Spambots of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

I decided to feature two today. Compare and contrast—

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It goes on. Believe me, it goes on. But I think that’s enough to give you the basic flavor.

The ennui of political weariness

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed that a lot of people on the right have had it with politics, at least for now. After many years of struggling to explain the details of the Iraq War and why it was waged rather than why people think it was waged, after nearly two terms of assimilating each fresh outrage from the Obama administration and frustration with Congress for not fighting back hard enough, people were ready for an invigorating change.

The primaries dawned, with so many credible and viable GOP candidates it seemed an embarrassment of riches. Some (approximately a third) on the right were enthusiastic about Donald Trump, and remain so. Everyone else—plus most Democrats and just about all the people I know—are demoralized and confused, worn out by day after day of news they don’t like about people they don’t admire who are now our designated leaders.

It’s come to a pretty pass. As some pundit somewhere said, we had a long arduous process to separate the wheat from the chaff, and we did so. Unfortunately we threw out the wheat and kept the chaff.

Even political junkies in the blogosphere are tired. I sense it. For the last month or so on this blog, traffic has been up and down but in general down a bit from the fairly stable levels it had been pulling for years. Traffic often goes down somewhat when the nice weather comes, but it seems somewhat more extreme this year. I think this may be true for a lot of blogs, although I have no way of knowing. But it makes sense to me that enthusiasm is down, hope is down, and some people would like to ignore the whole thing.

Now that Trump and Clinton seem to be the obvious nominees, we’re in a holding period, a waiting period. People can speculate all they want (and we do, we do!) about who will win in the epic match between Hillary and Trump, and what each might do if elected, but there are so many unknowns right now it’s really a bunch of blah-blah-blah at this point. The primaries were unusually fascinating, and although it was a fascination tinged with mounting anxiety and even horror, it was hard to turn away. Now a lot people are turning away.

I’m trying to write less about Trump/Hillary for now. That does not mean I won’t write about them, but it just means that I’m trying to take the long view and branch out a bit more than I have in recent months—although there’s always this possibility:

[ADDENDUM: Perhaps in my own self-interest I need to add that I hope your understandable weariness doesn’t extend to the myriad delights involved in reading this blog.]

Freddie Gray arresting officer Nero found not guilty

The New Neo Posted on by

The charges were second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and two counts of misconduct in office:

WJZ’s Ron Matz says the trial was attended by a group of Baltimore City police officers, most in plain clothes. After the verdict was read, they came up to Nero one by one, embracing him and patting him on the back. Nero was seen with tears in his eyes.

On the other hand, there was predictable fury from those who have been on the protest lines:

According to WJZ’s Mike Schuh, who was outside the courthouse, there was a huge “roar of disapproval” that came from the protesters outside.

One of the people leading the charge is Rev. Wesley West.

“I’m angry because this is what we deal with, and when I say ”˜we,’ we’re talking about the black community and I’m a part of and represent that community as well, it seems like we have no voice when it comes to these issues,” he said. “When it comes to conversations like this, we’re not involved. This should have been a jury trial where the community had a voice in this case.

I assume that the Rev. West is against a defendant having a choice between a judge and a jury trial? I bet not—not in all cases, just in the ones he’d like to see tried by jury. And I also bet that, if Nero had chosen a jury and the jury had acquitted him, Rev. West would have been denouncing the jury system or the jurors, who (whatever their race or other demographic characteristics) would have been found by West to have not represented “the community.”

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the right thing, however (which is somewhat of a surprise, given her history; see this and this, for example):

Today Judge Barry G. Williams found Officer Edward Nero not guilty of all criminal charges. This is our American system of justice and police officers must be afforded the same justice system as every other citizen in this city, state, and country. Now that the criminal case has come to an end, Officer Nero will face an administrative review by the Police Department. We once again ask the citizens to be patient and to allow the entire process to come to a conclusion. In the case of any disturbance in the city, we are prepared to respond. We will protect our neighborhoods, our businesses and the people of our city.

I’ve not seen any articles reporting on the verdict that mention this, but I note that the presiding judge in the case is a black man. To me this seems like a great advantage, at least potentially, in placating the rage. Of course, if he doesn’t find some of the other defendants guilty in later trials, to some people it will make no difference what race Williams belongs to and they will be fighting mad. In addition, other defendants may end up preferring a jury for one reason or another. Each person’s case is different and some are stronger than others (although IMHO they are all weak), with Officer Nero’s case being one of the very weakest of all.

[NOTE: Legal Insurrection has had excellent and thorough coverage of the case from attorney Andrew Branca. You can read today’s analysis from Branca here.]

Pavlov’s dogs were happy campers

The New Neo Posted on by

Practically everybody knows about Pavlov’s dogs.

But do many people know about their master, Pavlov himself?

The other day I started to wonder—apropos of just about nothing—why dogs? And was Pavlov mean to his dogs, or were they treated well? That curiosity led to learning something about a fascinating, laudable man—Ivan Pavlov—about whom I’d previously known next to nothing.

Take a look:

After completing his doctorate, Pavlov went to Germany where he studied in Leipzig with Carl Ludwig in the Heidenhain laboratories in Breslau. He remained there from 1884 to 1886. Heidenhain was studying digestion in dogs, using an exteriorized section of the stomach.

So it started with studying digestion, with dogs as the subject.

In 1891, Pavlov was invited to the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg to organize and direct the Department of Physiology. Over a 45-year period, under his direction it became one of the most important centers of physiological research…

In 1904, Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize “in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the subject has been transformed and enlarged”.

While at the Institute of Experimental Medicine he carried out his classical experiments on the digestive glands which is how he eventually won the Nobel prize mentioned above. Pavlov investigated the gastric function of dogs, and later, children, by externalizing a salivary gland so he could collect, measure, and analyze the saliva and what response it had to food under different conditions.

And then he noticed something surprising, and decided to look into it:

He noticed that the dogs tended to salivate before food was actually delivered to their mouths, and set out to investigate this “psychic secretion”, as he called it.

This is how he treated his dogs:

Pavlov’s laboratory housed a full-scale kennel for the experimental animals. Pavlov was interested in observing their long-term physiological processes. This required keeping them alive and healthy in order to conduct chronic experiments, as he called them. These were experiments over time, designed to understand the normal functions of animals. This was a new kind of study, because previously experiments had been “acute,” meaning that the dog went through vivisection and was ultimately killed in the process.

But perhaps best of all is how he later dealt with the Soviets:

Pavlov was highly regarded by the Soviet government, and he was able to continue his research until he reached a considerable age. He was praised by Lenin. However, despite the praise from the Soviet Union government, the money that poured out to support his laboratory, and the honours he was given, Pavlov made no attempts to conceal the disapproval and contempt in which he held Soviet Communism. For example, in 1923 he claimed that he would not sacrifice even the hind leg of a frog to the type of social experiment that the regime was conducting in Russia. Also, in 1927, he wrote to Stalin protesting at what was being done to Russian intellectuals and saying he was ashamed to be a Russian. After the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Pavlov wrote several letters to Molotov criticizing the mass persecutions which followed and asking for the reconsideration of cases pertaining to several people he knew personally.

He could get away with it because of the esteem in which he was held. But it was still brave of him.

His lab is now a museum.

[NOTE: In case you’re not familiar with Pavlov’s major work with dogs and salivation, here’s an explanation:

The concept for which Pavlov is famous is the “conditioned reflex” (or in his own words the conditional reflex) he developed jointly with his assistant Ivan Filippovitch Tolochinov in 1901. He had come to learn this concept of conditioned reflex when examining the rates of salivations among dogs. Pavlov had learned that when a buzzer or metronome was sounded in subsequent time with food being presented to the dog in consecutive sequences, the dog would initially salivate when the food was presented. The dog would later come to associate the sound with the presentation of the food and salivate upon the presentation of that stimulus…

It is popularly believed that Pavlov always signaled the occurrence of food by ringing a bell. However, his writings record the use of a wide variety of stimuli, including electric shocks, whistles, metronomes, tuning forks, and a range of visual stimuli, in addition to the ring of a bell.]

The tyranny of virtue: Robespierre and the Reign of Terror

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve long known the basics of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. You probably do, too. But except for the history buffs among you, some of the details may have escaped you, as they had escaped me.

Right now I’m reading a book by Christopher Hibbert called The Days of the French Revolution, and I’ve had to put it down periodically to rest from the horror I’m reading, as well as to think about it—even though, as I said, I already knew the broad outlines of what happened.

Here are a couple of the things I’d never thought about before: most of the protagonists were trained as lawyers. And most were young—some really really young (for example, Robespierre’s ironically-named right-hand man Saint-Just, one of the coldest and cruelest of them all, was 25-26 years old during the height of the Reign of Terror, and Robespierre himself was a relative elder statesmen when he became an influential revolutionary at barely 30).

Here is a quote from Robespierre which I found at this website. Robespierre justified what he did in the Terror this way:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.

In other words, the ends justify the means.

At that same website, Marisa Linton describes the process:

[Robespierre] had an unshakable belief that his own aims coincided with what was best for the Revolution. He was a man of painful sincerity. He was not a hypocrite. He really did believe that the Terror could sustain the republic of virtue. But he was naturally self-righteous, suspicious and unforgiving. All these qualities came to the fore as it became evident that while the Terror played a key part in winning the war and quelling the counter-revolution, it was having the reverse effect as far as installing the republic of virtue was concerned, undermining any genuine enthusiasm for the Revolution.

Very early in the uprising that became known as the French Revolution, massacres had been perpetrated by the mob itself. During the Reign of Terror, revolutionary leaders Robespierre and many of the other Jacobins rationalized their use of government as an instrument of terror to prevent more terror by the mob:

The most notorious instance of the crowd’s rough justice was the prison massacres of September 1792, when around 2,000 people, including priests and nuns, were dragged from their prison cells, and subjected to summary ”˜justice’. The Convention was determined to avoid a repeat of these brutal scenes, but that meant taking violence into their own hands as an instrument of government.

When the Convention debated the fate of Louis XVI, now a prisoner of the revolutionaries, Robespierre and his youthful colleague, Saint-Just (1767-94) – also once an opponent of the death penalty – led the way in claiming that ‘Louis must die in order for the Revolution to live’. Robespierre…was coming to the conclusion that the ends justified the means, and that in order to defend the Revolution against those who would destroy it, the shedding of blood was justified.

In June 1793, the sans-culottes, exasperated by the inadequacies of the government, invaded the Convention and overthrew the Giron­dins. In their place they endorsed the political ascendancy of the Jacobins. Thus Robespierre came to power on the back of popular street violence. Though the Girondins and the Jacobins were both on the extreme left, and shared many of the same radical republican convictions, the Jacobins were much more brutally efficient in setting up a war government…

…As fellow revolutionary Danton said, “let us be terrible in order to stop the people from being so”…

Many people in France were already indifferent, if not openly hostile, to the Revolution. For many the Revolution now meant requisitioning of supplies, military conscription and the constant threat to their traditional ways of life, churches, even time – for the revolutionaries had even invented a new calendar. Throughout the year of Jacobin rule, it was the sans-culottes who kept them in power. But the price of that support was the blood-letting.

Food for thought. Let me add that once Robespierre and confederates like Saint-Just had been guillotined by former colleagues who had (justifiably) become afraid that they themselves would be next on the block, the Terror abated—although massacres and killings and suffering continued on a somewhat smaller scale. Society and civil order had been broken, and the task of putting them back together (never in the same way, of course) was long and arduous.

Why am I interested? I’ve had a lifelong fascination for the ways in which “good intentions” can lead to—well, you know where they can lead—and just how it has happened time and again in human history. The French Revolution was just one example, a populist movement of the left based on a philosophy that ignores human nature, run by people who seem to have had no idea what they had unleashed or how to control it.

Dealing with the consequences: the road not taken

The New Neo Posted on by

People on the right who refuse to vote for Donald Trump are commonly met with the response that they must then bear some responsibility for electing Hillary Clinton, and that as they watch her presidency unfold they will have to realize that every bad thing she does is at least partly on their shoulders.

That was the sort of argument that was often used to suggest that people should vote for McCain rather than Obama in 2008, or Romney rather than Obama in 2012, even if the people in question weren’t fans of McCain and Romney. The idea was that it was obvious that, whatever their objections might be to the GOP candidates, the Democrat was obviously so very much worse.

If Trump and Clinton are the nominees and Hillary is elected, I agree that those conservatives who refused to vote for Trump will bear a great burden as they watch whatever Hillary Clinton might do as president. And although countless people on the right may believe it is utterly obvious that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be worse than a Trump presidency, most of those conservatives who plan to refrain from voting for Trump find that to be an unsupported assumption. They believe that each of the two candidates would be horrendous presidents, but merely in different ways, and that it would be a case of “firing squad versus hanging” to try to decide between the two. Some even think that Trump would be worse.

We don’t need to evaluate their reasoning right now, and say whether we agree with it, to know that that that is their considered and firm opinion, and that it’s a significant part of the reason they are refraining from voting for either one.

What’s more, we can probably never know if they were right or wrong to do so, because if Hillary is elected it will remain a mystery whether Trump would have been better, as bad, or even worse—even more of a mystery than is usual with candidates because of Trump’s unpredictability and lack of political track record. The answer to the question of who would be worse is not only not obvious, but what’s more it probably never will be obvious because we cannot compare an alternative that occurs with one that never occurs. We can only speculate.

This is not just true of Hillary vs. Trump, to a certain extent it is true of everything in life. Of course, if the outcome is good, we’re much less likely to question a decision we’ve made than if the outcome is bad.

In closing I offer something I wrote years ago on the subject of comparing alternative paths in life and in politics:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (made into a movie that I, for one, considered unbearable, especially compared to the book that inspired it) was written in 1984, when Kundera’s native Czechslovakia was still under Soviet domination. Kundera could not see past the curve in the road to a future that was not even so very distant; he did not imagine that a Communist collapse was imminent (of course, in that lack of foresight, he had plenty of company).

Concerning decision-making in Czech history, Kundera wrote:

There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end, as surely as Tomas’s life, never to be repeated.

In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not.

Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czech’s country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In countrast to 1618, they opted for caution. Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation’s freedom for many decades or even centuries. What should they have done?

If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to check the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses…

The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of all of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe are a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience.

We remain trapped in “mankind’s fateful inexperience,” I’m afraid. Human life and history contain too much complexity, too many unpredictabilities and uncertainties, for us to ever really know whether the best decision was made. We can only try to apply the lessons of the past, knowing full well that we can never learn them quite well enough.

It’s still true.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Enthusiastic bot with exclamation point for emphasis:

Whoa! This web site actually presses with me and that I may say nothing significantly less than I enjoy it!

And nothing significantly more.

Trump and Obama: a deeper resemblance

The New Neo Posted on by

On the surface—in personality and speech characteristics—Donald Trump is nothing like Barack Obama. In fact, you might say he’s the un-Obama.

Obama’s most salient characteristics (at least, as his supporters and the press see him) include being smooth, intellectual, and articulate. He likes to lecture at us from a position of supposed superiority. One would never describe Trump that way. But underneath Obama’s surface smoothness lies the strongman who is actively trying to circumvent and/or destroy parts of the Constitution if it stands in the way of what he wants to do, despite Obama’s rep as the supposed constitutional law prof and scholar. Obama sees the Constitution as a negative restraining influence to be circumvented when he wants to accomplish something, and he counts on ignorance and/or lack of caring on the part of the public about that.

Now comes GOP-nominee-to-be Donald Trump. Trump may or may not actually be ignorant of the Constitution, but in any event he doesn’t seem to care much about most of it and his supporters don’t seem to care. To be more exact about that, many of his supporters used to care but don’t any more because—having experienced nearly eight years of Obama—they want their own strongman to ride roughshod over the Constitution in order to correct what Obama has done. Whether he would actually try to correct it or be able to correct it (not to mention the dangers inherent in the process of his doing it that way) is an open question, but there’s also no question that Hillary Clinton would not even try to correct what Obama has done.

Ted Cruz presented an alternative approach that GOP primary voters rejected. Cruz’s alternative was to undo what Obama did while respecting the Constitution and its restrictions. But that ship has sailed, at least for now. Those who much preferred (understatement of the decade) Ted Cruz and yet will end up voting for Trump in November of 2016 (and I might end up being one of their number) think that if Hillary Clinton is allowed to become president a corrective will never occur, and that with Trump there is at least a small chance of its occurring.

That’s the terrible dilemma we face.

The Juanita Broaddrick rape accusation

The New Neo Posted on by

The topic of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape accusation against Bill Clinton has come up again this campaign season, a result of Donald Trump bringing it up in an interview with Sean Hannity.

Although anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I have no hesitation to criticize Trump vigorously, this is not an instance where I’m going to do it. Trump’s point is a valid one, and not only because Broaddrick’s accusations are serious enough to be at least potentially credible (particularly since there are people who swear she told them the story close to the time it allegedly occurred, back in 1978). It also is particularly relevant for Trump, who was recently the target of an article in the NY Times alleging various rather mild offenses on his part towards women, which even if true were deemed unoffensive by a lot of readers.

That does not mean, however, that Broaddrick’s allegations are true. We don’t know if they are or aren’t, and a good case could be made for either position. The full story is a complicated one, but you can read the pros and cons of it here if you’re interested. That Slate piece was published in 1999, when Broaddrick’s accusations surfaced, and it points out various inconsistencies in her story (including her saying under oath that Bill Clinton did not assault her, and then one year later saying he did). Also, several of the witnesses who said she told them the story long ago had beefs with Bill Clinton and might have a motive to lie. Lastly, although there is no question that Bill Clinton has been a major philanderer who came on to women at the drop of a—whatever, no one else but Broaddrick has ever alleged that he raped her.

That does not mean that Broaddrick is lying, however. She might indeed be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The problem is that there are good arguments for either side. What does my gut tell me on this one? My gut says it just doesn’t know.

[NOTE: More details here.]

EgyptAir Flight 804: the four scenarios

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d say that this just about covers it:

There are broadly four areas investigators will consider as they probe the disappearance of EgyptAir Flight 804 over the Mediterranean shortly before it began its descent to Cairo: Did it crash or explode due to pilot error, a technical malfunction, a smuggled bomb or an inside act of sabotage?

The “smuggled bomb” could involve a passenger carrying a bomb on purpose, or a passenger doing it unknowingly because someone else put a bomb in that passenger’s luggage or among his/her possessions, or ground crew being responsible for the placement of the bomb (that latter scenario would make it both a smuggled bomb and an “inside act of sabotage”). Other “inside acts of sabotage” could include something on the order of last March’s Germanwings crash in which co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and then intentionally flew the plane into a mountain, or 1999’s EgyptAir Flight 990 which is thought to have been the result of deliberate actions of the relief first officer who caused the plane to crash near Nantucket.

One must be careful with all these theories, particularly ones that might slander good people (the crew) who are recently deceased and whose families are in deep grief. But unfortunately—very unfortunately—they all have to be considered, including what used to be the unthinkably shocking idea of pilot intention. Previous incidents have made it all too clear that such a thing is possible.

It does seem, however, that since wreckage has been sighted and the Mediterranean is not incredibly deep, the plane’s black boxes will be recovered and much more information should be available before too long.

RIP.

Giraffes are more amazing than you knew

The New Neo Posted on by

They’re certainly more amazing than I knew, anyway, and I already knew they were pretty amazing merely by looking at them. It’s the neck, of course—that impossibly long, impossibly stretched-out, Dr. Suess-like neck.

I recently saw surprising footage of giraffes fighting and using their necks as clubs. It wasn’t this exact footage, but it was very similar:

Ouch.

So I had giraffes on the brain when I came across this article describing the latest theories on the genetics of the giraffe’s long neck and cardiovascular idiosyncracies.

I’d never thought about it before, but it makes perfect sense that giraffes would have to have some special way of getting blood all the way up up up to their lofty brains. Sure enough, they do:

The giraffe’s heart, for example, must pump blood two meters straight up in order to provide an ample blood supply to its brain. This feat is possible because the giraffe’s heart has evolved to have an unusually large left ventricle, and the species also has blood pressure that is twice as high as other mammals.

To identify genetic changes likely to be responsible for the giraffe’s unique characteristics, including sprints that can reach 37 miles per hour (60 km/h), Cavener and Agaba compared the gene-coding sequences of the giraffe and the okapi [its nearest relative] to more than forty other mammals…

Using a battery of comparative tests to study the genome sequences of the giraffe and the okapi, the scientists discovered 70 genes that showed multiple signs of adaptations. “These adaptations include unique amino-acid-sequence substitutions that are predicted to alter protein function, protein-sequence divergence, and positive natural selection,” Cavener said. Over half of the 70 genes code for proteins that are known to regulate development and physiology of the skeletal, cardiovascular, and nervous system ”“ just the type of genes predicted to be necessary for driving the development of the giraffe’s unique characteristics.

Among the research team’s discoveries are that several genes known to either to regulate the development of the cardiovascular system or to control blood pressure are among the genes showing multiple signs of adaptation in the giraffe. Some of these genes control both cardiovascular development and skeletal development, suggesting the intriguing possibility that the giraffe’s stature and turbocharged cardiovascular system evolved in concert through changes in a small number of genes.

The article goes on to explain theories of how it might be that the vertebrae of the giraffe (they have the same number of vertebral bones as we have) and their leg bones may have elongated in concert with each other. Fascinating.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.