State of the Discussion

After the Civil War, succession became a dead letter. You can get into the Union but it will take really extraordinary circumstances to get out. Federalism and the Constitution also makes internal administrative reform really difficult. The state boundaries are what they are. In a weaker federal system like India or in a centralized state like France, you can adjust boundaries as you see fit. Not in the United States.

I also think it'd be wildly selfish of California to do so; if they did they'd be massively screwing the rest of the country in exchange for relatively little benefit, at least as far as I can tell.

Golly. I was totally wrong. Check out this official letter from Fresno State:

Dear Campus Community,

I write to provide an update regarding the university’s review of comments made last week by Professor Randa Jarrar, following the passing of former First Lady Barbara Bush. This issue has raised many important questions about the scope of free speech and the extent to which a member of our university community can be held accountable for expressing his or her personal views.

Professor Jarrar’s conduct was insensitive, inappropriate and an embarrassment to the university. I know her comments have angered many in our community and impacted our students. Let me be clear, on campus and whenever we are representing the university, I expect all of us to engage in respectful dialogue.

Immediately following Professor Jarrar’s tweets last Tuesday, we carefully reviewed the facts and consulted with CSU counsel to determine whether we could take disciplinary action. After completing this process, we have concluded that Professor Jarrar did not violate any CSU or university policies and that she was acting in a private capacity and speaking about a public matter on her personal Twitter account. Her comments, although disgraceful, are protected free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Additionally, although Professor Jarrar used tenure to defend her behavior, this private action is an issue of free speech and not related to her job or tenure. Therefore, the university does not have justification to support taking any disciplinary action. Professor Jarrar will remain on leave through the Spring semester, which she had previously requested before this incident. This matter has highlighted some important issues that deserve further consultation with our academic leadership.

Our duty as Americans and as educators is to promote a free exchange of diverse views, even if we disagree with them. At Fresno State, we encourage opinions and ideas to be expressed in a manner that informs, enlightens and educates without being disparaging of others. It makes me proud when I see our students, faculty and staff debate and learn from each other. This is how we boldly educate and empower our students to succeed.

I want to thank all of you for sharing your views and opinions. By doing so, you demonstrate care for our university and commitment to our students’ success.

Sincerely,

Joseph I. Castro, Ph.D., M.P.P.

President

They actually came out and supported the First Amendment, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom.

They even covered her comments about how she can't be fired because she has tenure!

Good on them.

A riot is what we call violence outside of legal control. When you control the law, there isn’t any need to riot.

Donno. I can think of lots of situations where the people who control the law were/are more free to use violence outside of the law, not less. The police turn a blind eye towards their favorites (or the favored of their political masters) and those favored run amuck.

I'm not a fan of rioting given current USAian circumstances (i.e. there were/are other times and places where rioting was/is justified, if not necessarily pragmatically a good choice): you'll get no excuses from me for the various left wing rioters (e.g. Berkeley, Seattle). I would love to see a lot more straightforward condemnation of rioting and no-platforming from the center-left (e.g. Democratic officeholders) than we have had so far, although I'm not holding my breath: the present constellations don't augur well for it.

OTOH, assuming that USAian politics are basically stuck being bipolar (two battling coalitions with occasional migrations of subgroups from one coalition to t'other), I still have miniscule hope for the center left, versus no hope at all for the (center?) right meaning actually-existing Republican officeholders: to the best of my knowledge no Republican officeholders and exactly one right leaning pundit (Gracy Olmstead - not exactly a household name - writing in The Federalist: may her reputation soar) took clear anti-Bundy stance when his crew were merely rejecting law and threatening mass violence*.

*as opposed to later when it turned out Bundy was also insufficiently circumspect on race relations - evidently that was a bridge too far, as opposed to say birtherism which was clearly an excellent opening bid to get the Republican nomination.

Okay...

SCI01: Unsurprising, to anyone who has been paying attention. The interesting parts of material science requires access to IC-style fab lines running from tens to hundreds of millions. Systematic astronomy requires scopes running to billions of dollars (Weber). Experimental physics platforms run tens of billions (CERN, ITER). The exceptions are in biologic sciences, where CRISPR and other tools are making it cheap to do stuff that used to be hideously expensive. Yes, I"m ignoring leading-edge engineering, eg, AERO03.

TECH01: If you can dissolve it in a solvent that can be removed, or converted to an inert solid by some means that doesn't mess with the active ingredients -- evaporation, thermal setting, UV curing, etc -- someone will 3D-print it. Caseless ammo is always going to be tricky. Not to mention that the obvious place where the weight savings is most valuable -- aircraft -- is rapidly reaching the point where cannons are a second- or third-order consideration. Apaches and F-35s are missile platforms, not gun platforms. (F-35 software was going to include the ability to actually fire the cannon in approx 2020; until the press made that an embarrassment, none of the Air Force, Navy, or Marines cared particularly.)

I actually ended up discussing SCI01 with a friend separately, who unlike me is a scientist (research Neurologist) that I like to discuss such things with, so I'll condense a few of his comments for the group:

Good stuff. I would agree that there is just too much to know in any given field, so more specialization and more researchers are needed to advance a given branch of science further.
In my field, we know so little that I disagree about advances being less but I lament the slow progress. We get eager for treatments and we need money to address this but we also need more funding for basic science - such as understanding Alzheimer’s dx. This unfortunately does not profit well directly - “priceless.”

This chunk from part 2 generated caused me to flag for later reading/research:

The throw money at it tendency. Many companies have responded to competition by “adding human resources and other resources to R&D,” the authors note. They add that there may be “a bias in large companies to equate professional success with the size of one’s budget.”
Investors and managers are now questioning the throw money at it tendency and seeking to slash R&D costs, according to Scannell et al. They add: “The risk, however, is that the lack of understanding of factors affecting return on R&D investment that contributed to relatively indiscriminate spending during the good times could mean that cost-cutting is similarly indiscriminate. Costs may go down, without resulting in a substantial increase in efficiency.”

I like the revolver theory idea. I tend to believe in it.

Also--and I realize this is not quite the same thing we're talking about--I tend to think of most protests and in-your-face tactics to be blunt instruments, best used when the target is obvious AND when smashing the target will actually do some good.

I've read a handful of articles talking about the awful things happening to coral reefs, specifically "bleaching".

"That's awful", I thought and then didn't think about it.

In preparing for a VR game night with co-workers, I picked up a little "game" called "theBlu". Ten bucks full price, I bought it on mega-sale.

It's not even a game, really. You're just put down into one of three scenes in the ocean. In one, you're in the deepest depths and you can watch an Anglerfish do some light hunting. (You're given a flashlight that can let you look around your area but you don't need it to be on to see the Anglerfish do its thing.) In another, you have an up-close-and-personal moment with a whale. In the last, you're put smack dab in the middle of a coral reef as a bunch of fish migrate through. Interactivity is limited to fish not wanting to be touched and swimming away from your "hands" as you try to touch them.

All of these were stunningly beautiful... but it was the coral reef one that made me say "oh" several times as I looked around.

VR is potentially a tool to make people care, and care *VERY* deeply, about such things as bleaching. Show what the reef used to look like. Then show them what it looks like now. Then show them what it's going to look like in 5, 10, 20 years if something isn't done.

This could be one hell of a powerful educational tool. Take people places they'd never ordinarily go and show them "this is what is happening" and then put out a call to action. You can make people care about a place they've seen and looked around in a way that you could never make them care about with mere words and, maybe, some high-quality photos.

Who cares if the pictures are "real" and the VR is "fake". Put the person in the middle of a migration and tell them that such migrations are threatened and see what happens.

The State of Jefferson.
On the East Side.
Where you can finally get a piece of the pie.
Yes, it took a whole lotta tryin'
Just to get up that hill.
But now we're up in the big leagues
Gettin' our turn at bat.

The “State of Jefferson” cranks don’t realize that no matter how they cut it, California is pretty blue these days and they would find themselves in just another blue state and not a red one.

Sure, blue is blue, but there are different shades of blue, and as Br. Cain likes to remind people, the concerns of urban blue and rural blue don't always align perfectly.

@doctor-jay I can personally promise I will not.

(Just promise me in return that you won't characterize Colorado Springs by Doug Bruce, or Seattle by either Tim Eyman OR Jeff Bezos ...)

Every year comes with obtusely written propositions that obfuscate more than they illuminate, are often conflicting, unconstitutional, and a waste of time and resources.

Just wanted to highlight that amazing sentence seperate from the debate at hand. I enjoyed it.

The right was rioting? I don’t remember anything in last 47 years.

It's rare but it happens.

Year 2000, during the Bush v Gore stalemate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

Similarly one of those militia groups staged a land protest out West within the last 5 years or so which seemed pretty lawless.

Are you arguing that the loudest voices of the pro-life movement claim to believe that abortion is murder?

If we define "the loudest voices" to be "all of the major pro-life organizations", then yes.

And they are to the pro-life people what the NRA is to the gun rights people, so it's not unreasonable to think they're more extreme. However with more than one group it's interesting there's no room for a less extreme group.

And more importantly, these are the groups which are attempting to make law. Buying/advising politicians, that sort of thing.

Dark Matter: “The bulk of the pro-life movement claims to believe 1) Abortion is murder.”

@maribou What proof do you have of that statement?

You're the first person I've heard suggest they don't believe that.

https://medium.com/@kes159/abortion-murder-or-a-womens-right-720a029fae5

https://www.viralbeliever.com/bible-studies/abortion-is-murder/

http://christiangunslinger.blogspot.com/2014/04/abortion-why-abortionmurder-should-be.html

https://shirtsthatspeak.com/product/abortion-is-murder-shirt/

Donald Trump abortion comments exposed the incoherence of the pro-life Right.
The Republican Party, its presidential candidates, and all major pro-life organizations claim to believe two things about abortion. First, “unborn children” deserve the same legal protection as born children. Second, a woman who hires someone to kill her unborn child should not be punished.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/donald_trump_abortion_comments_exposed_the_incoherence_of_the_anti_abortion.html

So apparently the pro-life movement wants abortion treated exactly the same as murder... except there shouldn't be any punishment. However if they ever are successful at making a fetus a full person, the logic leads where the logic leads.

I would say it is more accurate to assert that the vast majority of pro-life and pro-choice people have much more nuanced and complex view than the party line would suggest.

The idea that a fertilized ovum is a baby, or that a 8 month fetus is no more than a hangnail, are positions that I think very few people actually hold.

As evidence I point to the polls showing strong support for choice in the first trimester, dwindling to very little in the last trimester.

The idea that human-ness happens at some unspecified and unknowable place in between frustrates ideologues, but happens to be the position most people including myself hold.

I love all forms of purple except magenta, which is pink.
Thank you for the welcome! I dont know about “high status”, but I’m happy to join this crowd.

@maribou

There are plenty of other pro-life positions.

The bulk of the pro-life movement claims to believe
1) Abortion is murder.
2) Thus the current situation is tolerating genocide.
3) This should be handled via criminal law, i.e. establish the legal theory that abortion is murder.

And normally there's silence on the subject of what happens to women who have abortions after it's outlawed, and deer-in-headlights looks if the topic is raised to the typical supporter. If pressed on the subject we tend to get either "pray for them" (because that's what police do with murderers) or "treat it as murder". Apparently after it's outlawed abortion will magically stop.

The higher level pro-life people will talk about how only abortion doctors will be targeted and/or punished, but that ignores the technology for self-induced abortions exists.

Calling for death by hanging is intellectually honest. If we go down this path then "punish the woman" is such an obvious result even Trump saw the implications.

These laws will be ignored without strict and harsh enforcement, that's why the job needs to be handed to the criminal law enforcement machinery. That the pro-life movement flinches away from looking at or defining what "strict and harsh enforcement" means is besides the point. Society already has established, accepted rules for what to do about 1st degree murder, genocide, and the like.

I haven't read Williamson's work directly, just comments on it, however as far as I can tell; His problem is he's being more honest and using less magic thinking than is politically correct.

I like honest. I dislike magic thinking. If and when we decide to treat abortion like murder, I expect something a LOT closer to "hang them" than "pray for them".

That was the original thing I think, yes - you install a horribly insecure IoT (redundant descriptors, I know) door lock and surveillance camera system, so Amazon delivery folks can unlock your front door, and you can review the surveillance footage to see that all they did was drop off a parcel and leave.

Hi Em -

I too am very glad to have you join. Plus having another person of purple, and one of such high status, is a great leap forward.

(p.s. I certainly hope that your love of "all things purple" extends at a minimum toleration to violet, the sadly monochromatic lesser neighbor of the proudly multichromatic purple sensu stricto)

I’m GC for a state agency (within a larger agency). My agency oversees six smaller divisions, for each of which I provide advice and support, so I am usually working on multiple fires at once. I did write some legislation this year and it passed, so that was cool. But there is a lot of BS intra-bureau power struggles that make it frustrating.