"Human-level" Concept Acquisition

In today's AI news, a probabilistic approach to learning allows machines to learn to generalize about how to draw some simple figures at a rate similar to human beings.

I finally put my finger on it

So let me preface all this with the following disclaimer.  I in no way can bring myself to support a single Democrat candidate currently in the field.  I do not think a single one of them should be put into the White House.  But I'll tell you, I honestly think that if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, I won't be able to bring myself to vote for him.  But for the longest time, I couldn't really pin down specifically why.

This Stamp Was Accurate, Once

Not since 2004. We beat them once. We'll beat them again.

With great thanks to Raven, and in memory of Colonel Sam Colt.

Alternative Headline: Republican Politics Much Less Corrupt Than Advertised

The boys at Vox are sad that Republican "megadonors" can't buy the election.

The same is not true in the reverse: Clinton's international megadonors have not only bought her the primary, they've kept her out of prison.

Zoroaster Lives!

The Kurds are awesome on so many levels.

A Small Irony on Religion

Sister John Paul Bauer shot a ten-point buck, and shared the meat with local hungry families. Naturally, she came under intense and obscene criticism.

Within days, the nearby Erie Diocese removed the Facebook post because of nasty comments posted by activists who apparently were offended enough by guns, God and hunting to feel justified in reacting offensively and lewdly.

God, guns and prayer have been intertwined as enemies of the political left ever since Barack Obama described Pennsylvania voters as being “bitter” over job losses and surmised that “they cling to guns or religion.”

Despite handily winning this state twice, his and the left's hatred for the very people who voted for him has never waned. As with everything else he dislikes about traditional American culture, he has sought to “correct” the behavior of those people.

Last week, that corrective zeal reached an entirely new level when the left condemned the act of offering thoughts and prayers to the grieving, treating it as code for gun ownership.

Had she been a devout Muslim, would the criticism be as loud?

Probably not. Nevertheless, if she had been, it would be the NRA and not the President defending her right to keep and bear arms. The people so hot to restrict her rights are the very ones who think themselves to be on the side of sympathy and understanding for the religious -- provided they are Muslims. The NRA is as ready to defend a Muslim's rights as a Catholic's, but they are said to be the enemies of all that is decent and good in America.

We Missed Out

James Madison's deleted Constitutional proposals were helpfully clarifying.

Another item that Madison proposed was making sure at least three of the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights applied to all states.

“No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases,” Madison said in the fifth part of his original Bill of Rights proposal.

The selective incorporation of parts of the Bill of Rights to the states didn’t happen until the early part of the 20th century as the Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause in a series of cases.

Madison also wanted to clearly spell out that each branch of government had clear, distinct roles.

“The powers delegated by this Constitution are appropriated to the departments to which they are respectively distributed: so that the Legislative Department shall never exercise the powers vested in the Executive or Judicial, nor the Executive exercise the powers vested in the Legislative or Judicial, nor the Judicial exercise the powers vested in the Legislative or Executive Departments,” he said in the last part of his proposed Bill of Rights.

The proposed incorporation would have made clear that the states and the Federal guarantees were different, and might have made unnecessary the 14th Amendment's vesting of Federal Courts with such expansive powers. They might have been given only an additional power or two to oversee, rather than reordering the relationship between the states and the central government so completely. It is my sense that most of the serious tensions in American's politics come from the fact that the Federal courts impose one-sized-fits-all solutions on a nation that does not agree about fundamental questions of right.

The proposed clarity on the separation of powers would have been helpful, too, at least potentially. The Supreme Court understood the difference until Roosevelt intimidated them into yielding place. It's been a long fall since then.

Charles Blow Visits a Gun Show

And the result is slightly positive.

I thought of how productive it would be if more people with discordant views on gun regulations could have as civil a discussion as I had with my brother — full of mutual respect, adults disagreeing but not attempting to demonize, honestly searching for solutions.

The gun lobby poisons these conversations. It pumps out and promotes a never-ending stream of worst-case scenarios until it builds a level of fear and paranoia that only profits gun makers and grinds all progress to a halt.

Indeed, the Austin Highway Gun Show itself published on its Facebook page on Dec. 9 an image of a gun and a Bible with the caption: “History has shown that these are the first two things banned by totalitarian governments.”

But, I must also say that, to a lesser degree, some proponents of better regulations also do damage by painting with too broad a brush and labeling the millions of gun hunters, collectors and people simply seeking to provide an extra layer of protections for their families — people like my brother and his gun show buddies — as deranged and deficient. Most are not. Many are simply enthusiasts like my brother and the elderly man who climbed out of an S.U.V. as we were about to leave.

My brother bellowed, as is his wont, “How you doing today?” The man responded with a smile, “Any day I can go to a gun show is a good day.”

Emphasis added. I think we can disagree about which side "poisons" the debate the most. Still, it's a more welcome tone than we've seen from the Times lately. Or, indeed, from many others.

She Had Help

Today's outrageously outrageous Trumpism: 'Hillary Clinton killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.'

Doubtless she bears part of the blame for the precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, because her State Department failed in its attempts to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government. They tried, and they blew it. Partly the President is to blame, too, for not getting more directly and personally involved but accepting the 2011 withdrawal as a fait accompli.

On the other hand, if the Maliki government had behaved better, perhaps Iraq would have remained stable. If Assad hadn't touched off a major civil war next door, that would really have helped. And, of course, if we'd left Saddam in place only tens of thousand of people would have been killed by his brutal regime if the history of his reign is any indication.

She bears some responsibility, and it is the quality of guilt that it can be divided without being lessened.

I Would Have Called This "Marketing"...

...but I guess that's less scary-sounding than "psychological data and analytics."

As Cecil Stinemetz walked up to a gray clapboard house in suburban Des Moines last week wearing his “Cruz 2016” cap, a program on his iPhone was determining what kind of person would answer the door.

Would she be a “relaxed leader”? A “temperamental conservative”? Maybe even a “true believer”?

Nope. It turned out that Birdie Harms, a 64-year-old grandmother, part-time real estate agent and longtime Republican, was, by the Ted Cruz campaign’s calculations, a “stoic traditionalist” — a conservative whose top concerns included President Obama’s use of executive orders on immigration.

Which meant that Stinemetz was instructed to talk to her in a tone that was “confident and warm and straight to the point” and ask about her concerns regarding the Obama administration’s positions on immigration, guns and other topics.

I suppose it's really both. It's not really shocking to learn that he sent pro-Israeli messages to pro-Israeli groups and pro-gun-rights messages to NRA members.

XKCD speaks

These are posts from "Not Exactly Rocket Science," by the way.

In The Guardian, the author of the XKCD comic strip interviews an astronaut.  Did you watch the movie "Gravity" and pick it apart?  I didn't like that someone in a low-Earth orbit who wanted to catch up with someone else in the same orbit, but on the opposite side of the Earth, accelerated to catch up.  The XKCD and his astronaut had different problems.  For one thing, apparently the movie producers sometimes had Earth rotating in the wrong direction in the background.  The astronaut noted in passing that, when he was in orbit, he had to get used to the idea that north wouldn't always be up.

All-Around Education

That's the etymology of "encyclopedia."  The Atlantic is running an article about the habit of creating these works, starting with Pliny.

Sure-Fire Electoral Success

Republicans are in dismay over the primary. S. E. Cupp apparently thinks they ought to throw the election to keep Trump out of the White House -- but how hard can they really throw it?

For Democrats, particularly those who must defend President Barack Obama’s record on foreign affairs and terrorism, there is no good news. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News survey, seven in 10 Americans now describe ISIS as a major threat to national security. Another 44 percent of respondents believe another attack inside the United States at some point in the next few months is “very” likely, greater than at any point since October 2001. 57 percent of those polled disapprove of Obama’s handling of the issue of terrorism. According to Gallup, 67 percent believe future “acts of terrorism” inside the United States are either somewhat or very likely. Gallup further revealed that confidence in the government’s ability to keep its citizens safe is lower than it has ever been since the 9/11 attacks. Simultaneously, a majority of Americans fear they will be the next victims of that forthcoming attack for the first time since 2001. Perhaps most ominously from a Democratic perspective, satisfaction in the direction the country is headed has not been this depressed since November of 2014 when Republicans rode a wave of voter dissatisfaction to pick up control of the U.S. Senate.

It is in this environment that both their President and their front-runner for the party's nomination have decided to make their party's main issue obtaining unilateral authority to strip Americans of the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms without due process.

Saturday Medieval song

Was able to see these ladies last night in one of their last concerts. (They are retiring). At least they made a lot of recordings.

A Footballer's Ave

He's a man of more than one talent.

Dying young

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.

John Keats (1795-1821)

That Would Be The -Clinton- State Department

DHS whistleblower says that the State Department crushed his investigation and destroyed database materials that could have stopped the Berdoo attacks.



Apparently the concerns came out of a union of the Clinton State Department and DHS's office of Civil Rights / Civil Liberties. That there was a network bringing in known radical Muslim preachers to American mosques was not a proper concern for Customs and Border Protection, apparently. His work, which had documented the extent of the network and that included the mosque attended by the Berdoo shooters, was deleted from the DHS systems following State Department complaints.

Immigration's a Big Deal

Even if we're not talking about refugees or the structure of Islam, the biggest part of the problem remains. Why aren't we asking whether the immigrants we are bringing in are good for America?, asks the Atlantic magazine.

Say, Who's Up For An 'Assault Weapon' Ban?

The New York Times asks the question as part of their regular poll with CBS, having just run a front-page editorial to fulminate on the subject. Now 'assault weapon' isn't a real category based on function, but a scary name invented to make the guns easier to ban during the Clinton Administration. We all remember the Clinton-era ban, and that it was allowed to sunset after ten years because it accomplished nothing whatsoever. Even the Brady folks couldn't muster anything positive to say about it.

Given that the name was invented for the sole purpose of being scary enough to sell gun control, the poll has always before found that a majority of respondents agreed to ban such guns. Not this time. The highest opposition on record for the poll was 34%. Now a clean majority oppose such bans.

In Fairness, I Thought He Was Talking About -Us-...

Clinton receives some negative feedback from 'Muslim advocacy organizations.'

“We appreciate that you forcefully condemned the proposal put forward by Donald Trump to ban any Muslims from entering the United States — but we are concerned that your campaign is sending mixed messages when it comes to Islamophobia,” the letter reads. “Just months ago, one of your prominent campaign surrogates, Gen. Wesley Clark, called for the internment of some American Muslims. We call on you to make clear that you find such extreme proposals unacceptable by immediately removing Gen. Clark from his role as a surrogate for your campaign..."

Former Supreme Allied Commander -- Europe, Clark wasn't talking about "Muslims" per se, but about "disloyal Americans." He was speaking in the wake of the Chattanooga shooter, of course, whose motive is completely unknown. Maybe he was a right-wing fanatic.