debating Trump

I don’t make a point of reading the National Review, but sometimes I do so I know what they are saying. Most of this is ridiculous, like a suggestion that Trump will get the minority vote because minorities are on welfare and they are afraid illegal immigrants will get their welfare. That’s just lies, racism, and nonsense. But I did think the article made some points about how and why it is hard to debate someone like Trump.

it is suicidal to descend into the muck to battle Trump. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz all tried and failed, despite the fact that they had every moral justification in hitting back in like kind. Elizabeth Warren is trying to be an anti-Trump street-fighter; but her incoherent venom suggests that Harvard Law professors should stick to academic jousting in the faculty lounge. Brawlers know the rules of the street far better than establishmentarians. The Senate is not The Apprentice, and politics is not New York real estate. Ask the trash-talking Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg if she came out on top in dueling with Trump — or whether she virtually destroyed a quarter-century’s reputation in minutes and ended up no better than an elderly version of Rosie O’Donnell in a Supreme Court Justice costume. Hillary is stepping up her crude attacks on Trump. But as in the past, such hits are more likely to make the Trump mode suddenly seem normal, and to make Trump a target of those who claim they are more sober and judicious but in extremis prove no more measured than Trump himself.

Stoop to Trump’s level and you are trying to beat him at his own game, and he will shred you. Refuse to engage him and you might look weak or scared. That leaves trying to challenge his facts and logic and lack of coherence from one speech to the next. Clearly his supporters don’t care about any of these things, but maybe some swing voters are capable of logic. We will find out.

weather forecasting history

I recently wrote about earthquake forecasting and how many scientists think it is essentially impossible. But it is interesting to compare that with the state of weather forecasting in the 1800s:

Before the Royal Charter storm, FitzRoy had been agitating in London for government funding for collection of weather data. He and other Victorian men of meteorology knew that the more they could parse what the weather had done in the past, the better they could warn what it might do in the future. FitzRoy called the concept “forecasting.” To show just how ludicrous that idea seemed at the time, Moore unearths a telling 1854 Commons debate. When a scientifically enthusiastic member of Parliament suggested that amassing weather observations from sea and land could someday mean “we might know in this metropolis the condition of the weather 24 hours beforehand,” laughter broke out raucously enough to stop the proceeding.

Trump’s Banana Republic

Here’s what Fareed Zakariah had to say about the Republican Convention.

Over the years, I have watched campaigns in third world countries in which one candidate accuses the other of being a criminal, sometimes even threatening to jail his opponent once elected. But I cannot recall this happening in any Western democracy until this week. The Republican convention has been colorful and chaotic, but above all, it has been consumed by a vigilante rage, complete with mock prosecutors, show trials and chanting mobs. The picture presented to the world has been of America as a banana republic.

We have descended so far so fast that it is sometimes difficult to remember that this is not normal. It was only eight years ago that the Republican nominee, John McCain, interrupted one of his supporters who claimed that Barack Obama was an Arab and thus suspicious to explain that his opponent was in fact “a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

Contrast that with the tenor of this campaign, which has been set from the top by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly insisted that Hillary Clinton deserves to be in jail. He even promised that were he elected, his attorney general would reopen the books and “take a very good look” at possibly indicting her, himself having concluded that she is “guilty as hell.” That might have happened in a Latin American country — 30 years ago.

earthquake prediction

Here’s an interesting article on earthquake prediction. Basically, it has eluded scientists so far and will probably continue to do so.

Since the early 20th century, scientists have known that large quakes often cluster in time and space: 99 percent of them occur along well-mapped boundaries between plates in Earth’s crust and, in geological time, repeat almost like clockwork. But after decades of failed experiments, most seismologists came to believe that forecasting earthquakes in human time—on the scale of dropping the kids off at school or planning a vacation—was about as scientific as astrology. By the early 1990s, prediction research had disappeared as a line item in the USGS’s budget. “We got burned enough back in the 70s and 80s that nobody wants to be too optimistic about the possibility now,” says Terry Tullis, a career seismologist and chair of the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council (NEPEC), which advises the USGS.

Defying the skeptics, however, a small cadre of researchers have held onto the faith that, with the right detectors and computational tools, it will be possible to predict earthquakes with the same precision and confidence we do just about any other extreme natural event, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The USGS may have simply given up too soon. After all, the believers point out, advances in sensor design and data analysis could allow for the detection of subtle precursors that seismologists working a few decades ago might have missed.

And the stakes couldn’t be higher. The three biggest natural disasters in human history, measured in dollars and cents, have all been earthquakes, and there’s a good chance the next one will be too. According to the USGS, a magnitude 7.8 quake along Southern California’s volatile San Andreas fault would result in 1,800 deaths and a clean-up bill of more than $210 billion—tens of billions of dollars more than the cost of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill combined.

 

The Art of the Deal

It turns out Donald Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal all by himself. Here’s what the guy who actually wrote it has to say in The New Yorker:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

ecological landscaping

I recent linked to an article by Odum on ecological landscaping, or sustainable gardening, or whatever you want to call it. Her article linked to a number of other articles in the mainstream press. These are the articles I would share with friends and neighbors if they were to express an interest (or quite possibly, skepticism) about my own gardening methods. I’ll grab an interesting paragraph from each. The articles also have lots of interesting pictures and links to even more articles.
“Outgrowing the Traditional Grass Lawn” from Scientific American

Experimenting with alternatives to grass lawns does not require banishing turfgrass altogether, however. As Smith’s research underscores, turfgrass has a useful property not easily matched by other plants: its impressive material resilience. Grass tolerates a lot of trampling without dying and will spring back when compressed by cleats and lounging people’s backsides. Some scientists are currently focusing on how to make regions of private lawns and public green spaces more attractive to native pollinators, without uprooting a lawn altogether. Emily Dobbs of the University of Kentucky and her colleagues visit golf courses in the state and persuade the managers to transform some out of the way spots into wild habitat by planting a mix of perennial, native, low-maintenance wildflowers that bloom from April to October—coneflowers, columbines, black-eyed susans, clover, hyssop, and goldenrod, for example. The owners of five golf courses, including one belonging to Marriott Hotels and Resorts, have agreed so far—and the results are astounding.

“What is Sustainable Landscaping?” from Daily Kos

A landscape based on a small palette of non-native species supports less than 10% of the insect species needed to sustain native birds (Bringing Nature Home). Replacing these landscapes with a diversity of native trees, shrubs, grasses and wildflowers supports the hundreds of species of native insects needed to sustain birds and other organisms such as frogs, toads, lizards, and bats, which help control annoying or dangerous insects such as flies and mosquitoes.  It also links together an increasingly fragmented landscape that isolates natural areas between areas of biological desert.

“It’s come to this, yards are the next frontier of conservation” from Fusion

Native plants boost insect populations significantly, Louderman said.

“In your backyard, if you have just a lawn and non-native plants, you’d find just about a dozen species of native insects. If you have native plants, you can usually find hundreds of almost all native and beneficial insects,” Louderman said.

These are not bad or dangerous insects, Louderman pointed out. In fact, the honeybee is the only one that might sting a human.

intelligence?

According to TheWeek.com, the “Turkey coup attempt was a surprise in diplomatic and intelligence circles, says House Homeland Security Committee member“.

Is this a rare lapse by the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence establishment? No, if you believe Tim Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Using mostly primary sources and declassified government documents, he makes a surprising but very strong case that the CIA was never very good at spying. This is why major historical events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 have caught our government completely by surprise, and why we have had trouble competently prosecuting wars from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. The government and military just don’t have an accurate picture of what is going on or an understanding of the complex cultures and conflicts they are dealing with, and it leads to disaster. The CIA is pretty good at buying intelligence from allies that are good at spying on their neighbors, like Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, South Korea, etc., which explains our strong ties to many of these countries. So it is not too surprising that if something is going on inside one these countries itself, we would not be the first to know.

the fall of the U.S. republic?

This article on History News Network compares the current state of the United States to the Roman Republic a few decades before it fell.

By the second century B.C., the Romans believed they had achieved the ideal state: a republic with strong checks and balances that provided a voice for the common people while limiting the dangers of direct democracy. By the mid 140s B.C., victories in foreign wars had led to a massive expansion of Roman power. It seemed the Republic — stable, powerful, and immensely wealthy — would last forever.

But things changed. The economy transformed as Roman power expanded across the Mediterranean. As Rome began to import cheap grain from North Africa in quantities previously unimagined in the ancient world, grain prices plunged. Domestic small farmers were squeezed out of the market and off their lands. Rich landowners snapped up land from these struggling farmers, incorporating these plots into giant plantations worked by slaves from newly conquered territories. Many of these land acquisitions were illegal — but the plebeians were powerless to stop them. Forced to compete against slave labor and facing a nascent form of corporatization that favored the wealthy, the plebeians felt that they were cast aside as Rome ascended to greatness.

In response to these changes, the plebeians voted a slew of populist politicians to power. These politicians were called Populares. While some Populares genuinely sought to uplift the plebeian class, others learned to harness the power of the people in a cynical ploy for power.

– See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163207#sthash.FccCVUPn.dpuf

Could the U.S. form of government really fall? I am not predicting that but I can envision a scenario where it is plausible. Let’s say a completely incompetent leader gets elected by the people (I’m not naming any names) and orders the military to do something so egregious it refuses to carry out the order. At that point, the Constitution would no longer be functioning, so what then? Congress could act quickly to impeach the President to maintain the appearance of order, while the military could temporarily maintain order until the Vice President or another civilian leader could be installed according to the letter of the Constitution. But if that sort of thing kept happening, the Constitution would be weakened each time until one day the civilian government might cease to exist. Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but within the realm of plausibility. Throw in some serious natural or industrial disasters, terrorist attacks, or major geopolitical conflicts and it could put even more strain on our system.