Blog Break

Not me... I mouse left-handed
and my hair is gray!

Before I had a smartphone, I always imagined it would be much more convenient to do research for blog posts when I'm away from home if I had a mobile device literally always with me. As it turns out, that aspect is true... but the phone does not provide me with any more time or energy actually to write those posts. I made a new folder  in my email called BlogThis and began sending myself links and notes each time I ran across an article or post worth my time (and presumably my readers' time as well). Indeed I blogged a few of those, but the rest of life goes on... significant weather events, my health and that of my friends, household matters, etc. ... and at the moment I have a backlog of 33 articles in the BlogThis folder.

In short, I'm getting the research done, but the blogging is going by the boards. Many of the pending BlogThis entries are obsolete by now, so I believe I'll take a break of a few days, let them all obsolesce, and start fresh, knowing how the presence of the new phone changes things. Please bear with me; I'm not ready to quit blogging yet. But there's this article I found that I just have to make notes on for a future blog post...

Debunking Myths About The Koch Brothers

These myths, documented at billmoyers.com by two well-respected Harvard scholars on government and policy, reveal five common fallacies or misunderstandings prevalent among left-leaning and Democratic writers, fallacies which could put our democracy in peril of literal takeover by wealthy but ideologically driven oligarchs. Conspiracy theory? maybe, but I suspect we ignore multibillionaire right-wing crazies at our peril. YMMV.

NOTE: the original draft of this post was written on a smartphone, composed using the Google keyboard with its auto-completion feature. When I saved the original draft, Google keyboard silently changed one word I typed manually, "multibillionaire", to "multimillionaire". The mistake is understandable, but it must have been a lower-level Google developer who saw fit to make the silent change: a Google CEO (or some such) would never have made that mistake.

In Vino Ver... Oh, The Hell With It — DOGGEREL!

I glanced over my little wine rack today after a minor buying run. No individual wine was more than $5 a bottle and most were cheaper than that... it is possible to buy a very satisfactory table wine for very little money these days, and I've done exactly that, because retired elderly Americans aren't left with a great deal of money, except those who are, ah, left with a great deal of money.

In any case, I noted that the rack contained sixteen bottles of wine. Sixteen wines... hmmm, how could I resist a bit of parody...

In Vino...

Some... people say a wine is made out of grape;
A poor wine gets ya' by the neck o' the nape:
The nape o' the neck, and skin an' bones...
A nose that's weak but a finish strong...

Ya' taste sixteen wines, 'n' whaddya' get?
A little bit drunker and possibly wet;
St. Vincent don' ya' call me 'cause I cain't go...
I SOLD MY SO-O-O-OUL... FOR A CASE OF MERLOT!

- Steve Bates

OK, it could be better, but I'm impatient to publish before the effect of the wine wears off...

Trump The Fascist

I do not enjoy publishing an unadulterated slur against a presidential candidate, even a Republican. But Trump is no ordinary Republican candidate, and I choose my words based on Trump's actions at campaign events, from documentation by Juan Cole and from ABC News footage I saw myself, shown on this evening's news.

Trump was interrupted by protesters apparently from Black Lives Matter (no unusual event; so was Bernie Sanders) and responded, "Get them out of here," or words to that effect. A reporter in the "media pen," attempting to take a picture of the BLM protesters, apparently stepped a foot or two outside the line. A Secret Service agent (which, BTW, The Guardian referred to as an "SS agent"!) first grabbed the reporter's throat, then, on meeting resistance, threw him to the floor. Trump's audience cheered; Trump himself beamed.

I ask you: is this presidential behavior? Is it even rational behavior?

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but Trump's actions bug the bejezus out of me. YMMV.

THIS POST IS INTENTIONALLY POSTDATEDEarly Voting Starts Tuesday 2/16 In Texas

Harris County residents please find information and useful links below; also a fragment of parody/doggerel for the occasion. We plan to vote this weekend; one of us has a paying gig that makes weekday voting difficult!

(This post will float to the top while early voting is ongoing, i.e., through 2/26. Election Day is 3/1; your Election Day polling place is most likely NOT THE SAME as any early voting location.)

NYT Editorial On How GOPers Are Behaving

The short version on GOP behavior as a whole: deplorable. The NYT says it better than I ever could:

...

Forget an up-or-down vote [on Obama's nomination to replace the late Antonin Scalia] on the Senate floor. Top Republicans are pledging not to hold hearings or even to meet with a nominee.

In a statement dripping with sarcasm, Mr. McConnell said that Mr. Obama “has every right to nominate someone,” and “even if doing so will inevitably plunge our nation into another bitter and avoidable struggle, that is his right. Even if he never expects that nominee to actually be confirmed but rather to wield as an electoral cudgel, that is his right.”

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip, said, “We believe the American people need to decide who is going to make this appointment rather than a lame-duck president.”

These statements are so twisted that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s take them one by one.

...

And so they do take them and wield them like sharp swords.

This is not my father's Republican Party... yes, Dad was a Democrat, but he could occasionally be persuaded to vote 'R'; he was very proud of the whole system and explained to me why it had so many virtues.

McConnell & Co. were not virtuous when they decided to defy the Constitution by refusing even to consider "advise and consent" on Obama's proposed Supreme Court nominee. If one of us went to one of our bosses and said what today's GOPers in Congress are saying to the President and the American people, s/he would be met with Donald Trump's signature line, "You're fired!"

And the small bit I saw of last night's "debate" ... we don't have cable, but we were having dinner in a restaurant that plays Conservative News Network (CNN) continuously... was a schanda für die goyim... and the GOPers themselves seem unaware of that shame. The Democratic Party ("Democrat Party" if you're the author of Marco Rubio's campaign commercials) sometimes does things that make me squirm in embarrassment, but the Rethuglicans often do things that make me want to toss eggs at them.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Ogden Nash, ‘With My Own Eyes,’ 1950, Or,America Isn't So Bad After All

View this long poem (but very much worth the reading!) here. Click the magnifying glass "+" several times if the font is too small for you (as it was for me). Or go find and purchase a first edition of Nash's The Private Dining Room, which is where I discovered the poem.

Thomas Piketty On Bernie Sanders: The End Of The Reagan Era

‘In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections,’ writes Piketty. This column is food for thought, and many of us are very hungry!

All Animals Democrats Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

Trevor Timm at The Guardian reminds me... reminds us all, or informs those of you who didn't already know... that the sadly misnamed Democratic Party chooses its presidential candidate using a system that is outrageously undemocratic (small-'d'):

Even if Sanders wins the popular vote, Clinton could still get the nomination

The Democratic party decides its nominee in a massively undemocratic way – and is a ticking time bomb for the party and its voter base if Bernie keeps winning

... 

The Democratic party’s nomination will ultimately be decided by more than 4,700 delegates at its nominating convention in the summer. Most of those delegates are allocated based on votes in each state’s primary or caucus. However, the party also assigns what are known as “superdelegates” –
700 or so people who aren’t elected by anyone during the primary process and are free to vote any way they want at the convention. They are made up of members of Congress and members of the Democratic National Committee – which is made up of much of the establishment that Sanders is implicitly running against. 

According to University of Georgia lecturer Josh Putnam, superdelegates exist solely to allow DNC elites to better control who ultimately becomes their nominee. “The reason superdelegates came into being in the interim period between the 1980 and 1984 elections was to allow the party establishment an increased voice in the nomination process,” he wrote on his blog in 2009.

...

Not that anyone ever asked me, but this is exactly why I ceased giving money to the Democratic Party through the DNC, DSCC, etc., and started giving money directly to candidates' campaigns. Although I've given and will continue to give money to Bernie Sanders for President, I am nonetheless long since not officially a member of the Democratic Party. I vote straight 'D' virtually every partisan election, but I just can't handle the notion of superdelegates.

Friday Monday Catnap Blogging

I really haven't gotten the hang of the camera in the new phone... my heavy-handed application of GIMP (the Photoshop equivalent in the Linux world) makes this pic barely acceptable. Esther catnaps in Stella's grandfather's rocker, which makes Esther the only sentient creature in the household who is not off his/her rocker:

Esther on her rocker

Scalia. Dead. Yesterday.

I knew about it then, but God asked me to announce it only on a Sunday. 

Dead and (one hopes) gone...

Actually, I found out while I was sitting in a car in the Academy Sports & Outdoors parking lot, waiting for Stella who was trying to buy tennis shoes. I struggled mightily to find a free, unpassworded WiFi available from the parking lot. I found one, with a signal strength so low that its download transfer rate was only 1mbps. About the only news list I subscribe to is The Guardian (what? you expect an American news service to publish straight info on American politics, etc.? gimme a break!), and I saw the announcement of Scalia's death pass quickly before my eyes, but the connection was so iffy I gave up and dismissed the browser. But even the dismissal didn't get through the bad connection; I received one article from the Guardian, sans photos, and read the basics.

I have never had any sympathy for that man. He was a smiling dogmatist, with no redeeming qualities I could ever find. (I guess that makes me one of those "liberals" The Guardian said found him "infuriating" ... fair enough.) Read the article at ThinkProgress for a list of possible consequences of Scalia's sudden absence on the Court; be forewarned, they range from actually beneficial to nearly "chaotic" (their word, not mine). Now that there is a 4-4 tie between conservatives and moderates (the last actual liberal retired and died over a decade five years ago), cases which provoke an ideological reaction from the Right will rebound to the lower court in which they originated; in many cases, that court has more "tighty Righties" than the Supremes... and the result will apply only to the circuit in which that court operates. In other words, no help for Texas, Louisiana or Oklahoma. Sucks, if you ask me.

Here are other articles I found once I had a solid connection from inside a bookstore:

• Moments After Scalia’s Death Is Confirmed, GOP Senate Staffer Pledges To Block Any Obama Replacement
  

  So did Sen. and presidential candidate Ted Cruz, I read somewhere. Grrrr... if he becomes president, he shall appoint NO Supremes; I would hope the Democrats in the Senate will see to that.

• Antonin Scalia's death calls supreme court gun rights stance into question
  

  That would be District of Columbia v Heller.

• Supreme court justice Antonin Scalia dies: legal and political worlds react
  

  The summary bulleted list contains useful links.

That will do for the moment. Ted Cruz and other Repugnant members of Congress are vowing to torpedo anyone... ANYONE... Obama nominates to replace him. Dog help the next Repub president, whenever they manage to steal that office again...

Gravitational Waves: They Found Them, For Real

Somewhere in (or out of) the Multiverse, the shade of Albert Einstein is smiling.

From The Guardian:

Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery after a century of expectation
Scientists announce discovery of clear gravitational wave signal, ripples in spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.

The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror.

...

The waves were discovered in the wake (literally, I suppose) of the collision two black holes a very long distance from us. The signal received from the LIGO matched the mathematical model of the event to a very high degree of probability; in other words, what they observed is for real.

So what difference does this discovery make? Remember: until ~378,000 years after the Big Bang (hence 378,000 light years from that event), space was opaque to electromagnetic radiation, e.g., light and radio waves. So no matter how good a conventional light or radio telescope scientists manage to create, they cannot see closer than that to the Big Bang. But gravitational waves are not similarly stopped. And a lot of awesome and interesting stuff happened in that era; scientists would surely learn a lot about how our universe formed (and presumably about how other universes form, if there's really a multiverse). That alone has me excited.

Here are some other worthwhile articles (not in chronological order; sorry):

Science News: Gravitational waves explained
The Guardian: Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery announced - as it happened
Sciencealert: IT'S OFFICIAL: Gravitational waves have been detected, Einstein was right

The Exercise Of Executive And Judicial Power, Both To The Public's Detriment

First, the Executive branch, in which the DNI threatens to use the "internet of things" to spy on Americans in their home or at work:

US intelligence chief: we might use the internet of things to spy on you

(Warning: your refrigerator is telling the spooks what you snack on at midnight!)

Not to be outdone, the Supreme Court throws a spanner in the works of Obama's executive orders reducing carbon emissions:

Carbon pollution controls put on hold

(Note: today's Big Event may change what the Supreme Court does about a lot of things. See more recent post above.)

It's not so much that we need [booming Republican voice] LESS GOVERNMENT as that we need more constraints on all branches of government. Say, I know what... we need a Constitution; that should provide the necessary... oh, right; we've got one of those, and it doesn't seem to constrain much of anybody in government...

Vote!

Early voting in the 2016 primary starts this Tuesday. Here's the Harris County, TX early voting schedule:

Early Voting Hours of Operation:
February 16 - February 19: 8:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
February 20: 7:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
February 21: 1:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. 
February 22 - February 26: 7:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.

Choose your early voting location at this page (.pdf). Any registered voter in Harris County can vote at any early voting location shown on that map. Be sure to bring an approved photo ID (e.g., your Texas driver license or a concealed-carry license). For good measure, if you have your voter certificate, bring that, too, but it is not sufficient; you must have an approved photo ID.

Later today I'll post additional info, but there is no official word on Election Day poll locations yet (goddamn Republicans anyway). Also, there will be a bit of doggerel on this post...

---

ADDENDUM: Doggerel as promised, a parody with apologies to the late great Nat King Cole... sing this to the tune of his song "Smile":

Vote, though your brain is aching;
Vote, though bad news is breaking.
When their attack is a weight on your back,
If you vote, yes, despite your terror,
Vote, you can face your mirror;
You'll find your life ain't worth a groat,
If you... don't... vote!

        - SB after NKC

‘... Secure In Their Persons, Houses, ...’

This is not really a Fourth Amendment issue because the search party is not from the guvmint. But it is indisputably an unreasonable search.

First of all, this is for real, not some scam, or a setup for a home invasion robbery; the call came from our landlord's secretary, whose voice and caller ID are known to me. That was the first thing Stella asked when I informed her.

Our landlord's insurer on this house has insisted on inspecting the interior of the house for safety violations. When I heard from the secretary, the landlord (generally a good guy) had already set up an appointment for us, this Wednesday at a named time. The insurer will send an inspector. To look for what? I don't know. Her name is Jody, but what are her credentials to do such an inspection? I don't know that, either.

The government would need a warrant to do this, but in our "guilty until proven innocent" era, a private corporation can demand anything it damned well pleases as a condition for doing business with them, and if all the insurance companies conspire together to do these inspections, it's a certainty that property owners will yield.

Welcome to America in the 21st century.

Friday Cat Blogging On Sunday

This pic of Lily is clipped from one of the first photos at home using the new phone:

The original is better, but huge... I had to reduce the file size a lot by reducing the pic size and cutting the jpeg quality a bit. Sometimes Stella wishes she could reduce Lily a bit, but dieting is not Lily's forte.

Walmart Deserves Its Losses — America's Small Towns Do Not

As long ago as the early 1990s, when my father was still alive and living a few miles outside Livingston, TX, Walmart was moving into small towns, engaging in predatory pricing and driving competing mom-and-pop stores out of business. Now, 20 years later, Walmart is closing 154 stores in America, many in those same small towns, in some cases forcing residents to drive to other towns to buy their bread and butter. Will the small grocer now re-emerge? Who knows. Folks gotta eat and clothe themselves...

Between predatory pricing and mistreatment of employees... e.g., at one point Walmart was taking out "dead janitor" insurance policies on rank-and-file employees; such policies do not benefit the employees at all... Walmart is just about my least favorite retail chain. I haven't shopped there in at least 20 years. Indeed, I could truthfully say, in the words of singer/songwriter Dave Lippman, "I Hate Walmart." (That link autoplays an audio recording; lyrics alone are here, including several newer verses not in the recording.)

Regarding Walmart's announcement of store closures (including another 115 stores not in the US), I can only say, they had it coming. If they failed to profit from their deplorable act of driving local stores out of business, the invisible hand should indeed raise its middle finger at them.

I do feel for the Walmart employees who lost their jobs. Walmart did offer them a job in another Walmart... if they were willing to relocate to another town. What part of "home" do the executives fail to understand?

My Smartphone Hears Voices - And Transcribes Them

It is said that idiots are easily amused. By that criterion I am one. I am easily amused by the degree to which speech recognition software has improved from my college days 47 years ago to the present. It still has a few problems even today, but I am managing to write this post using the Google speech to text software built-in to this phone.

And that pleases me more than you can imagine, or at least more than words can express. I am having fun with a technology for the first time in years!

ANNOTATION from the desktop's keyboard: my dictation was halting, as you might expect of someone who is not by training or nature a dictator. But there were only two errors I could not easily correct by speaking rather than typing: one was the sentence "I am one"; the s/w was absolutely determined to change the "one" to the digit "1" no matter what I did. One time it even visibly transcribed it as "one" and then visibly changed it to "1". (sigh!) The other had to do with inserting explicit newlines. The s/w recognizes some punctuation and a few formatting characters when their names are spoken, and "newline" is one of them, but something about my Texas accent must have thrown off the recognition algorithm: sometimes it inserted a Unicode/ASCII newline character; sometimes it rendered it "Near line" or something even more unrecognizable. Even so, there were no more transcription errors than I learned to expect from the cheeky and uncooperative keypunch operator in my first job right out of college. (sigh again!)

Lester Young, The Most Relaxed Sax Player Ever

The POTUS is never relaxed (it's not the nature of the job) but the Prez (Lester Young, tenor sax) certainly was, in 1951 at least. Enjoy a laid-back hour of Prez sitting in with the Nat King Cole Trio, featuring

• (tracks 1-10) Cole on piano (we forget that the guy did more than sing!), unknown on bass, Buddy Rich on drums; and
• (tracks 11-14) Cole on piano, Harry Edison on trumpet, Dexter Gordon on tenor sax, Red Callender or Johnny Miller (?) on bass, and again Buddy Rich on drums.
  

Mmmmm, it's like eating homemade ice cream!

We are fortunate that despite Young's short life (yes, he died Young, at age 49), he influenced many of the great players of the following generation.

Things That Make You Look Over Your Shoulder

Two articles well worth your time to read:

• It turns out Donald Trump's father was the racist landlord Woody Guthrie hated
  

  

  I admit I am a fan of Woody Guthrie (I wish I could truthfully say "This Keyboard Kills Fascists," as Guthrie often labeled his "machine" [guitar]), and not so much a fan of Donald Trump or landlords in general, but based on this article, Fred Trump was worse than the lot regarding racial discrimination. Like father, like son? I wouldn't go that far, but things one learns in youth about interaction with other people tend to last a lifetime, and a racist parent makes me nervous about the child.

• U.S. will use facial recognition at airports
  

  

  I no longer fly because I do not like undergoing invasive searches without a warrant, but these machines, however well they appear to work, make me very uncomfortable. What happens if you're a close match (as the device reckons) with a terrorist? Are your happy urban life, your career, your relationships personal and business, etc. immediately over? I wouldn't bet against it. It's the no-fly list writ large. ("No-live list"?)
  
  And then there's the fact that these machines work, um, badly. Here's the ACLU on the subject:
  

  A study by the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for example, found false-negative rates for face-recognition verification of 43 percent using photos of subjects taken just 18 months earlier, for example. And those photos were taken in perfect conditions, significant because facial recognition software is terrible at handling changes in lighting or camera angle or images with busy backgrounds. The NIST study also found that a change of 45 degrees in the camera angle rendered the software useless. The technology works best under tightly controlled conditions, when the subject is starting directly into the camera under bright lights - although another study by the Department of Defense found high error rates even in those ideal conditions. Grainy, dated video surveillance photographs of the type likely to be on file for suspected terrorists would be of very little use.

  Does that give you a lot of confidence?

(I'm afraid I didn't log the sources of these links. If you published one or both, and you are on my blogroll, please accept my thanks.)