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.

Gutting net neutrality is a death knell for the resistance - The Globe and Mail

Gutting net neutrality is a death knell for the resistance - The Globe and Mail:

Gutting net neutrality is one of the most unpopular proposals the Republicans have made this year, along with Trumpcare and the proposed tax hike for all but the wealthiest Americans. Normally, there would be risk in proposing such widely loathed policies, but the GOP appears unconcerned with public approval – a strong indicator to me that the elections are indeed a fait accompli.

What can we Americans do? Talk about it – while we still can. Call our representatives, organize in our community, and have a plan for what we'll do should these repressive initiatives pass. Over the past year, citizens have had success exerting public pressure on officials and raising consciousness over social issues. The internet was key to these endeavours, which is precisely why the administration wants to eliminate equal access to it. If we, as Americans, want to retain our voice, we must speak up now, or forever, involuntarily, hold our peace.

Shaping the World | David R. MacIver

Shaping the World | David R. MacIver

This keynote speech from PyCon UK is about software, a little. But it's more about societies and other complex systems, and the consequences that arise from our simplified models of them. It is full of wonderful associations.

It's pretty amazing that Mr. MacIver was able to speak so evocatively, especially after having had his memory wiped by the sight of 800 or so audience members.

I wish the read-write web actually existed. I would love to be able to annotate his transcript directly. Instead I'll quote, and note, here.

Models of Trees

If you’re a computer scientist, or have had an unfortunate developer job interview recently, a tree is probably something like this.

Hello, Google ;)

[A real, biological tree] provides shade, maybe fruit, it has a complex root system. It’s the center of its own little ecosystem, providing shelter and food for birds, insects, and other animals.

"Complex root system" reminds me of what has recently been written about how tree root systems communicate and share nutrients with other trees. It also reminds of the relationship between root systems and fungal meshes (a mushroom is to the whole fungus as the tip of the iceberg is to the submerged mass), which dissolve rock to serve as nutrients to plants in exchange for carbohydrates (?) from the plant.

And of course it reminds me of Aldo Leopold's story of an atom: the "Odyssey" chapter from "A Sand County Almanac", written in a time when it was believed that plants disintegrated rocks solely by driving roots into them like wedges.

Back to the keynote:

The problem that the German scientific foresters ran into is that complex, natural, systems are often robust in ways that simple, optimised systems are not. They’ve evolved over time, with lots of fiddly little details that have occurred locally to adapt to and patch over problems. Much of that illegibility turns out not to be accidental complexity, but instead the adaptation that was required to make the system work at all.

I've spent much of the past year updating a build system that generates Makefiles from Visual Studio solution/project files. This is a lovely description of that system.

Taxes and Their Avoidance

Have you seen these? Do you know why there are these bricked up windows? Well, it’s because of window taxes... So this is where windows taxes come from – take complex, messy, realities of wealth and pick a simple proxy for it... and you end up taxing the number of windows. Of course what happens is that people brick up their windows to save on taxes. And then suffer health problems...

I was surprised that this was an English building. For me, bricked-over windows and doors evoke Russia, Peter the Great, and the war of countermeasures between tax collectors and peasants.

From "Peter the Great", by Robert Massie:

"The only solution [to Peter's constant need for funds...] was to lay still heavier taxes on the burdened nation... the basic tax had been the old household tax, determined by a census... This tax... made for crowded living because, to avoid taxation, as many families and people as possible crowded under one roof."

"But the new low figures also represented the helplessness of the government to overcome the stratagems of both nobility and peasants who were determined to evade taxes... Russian peasant houses were largely made of logs or timbers notched at four corners. Thus, they could be un-notched in a few hours and either removed to the forest or scattered about. The census takers and tax collectors knew the trick, but there was little they could do about it."

From "For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization", by Charles Adams:

"Duplexes and triplexes were built to take advantage of the one-dwelling, one-tax loophole. The tsar's tax collector responded by considering each outside door as a separate household. Peasants responded by boarding up one of the doors..."

But to return to the keynote:

These complex shared ownerships are illegible, so we force people to conform instead to the legible idea of single people or families owning each piece of land. This is where a lot of modern notions of ownership come from by the way – the state created them so they could collect more tax.

...

And of course we have the soviet union’s program of farm collectivization, which has the state pushing things in entirely the opposite direction.

This reminds that I want to read Anne Applebaum's new book, "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine", which details the use of collective farming as a tool of mass murder.

Legibility, and the Choice of Model Parameters

After all of these interesting anecdotes rich with association, Mr. MacIver moves to his main point, which is that the attempts of tech companies to be disruptive, or to improve efficiency, can be boiled down to attempts to improve legibility. They aren't removing cruft: they're building new models of complex systems. They're choosing principal components – sets of parameters – that make it easier to understand the properties they want to optimize.

That model building produces lots of unintended – often bad – consequences.

... we’ve reduced the world to the small subset of it that we think of as the important bits, and discarded the old, illegible, reality as unimportant...

that legibility we impose often maps very badly to the actual complexity of the world. You only have to look at the endless stream of falsehoods programmers believe [in order] to get a sense of how much of the world’s complexity we’re ignoring.

Mr. MacIver next explains soft power, and in particular the soft power of disruptive technology companies. I took his words as an oblique reference to Amazon's business model, and free two-day shipping, but Mr. MacIver explicitly referenced other companies such as Twitter and Uber:

... soft power is power that you derive instead from appeal – People want to do what you want. There are a variety of routes to soft power, but there’s one that has been particularly effective for colonising forces, the early state, and software companies. It goes like this.

First you make them want what you have, then you make them need it.

The trick is to to basically ease people in – you give them a hook that makes your stuff appealing, and then once they’re used to it they can’t do without...

Pity they’re going to hike the prices way up when they’ve driven the competition into the ground and want to stop hemorrhaging money.

Sometimes it turns out that what we were disrupting was our life support system.

Admonitions

Mr. MacIver ends with some advice.

First he reminds the partisans of the old Mac / Windows wars that they both have it wrong, and that Richard Stallman's painful prescription is probably, by far, the best.

Then he advises that anyone who wants to develop a new, disruptive technology (and who is not cynically trying to control some large portion of society/industry, as I believe Mr. Bezos and others are) should begin with user research. "If you’re going to be forming a simplified model of the world, at least base it on what’s important to the people who are going to be using your software."

Finally, he practically begs us all to stop relying on ads. You should read his advice for yourself.

Thanks, Mr. MacGiver, for such a wonderful and thoughtful talk.

The Founding Fathers designed impeachment for someone exactly like Donald Trump - The Washington Post

The Founding Fathers designed impeachment for someone exactly like Donald Trump - The Washington Post: in which Barbara Radnofsky lays out the many causes for which a properly functioning Congress would already have impeached Donald J. Trump.

Scores decry new science standards | Northern New Mexico Education | santafenewmexican.com

Scores decry new science standards | Northern New Mexico Education | santafenewmexican.com:

More than 200 people showed up at the Public Education Department on Monday to voice opposition to the New Mexico STEM-Ready Standards, due to go into effect for state schools in July 2018...

By midafternoon, not one person spoke in favor of adopting the standards.

Want to deepen our democracy? Get ready. - The Washington Post

Want to deepen our democracy? Get ready. - The Washington Post:

The time has come to make our democracy democratic again. And now, no one can say that we lack ideas for how to do it.

Nuclear Experts Head to China to Test Experimental Reactors - Bloomberg

Nuclear Experts Head to China to Test Experimental Reactors - Bloomberg:

“China by a very large margin is the largest market in the world for new power plants of any type,” said Charles W. Forsberg, a professor at MIT. “If we do not get our act together, the low-carbon energy business will be owned by the Chinese.”

Yup.

The First White President

There is a lot to consider in this, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Lest I create the false impression of a disjointed argument, please note that these are just a few bones taken from a beautifully articulated skeleton. The First White President:

After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigeur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed.

Trump’s white support was not determined by income... Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly [emph. added] every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31).

And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums.

Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating premises—white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else—lived on.

“A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country. “It is a voice that has been silent too long,” Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.”

It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible.

I suspect all of the above is just background, to enable the reader to see in a new light the material to come: I've just reached the point where Mr. Coates begins recounting statements of the (all-white) Democratic candidates in the 2016 Presidential election. Recommended reading.

What a human can endure

Sumiteru Taniguchi, who fought to abolish nuclear weapons after Nagasaki, dead at 88 - World - CBC News

Joe Biden lays it down

'We Are Living Through a Battle for the Soul of This Nation'

Today we have an American president who has publicly proclaimed a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and Klansmen and those who would oppose their venom and hate.

You, [I], and the citizens of this country carry a special burden in 2017. We have to do what our president has not. We have to uphold America’s values. We have to do what he will not. We have to defend our Constitution. We have to remember our kids are watching. We have to show the world America is still a beacon of light.

+1

"I am The Law." The Law is an ass

Laurence Tribe on Twitter:

T just sent lots of messages: to F & M, to Mueller, to all POC & LGBTQ, to GOP, to Pentagon all Americans: I AM THE LAW. Get used to it.

Retweeting Beau Willimon:

It was a message - on the same day that Mueller's grand jury issued subpoenas for Flynn & Manafort - that they should hold the line...

Beware: Trump may use the alt-right to turn himself into the center - The Washington Post

Beware: Trump may use the alt-right to turn himself into the center - The Washington Post:

Remember, along with group violence, individual acts are very useful to Trump: He can “crack down” on the violence, he can call for more police, he can present himself as the candidate of law and order. The more chaos, the stronger he will seem.

Now that Jobbik is Hungary’s second-largest political party, Fidesz positions itself as the center. Here’s the paradox: “Vote for us or else you get the far-right” is an argument that the farthest-right ruling party in Europe uses to win elections.

Building America’s Trust Act would amp up privacy concerns at the border | Ars Technica

We will protect your civil liberties by curtailing them. Building America’s Trust Act would amp up privacy concerns at the border | Ars Technica:

"This is a surveillance bill in pretty weak disguise. And it won't be limited to immigrants," Alvaro Bedoya, a law professor at Georgetown University, told Ars. "It would pave the way for more face scans of American citizens at airports. It would aggressively deploy drones at the 'border,' but [it] doesn't mention that DHS interprets its authority to operate at the 'border' to extend to any area within 100 miles of the actual legal border."

In 1939, I didn’t hear war coming. Now its thundering approach can’t be ignored

This is just one arresting statement from a worrying essay. Harry Leslie Smith | Opinion | The Guardian:

It is as foolish for Americans to believe that their generals will save them from Trump as it was for liberal Germans to believe the military would protect the nation from Hitler’s excesses.

When the White House Lies About You - The New York Times

When the White House Lies About You - The New York Times:

[Using a general to demonize the press] raises the question of whether normally apolitical figures aren’t being conscripted into Trump’s war on the press. That’s a worrying thought for institutions, like the C.I.A., that are supposed to remain above the fray to preserve public trust.

This does raise the question of whether the WH is planting disinformation with outsiders in hopes they will find it outrageous enough to propagate it. You know, dezinformatsiya.

A Wisconsin Republican Looks Back With Regret at Voter ID and Redistricting Fights - ProPublica

ProPublica interviews a retired state senator who speaks with candor, and who describes collecting evidence and then using it to guide his decisions. That was refreshing.