May 25, 2018

Trump's antagonists are enjoying themselves over the break in the momentum toward a North Korean deal.



But the process isn't over, and I assume it's a dealmaking dance in which breaks like this a part of the process. Isn't that what Trump wrote in "The Art of the Deal" and has talked about innumerable times? Trump haters shouldn't exult over his failure until they see how this ends. And maybe even then, they shouldn't exult. Don't we all want a better, safer world? Or is seeing Trump fail better?

459 comments:

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narciso said...

Bolton was for goldwater, he was on Jesse helms staff right out of tale law he is no neocon.

narciso said...

The nexus of the Kiev crisis you find here sixty years ago, yes the Soviets saw it necessary to hunt down a defector in a foreign city:

http://www.brightreview.co.uk/ARTICLE-Bandera.html

Serge plochly fills in the details.

FullMoon said...

Well unlike K. whatever we learned or know about science and molec bio wasn't based in an agenda - let alone K's racist agenda - so hopefully that perspective makes it more interesting. There's a lot going on out there and a lot to keep finding out, but that can only be done if one doesn't impose a narrow agenda on things as K. does.
Interesting. Perhaps links to your published works may serve to educate him.

narciso said...

Eerie the dejavu i' m getting from erdmans



https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-saudi-trade/saudi-arabia-to-exclude-german-firms-from-government-tenders-spiegel-idUSKCN1IQ2GF

narciso said...


Speaking of dejavu:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-spied-for-lbjs-campaign-1527201701?redirect=amp#click=https://t.co/1LujF4jhnp

Bad Lieutenant said...

Narciso, your Bandera piece had this:

...
After some routine intelligence gathering he was given a new assignment straight from Moscow: assassinate Lev Rebet. The senior OUN man was hated by the Soviets for his ideological articles in exile newspapers. Stashynsky flew to Munich with a spray cylinder of liquid poison activated by squeezing a handle. He had tested the weapon in an East German forest on a dog tied to a tree. At the first spray the dog collapsed. It twitched for three minutes and died.

Stashynsky tracked the bald, beret-wearing Rebet around Munich. On 12 October 1957 he approached him on a stairwell with the gas gun hidden in a rolled up newspaper and sprayed the poison in Rebet's face. The OUN man fell. Stashynsky kept walking. The police thought it was a heart attack.

Back in East Berlin his bosses gave him a camera as a present.

Two years later he got his next target. Stepan Bandera.
...

Ian Fleming wins again!

What a storehouse of facts you are.

But please, please, learn to fucking type!

narciso said...

Another erdman potboiler from the 70s, suggested that the Germans if left to their own devices under a franz Joseph Strauss regime would ally with the russians.

Michael K said...

I come back from dinner and find Ritmo defecating all over the thread and Inga and ARM gobbling it up.

Nice work guys.

Why some threads die.

Birkel said...

The typos hide language indicators that might help people identify the anonymous narciso.

Francisco D said...

Ritmo is in da house!

Good night folks.

Inga...Allie Oop said...

Seems like the thread is alive and kicking despite your neglect Michael, lol. No one even knew you were gone.

Inga...Allie Oop said...

“Ritmo is in da house!

Good night folks.”

Coward.

narciso said...

Like some decaying krait dragon, speaking of solo. They won't let the series die a decent ending.

narciso said...

I have left enough clues for those who are paying attention:

Bad Lieutenant said...

Birkel said...
The typos hide language indicators that might help people identify the anonymous narciso.

5/25/18, 9:30 PM


What, you mean to defeat an AI trying to run pattern recognition on him? It sure works on me. Yeah, okay. Maybe he should write in his native language and translate through Google, or AltaVista if Babelfish is still around.

Birkel said...

Han shoot first?
Han Soylo?

narciso said...

You don't want to do that, I used babelfish is a conversation with some in Holland and it's ends like Jeff goldblum in the fly

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-takes-aim-at-federal-bureaucracy-with-new-executive-orders-altering-civil-service-protections/2018/05/25/3ed8bf84-6055-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html?sw_bypass=true&pwa=true

Inga...Allie Oop said...

Narciso,

Noli pati a scelestis opprimi.

I think your typing style is charming.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Coward.

No doubt.

I come back from dinner and find Ritmo defecating all over the thread and Inga and ARM gobbling it up.

Translation: Other people can have conversations without me being in charge of them and that really hurts my feelings.

No one even knew you were gone.

As usual.

The Michael Special K. School of Butthurt Train arrives every day, without delay. How does he imagine that people can discuss anything without him overseeing it all? It's really amazing the childish sense of entitlement he has.

narciso said...

Thanks,

In the last of David downing Berlin station series the protagonist comes upon a thinly disguised Bandera in some Italian safe house and his ticket is punched about a decade early.

Michael K said...

Poor ARM, the oil prices just aren't cooperating.

There goes another theory.

narciso said...

No good deed goes unpunished:

https://babalublog.com

narciso said...

More particularly

https://babalublog.com/page/2/

Michael K said...

These very long threads always seem to end up with Ritmo defecating on them.

I think that maybe all he can do.

Waste of pixels and others' time.

mandrewa said...

ARM said, "To be fair, this was in an era when Skinner still reigned supreme and tabula rasa was viewed as a reasonable description of an infant's brain. Chomsky killed off both those idiocies. No small achievement at the time."

I think it depends on who you are. Because I was there. This was part of my time.

I'd heard of tabula rasa. But I would have thought that was of historical interest, as in, once upon a time people believed this. In fact wasn't this part of what Marxists once believed? But to my mind this was an implausible hypothesis and I would have been surprised to encounter a modern scientist who took it seriously.

I did read Skinner. I had run into his name so many times, that finally I went read something of what he had written. I didn't get very far because I thought it was borderline ridiculous. Again, I thought it was history. I could see it was recent history, but it also seemed just wrong to me.

I would have thought all of this long before I'd read any part of Chomsky's work.

But these were my thoughts. And I knew what some other people were thinking because I had read their books, but a lot of other things I filtered out because I thought they were noise and nonsense.

mandrewa said...

ARM quoted, From Rational-wiki:

Challenges to this received idea [tabula rasa] came first from the field of linguistics. Noam Chomsky, reviewing Skinner's 1959 book Verbal Behavior, concluded that "The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or "hypothesis-formulating" ability of unknown character and complexity."[5] Were the tabula rasa hypothesis true, it would be computationally impossible for human beings to acquire their native languages, much less acquire them with the speed and facility they do. Human children are able to speak well before they are able to handle other complex mental tasks. It therefore must be the case that normal human brains come equipped factory standard with a facility for processing and using language. Other inborn human abilities can be easily demonstrated by the structure of the typical human body. No one had to teach you, nor did you have to figure out yourself, how to use the parallax of your two horizontally separated eyes for the purpose of depth perception, for example. Your brain came pre-equipped with a module to process binocular vision.

I probably first thought about this subject when I was 18. And my passport into the subject would have been Jean Piaget. These were the first books Jean Piaget wrote and I think they were written when he was a teenager, so that would have made it somewhere between 1907 and 1913. The texts I read were written in French and I learned to read French so I could read them. I have the vague memory that there were about ten of them.

Anyway for anyone that had read and understood those books, then the paraphrasing of Chomsky's thoughts from Rational-wiki above is all obvious stuff. This isn't the way Piaget would have put it, because Piaget was approaching the problem from a different angle, but still it's close enough, and Piaget struggles with the problem over many books and to far greater depth.

There's likely a sixty year gap between Piaget first going into this territory and Chomsky's relatively simple poke into a related direction.

And then there are probably other people that I don't know about.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Go play with yourself, Michael K. That's all you can do.

Waste of pixels and others' time.

wholelottasplainin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Michael - your obsession with me really is weird.

Did you want to come over and meet me or something?

I could send you some nude pics instead if that would settle you down.

Let me know your preference. Your frustration is very evident.

wholelottasplainin said...


readering said...
US tried twice to conquer Canada. It conquered northern Mexico, and Congress debated annexing the whole country. It conquered Cuba and Puerto Rico, keeping the latter and a base on the former. It intervened at will throughout Central America and the Caribbean, taking the Canal Zone. Of course, all westward expansion was at the expense of the existing First Nations.

*******************************************

Funny how you glide over any of the reasons why the US went to war with those countries...could it be that they were themselves colonies of other European nations, that the latter had continuing antagonisms toward the upstart new nation ?

The North American continent was virtually empty when the European arrived. Can you give us examples where Stone Age peoples were NOT overwhelmed by encroaching civilizations with superior technologies?

narciso said...

There is ,glenn close level of irony here, p3 reminds of a nazgul that sank douthats blog in the Atlantic about nine heart ago.

Anyways since we've tip toed into the Ukrainian civil war, one should reAlize who the fledgling regime has sought as a standard a fellow who had unclean hands on the border of the bloodlands

narciso said...

We were settlers of a sort in Mexico but the locAl warlord sought to provoke that would be Santa Ana,who lost more territory with each incursion.

walter said...

Blogger President Pee-Pee Tape said...Michael - your obsession with me really is weird. Did you want to come over and meet me or something? I could send you some nude pics instead if that would settle you down.
--
Via PPPT/TTR/Ritmo's projection of immense proportions (and Dahmer-esque proposition), Michael K gets to claim a metoo moment.

Scott M said...

The North American continent was virtually empty when the European arrived. Can you give us examples where Stone Age peoples were NOT overwhelmed by encroaching civilizations with superior technologies?

Don't sell those Paleo-Americans short. Before we arrived, they'd managed to kill off an astounding number of animal species.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

K. has to finish his sex change operation before that applies. Also, K. stalks me in such a weird way that it would be hard for him to claim he/she's being harassed.

But you already knew that.

walter said...

Sad! (retort)

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Did it trigger your depression, walter?

walter said...

Sadder!

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

You are an infinite well of sadness, walter.

Did you want some tissues?

walter said...

Nice try

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

The thing with Chomsky is that he was the first psychologist to really think about the nuts and bolts of how the brain worked. Piaget did not do this and remained something of a nativist. Chomsky realized that the brain is an assembly of specialized subsystems that evolved to deal with specific tasks, not a generalized computing machine. Because this has become the main stream of thought in neuroscience over the last sixty years Chomsky will always be a seminal figure.

This is not to take anything away from Piaget, who is apparently the second most cited psychologist after Skinner.

iowan2 said...

I'm sure it's been mentioned already in comments, but I wont read them all.
The left can ad to its list of things they now support, like MS13, and tearing up the 1st 2cn and 4 amendments. Now they are rooting for the Norks instead of the The Whole World, to keep their Nukes

mandrewa said...

ARM, nativist in this context means "the doctrine that the mind and its capacities are innately structured and that much knowledge is innate."

Now aren't these words just as applicable to Chomsky's hypothesis that you quoted from Rational-wiki above?

Quote: Human children are able to speak well before they are able to handle other complex mental tasks. It therefore must be the case that normal human brains come equipped factory standard with a facility for processing and using language.

Do you think Piaget wasn't aware of this question? He spent many years observing children and listening to and eliciting their explanations of how the world works.
And he discovered that most people have a shared mental framework. And in fact that there is even kind of standard path of different theories about the world that we go through as children.

Do you think he never wondered about language itself, and how it unfolds?

Here I'll make a hypothesis. It's my hypothesis and it's not quite what Piaget would have said, but it's closer to his thinking than that group of people that we call "Chomsky" would have said.

We have a very limited amount of DNA. There is no way we have enough DNA to describe explicitly some factory standard language processing machine. In development, the great mystery is how you get from the very tiny amount of information that we start with to these massive and elaborate structures that somehow most of us share.

It must be that most detail is coming from the universe. Our minds and our language are not some arbitrary structure.

The neurons in our head and their relationships map onto language and of course everything else that we think about. But all we really start with is the cellular machinery, which is a given, and some basic rules and tendencies, which are the only thing we inherit from our ancestors. As these basic rules and tendencies, and the cellular machinery, interact with the universe more elaborate structures and order emerge as a consequence. And then from these structures, even more elaborate structures are constructed.

To some limited degree this is arbitrary and can be influenced by DNA but to a massive degree the possibilities and information that shape these large structures are coming from the universe itself.

It's kind of like math. In fact it's a lot like math.

If we survive long enough, or the species that emerge from us survive long enough, to meet an alien species, I would expect that we will both have maths and that for the greater part our maths will be the same.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

"There is no way we have enough DNA to describe explicitly some factory standard language processing machine."

Not sure this is true, since this is what actually happens. We do have a relatively small number of genes, but they get reused in different patterns over time during development so the combinatorial effects are relatively large.

Michael K said...

We do have a relatively small number of genes, but they get reused in different patterns over time

This refers to "reading frames" and is probably correct,

mandrewa said...

I've heard or I've read papers about certain spots on the chromosome where different but related proteins are transcribed by shifting the reading frame, or shifting where the transcription stops, or shifting where the transcription starts, or more commonly different ways the same sequence can be post-processed by other proteins and RNA and thus generate different but related proteins.

I also know that there are large stretches of DNA that do not code for proteins but nonetheless influence which protein-coding regions are activated and to what degree.

None of this effects the issue. The amount of encoded information is still tiny compared to our complexity.

Bad Lieutenant said...

How much data is encoded in one strand of DNA? How many bits?

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

mandrewa said...
None of this effects the issue. The amount of encoded information is still tiny compared to our complexity.


Not sure why you believe this. Leaving the issue of language aside. All of development is controlled by a given animals genetic apparatus. Development is vastly complex. It is not just the number of genes, which admittedly turned out to be a smaller number than expected, but how they are controlled, turned on and off in temporal sequences. This has turned out to be vastly more complex than anyone realized. This is where the complexity of development is encoded - in the gene regulatory apparatus - more so than the protein coding regions of the genes.

mandrewa said...

There are somewhere between 20,000 to 25,000 human genes. All of these code for proteins. That is what a gene is. In addition there is some small amount of DNA that codes for functional RNA. I'm sure there is a name for that, but anyway this is RNA that does something other than carrying the pattern for a protein.

Protein encoding DNA adds up to 1% of our DNA. In addition there is a further 8% of our DNA that is called regulatory DNA, because it doesn't encode anything but it does effect at what time and how much the genes are expressed. That leaves 91% of the DNA that is believed to do nothing at all except in some cases to keep groups of things separated.

Ninety-nine percent of our proteins are identical to a chimpanzee's proteins. But that understates the similarity because the different proteins between humans and chimpanzees are different to only a tiny degree. There are probably more differences in the expression pattern of human versus chimpanzee genes than in the genes themselves. So although no one has done it, one can possibly take a human and replace his regulatory DNA with a chimp's regulatory DNA and probably the result would be more like a chimp than a human even though all the genes are human.

But as I said before, I don't think it matters. Even if every bit of DNA was functional, it would still be a tiny amount of information compared to our complexity. The difficulty I have in justifying my intuition is just how to count in such a way as to make it clear just how much larger one thing is than the other.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

mandrewa said...
But as I said before, I don't think it matters. Even if every bit of DNA was functional, it would still be a tiny amount of information compared to our complexity. The difficulty I have in justifying my intuition is just how to count in such a way as to make it clear just how much larger one thing is than the other.


I still think that you are vastly underestimating the information stored in the gene regulatory apparatus. The best analogy I can think of, for the moment, is that the coding sequences are the constants or variables of a program and the regulatory apparatus is the control structures (if .. then, while ..., etc). You can build very complex programs with a few primitive controls structures. Biological programs have much more complex control structures.

mandrewa said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
mandrewa said...

That's an interesting idea. C has 33 keywords. Java has some 50. Your analogy is that the genes are like the keywords in a computer language and the regulatory DNA is like a computer program.

Well if that is the way it works then that might make the information carried by the DNA much larger than it seems to be now, although I have some reservations.

A couple of thoughts. First this should be a highly testable hypothesis. I mean if this is actually happening then I would expect that not too many years down the road someone is going to break the code of regulatory DNA. And right away I see one place one would look at to see if this is occurring. There have to be mechanisms, either protein or RNA or both, that are transferring the program in the regulatory DNA to the genes.

Now the program would be all about turning different genes on or off as different events happen. So there should be this group of proteins that are interacting with regulatory DNA and that have no known function right now. That would be my first thought for what to go looking for if I were trying to verify this.

The point is you can't hide something like this. I mean it might take many years to prove this was happening and to discover how it was happening, but once you get the idea that it might be happening you are going to discover it, if it is happening, because the evidence and clues for it will be overwhelming, at least in retrospect.

My second thought is to wonder how much this really changes things with respect to what I was talking about. Now the issue is with measuring the amount of information that can be encoded, as in how long are the programs?

On the one hand I kind of know, through personal experience, that an immense amount of information can be encoded in a small program. Far more than most programmers, I think, dream of. So I appreciate that you can build really complicated things with a small program. I get it. I don't know how to quantify it but I know it's way more than seems plausible.

On the other hand, I'm wondering about instruction size. This regulatory program would need the ability to discriminate between maybe 25,000 proteins but probably far more than that since the same regulatory language, if it exists, would have to be shared with all the other eukaryotes, and some of these other organisms have far more than 25,000 proteins.

Well, it's a great speculation.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

"We do have a relatively small number of genes, but they get reused in different patterns over time"

This refers to "reading frames" and is probably correct,


No it's not, you fucking nincompoop. Gene duplication and amplification is. (Unless you're a virus whose evolution is being studied in a theoretical way).

Try to be less of a moron when chiming in about this stuff. Stick to the Derbyshire stuff or that physicist who runs the genetics blog.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

mandrewa said...
So there should be this group of proteins that are interacting with regulatory DNA and that have no known function right now. That would be my first thought for what to go looking for if I were trying to verify this.


Transcription factors are the regulatory factors, along with co-factors and a bunch of regulatory RNAs. So this bit is known.

If you are interested I can recommend two books.

This covers the basics:
https://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Switch-Third-Lambda-Revisited-ebook/dp/B001WAKRQE

Less well understood is how these regulatory circuits really work. This covers the case of development:
https://www.amazon.com/Genomic-Control-Process-Development-Evolution/dp/0124047297/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1527360014&sr=1-1&keywords=eric+Davidson

mandrewa said...

Thank you, ARM. I've ordered Genomic Control Process: Development and Evolution by Peter and Davidson.

From what I could read on Amazon it sounds like the genes literally are the keywords and the regulatory DNA literally is the program.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

No problem. It is a rapidly advancing part of biology so there are a lot of interesting new facts/ideas.

ojdidit1994 said...

Those of us old enough remember the Paris Peace Accords. Five years to settle up on Viet Nam. I have been on both sides of union bargaining issues with the usual posturing, threats, walks out, etc. followed by smiles, handshakes, and a we love each other breakfast.

Michael K said...

This was getting interesting until Ritmo arrived with his poo flinging.

Do you have any friends Ritmo ?

Mike in Keller said...

A wonderful part of "The Art of the Deal" is the willingness to walk away from a bad deal. Kerry and Obama had to have an Iran deal, had to have the Paris Climate Accord, so they signed bad deals. They didn't care what it said or did, so long as they had a deal.

Trump does not have to have a deal with NK. He can walk away. Now that NK understands that, they will have to give a little bit more to give Trump the deal he wants.

Actually, there's a great deal out there. For us, no-warning inspections anywhere, anytime, to ensure they are not creating nukes or missiles. For them, a chance to join the 21st century, assuming they want to. For them, possibly, a change at reunification, at which point NK gets the same benefits that East Germany got when Germany reunified. They also get terrific trade deals from the U.S., but they have to comply with that no-notice inspection program.

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