3ubuntu3_all.deb
• gcc_7.2.0-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb
• gcc-7_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libasan4_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libatomic1_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libc6-dev_2.26-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb
• libc-dev-bin_2.26-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb
• libcilkrts5_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libgcc-7-dev_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libitm1_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• liblsan0_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libmpx2_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libquadmath0_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libtsan0_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• libubsan0_7.2.0-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
• linux-libc-dev_4.13.0-16.19_amd64.deb
• make_4.1-9.1_amd64.deb

Trump’s invincible ignorance

Last Week Was a Degrading Embarrassment. And a Microcosm of Trump. – Foreign Policy: Does Donald Trump engage in some secret ritual involving the mass ingestion of bullshit? How else does he manage to spew out so much?

Almost everything else about that tweet is also false: The decision to sell the old U.S. Embassy was made by former President George W. Bush, not former President Barack Obama, and it was done for security reasons. The new embassy, built at a cost of $1 billion, not $1.2 billion, has been described by Trump’s own ambassador to the Court of St. James’s as a “bargain” that was paid for by the sale of other U.S. properties in London.

...in fact there is a big price to be paid for having a president whom no one can trust. It makes it almost impossible, for example, to convince other countries to go along with the United States in any international crisis where the facts are in dispute.

“See, that’s treason right there,” he said. No it’s not — unless treason is redefined to mean, as it does in places like Turkey and Russia, any criticism of the supreme leader.

What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult? | Quanta Magazine

What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult? | Quanta Magazine:

When you start modeling a flow using Navier-Stokes, your fluid will have some initial amount of energy. But in a turbulent flow, that energy can get concentrated. Instead of being distributed evenly across the river, kinetic energy may gather in arbitrarily small eddies, and particles in those eddies could (theoretically) be accelerated to infinite velocity.

... turbulence is meant to describe exactly this — the transfer of kinetic energy from large to smaller and smaller scales...

Why Raspberry Pi isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown - Raspberry Pi

Eben Upton provides a wonderfully clear explanation of recently-disclosed CPU vulnerabilities: Why Raspberry Pi isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown - Raspberry Pi. I think this is the clearest writing on CPU architecture details that I've seen, aside from articles in BYTE magazine in the early 1980s. The comment thread is also a fun read, not least for its mention of the Motorola 68000.

Ptolemy, Kepler and Fourier walk into a used bookstore...

In which I learn a little modern JavaScript and bemoan my lousy memory: Epicycles Ever After

Food for Thought, and a Digestive

Both from the Washington Post:

To beat President Trump, you have to learn to think like his supporters

The euphemisms I refuse to use in 2018

Sarah Kendzior on Twitter summarizes Sen. Warner's Red line

Sarah Kendzior:

All Dems and GOP must unambiguously say that any effort to shut down Mueller probe would be a gross abuse of power. This is a red line.

Many of the same people attacking Mueller's appointment today praised him months ago.

Our intel committee uncovered numerous, troubling high-level engagements between the Trump campaign and Russian affiliates.

The national security threat we face demands we rise above partisan differences. We should all want to know the truth about what happened in the election, and know it as quickly as possible

POTUS's track record is a source of concern. Most people thought he wouldn't fire Comey and he did. Firing Mueller would cause a constitutional crisis.

I had hoped I'd never have to make these speech, but these are troubling times. We must all speak up -- before it's too late.

Sen Warner's speech on the Mueller probe felt more like a warning to the US public than to Trump: brace yourself for a crisis even worse than our current one, and don't fall for spin

EPA says Superfund Task Force left no records

Blessed are the scum, for they shall envelop the earth. Scott Pruitt's secretive, unaccountable EPA is re-defining what it means to be a public servant. EPA says Superfund Task Force left no records | News | santafenewmexican.com:

The task force in June issued a nearly three dozen-page report containing 42 detailed recommendations, all of which Pruitt immediately adopted. The advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, known as PEER, quickly filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking a long list of documents related to the development of Pruitt’s plan.

“Task force members were all volunteers from EPA staff with no selection criteria,” Johnny Walker, a Justice Department lawyer representing EPA, wrote to PEER last month. “The Task Force recommendations were intended to provide guidance to EPA staff. As such, there was no plan for public review and comment on the recommendations.”

The task force was led by Albert “Kell” Kelly, whom Pruitt hired at EPA as a senior adviser at an annual salary of $172,100. Kelly was previously the chairman of Tulsa-based SpiritBank, where he worked as an executive for 34 years.

The Associated Press reported in August that Kelly was barred by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from working for any U.S. financial institution after officials determined he violated laws or regulations, leading to a financial loss for his bank.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich: Why hinder a rapidly growing industry?

Why hinder a rapidly growing industry? | Albuquerque Journal:

Only a little more than 1 percent of the hundreds of thousands of American solar workers manufacture solar panels or modules. Even within solar manufacturing as a whole, approximately 20 times more American workers work for companies like New Mexico’s Unirac that manufacture other equipment used to produce solar power. Those companies have warned that they may have to lay off employees if the United States imposes costly tariffs or quotas on imported panels.

I’m on Trump’s voter fraud commission. I’m suing it to find out what it’s doing. - The Washington Post

I’m on Trump’s voter fraud commission. I’m suing it to find out what it’s doing. - The Washington Post:

Instead, the commission is cloaking itself in secrecy, completely contrary to federal law. Recommendations for changes in public policy — whether you agree with them or not — ought to come through an open, public discussion where any American can weigh in.

the memo wasn’t written by staff — it was written by individuals who were later named to the commission but who were working outside of government at the time. The letter went out immediately after our first conference call, indicating that Kobach’s data-gathering effort was underway before the commission formed. But no one told members of the commission that; I learned about it from the press.

Strangely, [Kobach's] charges had less to do with how voters in New Hampshire had conducted themselves than with the structure of the state’s election laws, which Kobach apparently dislikes.

The commission was established by executive order under the auspices of the Federal Advisory Commission Act (FACA), which requires notice of our public meetings, disclosure of our work product and the opportunity for public participation. FACA was written precisely so Americans would know what the government is doing and what it is considering, so we could participate in that process.

Without transparency about the commission’s actions, how can you find out if a policy is being developed that may require you to have a Real ID-compliant driver’s license to vote? Or whether you’ll have to prove American citizenship at the polls? How will you know about proposed changes to voter registration deadlines or new restrictions on absentee balloting?

Of course, this is politics. But remember, we as American citizens are supposed to own the process.