Jeff's Lunchbreak: June 2017 Archives

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Friday, June 23, 2017

Friday Trump & Politics Roundup - 18

This is my semi-regular feature to post links to articles about Donald Trump along with excerpts from those articles. Trump has the potential to cause so much damage to our country and the world that it's every citizen's responsibility to keep pressure on him and our other elected officials to try to minimize the damage. To read previous entries in this series and other Trump related posts, check out my Trump archives.

Obviously, there's a lot more news that I haven't included here. Bad news comes out of the Trump administration and Republican controlled House and Senate too fast for me to keep up with it all. (I wonder if that's a strategy - overwhelm the public with so much that people can't be outraged about everything.)

And damn, these posts are so freakin' depressing. If I just quit giving a damn about other people, I suppose I could ignore Trump and all the damage he's causing and just enjoy my own comfortable little bubble. But these are literally life and death stakes. His Mexico City policy is going to kill tens of thousands of people. The new Republican healthcare bill could kill tens of thousands per year more.

How in the hell did we get here as a nation where we've voted in such horrible politicians? The 4th of July is coming up in just a couple weeks, and I'm struggling with how to celebrate pride in America when I'm so disgusted and embarrassed with the current state of government. Setting off fireworks and waving flags seem hollow when an incompetent proto-fascist demagogue like Trump is leading the nation.

HAI Press Release - Helicopter Association International Strongly Opposes President Trump's Air Traffic Control Privatization Plan

Helicopter Association International (HAI) today joined other national organizations in opposing privatization of the nation's air traffic control (ATC) system.
These organizations signed a joint letter to President Donald Trump, expressing concerns that the plan would directly and significantly benefit the airline industry while destabilizing the current successful ATC system and raising costs through user fees that would be passed on to consumers.

"All stakeholders on both sides of this issue acknowledge that we already have the safest, most efficient air traffic control system in the world," said Matt Zuccaro, president and CEO of HAI. "So what problem are they trying to solve?"

"This initiative appears to be an effort by the airlines for more control of the airspace and the airports," continued Zuccaro. "As we all witness the airlines struggling with their own internal technology issues and related problems, does it really make sense to hand over control of the best ATC system in the world to them?"

Newsweek - Will Trump Visit U.K? After attack on Sadiq Khan, Theresa May Faces Calls to Cancel State Trip

[This was particularly shameful behavior from Trump. And baffling. How can you screw up foreign relations so badly with the U.K.? Who criticizes a mayor in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack?]

President Donald Trump's already controversial planned state visit to the United Kingdom has just become a whole lot more contentious. Multiple tweets attacking London mayor Sadiq Khan in the wake of Saturday's attack in London that left seven people dead have led several leading British politicians to call for Prime Minister Theresa May to cancel the invitation.
"Sadiq Khan has shown dignity and leadership," said Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. "Theresa May absolutely must withdraw the state visit. This is a man insulting our national values at a time of introspection and mourning."

Those comments were slammed by senior Labour member of Parliament David Lammy.
"You are truly beneath contempt," he said in a series of tweets in reply to Trump. "You are just a troll. Show some bottle please PM. Cancel the state visit and tell Trump where to get off.

"You demean your office by misquoting and smearing the Mayor of a city that has just been attacked and is also the capital of your close ally. You besmirch the presidency, you taint previous Presidents with your behavior & you bring shame on your great country and its great people."

Industrial Equipment News - Energy Chief: Carbon Dioxide Not Prime Driver of Warming: His view is contrary to mainstream climate science.

Asked on CNBC's "Squawk Box" whether carbon emissions are primarily responsible for climate change, Perry said no, adding that "most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in."
Perry's view is contrary to mainstream climate science, including analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The EPA under President Donald Trump recently removed a web page that declared "carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change."

Nature Op-ed - Fight the silencing of gun research

In the half-century since the assassination of Martin Luther King, more civilians in the United States have been killed with guns than American soldiers have died in all US wars since the nation was founded in 1776. Currently, on an average day, about 300 Americans are shot and 100 die from gunshot wounds -- in murders, attempted suicides or accidents (see go.nature.com/2qnp4m2).

Yet the US government, at the behest of the gun lobby, limits the collection of data, prevents researchers from obtaining much of the data that are collected and severely restricts the funds available for research on guns. I have watched this first-hand, being one of a half-dozen or so gun researchers in the United States who has continuously published in this field over the past two decades.

Because of a two-decade stranglehold on US gun research, there are few, if any, scientific studies for people to refer to when promoting or countering proposed changes to gun control. Policymakers are essentially flying blind for what is currently classified as the third leading cause of US injury and death, after motor vehicles and opioids (see go.nature.com/2rpky2y).

Alarmingly, the gun lobby is increasingly aligning itself with a broad political movement that sees science not as a search for truth and understanding, but as a tool for promoting partisan agendas (see go.nature.com/2sderwh). The American Bar Association and many medical societies have spoken out on the firearm funding limitations imposed by Congress. Now all scientific associations need to add their voices.

Vox - World leaders tell jokes about Trump. But the implications aren't funny at all.

It's one thing when American late-night TV show hosts and online commenters make fun of President Donald Trump. It becomes something completely different -- and, frankly, alarming -- when world leaders mock the president.

But even though Turnbull thought his comments were off the record, he was still mocking the US president as a pompous clown in front of a room full of journalists and fellow politicians. When viewed in a wider context, that's more than a bit unnerving. This is an ally of the United States blatantly demonstrating that he doesn't take the president seriously.

Washington Post Op-ed - Trump said foreign leaders wouldn't laugh at the U.S. Now they're laughing at him.

"In the private conversations I've had with heads of states and ministers of foreign relations ... they all feel what Turnbull just basically came out and said: This is, by far, the least capable person ever to sit in the office and it's appalling they have to deal with him," said Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a global risk-assessment firm. "Even in a country that really needs to have a good relationship with the United States, you're just not willing to deal with it. Your own ego will say, 'Screw this guy.' "

Vox - Trump wants to deport Iraqi Christians. A federal judge may have just saved them.: ICE officials arrested dozens of Iraqi Christian nationals over the weekend of June 10th in Michigan. The ACLU is fighting to keep them home.

When more than 100 Iraqi Chaldean Christians in Michigan were arrested and threatened with immediate deportation the weekend of June 10th, the Trump administration's oft-repeated promises to protect Christians around the world rang not just darkly hollow but demonstrably false. After all, local activists argued, deporting Christians back to the war zones of Iraq was tantamount to a death sentence.

"Not only is it immoral to send people to a country where they are likely to be violently persecuted, it expressly violates United States and international law and treaties," Kary Moss, the executive director of the ACLU of Michigan told the Huffington Post soon after the arrests. "Our immigration policy shouldn't amount to a death sentence for anyone."

Vox - John Oliver: it's time for Trump to stop lying to coal miners

Oliver points out that the coal industry employs fewer people than JC Penny ("I didn't even know JC Penny had employees anymore!") but, to his credit, takes the suffering of coal communities seriously.
In fact, he takes it so seriously that he dares to tell them the truth. Oliver does two things that are rare in mainstream media reports about coal. First, he cites research showing that competition from natural gas and renewables, not Obama regulations, is killing US coal.

Second, he makes clear that the interests of coal miners and coal executives often diverge -- that it's coal CEOs, not coal miners, that Trump is close to. In fact, coal executives are in the process of trying to screw over retired miners as we speak.

NY Times Op-ed - Paul Krugman - Pure Class Warfare, With Extra Contempt

he Senate version of Trumpcare - the Better Care Reconciliation Act - is out. The substance is terrible: tens of millions of people will experience financial distress if this passes, and tens if not hundreds of thousands will die premature deaths, all for the sake of tax cuts for a handful of wealthy people. What's even more amazing is that Republicans are making almost no effort to justify this massive upward redistribution of income. They're doing it because they can, because they believe that the tribalism of their voters is strong enough that they will continue to support politicians who are ruining their lives.

This bill does nothing to reduce health care costs. It does nothing to improve the functioning of health insurance markets - in fact, it will send them into death spirals by reducing subsidies and eliminating the individual mandate. There is nothing at all in the bill that will make health care more affordable for those currently having trouble paying for it. And it will gradually squeeze Medicaid, eventually destroying any possibility of insurance for millions.
Who benefits? It's all about the tax cuts, almost half of which will go to people with incomes over $1 million, the great bulk to people with incomes over 200K.

Vox - The health bill might pass because Trump has launched the era of Nothing Matters politics

Since taking office, his signature values -- showmanship, shamelessness, and corruption -- have spread like kudzu in official Washington. It's now a country where Cabinet secretaries go on television to lie and claim that a $600 billion cut to Medicaid won't cause anyone to lose coverage. It's a country where the speaker of the House introduces an amendment to erode protections for patients with preexisting conditions and then immediately tweets that it's just been "VERIFIED" (by whom?) that the opposite is happening. Republican senators who a couple of months ago were criticizing the House bill's Medicaid cuts as too harsh are now warming up to a Senate bill whose cuts are even harsher.
The watchwords of Trump-era politics are "LOL nothing matters." If you're in a jam, you just lie about it. If you're caught in an embarrassing situation, you create a new provocation and hope that people move on. Everything is founded, most of all, on the assumption that the basic tribal impulses of negative partisanship will keep everyone on their side, while knowing that gerrymandering means Republicans will win every toss-up election. If you happened to believe that Republicans in office would deliver on their health care promises, well, you might be interested in a degree from Trump University.

Posted by Jeff on A, Jun 23 | Permalink | Comments (33) | TrackBacks (0)

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Responding to Article - Atheists Aren't Dogmatic

The latest issue of Skeptic magazine had an article with a few things I disagree with. Skeptic recently shared the article in their eSkeptic section, so you can read it even if you aren't a member of the Skeptics Society. Here's the link:

The Three Shades of Atheism: How Atheists Differ in Their Views on God

The authors conducted a survey to try to help categorize atheist beliefs and the percentage of atheists with those beliefs. They came up with 4 categories to characterize atheist responses. Unfortunately, I think their categories are flawed.

Gnostic-Atheism: Any explicit or implied characterization of the participant's position as certain or definite.
Agnostic-Atheism: Any effort made to distinguish between a "belief" and "knowledge" position; or participants who indicate that they are open to evidence: they describe their belief as malleable and open to changing based on new information, evidence, or "proof."

Ambivalent-Atheism: Any use of the phrase "I don't know" or "I am not sure," or similar characterizations of belief, without further explanation.

Other: Any statement that does not fit the criteria of the other categories.

The problem is, their definitions for 'gnostic-atheism' and 'agnostic-atheism' aren't mutually exclusive. You can be certain of something based on all the evidence you've seen so far, but still open to changing your mind if new evidence comes to light. I discussed this in detail in my essay, Confidence in Scientific Knowledge, so for this entry, let's just look at a few other knowledge claims as examples.

I am certain the Earth revolves around the Sun. However, if somebody showed me convincing evidence to the contrary (and it would take a hell of a lot of evidence at this point), I could be convinced to change my mind.
I am certain that the American Revolution took place in the late 1700s. However, with sufficient evidence, I could be convinced to believe that all of our history books were wrong.
I am certain garden fairies don't exist. However, I could be swayed by convincing evidence.

As long as we're using language in the normal way, 'certain' just means very, very high confidence. And there are lots of things were reasonably certain about, but could be convinced to change our minds on given sufficient contrary evidence.

The conclusion was especially galling:

Gnostic-theists would be individuals who equate their beliefs with facts, dogmatically insisting that they have positive knowledge of God's existence. Agnostic-theists would be individuals who accept the distinction between belief and knowledge, thereby demonstrating a degree of skepticism about their own position, and would indicate that their belief is based on faith, intuition, or an interpretation of natural phenomena. A 5-level, bipolar scale relating theistic and atheistic beliefs would be:

Gnostic-Atheism
Agnostic-Atheism
Nonbelief
Agnostic-Theism
Gnostic-Theism

The scale represents maximum darkness at both ends, the domains of dogmatic thinking. Maintaining a skeptical attitude toward one's own beliefs can be a challenge but, as the achievements of science have shown, it is a better route to enlightenment.

Were any of my previous examples 'dogmatic'? Is it dogmatic to be certain the Earth orbits the Sun? Is it dogmatic to be certain that fairies don't exist? Is it dogmatic to be certain that leprechauns aren't real? Is it dogmatic to be certain magic unicorns are just fantasy? Why, out of all the mythical and imagined possibilities dreamt up by humans, do gods get treated differently, and why does saying you're reasonably certain that gods don't exist get you labeled 'dogmatic'?

Image Source: Skeptics Society eSkeptic

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Posted by Jeff on A, Jun 21 | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (0)

Friday, June 16, 2017

Evolution in Action - Visualizing Bacteria Evolving Antibiotic Resistance

This entry is part of a collection on Understanding Evolution. For other entries in this collection, follow that link.

e. coli Not too long ago, I came across a question on Quora, Evolutionary biologists usually say that organisms adapt to their environment. Does this not contradict Darwinism?. It seemed like a good opportunity to explain how natural selection adapts organisms to their environments, and especially to use a recent experiment involving e. coli. Here's what I wrote, with some very minor edits.

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I'm going to assume that by 'Darwinism', you mean natural selection. Organisms adapting to their environments is pretty much textbook natural selection, but let's go through an example to see what this means.

There was a very interesting experiment/demonstration last year involving bacteria and antibiotics. A team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and Technion - Israel Institute of Technology made in effect a giant petri dish - a rectangle 2 ft x 4 ft. The unique aspect of this petri dish, besides its size, was that it was divided into regions with varying concentrations of an antibiotic. Either end of the rectangle was free of antibiotic. The next region in had the minimum concentration to kill the e. coli bacteria that were the subject of the experiment. Each subsequent region moving in increased the concentration ten fold, until the center region, which had a concentration 1000 times higher than what would normally kill e. coli.

Image Source: Screen Capture from Video Shown Below (Click to embiggen)

So, the researchers seeded the antibiotic free ends with e. coli, and then let them grow, taking periodic photos of the petri dish, and combinging them all into a time lapse movie. I'd really recommend watching the whole thing. It's really very interesting, with more explanation than what I've provided here, and only 2 minutes long.

So, let's take a closer look at one instant to see what exactly is going on. At one point, the tray looked like this:

Image Source: Screen Capture from Video Shown Above (Click to embiggen)

So, the antibiotic free ends are completely colonized by bacteria. The two regions with the lowest concentration of antibiotic have just begun to be colonized. There are several small resistant colonies, and you can see where each one of those colonies got their starts. What happened was that the original e. coli, with no antibiotic resistance spread across the agar until they hit the antibiotic. Since they weren't resistant, that was as far as they could go without dying. But those e. coli kept on living and reproducing, with mutations appearing throughout the population. In bacteria that just happened to be at the boundary of the antibiotic, who also happened to acquire just the right mutations to make them resistant to the antibiotic, they now had a whole new environment opened up to them and their descendants.

Notice that there's really no pattern to where those colonies got their starts. It was basically random, because mutations are random. No bacteria were trying to evolve. No bacteria were attempting to figure out a strategy to survive the antibiotic. Bacteria don't even have brains to try to do any of that. It was just whatever bacteria happened to be lucky enough to acquire the appropriate mutations by chance, an error at the chemical level when copying DNA.

Once those first resistant bacteria entered this new region, they spread. Then, once they hit the region with 10x the antibiotic concentration, they were contained again, until a few more bacteria happened to acquire the proper mutations by luck, and had a new environment opened up to them and their descendants. This repeated, until the bacteria were eventually colonizing the region with 1000x the concentration of antibiotic that would have killed the original e. coli that seeded the plate:

Image Source: Screen Capture from Video Shown Above (Click to embiggen)

So, these e. coli were adapting to their environment. However, it wasn't any conscious intent, or Lamarckian type of use and disuse. It was random mutations creating variation in the e. coli populations. Whichever e. coli happened to be lucky enough to have mutations to survive the antibiotic were the ones that thrived. Any e. coli that weren't lucky enough to have those mutations were limited to their existing environments.

This experiment had a pretty strong selection pressure with the antibiotic, but the same principles are at work in nature with other selection pressures. Whatever individuals happen to be lucky enough to acquire by chance the mutations best suited to an environment will be the ones that have the most offspring, increasing the frequency of whatever mutation that benefited them. Multiply this over generations, with natural selection 'ratcheting' additional mutations, so that the population becomes better and better suited to the environment. That is what is meant by saying that organisms adapt to their environment.

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More info on the e. coli experiment:

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Want to learn more about evolution? Find more at Understanding Evolution.

Posted by Jeff on A, Jun 16 | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Friday, June 9, 2017

What Would Happn if Everybody on an Airliner Jumped at the Same Time?

Vomit Comet I recently came across the Quora question, If everybody on a Boeing 747 jumped at the same time, what would happen to the plane?. The first answer I read was spectacularly wrong, and most of the others were either guesses, jokes, or just generalities without much substance. So, I did what any good engineer would do and calculated it. Here's what I wrote.

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In general - not much is going to happen if everybody on a 747 jumps at the same time. Just from a big picture view - there is no major change to the external forces acting on the aircraft/passenger system. So, you would expect the combined center of gravity to continue along the same path. And since most people can't jump very high, and the aircraft weighs substantially more than the passengers, the aircraft isn't going to be affected much at all.

In general, when the passengers jump, they'll push the aircraft down slightly, in proportion to their own mass and how far they jumped up. Then, since the lift didn't go away on the aircraft, the lift will first slow down the aircraft's slight descent, then cause the aircraft to start to climb again as the passengers start to fall.

But we don't have to just hand-wave an answer. We've got equations - we can calculate what will happen. So, I made a super simple model of this, with one mass to represent the aircraft, and another to represent the passengers*.

According to Wikipedia, a 747-400ER can hold 660 passengers, and has max takeoff weight of 910,000 lbs. According to FAA Advisory Circular 120-27E, average adult passenger weight in the winter, including "a 16-pound allowance for personal items and carry-on bags" is 195 lbs. Assuming the plane is full of adults, and that they're not going to be holding their carry-ons when they jump, that's 179 lbs per passenger, or a total of 118,140 lbs for all the passengers combined. That leaves 791,860 lbs for the aircraft itself.

For the forces, I assumed that the passengers jumping would be applying a constant force 2x their weight for 0.2 seconds. For the lift on the 747, I assumed that it would remain unchanged. Granted, there will be a small change in angle of attack (not pitch) due to the changes in vertical velocity, but I assumed it would be negligible.

So, what actually happens? This:

For passengers jumping ~1.3 ft into the air, the airframe itself will dip ~0.2 ft (2.4 in). Unsurprisingly - that's the same ratio as passenger weight to aircraft weight (confirming that the combined center of gravity does indeed continue on the same path unaltered). As the passengers reach the apex of their leap, the 747 reaches the bottom of its dip, and they quickly come back in contact again in less than a second.

I did skip out on what happens when they come back in contact, since I only did a super simple model and didn't really feel like spending a lot of time on it. They won't come smacking into each other. Rather, it'll probably be something like a mirror image of the jump, where the passengers flex their legs as they land to cushion the coming back together.

And of course, if you change up the assumptions, this will all change accordingly, but this puts the whole thing into perspective, showing the magnitudes and general behavior.

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*Here's a fuller description of the simple model, attempting to put it terms that most people can understand. Like I said, I broke the system up into 2 bodies - one for the 747, and one for the passengers. Here's a diagram of the forces acting on each body (insert joke about spherical cows here):

Note first of all that I'm only looking at forces in the vertical direction, since that's the only thing changing in this problem. Thrust and drag are staying constant, so the speed of the aircraft isn't going to change. Next, note that thanks to Newton's Third Law, we know that the force the passengers are pushing down on the 747 is the same magnitude but in the opposite direction as the force that the 747 is pushing up on the passengers. That's the magenta arrow on each body. Finally, note that that's the only force that changes during the entire problem. The weight of the aircraft is essentially constant. The weight of the passengers is essentially constant. And like I already explained up above, I assumed that the lift remained constant. So, here are graphs of what those forces look like, with an additional solid curve showing the net forces on each body (or the summation of forces, designated with the Σ label):

Note that just before the jump, everything was in equilibrium, with no net forces. As the passengers jumped, they pushed down on the plane. Once they were in the air, that force, Fy_pax_to_747, went to zero, and then only lift and gravity were acting on the 747, and only gravity was acting on the passengers.

Next, we use Newton's second law, F=ma, to figure out the accelerations on the bodies. Since the force of the passengers jumping was modeled so simply as a constant force for 0.2 seconds, and all other forces were constant, the accelerations also all turned out to be constant.

For a constant acceleration, it's easy to calculate velocity, using the formula V2 = V1 + a*Δt. That produces accelerations over time that look like:

Finally, I used the velocities to calculate how far the bodies moved. I actually broke it up into 0.001 second increments, and did this linearly, with the simple formula h2 = h1 + V*Δt. That's not exactly accurate when velocity isn't constant. There are more exact formulas you can use, but when you break it up into such short segments, you're going to be very, very close. And with Excel, it's very easy to do this brute force approach. And doing that gave the graph I already showed up above, but which I'll repeat again here for completeness:

Image Source: NASA by way of Business Insider

Posted by Jeff on A, Jun 9 | Permalink | Comments (32) | TrackBacks (0)

Friday, June 2, 2017

H.P. Lovecraft - Overrated

I've recently been reading a collection of several H.P. Lovecraft short stories*. I was excited when I first bought the book. There are all these pop culture references on the Internet to the Cthulhu mythos, the Old Ones, "the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors that apparently exist in the universe" (Wikipedia), and beings "so horrific that direct knowledge of them meant insanity for the victim" (Wikipedia again). Sounds like pretty deep stuff, like stories to make you really ponder the universe and humanity's place in it.

Well, I'm about halfway through the collection, and it's little more than B-movie quality plotlines. The monsters are basically just monsters, with a thin veneer of exposition about them being ancient aliens from distant corners of the universe. But that thin veneer doesn't really add much. Replace the alien aspects with more traditional magic, fairy tale, or fantasy elements, and the stories wouldn't really change. Once the monsters are finally unleashed towards the ends of the stories, they could just as easily be the Blob or a werewolf - generic, mindless killing machines.

But even worse is his writing style. There's a certain well known writing technique, Show, don't tell. Writers can go overboard with it or overuse it, but the point is to paint a picture with words, not just say what's going on. The classic example is, 'Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.' Well, it seems that H.P. Lovecraft never got the memo. Do you know how to tell if a scene is supposed to be scary in a Lovecraft story? The narrator will tell you it's scary, or he'll throw scary sounding adjectives into an otherwise normal description of a scene.

Consider this paragraph, from At the Mountains of Madness:

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully 20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than 500,000 years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause.

Pretty scare ruins, huh. You can tell because they're 'monstrous' and 'fiendish' and 'on a hellishly ancient' landscape, in a 'deadly' climate. And just a bit later, we learn that ,"It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality." But take away those adjectives, and you're left with merely an unusual set of ruins.

Or consider this paragraph, from The Dunwich Horror:

Morning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man's existence that he had uncovered.

This text that Armitage is translating is supposed to be terrifying, but we only know that because the narrator says Armitage is scared, and in a rather conventional way of having nightmares. You know what I have nightmares about, still? College finals. Not particularly horrifying.

Or consider this from The Call of Cthulhu;

Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.

Again, we know this is scary, because the narrator tells us how scared he is, followed by an adjective laden description of what he's scared of. But take away the spooky adjectives (unhallowed, nightmare, monstrous) and replace the over the top nouns (the Thing, horrors, blasphemies) with more neutral descriptions, and it's not really terrifying.

I would have quipped that the only way Lovecraft knew how to make a scary setting was with a thesaurus, but here's an article where someone counted how many times Lovecraft used certain words in his stories, Wordcount for Lovecraft's Favorite Words. As that person put it, "One of the things any fan of Lovecraft discovers early on is that Lovecraft was very attached to certain words. We either laugh or groan every time we hear something described as 'indescribable' or called 'unnamable' or 'antiquarian' or 'cyclopean.' "

Granted, I am being a little harsh. Lovecraft obviously wouldn't have had a following if he didn't describe scenes at all. But there are way too many sections where he doesn't show us how the story is scary. He just tells us it's scary, and uses distractingly bloated prose to try to convince us.

I will say that the stories aren't horrible. The big problem is that my expectations were too high. There's such a huge Lovecraft following on the Internet that I was expecting great, when the reality is only mediocre to decent. They're worth reading just to see what all the hubbub is about, but don't expect deep thought provoking stories that make you face "the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors that apparently exist in the universe".

Out of the stories in the collection I'm reading, the two best by far are "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow out of Time". Despite the problems discussed above, they're actually pretty good and enjoyable to read. Just don't expect masterpieces.

And this review didn't even get into Lovecraft's racism, which was bad even for his time.

*The collection I'm reading isn't actually the product I linked to up above. The collection I'm reading is a 'bargain' book from Books-A-Million, The Essential Stories of H.P. Lovecraft, that I bought on a whim at the bookstore. However, for 1 novella and 6 short stories, it's $8 (I think I got it half off), while the complete collection I linked to, with 1 novel, 4 novellas, and 53 short stories is only $11.23, so I figured if anybody was actually going to follow the link and buy something, the complete collection was a much better deal. And for a nice hardcover, that's not a bad price. However, given that his writings are all in the public domain, you can read electronic versions for much cheaper, or even free. Here's one such collection, HPLovecraft.com - His Writings.

Posted by Jeff on A, Jun 2 | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Friday Trump & Politics Roundup - 17

Amid all the controversy, scandal, and potential corruption surrounding Trump's administration, it's important not to forget his official actions and policies as president, and all the damage that's causing.

Climate Change

As I've written many times before, climate change is the biggest issue facing the nation and the world right now. It's important enough to make me a single issue voter, at least for offices that can have any effect on climate change. That's what makes Trump's recent decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement so infuriating. Granted, he was already doing a lot to damage U.S. efforts to combat climate change, but this was still a very big deal. Trump's actions on climate change are inexcusable.

Bad Astronomy - We'll never have Paris: Trump pulls the US out of international climate accord

And so, this is why I'm very unhappy with Trump pulling us out of the Paris Accord. It signals that we don't care about global warming, that we don't care about helping other countries with it, and together with Trump's other policies (like putting full-blown climate change denier Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA, for example), it's a huge flag showing that we're willing to cede energy leadership in the 21st century to other countries.
This is more than just foolish. It's contrary to everything the United States strives for as a nation. It shows that we stand against essentially the entire world when it comes to climate change. It also makes it clear that, once again, the U.S. as a nation will delay taking any real action to slow or stop global warming, action that we should've taken a decade or more ago.

This is a complete failure of leadership, across the board. It's also a threat to our national security.

Vox - The 5 biggest deceptions in Trump's Paris climate speech: It wasn't easy narrowing these down.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump gave a speech announcing that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.
It is a remarkable address, in its own way, in that virtually every passage contains something false or misleading. The sheer density of bullshit is almost admirable, from a performance art perspective. Trump even managed to get in some howlers that had nothing to do with climate change. He started by citing an act of terrorism in Manila that wasn't terrorism. He said, "our tax bill is moving along in Congress," but there's no tax bill. And so forth.

A proper fact-check would run longer than the speech itself. To keep this quick, I've selected the top five deceptions.

A note: I'm not calling these "lies," because that implies Trump knows they are false. It is far from clear that Trump understands anything about any of the issues at stake, or is even capable of forming stable beliefs as such (as I wrote here and here).

1) No, an agreement cannot be both nonbinding and draconian (Spoiler: Paris is the former)

2) No, Paris cannot be "renegotiated"

3) No, abiding by the agreement will not cost the US a bazillion dollars

4) No, China and India are not getting away with anything

5) No, other nations are not laughing at us behind our backs -- or they weren't, anyway

International Trip

The Nation - Our Embarrassment in Chief's Internation Trip Is No Laughing Matter

But let's not grade a guy holding the nuclear codes on a curve. Three days into the trip, and Trump's already shown the world that the United States is being governed by a brittle man-child. And if he manages to get through it without causing a major international incident, it will only be because foreign leaders have done a competent job dumbing down any complex diplomatic issues that may arise and feeding the insatiable ego of our embarrassment in chief.

...Peter Baker reported for The New York Times that "foreign officials and their Washington consultants say certain rules [for dealing with Trump] have emerged: Keep it short--no 30-minute monologue for a 30-second attention span. Do not assume he knows the history of the country or its major points of contention. Compliment him on his Electoral College victory. Contrast him favorably with President Barack Obama. Do not get hung up on whatever was said during the campaign. Stay in regular touch." The rest of the world appears to have concluded that our president is an idiot.

Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump's national-security adviser, is tasked with babysitting this erratic character through a difficult trip, according to CNN's Jake Tapper. But a source told Tapper that "it can be difficult to advise the President effectively given his seemingly short attention span and propensity to be easily distracted. You can't say what not to say," the source said, "because that will then be one of the first things he'll say." Trump seemed to confirm that on Monday, when he told Israeli reporters, "just so you understand, I never mentioned the word or the name Israel" to the Russians when he shared highly sensitive intelligence with them in the Oval Office two days after firing his FBI director.

Vox - Trump's ally-angering trip abroad, explained in 7 images

President Donald Trump's first foreign trip is nearly over. Some events were near disasters; some went surprisingly well. But nearly all of them were deeply revealing about Trump, saying something important about his administration's policies and his own diplomatic style.

Now, Trump does actually have a point here. Technically, all NATO states are supposed to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on their defense budget -- but only five of NATO's 28 members hit the target. This is an issue that past US presidents, including Barack Obama, have raised at NATO summits before.
But Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of NATO in the past two years, once threatening to not defend allies that didn't pay enough money -- something past US presidents never did, as it calls into question the foundation of the alliance itself.

Most worryingly, Trump pointedly did not mention Article 5 -- the provision of the NATO treaty that declares an attack on one to be an attack on all -- in his speech. This strongly suggested to the allies that he cared more about allies ponying up than actually defending them.

The US government never officially confirmed the country whose asset Trump compromised. But then, when fielding press questions with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Trump somewhat backhandedly acknowledged it.

Slate - Making Enemies Out of Friends: Trump's special antagonism toward Germany is stupid and dangerous.

The fallout from President Trump's disastrous trip to Europe continues to poison the trans-Atlantic climate. His comments about Germany have been particularly toxic--and, beyond that, stupid, reflecting no understanding of the country's strategic importance or its dreadful history.
Chancellor Angela Merkel stated the matter plainly in a speech on Sunday in Bavaria. Europeans "must take our fate into our own hands," she said, because the "times in which we could rely fully on others ... are somewhat over." This, she added, "is what I experienced in the last few days"--a reference to Trump's behavior in Brussels and Rome, where, among other bits of rudeness, he declined to pay even lip service to the pledge, enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, that the United States would defend any member of NATO that comes under attack.

While overseas, Trump had reportedly told Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Union, "The Germans are bad, very bad. Look at the millions of cars that they're selling in the USA. Horrible. We're gonna stop that." Press Secretary Sean Spicer denied the report, which appeared in Der Spiegel, but Trump's Tuesday tweet undercut the denial and underscored his complaint. It wasn't some loose remark, he seemed to be saying; he meant it.

The Budget

Nature - Trump budget would slash science programmes across government: Proposed cuts include 11% at the National Science Foundation, 18% at the National Institutes of Health and 30% at the Environmental Protection Agency.

US President Donald Trump released a revised budget plan on 23 May that would cut science programmes across the federal government in 2018. Biomedical, public-health and environmental research would all be pared back. / Those cuts, along with deep reductions in programmes for the poor, are balanced by a proposed 10% increase in military spending.

"This budget is terrible, and we're confident that Congress will ignore it," says Jennifer Zeitzer, director of legislative relations at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would face a cut of 18% in the Trump plan, from US$31.8 billion in 2017 to $26 billion in 2018... The White House wants to slash more than $1.2 billion from the CDC's budget, with the largest cuts coming from public-health preparedness programmes... The Trump plan would cut government funding for the US Food and Drug Administration by 31% from the 2017 level, to $1.9 billion... The budget for the National Science Foundation (NSF) would be cut by about 11% from the 2016 level, to $6.7 billion. That would allow the agency to give out 8,000 new grants in fiscal year 2018, about 800 fewer than it awarded in 2016... The agency's Ocean Observatories Initiative, a collection of instrumented seafloor arrays, would be cut by almost 44%, to $31 million. The programme began full operations in June 2016, when real-time data began flowing in after nearly a decade of construction and development... Trump requested $19.1 billion for NASA, a 2.8% decrease from the 2017 level. The agency's science directorate would receive $5.7 billion, a drop of nearly 1%... Within that directorate, funding for Earth science would drop by 8.7%, from $1.92 billion to $1.75 billion. The budget would eliminate five Earth-observing missions... The US Department of Energy would receive $28 billion under the president's plan, a 5.3% reduction from 2016... The Office of Science would see its budget cut by 16%, from $5.3 billion in 2017 to just under $4.5 billion in 2018... The White House proposal would make good on promises to shrink and reorganize the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which would see its budget cut by more than 30% to $5.7 billion. Trump would slash spending on pollution-control programmes and research and development, eliminating about 23% of the agency's roughly 15,000 staff members along the way... The US Geological Survey would be cut by 13% from the 2017 level, to $922 million. That would include eliminating the entire $8.2-million federal contribution to the fledgling earthquake early-warning system on the US west coast... The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would receive nearly $4.8 billion, a decrease of about 17%, or $987 million, compared to 2017. The majority of the cuts would come from the agency's research activities and satellites.

Vox - The trillions in shocking cuts in Donald Trump's budget, explained

The budget broadly resembles plans put forward by now-House Speaker Paul Ryan, who as the House Budget Committee chair released a series of extremely aggressive budgets including trillions in cuts to programs for the poor. While Trump largely leaves Medicare and old-age insurance from Social Security unscathed, and boosts funding for border security, veterans, and defense, he cuts just about everything else.
What's more, his budget assumes an extremely unrealistic economic growth rate -- 3 percent, above the currently projected 1.9 percent -- due to the administration's tax plan. It appears the administration is counting on that growth both to pay for its spending in this budget and to pay for its tax cuts, meaning the budget doesn't really add up at all.

It's a startling, ambitious, and at times sloppy document that, for all its faults, clearly defines what the Trump administration wants to do with the federal government. And what the administration wants to do is dramatic, to say the least.

The cuts include:

All $880 billion in Medicaid cuts included in the Republican health plan that has passed the House, plus $610 billion in additional cuts due to adopting an even stingier formula for increasing Medicaid funding year over year. This amounts to a total cut to Medicaid of over 47 percent.
$191 billion in cuts from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, over 10 years. That's about a 25 percent cut. The administration claims it will achieve this by adding new work requirements, but it would effectively require kicking many people off the program or dramatically cutting benefit amounts.
$40.4 billion in cuts to the earned income tax credit and child tax credit over 10 years, programs that, along with SNAP, make up much of the US's safety net for poor people. Trump would require parents receiving benefits to submit a Social Security number to weed out unauthorized immigrants -- even those whose children are US citizens.
$21.6 billion in cuts to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or welfare, over 10 years. That's a nearly 13 percent cut to the program, which has already been cut dramatically since the 1990s.
Huge cuts to most federal agencies: a 31.4 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency budget, 29.1 percent cut to the State Department, 20.5 percent to Agriculture, 19.8 percent to Labor, 16.2 percent to Health and Human Services, 15.8 percent to Commerce, 13.2 percent to Housing and Urban Development, 12.7 percent to Transportation, and 10.9 percent to Interior.

Vox - 45 million Americans rely on food stamps. Trump wants to gut the program.: The administration's budget proposal would cut SNAP spending by a quarter.

If Trump had his way, though, the number of SNAP recipients would soon be drastically cut. The administration's first comprehensive budget proposal would trim SNAP spending by $191 billion over the next decade -- which is about a quarter of the program's funding.

In fact, researchers who study poverty and food policy say throwing people off SNAP is a silly idea because it's one of the government programs that really works. As the Trump Administration's own Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said earlier this week of SNAP, "You don't try to fix things that aren't broken."

SNAP is an effective recession buffer:
Again and again, researchers have found upticks in SNAP enrollment coinciding with recessions, which is why food stamps are referred to "automatic stabilizers." When the economy gets worse, more people enroll, helping them afford food; when the economy improves, they drop off the SNAP rolls.

One oft-repeated Republican party line is that benefits like SNAP discourage people from working. But according to the researchers who study SNAP, there's no good evidence that it acts as a work disincentive. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, the majority of non-disabled, working-age households that start to get SNAP don't actually stop working.

There's also little waste and fraud in the program. Some 95 percent of federal dollars spent on SNAP go directly to benefits. The USDA also takes SNAP abuse very seriously, which is why the rate of SNAP fraud has declined dramatically over the years.

National Air Transportation Association - Statement on Trump Administration FY2018 Budget Proposal

Today, the Trump Administration released its full budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2018, including recommendations for funding the Federal Aviation Administration. The proposal reduces FAA funding by almost $300 million below current levels for the fiscal year beginning October 1st.

Investment in our nation's aeronautical infrastructure is just as important to our long-term economic prosperity as tax cuts and increased defense spending. We cannot make the justification for ATC privatization a self-fulfilling prophecy by making cuts to important programs that need immediate funding. The proposed FAA budget would reduce spending on the modernization of our air traffic control system and continue what has been a six-year downward spiral in airport funding.
NATA continues to have significant concerns over proposals to corporatize air traffic control with its potentially detrimental impact on general aviation and rural investment. Targeted budget changes, including clear and unambiguous exemptions from the impacts of sequestration and government shutdowns, would be more effective than potentially destabilizing the world's safest, most complex air traffic control system. We urge Congress to continue to appropriately fund a modernization program that is delivering real benefits and to increase the investment in our airport infrastructure.

Health Care

NPR - CBO: Republicans' AHCA Would Leave 23 Million More Uninsured

The revised Republican bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act will leave 23 million more people uninsured in 2026 than if that act, also known as Obamacare, were to remain in place.

The CBO's assessment shows that premiums could fall for some Americans, but it raises potential concerns about the bill. The agency reports that the bill could destabilize individual insurance markets in some states, leaving unhealthy Americans unable to buy insurance.

The act could make obtaining healthcare coverage prohibitively expensive for some sicker Americans, the CBO found.
That's because under the AHCA, states could get waivers exempting them from some Obamacare provisions, including what are called "essential health benefits" -- a list of basics like mental health and prescription drugs that the Affordable Care Act required plans to cover. States could also get waivers that allow insurers to charge more for people with preexisting conditions.

"Over time, it would become more difficult for less healthy people (including people with preexisting medical conditions) in those states to purchase insurance because their premiums would continue to increase rapidly," the CBO wrote.
Waiving essential health benefits could also make medical care much more expensive for people who are pregnant, addicted, or have mental health issues, and who live in those states that waive those benefits.

"In particular, out-of-pocket spending on maternity care and mental health and substance abuse services could increase by thousands of dollars in a given year for the nongroup enrollees who would use those services," the report says of people living in those states.

By far the biggest savings would come from Medicaid, which serves low-income Americans. That program would face $884 billion in cuts. Cutbacks in subsidies for individual health insurance would likewise help cut $276 billion. But those are offset in large part by bigger costs, including the repeal of many of Obamacare's taxes.

NPR - Trump's Restrictions For Abortion Funding Overseas Could Hinder HIV Prevention

The newly-released details of the Trump administration's version of the "Mexico City policy" are raising many questions about its impact not only on abortion but also on preventing HIV and infectious diseases like malaria.

"This is going to result in an increase in the number of unintended pregnancies, in the number of unsafe abortions, in the number of mothers dying, whether from pregnancy-related causes or HIV causes, and also in the number of infant and child deaths," says Geeta Rao Gupta, executive director for the United Nations Foundation's 3D Program for Girls & Women, which addresses the needs and rights of women.

Some research has shown that when the Mexico City policy is in force, abortion rates can rise. One study by Stanford University researchers, published by the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2011, found that abortions in sub-Saharan African countries held steady at about 10 per 100,000 women every year from 1994 to 2000 during the Clinton administration, which did not enforce the policy. President George W. Bush reinstated the Mexico City policy in 2001, and from 2001 to 2008, there were 14.5 abortions per 100,000 women every year.
The study authors note that it's not possible to be completely certain about the reason for the rise. But they theorize that when women lose access to modern contraceptives like birth control pills because the clinics that provided them had shut down because of a loss of funds, some of the women may turn to unsafe abortions. In 2008, 47,000 women died from complications after unsafe abortions, according the World Health Organization.

Authoritarianism

Vox - Historian Timothy Snyder: Trump's lies are creeping tyranny: A historian on the danger of Donald Trump.

The way it works is that you first just lie a lot. You fill up the public space with things that aren't true, as Trump has obviously done. Next you say, "It's not me who lies; it's the crooked journalists. They're the ones who spread the fake news." Then the third step, if this works, is that everybody shrugs their shoulders and says, "Well, we don't really know who to trust; therefor, we'll trust whoever we feel like trusting." In that situation, you can't control political action and authoritarianism wins.

Frankly, we're in uncharted waters here. A lot of people believed in Trump because of his charisma and the simplicity of his promises and because, in many cases, they were facing real problems. What they believed in, unfortunately, has zero substance. It's very hard for people to recognize that. It's much easier for people to be fooled than it is for people to be unfooled.
Getting people out of a con takes a really long time, and I'm just not sure how that's going to work.

I think part of the problem with the Democrats is that they tend to look at the overall average and assume things are going well. But if you get down to the right fractal level, then in many parts of the country they're not. I think those people were intellectually vulnerable.

If people are poorly educated, if the state keeps pulling back from its role in educating people, there are less and less people to filter and make decisions for themselves.