Not Breaking News: Palin Serves Useful Purpose

WC doesn’t usually write about Alaska’s Biggest Embarrassment anymore, but WC was astounded to learn recently that The Quitter is serving a useful purpose. Yeah, WC was surprised, too.

It seems a nude painting of her adorns a dive bar in Chicago.

Palin Nude, by Bruce Elliott (Photo by Kuni Takahashi, Chicago Tribune / September 29, 2008

Sure, it’s old news – 2008, actually. Sure, it’s a very bad painting. But the key point is that the opus hangs at the Old Town Ale House, owned by Elliotts’s wife, where it remains a prime attraction among his display of more than 200 celebrity portraits and other bad, racy art. That’s right, Palin is still selling beer.

Best of all, Elliot said, “I find her bizarrely fascinating, even though I pretty much despise everything she stands for.”

Reportedly, Elliott’s next masterpiece was a nude of ex-Governor and convicted felon Rod Blagojevich.

"Cavity Search," by Bruce Elliott

Even bad art can serve a purpose. WC has been to the Old Town Ale House. It really is a dive bar.

We now return to more aesthetic blogging.

R.I.P. Levon Helm: An Important Part of a Greater Whole

Levon Helm, 1975, from "The Last Waltz"

Levon Helm, the only drummer whose playing could make you cry, died April 19 at age 71, of complications from throat cancer.

WC has written an appreciation of Levon Helm already, and won’t repeat it here. But the loss is no smaller for having been coming on for a long time.

At a concert in 1971, WC watched Helm play with The Band. Helm played extended sets on the drums, on the mandolin, on electric guitar, on electric bass and on saxophone. His drumming and mandolin work, in particular, were outstanding. On several songs, including “The Weight” and “This Wheel’s on Fire,” the band members handed the lyric lead around between stanzas, with Helm’s singing as a wonderful part of an flawless whole.

His voice on “The Weight” carries all of his influences: the South, country and western, folk and rock. Rachel Maddow said of his singing, “That’s Levon singing ‘The Weight’ with the rest of The Band and the Staple Singers in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. That’s what it sounds like when it’s good, and it’s deep and it matters.” His biography, This Wheel’s on Fire, is one of the best of the rock music genre.

After The Band broke up in 1976, he continued to make music and his later albums won three Grammys. His Midnight Rambles at his home in upstate New York were a 21st Century hootenanny.

Helm won Grammys, won Junos and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He survived a long time in a profession that kills its young, and was making wonderful music up until the cancer took him out. He helped invent a musical genre, and the passion he had for making music inspired every song he performed.

R.I.P., Levon, 1940-2012. We’ll miss you.

Chuck Colson, Nixon Hatchet Man, Dead

WC notes in passing the death of Charles “Chuck” Colson, Dick Nixon’s hatchetman. Like most associates of Nixon, he went to jail, not for the seriously dirty work he did – he was the organizer of the Watergate burglary – but for his effort to smear Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers.

He claimed a religious conversion. He certainly talked about God a lot afterward, but he acted like Chuck Colson. He hated gays. He was zealous and unrelenting in his efforts to destroy the wall between church and state.

He was not a nice man. To paraphrase Mark Twain, WC won’t be able to attend his funeral but plans to send a nice email saying he approves of it. Or to quote Bob Dylan, “And I’ll stand over your grave ’Til I’m sure that you’re dead.”

Disproving a Comforting Lie

Apart from a few crackpot politicians and flat earthers, no one who has seriously looked at the issue denies that the polar sea ice is melting. Because it’s the habitat of polar bears, no one except Governer Sean Parnell denies that the melting sea ice presents a crisis for polar bears. But it was all right, somehow, in the minds of a discouraging number of citizens and scientists. Because polar bears were just specially adapted brown bears, really. Somehow, and WC was never very clear about this logic, “just pale grizzlies.” So it was okay to extirpate them. There’s lots of grizzlies.

Now we know that the idea polar bears are just adapted brown bears is a lie. A comfortable lie, but a lie. A recent article in Science Magazine (paywall) examines the DNA of polar bears and concludes they separated from a common ancestor with brown bears some 600,000 years ago. They can still interbreed with brown bears, but they’ve been their own species for much longer than had been previously thought. We really are on the verge of extirpating a genuine species.

There’s even genetic evidence that there have been warming periods before, when comparatively small portions of the polar bear population survived. But the difference in those earlier episodes is that they happened slowly; only the current, anthropocene warming episode is happening over the course of a few decades. The evidence from gases preserved in glacial ice and elsewhere is that earlier warming episodes occurred over centuries.

It’s difficult to assess how the new science will impact the pending litigation. The US Fish & Wildlife Service has issued a special Interim Rule classifying the species as threatened in response to an earlier lawsuit challenging the 2008 determined that the species was endangered. The critical habitat designation still stands, making most of northern and northwestern Alaska critical habitat. Governor Parnell is suing over that, but at this date the habitat classification still stands and, based on precedent, the habitat classification is unlikely to be successfully challenged.

Some years ago, WC was privileged to visit The Magic Castle. Over a very good supper, WC watched a number of magicians, amateur and professional, perform a number of tricks and illusions. One builds a ten story high house of cards, putting together the whole thing in a matter of two and a half minutes. Then he proceeded to pull cards out of the middle and bottom, asking the audience how many he could remove before it collapsed. The answer was eight. Then the whole edifice collapsed.

Take it as a metaphor.

Maybe It’s the Bats?

Austin, Texas is a fairly weird town. After all, Governor and former presidential wannabe Rick Perry lives here, and he’s passing strange. They sell t-shirts at the airport that say, “Keep Austin Weird.” Maybe it’s the bats.

You don’t know about the bats? Neither did WC. Here’s some YouTube footage, not shot by WC, that gives you  a faint idea about the bats:

Every night from late March to early October, the crowds gather near sunset on Congress Avenue Bridge. At early twilight, the 1.0 – 1.5 million Mexican Free-tailed Bats that live under the bridge come out to forage and collectively eat 10 to 30 thousand pounds of insects. WC can report that there are no flying insects – none – in downtown Austin. The crowds and the bats are both pretty impressive. And the show lasts a lot longer than the video suggests. For at least ten minutes, the bats pour out from under the bridge; clouds of bats; rivers of bats.

After the bats have left – or at least after it has gotten too dark to see them – wander up Congress Avenue to Sixth Street and visit the night life in Austin. You’ll see immediately that it ‘s more than a little strange. Music, food, street artists, panhandlers, pimps, mimes; it’s not what you would expect in a Red State Capital dominated by arch-conservatives. It’s not what you’d expect from a state that elected Rick Perry, George Bush and, for that matter, Lyndon Johnson. Imagine Las Vegas, but with better music.

Maybe it’s the bats?

Shorebirds at Bolivar Flats

WC is told by Texans who live there that the name is pronounced “Buhl-ih-ver.” not “Boll-i-var.” But how ever you pronounce the name of the Audubon Society’s bird refuge at the southern tip of the Bolivar Peninsula, the shorebirds there are pretty impressive. Here are just four species from WC’s recent visit.

Black-bellied Plover

This Black-bellied Plover is just starting to move into breeding plumage, but they are a handsome bird year-round. A few turn up in Fairbanks most years, en route to coastal breeding areas. The cloudy-bright conditions weren’t ideal for photography. WC’s NPN buddy Mia introduced WC to the advantages of low angle photos of shorebirds, getting down to their eye level. The crud that washes in from the Gulf of Mexico was pretty gross; laying down in it wasn’t for the squeamish.

American Oystercatcher

Surely the most flamboyant shorebird is the American Oystercatcher, even more extravagant than its Alaska cousin, the Black Oystercatcher. They remain on the coast year around, mostly on the Atlantic and gulf side of the continent, but also along the coast of Southern California.

Ruddy Turnstone

These Ruddy Turnstones are in the awkward, ugly stage between their interesting, but drab winter plumage and their colorful breeding plumage. Turnstones sometimes pass through Fairbanks en route to breeding territories on the north and northwest coasts of Alaska. WC has been told, but cannot confirm, that the Inupiat word for Ruddy Turnstones means “calico birds.”

Sanderling Bath Time

By far the most common shorebird in most places is the Sanderling, and Bolivar Flats was no exception. Rather than a shot of a bird, WC offers this flawed but amusing photo of Sanderlings bathing. These little guys are famous for following waves in and out on sandy shores. Oddly, they are seen in Fairbanks from time to time, en route to the Canadian high arctic where they breed.

WC documented 16 species of shorebirds on Bolivar Flats, as well as a couple of specialist sparrows, nine species of terns, four species of gulls and more. It’s really a remarkable place. WC compliments to the far-sighted conservationists who preserved it.

WC Taking a Break

WC will be taking a break from the blog for a few days. Posts will be irregular, if there are posts at all. Photographs of birds may be taken.

Back soon.

Well and Good

I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well, and I shall make all thing well; and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well.

- Lady Julian of Norwich, Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 31, c. 1393

War Crimes, War Criminals and Exceptionalism

WC offers serious props to Spencer Ackerman, at Wired, whose Danger Room has taken a long, hard look at the United States’ use of torture in its so-called war on terror. And unflinchingly looked into the possible war crimes committed by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

WC is no expert in the area of international law or the complexities of the various Geneva Conventions. But WC does know that the United States prosecuted Japanese after World War II for waterboarding. It’s a matter of public record. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month while the CIA held him at an undisclosed “black site” prison.

When President Obama was elected in 2008, WC hoped for a public investigation into the conduct of the CIA, the FBI and private contractors. Not necessarily with a view to criminal prosecutions, but rather to get at the truth. The thing about playing fast and loose with international conventions is that it cripples your ability to complain when others violate those conventions. And it surrenders the moral high ground. WC would like for his country to be the good guys. It’s not. A careful, credible investigation might have helped restore the nation’s reputation.

That didn’t happen. Instead, there was a closed door, confidential investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, much criticized by the former Bush administration members and the Neocons for looking at even the lower levels of the darkest chapters in U.S. counterterrorism. WC can’t call it a “white wash” because no one knows exactly what was done. But the absence of a public process, the refusal to “look backwards,” raises suspicions in all but the worst of the Neocons. That “investigation” closed in June 2011 when Holder announced he’d pursue criminal investigations in just two out of 101 cases of suspected detainee abuse. Some of them turned out not to have involved CIA officials after all. Both of the cases that move on to a criminal phase involved the “death in custody” of detainees.

And now, it turns out, State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.” The lightly redacted memo – thought to have been expunged by the Bush Administration – has surfaced in Danger Room, in response to a Freedom of Information request.

No big deal, you say? Think about this: the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarik, was overthrown for, among other crimes, torturing prisoners. Egypt and Mubarik hosted at least one of the black sites where some of the worst U.S. torture of prisoners occurred. Any records of those black site activities are now in the hands of Egypt’s new government. Zelikow’s letter is now a public record. Those records, in the hands of the International Criminal Court, could lead to an indictment of U.S. citizens involved. It’s true that, shamefully, the U.S. has backed out of being a party to the Rome Statute that underpins the ICC. But the court has jurisdiction of crimes committed by non-members in member states. Egypt, however, is a member state.

In the best case we will be presented with the ugly spectacle of the United States trying to wiggle out of an international crime. Publicly. For a long time. Not very “exceptional.”

Not Seen in Fairbanks

WC is birding, a long ways from Fairbanks. There have been some challenges, but it’s going well. As proof, WC offers a few photos of birds that are not seen in Fairbanks.

Grey Catbird, Boy Scout Woods, High Island, Texas

The Grey Catbird is fairly common west of the Rocky Mountains. It’s best known for its call, which is very like a cat’s. This fellow was working up the nerve for a bath.

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, Anahuac Nat'l Wildlife Refuge, Texas

This extravagantly-tailed flycatcher is found in the southern half of the midwest. Despite the ridiculously long tail, it’s nimble in the air and great at snagging bugs.

Acadian Flycatcher, Smith Oaks, High Island, Texas

The Empidonax genus of flycatchers is a birder’s nemesis, with half a dozen individual species that all look pretty much the same, including this Acadian Flycatcher. The olive back and the buffy eye ring help ID this handsome little bug vacuum.

Blue-winged Warbler, Boy Scout Woods, High Island, Texas

WC has saved the best for last, an especially handsome Blue-winged Warbler. The very low light required ISO 1600, which created a bit of noise. But the dramatic coloration shows pretty well.

Most of WC’s birding time right now is devoted to High Island, which isn’t very high and isn’t an island. It must be a Texan thing. WC will guess that a salt dome deformed the underlying limestone, pushing the circular area that’s High Island up about 12-15 feet. Not enough to save it from hurricanes. But it’s the first patch of land that birds migrating across the Gulf of Mexico see. So it’s a great place to be in spring migration.

On Literary Criticism

WC recently posted this to a fantasy writer’s blog, in response to a couple of particularly ignorant comments on themes in fantasy literature. The fantasy writer is Elizabeth Moon. The works in question are her Paladin’s Legacy arc of stories.

Terry Pratchett, in his novel Guards, Guards, has described “Critters,” which devour good writing and excrete thin volumes of literary criticism. WC is skeptical of literary criticism in general and searching for themes in particular.

Many critics come to the work they are criticizing with a preconceived world view; for example, a Marxist critic will always find Marxist or anti-Marxist theses and themes in the work. It’s a Procrustean approach: strap the author to the frame, and lop off the inconvenient parts, and then apply your world view to what’s left.

Worse still are the ones whose criticism is that a work of literature “doesn’t have a theme,” because they lack the wit to find one.

WC can count on one hand – with digits left over – the number of critical essays that actually gave me insight into the work WC had read. Which is what WC understands literary criticism is supposed to entail. Besides excreting those thin volume of criticism.

Continue to write well, Ms. Moon. Obey your rules of writing. And ignore the critics, including WC.

N.B.: Elizabeth Moon’s rules of writing:

1. Shut up and write (or it never gets written).
2. Don’t bore the reader (or it never gets read.)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio: Watching the Carcass Rot

Readers will remember that the US Department of Justice had called out Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio as a racist bigot. Arpaio is a panderer, playing to the worst instincts of his constituents, in the tradition of Huey Long or Joe McCarthy. It’s usually a messy business when a panderer’s schemes start to unravel. Sheriff Arpaio’s is certainly messy enough.

Most recently, the Arizona Supreme Court has disbarred Arpaio’s lawyer, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, and two of his subordinates.

The 457-page decision is amazing in its own right. The introduction and the conclusion, in particular, are florid, overwrought and borderline hysterical. A sample:

This case is replete with intentionally orchestrated malignant actions. To proclaim they meant no one harm is nonsensical. They meant no one well either.The facts within this multi–chaptered story underscore the misery that lays dormant, expectant and waiting for the moment when such a self–centered theme is played to the staccato machine–gun fire of a series of unethical actions in harmony with malevolent rationalizations. This Panel strongly believes that history will characterize the melodrama inflicted on various individuals at such a staggering cost to the taxpaying public in Maricopa County as tragic, unwarranted and without excuse.

Whew! WC, to his recollection, has never seen “machine-gun” and “harmony” in the same sentence before.

But once you get past the florid introduction, the facts – most of them undisputed – are well laid out and the inferences drawn carefully and systematically. Unhappily, at least for WC, there are no links to the specific ethical rules that respondents Andrew P. Thomas, Lisa M. Aubuchon and Rachael R. Alexander violated. The facts are all there. Their conduct is both objectively and subjectively outrageous. But at no point WC oculd find was there a specific determination that Thomas, Aubuchon and Alexander by their conduct had violated a specific ethical rule.

In Alaska, at least, that omission would cause a reviewing court to send the decision back for more work. Arizona may have different ideas, but before you can conclude someone has broken an ethical rule and should be disbarred, you need to identify the ethical rule involved and show the elements of that rule have been violated. While the decision identifies copious, outrageous conduct, the link to those specific rules seems to be missing.

In the meantime, Thomas and Aubuchon are disbarred for five years. Under Arizona rules they can re-apply for admission to the state bar after that time, but will be re-admitted only on a showing they have rehabilitated themselves. Alexander got six months and one day of suspension, a lesser sanction.

Thomas and Aubuchon held a press conference on April 12, claiming that they were “just doing their job.” Thomas later did a television interview claiming to have done nothing wrong. Of course, if they had been doing their job the unsupported charges Thomas and Aubuchon brought wouldn’t have been dismissed for lack of evidence. And the independent, Colorado-based investigator likely wouldn’t have asserted the charges in the first place. And if Mr. Thomas would address the merits, and not engage in ad hominem fallacies, he’d be more persuasive. As for the claim that “Arizona, after what happened yesterday, has become Mexico,” WC respectfully suggests that it is the other way around. Maricopa County, Sheriff Arpaio’s little fiefdom, is slowly returning to the rule of law and American values.

There are no discipline panels for county sheriffs, of course. The US Department of Justice has a criminal investigation of Sheriff Arpaio under way, but it’s apparently moving very slowly.

As you would expect, there are numerous civil rights cases against Sheriff Joe and Maricopa County, brought by the victims of his outrageous conduct. In a consolidated set out those cases, an Arizona U.S. District Judge recently ruled that Sheriff Arpaio’s conduct was sufficiently outrageous that he should not be entitled to immunity as a government official, but instead should face personal liability. This is punitive damages territory under the federal civil rights statutes.

Sheriff Joe is standing for reelection. Apparently, there’s a decent chance he will be reelected by the good citizens of Maricopa County, which just goes to show that democracy is an imperfect form of government. Because every criminal case Sheriff Joe handles will be colored by his misconduct; his credibility and the credibility of the entire sheriff’s office are badly damaged. Criminal cases going to trial will focus on the credibility of the sheriff’s office deputies and prosecutors involved, not the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Many cases prosecuted by these three will have to be reviewed for prosecutorial misconduct. All this will cost more, cloud and delay justice and divert resources from the main business of protecting the public.

In electing a “law and order” sheriff, Maricopa County has gotten neither.

Department of Modest Victories: Connecticut Repeals Death Penalty

It took nine hours of debate, but the Connecticut House of Representatives voted to repeal the death penalty, following earlier approval by the state senate. Governor Dannel Malloy is expected to sign the bill into law, making Connecticut the 17th state to abolish the death penalty. WC’s views on this issue can’t be a surprise to readers: if and when the criminal justice system is perfect, then we can consider irreversible penalties. It’s not; we can’t.

This may be a hopeful trend. Connecticut will become the fifth state in five years to abandon the death penalty. In California, where the death penalty was expanded by initiative in 1978, the lead sponsor of that initiative is now calling for abolition of the death penalty. He points out California spent $4 billion executing just 13 criminals. If there is a deterrent – and that’s seriously open to question – you’re not getting much deterrent for $4 billion, and the money could be much better spent.

Call it a modest victory, or a hopeful sign.

Fallacies: The Naturalistic Fallacy and ‘Social Darwinism’

Social Darwinism is back in the air. President Obama recently criticized Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget as “social Darwinism.” But before the President, the Neocons or anyone else ventures too far down that path, it’s worth the time and effort to understand what social Darwinism is.Rich Lowry plainly doesn’t know.

After all, social Darwinism has been tied to eugenics, the the Third Reich, to racism and claims of Northern European racial superiority. Some of the vilest human conduct of the last 150 years has been performed in the name of one or another theory of social Darwinism. What is this theory?

Philip Kitcher’s explanation is as good as any:

The heart of social Darwinism is a pair of theses: first, people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop; second, intensifying competition enables the most talented to develop their potential to the full, and thereby to provide resources for a society that make life better for all. It is not entirely implausible to think that doctrines like these stand behind a vast swath of Republican proposals, including the recent budget, with its emphasis on providing greater economic benefits to the rich, transferring the burden to the middle-classes and poor, and especially in its proposals for reducing public services. Fuzzier versions of the theses have pervaded Republican rhetoric for the past decade (and even longer).

The thing is, the premises are both false and it’s not Darwinism in any accepted sense of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

If you malnourish a child and its suffers developmental disabilities as a result, whatever that child’s potential abilities, they will never be expressed. If a child as fetal alcohol as a result of its mother’s consumption of alcohol during pregnancy, the child is unlikely to succeed, no matter how nourishing its environment or loving its parents. If you deny a child an adequate education, then no matter what the child’s talents may be, they will never be realized. And we all know of people with immense talents who, for whatever reason, never realized that talent. The first premise, that intrinsic abilities will always be expressed, is simply false.

The idea that competition in the context of human behavior determines who among the talented succeeds is a misstatement of evolutionary theory. Is there any reader who thinks that George W. Bush would have “succeeded” if he has been borne into a lower middle class family and not been born, you know, a Bush? Any school teacher will tell you that the best predictor for a student’s success in school is the extent of parental involvement.

Evolution has made the cheetah very, very fast. Cheetahs with the genetic adaptations to run fast reproduced more successfully. Herbert Spencer thought that evolution operated at the level of human behavior sociology and economics. That evolution would make humans very, very successful. There’s no evidence to support his hypothesis. There’s no known genetic links for financial success. DNA doesn’t seem to enter into it. Social Darwinism is based on a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works. WC is of the school that regards progressivism as a profound misunderstanding of evolution.

In many ways, social Darwinism is an instance of the Naturalistic Fallacy. That fallacy occurs when someone concludes that if a behavior occur in nature, it is “good” and if it doesn’t occur in nature, it is “bad.” Evolution occurs in nature, so it must be “good” if it is extended to human behavior. The irony of evolution-denying Neocons unconsciously making this claim is not lost on WC.

Examined carefully, the Naturalistic Fallacy is claptrap. Birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide, homicide and cannibalism. It’s natural. Does that mean it is “good”? Altruism occurs extensively in nature. Shouldn’t that mean it is “good,” too? WC watched Gentoo Penguins endlessly steal from each other; does that mean theft is “good”? WC is an avid naturalist and a hard core birder. But just because Long-tailed Jaegers steal other Jaegers’ eggs and kids to feed their own chicks and kids doesn’t make infanticide “good.”

In other ways, social Darminism is an instance of the Moralistic Fallacy, which argues that what is “good” is found in nature. The Seville Statement on Violence is the best-known instance of the Moralistic Fallacy. The Seville Statement was designed to refute “the notion that organized human violence is biologically determined.”

Nature is amoral and vastly complex. We cannot create signposts for human conduct from what occurs or doesn’t occur in nature. That’s committing the Naturalistic Fallacy or its cousin, the Moralistic Fallacy. Social Darwinism is a self-serving excuse for Neocons and their wealthy backers to tilt the already un-level playing field still further in favor of the wealthy and against the poor. President Obama’s only mistake in calling it out was in not deriding social Darwinism at the same time.

Field Guide to Trolls, Second Edition

WC has bowed to the inevitable and updated his Field Guide to Trolls for recent developments. Yes, the post is a bit lame, but for reasons WC doesn’t pretend to understand, the original is by a considerable margin WC’s most popular post, ever.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published A Field Guide to Copyright Trolls, which is useful as far as it goes, but it omits all of the other species of intellectual property trolls. As a service to WC’s readers, and with apologies to the fine folks at EFF, WC offers a more complete field guide, identifying and describing some of the other species of trolls and related leeches that feed off of dubious property claims and bad manners in the 21st Century.

Illustration	Field Notes
Patent Troll (Not to Scale)	Patent Troll Perhaps the most common kind of troll is the Patent Troll. This pest files broad form patents, usually in “soft” intellectual property like software programs, and then attempts to extort money from anyone writing a remotely similar program.The species was accidentally created by the U.S. Supreme Court when it granted patent protection to software algorithms. Perhaps the best known example of the species is Paul Allen. No matter how much money the Patent Troll may already have, or how ridiculous the claim of patent infringement, the Patent Troll will keep demanding more money. Patent Trolls aren’t confined to computer software and algorithms. The pests occur in many industries. In some cases, for example the cell phone industry, they have created a kind of litigation gridlock by their various claims and counter-claims. WC suspects such antics are only amusing to the lawyers involved. Patent Trolls have recently been criticized as stifling innovation; it’s an argument with merit.
Copyright Troll (4/23/96 - Tom Boyd - Troll Haven)	Copyright Troll The Copyright Troll thinks any use of the word “the, “a” or “and” is an infringement of their prior use of the word, and attempts to extort money for the perceived infringement. The Copyright Troll has been around much longer than the Patent Troll, and several sub-species have evolved. Probably the most common subspecies is johndough. The subspecies feeds by filing a blizzards of lawsuits against persons unknown (“John Does”) and hoping that one of the lawsuits generates money. A representative example would be the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG), which has filed several “John Doe” lawsuits in Washington, D.C., implicating well over 14,000 individuals. Some scientists speculate that johndough may be a law firm mimicking a true troll. A second subspecies, selfinflictus, may be in danger of extinction. The best known example of the subspecies, Righthaven, LLC, was recently kneecapped by a federal judge. Righthaven sued anyone who used more than five lines from content on which it claimed a copyright. Even for a troll, it has disgusting habits. Several judges in various Righthaven cases have strongly suggested that a post on another site was protected by the legal doctrines of fair use and implied license. In other words, that the business model – for a loose definition of that term, was fatally flawed. Update: and Righthaven was tagged for another $32,000 on November 10, 2011 for claiming copyright when it didn’t have it.
Music Troll	The Music Troll, a/k/a RIAA Troll The Music Troll was apparently created by a group of unknown record companies in reaction to declining music sales in the recording industry. Like most such monsters, its actions arguably have only worsened its creator’s problems. The premise of the Music Troll was that if you sued enough people they’d buy something from you. It’s utterly amazing to WC that no one stopped to think about this premise for a moment. Sometimes you have to wonder if anyone thinks at all. But WC digresses… Sometimes called the Recording Industry Association of America (“RIAA”) Troll, it has filed tens of thousands of lawsuits against citizens who share music in violation of RIAA’s interpretation of the law. Aided and abetted by dubious actions of Congress, RIAA has issued of a subpoena to a recently deceased 83-year-old woman, an elderly computer novice, and a family reportedly without any computer at all. While the RIAA Troll has gotten some impressively large jury verdicts, and a lot of publicity, record and CD sales have continued to shrink. The RIAA Troll still thinks declining music sales is because of music sharing, despite the evidence. That evidence is that ”Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.” Phil Spector 2009 Mug Shot (There is no proof all this was Phil Spector‘s idea, although his mugshot admittedly looks remarkably like a RIAA Troll. It may just be a coincidence, but RIAA’s rate of filing lawsuits has declined noticeably since Spector began serving his sentence for the second degree murder of Lana Clarkson. But WC digresses… Again…)
Common Internet Troll	Internet Troll In Internet slang, an Internet Troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. WC assumes his readers are thoroughly familiar with this species, and don’t require examples. If you’ve been living in the woods and haven’t encountered this species. a thorough discussion is here. Delingpole claims to recognize subspecies of this cretin; WC doesn’t think it is worth the effort.
Fremont Troll, a/k/a Troll Under the Bridge	The Fremont Troll The Fremont Troll is not a troll at all, but an exceptionally clever and well-executed bit of art work. A very large bit of art work, as it were; that’s a real Volkswagen Beetle under its left paw. The sculpture was brilliantly parodied by Terry Pratchett in his short story, “Troll Bridge.” Pratchett had been in Seattle for a book signing, and a fan, after many banananana daiquiris, took Pratchett to see the sculpture. One thing led to another.

This is admittedly an incomplete bestiary. If WC’s readers have examples of other kinds of annoying trolls plaguing the World Wide Web in the second decade of the new millennium, they are invited to provide descriptions in comments.

ESA Has Bad News for Senator Inhofe (R, OK)

Readers will recall that Senator James Inhofe (R, OK) doesn’t believe in anthropogenic global climate change, and has even written a very bad book about it, The Greatest Hoax. His arguments are a mix of appeals to ignorance, big lies and bad biblical scholarship. It’s not a mindset that is easily influenced by evidence. But there is still more evidence that the polar regions, the areas that climate science predicts would show the first and most dramatic evidence of warming, are behaving as predicted.

The European Space Agency has published maps showing in high detail warming of the permafrost zones in the polar regions. This animated GIF is pretty explicit:

Polar Satellite Image - Thawing Permafrost

Melting of permafrost creates two separate sets of problems. First, it causes the ice in the soil to melt. The ground collapses; the technical term is subsidence. The collapse of ground not only changes the surface topography. Anything built on it – roads, bridges, buildings, pipelines – will collapse. The Transalaska Pipeline is famously built with thermopiling to keep the permafrost frozen; when it thaws as  result of climate change, the technology will fail.

Even more importantly, frozen soils are laced with organic material. Because they are frozen, they are preserved. If they thaw, the organics will decay, rot and give off staggering amounts of CO2 and methane, accelerating the rate of increase of greenhouse gases and, in turn, accelerated global warming.

And there are truly immense amounts of CO2 in those frozen organics. About half of the world’s organic carbon is frozen in northern permafrost. It’s more than double the amount already in the atmosphere as CO2 and methane.

So as you watch ESA’s nifty graphic, and see for yourselves have much more extensive the thaw regions are becoming, and how rapidly, consider it represents not just an engineering nightmare, but also a tripling of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Senator Inhofe may take refuge in his invincible ignorance, or in his biblical interpretations. But he’s the man in the burning house, who pulls his pillow over his head because the smoke alarm is shrieking. The issue is what the good voters of Oklahoma were thinking of when they elected this fool.

The Boss Does Rage: Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball

Wrecking Ball Album Cover

From the deeply ironic opening song, “We Take Care of our Own,” to the two bonus tracks on the CD, “Swallowed Up (in the Belly of the Whale)” and “American Land,” Springsteen rages against what has happened to our country. It’s powerful stuff. Can a 62-year old, multi-millionare rock star still relate to his roots in the underclass? Beyond question.

Springsteen does it with irony in “We Take Care of Our Own,”

The road of good intentions
Has gone dry as a bone
We take care of our own
We take care of our own
Wherever this flag is flown
We take care of our own

Politicians tried to copt his mega-hit, “Born in the USA.” He’s made certain none of them will try to use “We Take Care of Our Own.”

He does it by ambush in “Easy Money,” where a love song twists into a date for armed robbery. In “Shackled and Drawn,” he makes overt reference to the Great Recession:

Gambling man rolls the dice
Workingman pays the price
It’s still fat and easy up on Banker’s Hill
Up on Banker’s Hill, the party’s going strong
Down here below we’re shackled and drawn

But the song that will take you the edge of tears is “Jack of All Trades,” a mournful, slow-walk piano ballad about a skilled guy, out of work, who swears to his wife, “I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be all right,” and you can hear him trying to convince himself it’s true. And the barely suppressed rage at what has happened.

If this sounds like portions of Springsteen’s 1984-era recession album, Born in the USA, and especially “My Hometown,” Springsteen revisits that hometown in “Death to My Hometown,” and everything is gone. “The vultures picked our bones.” He’s pretty explicit that it’s far worse now.

Even the sweet bits are tinged with anger. Old songs are re-worked with new meanings. “Wrecking Ball.” the title track, was originally a whimsical, off-the-cuff tribute to the New Jersey Meadowlands, just before it was demolished, with the former home of the New York Giants taunting the wrecking crew, “C’mon and take your best shot, Let me see what you got, Hit me with your wrecking ball.” The defiance now is bluster, sad braggadocio that the narrator knows are just empty boasts.

The late, great Clarence Clemons’ sax is featured on two cuts, most notably a studio version of the 2001 anthem, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” and the liner notes include a part of Springsteen’s eulogy, with the punchline, “Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies. He leaves when we die.” But this isn’t an E Street Band album at all, except for “Hope and Dreams.” The music is complex, layered and mixed, far from the disciplined, straight ahead garage band sound of the E Streeters. The hot guitar solos go Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine.

Springsteen makes it explicit in the bonus track, “Swallowed Up (in the Belly of the Whale),”

We trusted our skills and our good sails
Our faith that with God the righteous
In this world would prevail
But we’ve been swallowed up
We’ve been swallowed up
Disappeared from this world
We’ve been swallowed up.

This is a superb album. And an unflinching, unrelenting criticism of our society and our politics. You can listen to the music and admire Springsteen’s growth and adaptability – there’s even a 16-bar rap. But if you listen to the lyrics, there’s an undirected, burning rage at what the country has done to itself. The Boss is at the top of his art still.

Romney and Reality: Taxes

The Mitt is claiming that Americans are over-taxed, and has promised to slash income taxes. The reality is very different. Here’s a chart, courtesy of Off the Charts, showing the current and historic median federal income tax rates paid by a family of four:

Federal Income Tax Rates, Family of Four, 1955-2011

The Mitt is campaigning both to slash the deficit and to cut taxes on the wealthy. Meanwhile. he wants tp ramp up defense spending to levels beyond even Cold War levels. He seems to want to repeat Reagan. But Reagan came to office at peak taxation and we are at 1955 levels.

To quote Andrew Sullivan, “This is what happens when ideology simply doesn’t shift to adapt to reality, and when one party refuses to tell people that they cannot have their cake and eat it too.” The Mitt’s campaign position is delusional, not as a metaphor, in the clinical sense.

We’ll have to see if the voters share the delusion.

A Really Big Big Bird

To readers of a certain age, Big Bird, muppet and perennial star of Sesame Street, is an icon. Big Bird is also big, a free-standing puppet that is 8 feet 2 inches tall. But there’s a new Big Bird on the scene, a really big bird, or at least a proto-bird. Meet Yutyrannus huali, which means “beautiful feathered tyrant” in a combination of Latin and Mandarin.

Yutyrannus huali and Big Bird, to Scale - Original by Brian Choo, Big Bird added by WC

Fossils of this newly-discovered Lower Cretaceous/Late Jurassic dinosaur, a cousin to the later and famous T. Rex, was found in Liaoning Province in northeastern China. Plainly visible in the fossilized remains were impressions of feathers; this 30-foot long dinosaur has feathers. The feathers were simple filaments, like the fuzzy down of a modern baby chick and not the evolved, variable plumes of an adult bird, but plainly feathers.

Yutyrannus huali Tail Feathers, Xang Hailong

The original article in Nature (pay wall). What makes these discoveries remarkable are that these fossils are much older than the previous earliest known feather dinosaurs, they occur on animals 30-40 times larger than previously known, and they occur on adults, killing the theory is was insulation for dinosaur kids.

Dinosaur geeks will take WC to task for calling Y. huali a “proto-bird,” this is a different lineage than the family of dinosaurs believed to have evolved to birds. But you don’t have to be able to fly to be a bird; you need feathers and eggs. Q.E.D.

What was the purpose of the feathers? Sexual characteristic? Insulation? Something else? Feathers represent a significant energy investment, and the floor is open to speculation as to the evolutionary pressure that caused these big beasties to develop feathers.

It must be a very exciting time to be a dinosaur paleontologist. WC may lack the patience for  paleontology. But the recent discoveries are nothing short of amazing.

Snow Buntings in Fairbanks

Dozens of bird species migrate to interior Alaska each spring but the first, the harbinger of Spring, is the Snow Bunting. You don’t have to be a birder to be excited about the arrival of Snow Buntings; it means spring, after a long, dark winter.

And they are here. Winter’s not over – it’s snowing as WC writes – but the first feathered signs of spring are in town.

Snow Bunting Foraging

These birds pass only pass through in Spring migration; they breed in high Arctic tundra; famously, they also nest in cavities in houses in Barrow. They stop here to re-fuel on seeds and winter-killed bugs, or to wait out storms.

Female Snow Bunting, with the over-the-shoulder look

The birds are nearly invisible when viewed from the front, a nice adaptation for a bird that migrates while there is still snow around.

Snow Bunting, front view on snow

If you are lucky, you may see a flock of these chunky sparrows flying around fields in Interior Alaska the next week or two. Their white and black wing patterns make them look like some kind of snowstorm. But it means it is spring.

Elizabeth Moon: Oath of Fealty

Oath of Fealty Cover

The Deed of Paksenarrion was very well done, especially for a first novel series, but it left any number of loose ends. Paks’ “Deed” had left entire countries in disarray. It’s the classic problem for fantasy readers: the Hero comes in, cleans up the bad guys, Good triumphs over Evil and then the Hero rides off into the sunset. How does the world cope with the consequences, the chaos that has been created?

Moon returned to Paks’ world with two prequels in The Legacy of Gird, but both were pretty dark. And the second novel in that arc, Liar’s Oath, wasn’t that good. “Legacy” has never been as popular as “Deed.” And, besides, they offered only the barest hints and a glimpse of what happened in Paks’ time after the events of “Deed.”

Now, at long last, with Oath of Fealty, Moon has returned to the world and time of Paksenarrion. The first of a projected five volume story arc called “Paladin’s Legacy,” this is What Happened Next.

While we have had to wait a very long time to hear the rest of the story, the good news is that Ms. Moon’s formidable plotting and writing skills have improved over the years. “Fealty” is a page turner, even more than “Deed” was.

We follow events across the Eight Kingdoms and even into Aarenis as the impact of Paks’ actions spread across her world. The story picks up the evening of Duke Phelan’s arrival in Lyonya – the last scene in “Deed” – and follows the very different consequences for the Duke’s captains, Dorrin and Arcolin, for the Crown Prince of Tsaia and other major and minor characters from “Deed.”

Paks herself appears, but she is a relatively minor character in “Fealty,” important but not the focus of the story. Despite the lapse of 22 years, the characters and events are consistent; too often, in late-arriving sequels, there are annoying inconsistencies and contradictions. Not here.

According to Moon’s blog, this is the first of a projected five volume arc, “Paladin’s Legacy.” Certainly some of the characters are left in peril at the end of “Fealty,” and there are important plot threads left unresolved. But this is a complete novel, just as the books in the first trilogy were. It is also an immensely satisfying read. Dorrin, in particular, is well-written and has moments that the 22-year younger Moon probably could not have written.

Bravo, Ms. Moon. Exceptionally well done. While Moon has written “Fealty” so it can be read without having read “Deed,” I suggest that “Fealty” will be much more satisfying if you read “Deed” first.