Boss Trump

Poor Donald Trump. Everybody picks on him. And for what? What did Trump do to deserve it? Nothing at all, really. Except for …

I guess you could start with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump handled that by firing the head of the FBI, James Comey. But then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller special counsel to lead the investigation. And it was back on.

But other than obstruction of justice, what has Trump really done that is so bad? I guess you could count that pesky Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution. Trump isn’t supposed to profit from being president. But he still retains ownership interests in businesses that profit in various ways from his presidency, so yeah, he’s breaking the law. Technically. But only a little. So I don’t see what the fuss is about.

Of course, there was that collusion thing, in which Trump’s son was invited to meet Russian officials to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. And he did meet with them. After journalists broke the story of the meeting, Trump lied about the purpose of the meeting. So it appears Trump knew he was breaking federal campaign law. But again, he was breaking the law only a little.

So what else has Trump done that might be considered bad? Let’s see: he did say there were good people on “both sides” of the neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville. He encouraged police officers to rough up people they have under arrest. He shared anti-Muslim content on Twitter. Little things like that.

Oh yeah, he pardoned Joe Arpaio who had been convicted of contempt of court for refusing to obey a court order. And Trump said that he would pardon any of his aides who broke the law to get a wall built. Some lawyers consider that an abuse of the pardon power.

There’s other stuff, but it’s kind of nit-picky. Like, repeatedly pressuring the Department of Justice and the FBI to prosecute and jail political opponents. What’s wrong with that? I hear they do it all the time in Russia and China.

And of course, there are his constant attacks on America’s free press. Trump calls coverage he doesn’t like “fake news” and journalists “the enemy of the American people”. He threatened to change libel laws and revoke licenses. His dislike of CNN led him to try to interfere in the AT&T/Time Warner merger.

There are people who dislike that Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy has separated thousands of children from their families. And the Trump administration has no plan to reunite all children with their families, even deporting some parents while their children remain detained. In legal jargon, this is called “violating immigrants’ right to due process” and lawyers say it’s a bad thing. But a lot of people who are not lawyers say immigrants don’t have rights, so who knows if it’s really bad?

There are people who would disapprove of Trump’s extramarital affairs with Stephanie Clifford (“Stormy Daniels”) and Karen McDougal just before the 2016 election. Knowing he might lose their votes if they learned of his indiscretions, Trump directed Michael Cohen to pay hush money to the two women. Once again, picky federal prosecutors have said that Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator for paying money in an attempt to influence the election. It turns out that you can’t do that. I mean, legally.

The cherry on top, so to speak, is the alleged Ukraine arms-for-dirt incident which launched an impeachment inquiry.

Sometimes it seems everything Trump does breaks some law. The conclusion is obvious. This country has too many laws.

Fink

The song of the day is Wheels from the 2011 album Perfect Darkness by English singer-songwriter Fink (Fin Greenall).

The Anti-Science Crowd

In my humble opinion—which, after all, is what this blog is all about—the reason for so much anti-science thinking today is because of a lack of education about the fundamentals of science. So when people try to refute climate science, or believe vaccinations are harmful, or refuse to believe the Apollo moon landings happened, or think Earth is flat, it’s understandable. They’re looking at the top of the pyramid and they can’t understand what’s holding it up in the air, because they can’t see the rest of the pyramid below the top. They don’t know it exists, so they’re confused.

I’ve spent much of my life immersed in the scientific world. I worked as an engineer, a job in which you’d better believe the science or your career will be very short. Even in high school, I read some fascinating science-oriented books. The book Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif comes to mind. The book is getting long in the tooth now, but it offered a younger me a fascinating glimpse into the scientific hunt for the causes of diseases like malaria and yellow fever. Like reading a detective story, I saw how the building blocks of scientific discovery fall into place.

The human urge to explore and colonize may be pushing us in a bad direction. We are actually considering going to a planet with no liquid water and almost no oxygen. It’s an unlivable place, at least without advanced technology. The danger is that it steals our responsibility to take care of our own planet because, if we mess up here, we think we’ll have a “backup planet”. We won’t.

Too many people today want to live in a fairyland of conspiracy theories and secret technologies. That’s okay as long as we remember it’s just a fairyland—a fun place to visit—but sooner or later we have to come back and live in reality. We humans are changing the world in ways that are not good. Species go extinct every day. There have been five mass extinctions in Earth’s history. A sixth mass extinction is underway. According to a UN report, one in four species are at risk of extinction today as a result of habitat loss, over-exploitation of animal populations, the spread of invasive species and diseases by humans, pollution and climate change.

Is the globe getting hotter and are humans causing it? There is no doubt the world is getting hotter. We have decades of temperature measurements from all over the planet. We have evidence from our own eyes, as invasive species move north, temperate forests recede, ice packs become thinner, sea levels rise and cause more frequent coastal flooding, etc. But is human activity causing all this?

More than 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists answer “Yes” to that question. Numerous scientific societies, science academies, government agencies and intergovernmental bodies agree that human activity is making the Earth warmer. (List)

If we take steps to reduce our impact on climate and it turns out the scientists are wrong, then at worst we will have had no significant impact on climate and its warming is out of our hands. But if we wait until the tipping point is behind us and we have iron-clad proof humans have changed Earth’s climate, we may have no chance to stop it.

According to Wikipedia:

The campaign to undermine public trust in climate science has been described as a "denial machine" organized by industrial, political and ideological interests, and supported by conservative media and skeptical bloggers to manufacture uncertainty about global warming.

Do you want to be scientific and use logic and your own brain? Or do you want to allow vested interests to tell you what to think? You decide. But make your decision as if the future of our planet—your planet—depends on it.

Salmon and Chips

Tonight for dinner I ate skillet-cooked salmon topped with garlic butter. I paired it with a semi-sweet red wine. And for a side—wait for it—potato chips. Or, as the French say, “saumon et croustilles.” I would have eaten sautéed kale or asparagus if only they came in a bag, cooked and ready to eat.

While the salmon cooked, I placed an optimistically named “splatter” screen over the skillet. Here’s how a splatter screen works: large drops of hot oil pop into the screen, which breaks them into tiny droplets before they continue on their journey to the stovetop and countertop. The only problem with a splatter screen is—it’s a screen. If someone threatens to spray you with water, see if you can stay dry by holding up a screen.

What else has happened in the past few days? Well, uh, the sewer line got stopped up and sewage backed up, first into the basement laundry sink, then overflowing onto the floor before I discovered the problem. How bad was it? Bad. Very, very bad. I won’t go into details. Use your imagination. Then let me assure you, it was worse. Next, my magicJack failed. I spent two hours on a fruitless debugging session with their tech support. Got nowhere. Why is it that tech support will point their finger anywhere except at their own product which does, on occasion and inevitably, fail, regardless of what is printed in the tech support troubleshooting manual?

Now it’s 12:30 AM. Probably a good time to try to get some shuteye. Later.

The Nick Tree Band

The song of the day is 2011's Creature Comforts by London-based group The Nick Tree Band.

Livvia

The song of the day is Damn from the 2018 album Damn by singer-songwriter Livvia (Olivia Somerlyn Hollins Christensen).

Late Night Video Fun

Last night, 8 PM. I had a 60 minute video file and I wanted to save the last 3 minutes, and only the last 3 minutes. So I needed a video splitter. It had to be simple enough that I wouldn’t need to spend hours learning it just to make one split, and it had to be free because I only needed to use it one time.

There are a number of free video splitters, but every splitter I downloaded had problems. My video was a Matroska, a frequently-encountered container format, but some splitters could not write a Matroska output file so that was one hurdle. One splitter was so user-unfriendly that I couldn’t figure out how to use it—another hurdle. One splitter could split the file and save the result, but the file length of the result was zero. Another splitter could make any number of splits but would not allow me to define the split points. I even installed VSDC, a nonlinear video editor, but its interface had changed since I last used it and I would have to spend hours re-learning it. And on it went, for three hours.

Finally I dusted off an old splitter that I downloaded a few years ago: Avidemux. I hadn’t tried Avidemux to this point because it is complicated enough that you really have to know a lot about video to use it. But the old Avidemux had no problem reading the video file, and it was easy to set the start and end points.

I left the defaults alone and let Avidemux do its thing. There was one glitch. When I told it to save the file, I got a popup box that read,

“Using H264/H265 in AVI is a bad idea. MKV is better for that. Do you want to continue anyway?”

I didn’t want AVI, I wanted MKV, so I clicked No. Then Avidemux complained that it couldn’t open the Muxer. So I saved the file again, only this time I clicked Yes when it asked if it should continue.

It produced a nice video file. Except for one very tiny problem: the brightness of the video flickered just a little, now and then. Maybe it was because the program needed updating, or maybe one of the dependent libraries needed updating. Maybe it was just a bug. So I downloaded the latest version of Avidemux from FossHub and ran it.

It wrote the output without doing any encoding. (That’s important because re-encoding degrades the quality of the video.) This newer version didn’t object to my using “H264 in an AVI”. It was MKV all the way in a split second. (I know I just came dangerously close to coining a pun.) The video it produced was perfect.

I wish I had more video editing skills. There was a time I did. But that was many yarns ago and I’ve forgotten far more than I remember. Now I know just enough to get myself in trouble. But I muddle onward.

Then it was time for the second big decision of the evening. Do I pour a couple of shots before going to bed, or do I pop the cork on that bottle of Shiraz?

So many decisions.

Glitch in Reality

So this happened. To me. Today.

I drove to Wally World to pickup medications from their pharmacy. While there, I decided to buy a few food items from their grocery.

There is a product called Boost, which is a nutritional supplement drink. I had never bought it so I decided to buy two 6-packs—one vanilla, one chocolate, to try it out.

I went home and put away my purchases. Noon came and I decided to try one of the Boost drinks. I opened the fridge door and was dismayed to see only one six-pack. What happened to the second six-pack?

I considered the possibilities. One: I had left it sitting on the sofa where I put the bags when I entered the house. So I checked. There were no bags on the sofa.

Two: I left the bag in my Jeep. If so, the product would keep until the next time I used the Jeep.

Three: I left it in the cart at the store. If so, I was out of luck.

I went back to the fridge and checked again. Bottom shelf: just one six-pack. I scanned the other shelves but they didn’t have any Boost on them. I shut the door.

Later, I opened the fridge and triple-checked, looking at every item on every shelf. The only six-pack of Boost was on the bottom shelf. I was perplexed, but I put it out of my mind.

An hour later I decided to eat a sandwich for lunch. I opened the door of the fridge to retrieve some ingredients I needed, and the first thing I saw was the bottom shelf. There were the two six-packs of Boost sitting side-by-side!

I’ve experienced this kind of thing before and have described a few of those experiences on this blog. What can a person do but shrug and say, “That’s weird!”

People will say, “The two six-packs were there all along.” To them I say, “Sure, I searched the fridge thoroughly three times and I failed to notice two six-packs sitting side-by-side.” But how realistic an explanation is that?

Remember, in the movie “The Matrix”, when Neo (Keanu Reeves) saw the cat walk by the door twice? My opinion is when these things happen it’s a “glitch in Reality.” Call it parallel realities or whatever you want. When it happens to you, you’ll discover people won’t believe it and will go to any length to dismiss it with the most trivial explanation. But it’s real, and it happens.

E-Cigs

According to the morning TV news, President Trump is considering banning flavored e-cigarettes because of the deaths associated with them. So how many people have died (possibly) because of e-cigarettes? At this time, six people. Plus there are more than 450 cases of pulmonary illness believed to be linked to vaping. So maybe e-cigarettes should be banned.

But not so fast. How many deaths are caused by real cigarettes, which are legally sold every day? In the US, cigarette smoking causes more than 480,000 deaths every year, including more than 41,000 deaths from second-hand smoke. That’s according to a CDC fact sheet. Furthermore, according to the CDC, more than 16 million Americans are living with a disease caused by smoking.

So the US has seen 6 people die from vaping and people are freaking out, while over 480,000 die every year from real cigarettes. But just try banning real cigarettes and see what happens. I’ll tell you now, it won’t be pretty.

LP

The song of the day is Lost On You from the 2015 album Lost On You by singer-songwriter LP (Laura Pergolizzi).