Who of us has not found ourselves in the position of needing hagfish slime at one point or another? The Navy has found a way to synthesize it:

Hagfish slime consists of two components — thread-like proteins and mucin, a gelatinous lubricant. When released the thread, mucin and seawater interact to create a three-dimensional, viscoelastic network. The secretion can expand to up to 10,000 times its original volume. On a per-weight basis, hagfish slime is 10 times stronger than steel.

Researchers believe this slimy substance could have uses in everything from bulletproof vests to food packaging to ballistics defense and even repelling sharks.

However, harvesting the substance is tricky business since the hagfish don’t breed in captivity.

But now, a team of U.S. Navy scientists and engineers have discovered a way to synthesize the slime. E. coli bacteria were used to produce alpha and gamma proteins which were recovered from the bacteria after a series of isolation and purification steps.

The synthetic hagfish slime could be used for ballistics protection, firefighting, anti-fouling, diver protection, anti-shark spray, even fabric. Researchers say the possibilities are endless.

Well, that’s a relief.

Either I don’t understand what Dan Drezner is getting at in his Washington Post op-ed or he’s overstating his case. I can’t do justice to it with an excerpt so read the whole thing.

The battle over American exceptionalism has been going on for longer than I’ve been alive. While it might be true as Dan asserts that President Obama believed in American exceptionalism (I don’t think he did as I understand it) but I think it would be hard to argue against the proposition that he was trying to move the U. S. in a more centralized, more social democratic direction, something I think that many of his supporters would laud.

The United States is still much less centralized in its government and much less hierarchical than other OECD countries. It’s a genuine outlier. Its trade is freer, its taxes lower, its safety net more limited than other OECD countries. Adjusted for population, it has more universities, more churches, more private charity, and more crime than other OECD countries. It provides much less government foreign aid than other OECD countries. It has had a higher immigration rate for longer than most other OECD countries.

If America has stopped being exceptional I would point to several watersheds: the systematic abrogation of responsibilities by the Congress over the period of the last half century, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights in 1925, Wickard v. Filburn (which gave the Congress control over just about anything under the rubric of “interstate commerce”), and the progressive reforms late 19th century including popular election of the Senate and the income tax. For good or ill these have worked synergistically to make the United States a lot less exceptional.

At the Washington Post Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan lays out the case that Iran just isn’t complying with the terms of our agreement with them:

First, Annex 1 of the JCPOA limits Iran’s stock of heavy water — a catalyst for nuclear weapons. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are at least two instances of Iran knowingly exceeding its heavy water limit — in February and November of last year. Instead of holding Iran to account for the violations, the Obama administration bought up the illicit material for $8.6 million.

Second, Annex B of U.N Security Council Resolution 2231 — which serves as the implementing resolution for the JCPOA and its legal framework — calls on Iran not to undertake any “activity related to ballistic missiles” for eight years. However, Iran has conducted five ballistic missile tests since the deal was finalized.

Third, Annex B of the implementing resolution also bans certain individuals from travel to foreign countries. Yet nothing was done when it was discovered that Iran’s Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani, who is on that list, traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin after the deal was signed. As recently as December, Soleimani was seen visiting Aleppo.

Finally, Annex B also states that the Security Council must approve “services, advice, other services or assistance,” related to the sale of conventional weapons. It’s been widely reported that Russia is in talks to sell Iran $10 billion worth of conventional weapons, including advanced tanks, artillery systems, planes and helicopters. Iran has not asked for such approval.

All of that sounds pretty damning to me but I was a skeptic about the deal anyway. I thought it was too lopsided in favor of the Iranians and demanded questionable assumptions about Iran’s good faith.

What if anything should be done about our deal with Iran and Iran’s non-compliance with Security Council resolutions? Is the U. S. fully compliant with the terms of our agreement with Iran?

We’ve had farmers, lawyers, career diplomats, and lots and lots of politicians and party apparatchiks as Secretaries of State but we have never had a lifelong businessman without previous government or diplomatic experience. Until now. The New York Times reports that the Senate has confirmed Rex Tillerson as the next Secretary of State:

WASHINGTON — Rex W. Tillerson, the former chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday in a 56-to-43 vote to become the nation’s 69th secretary of state just as serious strains have emerged with important international allies.

The votes against Mr. Tillerson’s confirmation were the most in Senate history for a secretary of state, a reflection of Democratic unease with President Trump’s early foreign policy pronouncements that threaten to upend a multilateral approach that has guided United States presidents since World War II.

Thirteen senators voted in 2005 against Condoleezza Rice in the midst of a deteriorating Iraq war, and in 1825, Henry Clay was confirmed 27 to 14, the record for votes against until Wednesday, according to a tally provided by the Senate Historical Office.

In a brief swearing-in ceremony in the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump said Mr. Tillerson understood “the importance of strengthening our alliances and forming new alliances to enhance our strategic interests and the safety of our people.”

To the best of my knowledge the closest we’ve come previously is Edward J. Stettinius, Jr., Secretary of State during Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth term. But he’d jumped from business to government and back again throughout the 30s and 40s. Not really comparable.

I don’t think that Mr. Tillerson is completely unqualified for the job as some critics would have it. IMO the claim merely indicates an ignorance of what modern big company CEOs actually do. They’re politicians, negotiators, and diplomats as well as managers. Will his skills translate to the public sector? I think that most will but only time will tell.

I hope he devotes a substantial portion of his energies and those skills to modernizing the organization and operations of the Department of State. It could use it. Above all State should not be allowed to be a shadow government as is too often the case now.

I don’t believe that Rex Tillerson should present much concern. Our real worry is President Trump. Either he will learn quickly and grow in the job or he will inevitably get us into trouble.

At Slate Mark Joseph Stern, writing of Supreme Court appointee Neil Gorsuch, notes:

Although he is a rock-ribbed conservative, he conveys his ideas fluently and courteously and is well-liked by his colleagues on the left and right. And though his rulings can be reactionary, he has never directly stated his opposition to hot-button legal issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. Democrats may argue that Gorsuch is an illegitimate justice in a stolen seat, but the judge himself will not fit easily into the role of a villain. Whatever extreme positions he may hold will be concealed by his humble, articulate demeanor. It seems overwhelmingly likely that Gorsuch will soon sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.

and closes:

If confirmed, Gorsuch will restore the ideology of the Supreme Court to about where it was before Scalia died. He is vastly more conservative than Judge Merrick Garland, the Obama nominee whom Republicans blocked for nearly a year in the hope—now realized—that a Republican might appoint Scalia’s successor. The memory of this ghastly disregard of basic constitutional norms will hang over Gorsuch’s hearings and may even tarnish his legacy. His confirmation process will have the whiff of illegitimacy, which Democrats will attempt to use to keep him off the court. But this strategy seems destined to fail, because it is so difficult to explain what is objectionable about Gorsuch himself. Yes, he is conservative, but he is not a rank partisan like Justice Samuel Alito, or a flame-throwing culture warrior like Scalia. He is a judge’s judge. And he is, in all likelihood, our next Supreme Court justice.

As I have written before, I think that the Republican majority in the Senate should have confirmed President Obama’s selection, Merrick Garland. And I agree with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s observation that President Trump might have appointed a “consensus candidate” but failed to do so. So might President Obama. What would such a consensus candidate have looked like? Presumably, one that would not have changed the ideological balance of the court.

Would Republicans have backed such a candidate? We’ll never know. Will Democrats support Neil Gorsuch? We may know in due course. If no Democrats support the appointment, I believe they’ll be making the same error as the Republicans did and two wrongs still do not make a right.

President Obama gambled in the Garland appointment and lost; the Republicans gambled in their refusal to confirm his appointment and won.

I hope that some Democrats find it in their hearts to confirm Judge Gorsuch’s appointment, as some Republicans found it in their hearts to confirm Justices Sotomayor and Kagan’s. Increasing escalation inevitably leads to violent confrontation.

or “The Triumph of Antinomianism”. Yesterday, students and others engaged in a riot at the University of California at Berkeley in protest of the scheduled appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos. Piles of trash and some building were set on fire. A few people were injured in fights. Barricades were used in an attempt at breaking down the doors of the venue. CBS San Francisco reports:

BERKELEY, Calif. (CBS SF/AP) — Protesters armed with bricks and fireworks mounted an assault on the building hosting a speech by polarizing Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos Wednesday night, forcing the event’s cancellation.

Several injuries have been reported and at least four banks have been vandalized after demonstrators marched away from the scene of a violent protest at the canceled speaking event by controversial far-right writer and speaker Yiannopoulos on the University of California at
Berkeley campus.

UC Berkeley officials said the protest was infiltrated by vandals.

Yiannopoulos was making the last stop of a tour aimed at defying what he calls an epidemic of political correctness on college campuses.

Personally, I find Mr. Yiannopoulos obnoxious. Worse, he is a provocateur. He is clearly deliberately outrageous and offensive, something I categorically reject. Nonetheless as a child of the Enlightenment, I may disagree with everything he says, etc.

The events couldn’t help but remind me of other events that took place on the UC Berkeley campus more than 50 years ago. They made national news and I was a student at the time so the events held particular resonance for me.

In 1964-1965 student at the UC Berkeley and a few outsiders held peaceful demonstrations protesting the ban on political activity on campus, loyalty oaths for the faculty, and related issues. The protests came to be known as the “Free Speech Movement” and it was the seed from which the anti-war protests of the 1960s sprouted.

A few weeks ago leaders of that long ago protest wrote a letter in support of the Berkeley administration’s decision to allow Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak:

As veterans and historians of the Free Speech Movement, we are writing to comment on the forthcoming visit to Berkeley of Milo Yiannopoulos.

Yiannopoulos is a bigot who comes to campus spouting vitriol so as to attract attention to himself. His modus operandi is to bait students of color, transgender students and anyone to the left of Donald Trump in the hopes of sparking a speaking ban or physical altercation so he can pose as a free speech martyr. His campus events are one long publicity stunt designed to present himself as a kind of hip, far right, youth folk hero — sort of Hitler Youth with cool sunglasses. “Look at me, I’m so rad, the PC police won’t let me speak on campus.” That’s his whole shtick in a nutshell, along with bigotry.

Banning him just plays into his hands politically, which is one reason why we were glad to see the UC administration refuse to adopt such a ban. True to form, however, Yiannopoulos and his Berkeley College Republican sponsors nonetheless put on their phony free speech martyrdom routine when the administration asked them to pay for security needed to ensure that the incendiary bigotry of their event does not end in bloodshed.

Berkeley’s free speech tradition, won through struggle — suspension, arrest, fines, jail time — by Free Speech Movement activists is far more important than Yiannopoulos, and it is that tradition’s endurance that concerns us. “The content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the university”: That’s what the pivotal Dec. 8 resolution says, as adopted by the Berkeley faculty’s Academic Senate when it finally backed the FSM’s free speech demand in 1964. Under the terms of that resolution, even the worst kind of bigot, including Yiannopoulos, must be allowed to speak on campus. So the UC administration was acting in accord with those principles when it refused to ban Yiannopoulos.

I wonder what they think of last night’s events? We may learn in due course.

I was reminded of something else by the events in Berkeley. Some scholars at the time wrote of the secular “antinomian personality”. The thrust of the argument that a combination of isolation, impotence, fear of the future resulted in a distinctive psychological state. The antinomian “treats his mind as if it were completely malleable, devalues reality, rejects reason and understanding, and selects certain experiences to create a fantasied, dogmatic cosmic view of the world.” (from Lawrence Chenoweth’s paper, “The Rhetoric of Hope and Despair: A study of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Jefferson Airplane.”) The influence of the antinomian personality seems to have reached full flower.

I follow the State of Illinois’s requests for quotations pretty closely. An RFQ from the state just came across my desk. Illinois is looking for COBOL programmers. Sounds to me like Illinois is a bit behind the curve.

Is my memory playing tricks on me or it the case that back in the Y2K days, in 1998 or 1999, people were having a hard time getting old COBOL programmers to come out of retirement? Imagine what it’s like now!

Add “COBOL programmer” to the list of jobs that Americans won’t do.

From Nieman Labs there’s a transcript of a Harvard colloquium on journalism in a post-truth era. I want to highlight this quote from Lydia Polgreen, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post:

I actually think that what we’re seeing right now is a collapse of empathy in journalism. I feel as though journalism has become a highly elite profession that feels extremely distant from the experiences of the people that we write about. There was a lot of handwringing after the election about, did we do enough to cover the sentiments that were leading people to vote for Trump. I feel like I read so much of that coverage.

The problem wasn’t that we didn’t write about them, it’s that we didn’t write for them. There are so many journalistic products that are aimed at highly educated, affluent people. I spent almost 15 years working at The New York Times, which produces the most marvelous journalistic product I think the world has ever known. But it’s speaking to a particular audience and I think that what it fundamentally comes down to is this question of audience and who you’re speaking to.

Having that ability to speak not just about, but really speak to, the experiences of people who fundamentally feel that the economic and political arrangements that govern our lives are unfair, is really a huge part of the problem. And I feel that institutions like The New York Times, institutions like The Wall Street Journal, have a hard time getting access to that audience. And there are very powerful institutions that call themselves journalistic institutions that are building products that are directly targeted at that audience. They’re organizations like Fox News and like Breitbart. So I look back to a period in the 1970s, when you had columnists like Mike Royko working, Jimmy Breslin — people who had a real deep connection to people who who felt disenfranchised from the establishments of power.

Who’s the Mike Royko of the gig economy today? Chances are it would be a woman. Perhaps it would be a person of color. But I think that journalism needs to rediscover its roots as a blue-collar profession, and find a way to get back in touch with empathic storytelling.

There’s lots of other great stuff in the exchange but I wanted to highlight that. It might be familiar to you because that’s what I’ve been saying for years.

The major news outlets aren’t on the side of the people anymore but on the side of the elite, not surprising since that’s who their editors went to school with, live among, and socialize with. How they can get back to the ordinary Americans when the entire thrust of the J-schools is that journalism is a profession not a trade or a craft and professionals are about 3% of the population isn’t entirely clear to me.

CBS Chicago reports that Chicago has opened the New Year with more homicides than it had in January 2016:

CHICAGO (CBS) — It was a violent start to 2017 in Chicago, with the number of shootings nearly duplicating the tally from the start of last year, which ended up being the city’s bloodiest year in nearly two decades.

Chicago police said January ended with 51 murders, one more than January 2016. About half of the city’s murders last month happened in three districts on the South Side and West Side – the Austin, Englewood, and Harrison districts.

At the White House, President Trump told reporters: “If they are not going to solve the problem .. then we are going to solve the problem.

“We are going to have to do something about Chicago. Because what is happening in Chicago should not be happening in this country.”

Last month also saw 234 shooting incidents and 299 shooting victims – compared to 242 shooting incidents and 291 victims during the same time period last year.

Chicago’s entire strategy is based on two prongs: reducing the number of guns and increasing the number of police on the streets. IMO both prongs are doomed to failure.

Criminals will obtain guns; that’s just a reality. And without much more cooperation from civilians than the Chicago police are receiving due to decades of abuse it will take more cops on the streets than Chicago has or can afford.

Economic development, community support, and going after the gangs. These will work synergistically to reduce violent crime in Chicago and without them everything else is just wishful thinking.