Les Paul with Billy Gibbons and a Young John Lee Hooker

Mr Paul plays a mean deadpan when he's telling a joke.

Here's John Lee Hooker early on. I enjoy hearing him talk.

Jim Mattis on DPRK

The second paragraph is pretty clear and easy to understand.

UPDATE: Just in case that wasn't clear enough.

Google Should Talk To This Guy

What this guy just told me, and the rest of the world, is that two-bit managers at Google can read all the things that they pretend to provide 'private' spaces for on any of your platforms. Now, Google owns Blogger too, so whatever I put out here they can read. But I was always intending this to be published for the world's consumption; there's no presumption of privacy about the things you publish on Blogger. What I've learned from this guy is that the pretense of privacy they are using to market some of their products is a lie. They don't and won't respect it, and allow even the least important manager to use violations of presumed privacy to hurt people of whose opinions they don't approve.

Edward Abbey wrote that, "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." To that you can add the petty tyrants who work for the electromechanical gadgets, I suppose. Nor do I forget that their plan, their hope, was to align that class of tyrants with the petty tyrants of government. One seamless technological experience of being told what to think and how to live, and being punished for any deviations.

More on the Memo

Some academics respond to the memo, for what it's worth:

#1: The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.

#2: I think it’s really important to discuss this topic scientifically, keeping an open mind and using informed skepticism when evaluating claims about evidence. In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. For instance, sex differences in negative emotionality are universal across cultures; developmentally emerge across all cultures at exactly the same time; are linked to diagnosed (not just self-reported) mental health issues; appear rooted in sex differences in neurology, gene activation, and hormones; are larger in more gender egalitarian nations; and so forth (for a short review of this evidence, see here.)

But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance).

#3: Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research.

#4: As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership.

Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at....

Some of these ideas have been published in neuroscientific journals—despite having faulty study methodology—because they’ve been deemed socially pleasing and “progressive.” As a result, there’s so much misinformation out there now that people genuinely don’t know what to believe.

I think the last one has an interesting point: some of the misconception about what the science says comes from the fact that even scientific journals filter for results that are "pleasing and progressive." That is naturally going to distort the debate downstream. That's how you get a guy like the former Google admin quoted below who argues, essentially, 'I'm sure the author was wrong on the science, though I am not qualified to discuss the science and must defer to experts.'

Markets Explain Cooperation in the Animal World

A biological theory suggests that the reason animals don't always kill each is economics.

Cooperation was common in nature—not just between animals of the same species but also between different species (for example, a plant and its pollinator). But the origins of cooperation were a mystery. How could two animals work together when Darwin’s theory of evolution taught about survival of the fittest? Shouldn’t natural selection always favor ruthless self-interest?

“It was one of the early questions in behavioral biology,” says Hammerstein. “Why do animals not always kill each other? Why is aggression limited?”...

In 1994, Noë and Hammerstein laid out their new theory of biological markets in the journal Behavioral Ecology & Socialbiology. The paper fused the biologists’ different styles: Hammerstein developed the mathematical models, while Noë dug through the scientific literature for evidence from the field. Examples turned up across the animal kingdom. Male scorpion flies offer females a “nuptial gift” of prey before mating. In some species of bird, such as the purple martin, a male will allow another male to occupy part of his territory in exchange for help raising his young. Lycaenid butterfly caterpillars produce a sweet “nectar” whose only purpose is to attract ants, which eat the nectar and protect the caterpillars from predators.

In each example the “exchange rate” is not fixed but rather contingent on the supply of available partners. “It is essentially a supply-demand theory,” says Frans de Waal, the eminent primatologist from Emory University and a former mentor of Noë. The more male scorpion flies available on the market, the larger the nuptial gift the female will demand. The male purple martin chooses the most juvenile-looking and least threatening tenant. And the caterpillars adjust the amount of nectar they produce to the number of ants in the vicinity.

Markets are the biological basis for altruism: Socialists hardest hit.

No One May Discuss This

One of the things discussed in the article cited immediately below was the firing of the Google employee who wrote a memo critical of diversity efforts at Google. Software engineers trending young, he may well have been too young to remember that it cost the President of Harvard his job to raise the same sort of issues even as a theoretical possibility he expressed that he hoped was not the case.

A recent alumnus of Google writes that this sort of thinking has no place in any organization except for purpose-defined hate groups.

What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”...

Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.... Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy.

If you feel isolated by this, that your views are basically unwelcome in tech and can’t be spoken about… well, that’s a fair point. These views are fundamentally corrosive to any organization they show up in, drive people out, and I can’t think of any organization not specifically dedicated to those views that they would be welcome in. I’m afraid that’s likely to remain a serious problem for you for a long time to come.

I notice that this last author opens by asserting that the views expressed are wrong, but declines to defend the proposition that they are: that belongs, he says, to someone with a different set of credentials than his own. What credentials would those be, I wonder? It sounds as if this proposition can only be studied from the perspective of disproving it, as it would be "fundamentally corrosive" to any organization to entertain them, such that any organization devoted to serious study would have to reject them outright. Certainly Harvard did.

The views expressed may well be wrong; perhaps it is even very likely that they are wrong. All the same, how much value should we put in the claim that 'all the studies' show X if not-X is a forbidden position that will cost you your career to entertain? Of course all the studies conducted by programs that refuse to consider the possibility of not-X support X. Of course all the people credentialed by programs that insist on X as a prerequisite for remaining in the program will assert X. That's not a significant finding in support of X being really true. Nor does the credential you get from this program, in which the hypothesis is required to be proven by the experiment, likely to inspire much confidence.

So there's a real problem.  Assume for a moment that he's right that you can't even entertain the question -- can't even float the question -- without creating a hostile work environment.  Maybe he is right about that:  certainly both here and in the Harvard case, the reaction to the question was explosive.  (NPR reports that female software engineers at Google skipped work today from upset.)  So it can't be done if it'll create a hostile work environment, not under current American law.  That's just it, then.  It would cause too many problems to ask, and that's the end of it.  We'll just have to assume the truth of the thing that we'd like to believe.

Haven't we tried that model before?  Indeed, isn't that the very model that Progressives like to mock as pre-modern, benighted, backwards, anti-science?

Bad Reputation

Though the original the goal of reputation systems was to issue access tokens to control entry into the groups, they are double edged. Donald Trump proved that the negative of a negative was positive and used his media disapproval ratings as an access token to Red State voters. There is nothing to prevent other candidates from doing the same or stopping groups from flipping the Chinese government reputation index by taking the inverse of the state metric.

A bad rep can be a good rep, depending on who's looking.

That's true about Trump, anyway. The more the media hated him in 2016, the more some people loved him for defying them. It was a kind of credential: you could trust him because the people who despised you hated him too. Maybe that's not the best credential, but it's also not nothing.

There's a Problem With This Metaphor

Hope is a Weapon.

Saw this today. Everybody reading this knows the story, but this is fascinatingly done. I have never seen my wife on the edge of her seat in a movie before. There is not a lot of speaking (despite the trailer). It works. But you must pay attention.



Curiously enough, the following below was shows as a trailer:

A lot more dialogue in any case.

53 Congressmen Call for Mutiny

This is alarming.

“As the respected leaders of our brave armed service members, you have no obligation to implement a hastily considered tweet designed to serve as a ‘wedge’ political issue; but rather you should honor your own independent duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the lawmakers wrote.

“We believe any serious or credible review of the law and the facts in the present case make it clear that the president’s proposed ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces will weaken, not strengthen our military, and is blatantly unconstitutional.”

If it is blatantly unconstitutional, it is a blatantly unconstitutional policy that then-President Obama maintained for almost his whole tenure -- as did every single President before him. Of course, we have recently learned that the mere fact that a thing has been considered constitutional for the entire history of the nation is no proof against it being declared unconstitutional now.

Still, it's a thin reed to hang a mutiny on. Military orders are to be defied only if they are so obviously illegal as to "shock the conscience," a standard that 'restore the policy we had last year' would rarely satisfy.

There is one military leader on the record as intending to defy the order, which is now a formal policy that will soon be transmitted to DOD. The Commandant of the US Coast Guard says he will defy the order. The Coast Guard is usually a Homeland Security outfit but capable of being transferred to the DOD during war or at the pleasure of the President. The Coast Guard apparently has 13 members who are openly transgender, all of whom he apparently had contacted to express his support.

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that defiance is becoming more standard in nonmilitary Federal agencies.

The growing opposition in the executive branch comes as the White House’s legislative agenda has stalled in Congress and Trump turns to his Cabinet agencies to change course in several policy areas. It also is emanating from career staffers or political holdovers whose resistance to Trump has, at times, been rooted in deep opposition to the president’s agenda.

The opposition can take benign forms, such as resigning in protest, which is obviously perfectly fine and even highly appropriate if you decide that you can't do the job for whatever reason. This opposition can also take other forms, such as the dangerous new culture of leaking American secrets to the press.

For members of Congress to openly call for a military mutiny, though, is... well, reckless at least. Insofar as they believe they are defending the Constitution, I suppose their oaths require them to do what they think is necessary. But they're asking for one hell of a crisis, and I hope they know it.

Biker War Movie Review

This week I had occasion to watch two movies that turn, in important ways, on bikers' relationship with the military. The first was 1971's The Hard Ride, a Vietnam-era story about a Marine who comes home with his best friend's body to try to arrange a funeral with his biker friends. The second was 1984's Tank!, where the military aspects are central, but bikers play a pivotal role in the final outcome.

Together with other movies of the era, these sketch an outline of a transformation in American culture. Spoilers below the break line.

What About Conscription?

What do you think conscription's for?

Europe is the continent with the fewest people willing to fight a war for their country. Globally, an average of 61% of respondents in 64 countries said they would. Morocco (94%), Fiji (94%), Pakistan (89%), Vietnam (89%) and Bangladesh (86%) had the highest percentage willing to fight.

The country with the fewest people willing to go to war was Japan, with just 11% of respondents saying they would fight.

Headline reference from this old movie:

Wow

From the NY Sun:

SAS soldiers are trying out “Star Wars”-style bulletproof helmets in the war against terror. The SAS is the UK’s answer to the Navy SEALs.

No, that is not accurate. The SAS has been around since 1941, and thus is not an "answer to" the SEALs because it predates them. Though the SEALs have predecessor units dating to WWII, they're all younger than the SAS. The SEALs themselves came to be during the Vietnam war, twenty years later than the SAS. The basic concept of the SAS isn't even similar, as it is an army-based commando unit conceived around airborne deployments, rather than sea-based naval commandos.

Cool mask, though.

Tattoo in Edinburgh

They're playing the Black Bear, transitioning to Scotland the Brave towards the end of the video. But you probably knew all that if you spend a lot of time around here.

That's from the end. If you want to see what the first rehersal of the massed bands looked like, here it is.

Happiness, German and American

The orchestral music identification video ended with an honorable mention by Robert Schumann called "The Happy Farmer."



Here's the American version of the same idea, "The Happy Camper." This is written and performed by the Reverend Horton Heat.



Happy Friday.

Democrats: Trump Doesn't Go Far Enough

So says Vox.

“Trade is at the core of our economic agenda,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement ahead of the formal launch. “We’re going to propose a better deal for American workers — one that puts their well-being at the center of our trade laws, not just the bottom line of huge corporations. Our trade laws have shortchanged American workers for far too long, and we Democrats are aiming to change that.”

The most striking proposal is a call for the creation of an “American Jobs Security Council,” a body that would review and potentially bar foreign purchases of American companies if they are deemed to be a major threat to American jobs.

That kind of scrutiny and interference with foreign investment would be unprecedented for the United States, says Edward Alden, a trade expert and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations.

I wonder what they'll do when they figure out that his immigration policy is even more popular among their blue-collar target voter demographic than his protectionist policies?

A Pleasant Exercise

This video includes evocative samples from one hundred of the great Western masterpieces of orchestral music. It's a great way to brush up on your recognition of famous pieces, and to rediscover ones you may not have thought of in a while that you'd like to listen to in full.



Enjoy!

Round the Mull of Kintyre

A retelling of the story of how the Kings of Norway lost the Hebrides to the Kings of Scotland.

Some appropriate music.

DB: "Trump taps decorated Army General for White House communications post"

My only regret is that I didn't think of this joke myself.

American Muslim Assimilation is Rapid

So reports Cato on its recent findings. The usual caveats about polling data apply, but they speak to some of them towards the end of the piece -- particularly the claim that these results come from lying to pollsters.